Scouting For Romance

Entry 43, History of the Leonid Empire

Day 11, Month 19, Year 572

Jovaisa walked into the lecture hall with an attendant and set a small box down. "We'll be learning something a little different today. Your studies are coming along well, so we'll take a break from Lèonese and learn about the history of the Léonid empire, and Basugio."

Tytus elbowed me, accidentally hitting my ribs, "hey-hey! History? That's right up your alley."

"I am interested in peldak history. I am not sure how entertaining alien history will be."

The answer was 'not very, except for one specific part'.

Jovaisa's attendant unfurled some charts and maps and graphs, then we spent the next seven hours learning about the history of these people in a soul-crushing level of detail.

History is a guessing game a lot of the time, so half of this lecture was 'here's something we think we know about the Léonid empire, and we think we know that because of these specific artifacts, mythologies, historical records, etc.' He explained every last source and detail for all of it. While that gave me a good understanding of what we think we know, it was also very boring.

Here's a summary.

Sometime prior to 15,000 years ago, the home world of the Léonid Empire, Actias, was united under one power.

We don't know the name of that power, so we call them the actians. We assume the planet was named after them, in the same way that we are peldaks and we named our planet Peldor.

For some reason, the actians didn't have access to the 'mystical cosmic lanes' that allow for faster than light travel, despite how we know for a fact that those cosmic lanes existed at the time.

So, using technology far more advanced than what we have today, they found various habitable planets within a few hundred light years of Actias. Thousands of actians were loaded onto ships which would move at sub-light speeds, and they were sent out to colonize these new worlds. We assume these settlers were somehow kept in stasis during the voyage, but we don't know how they did that.

The dozens of ships all eventually landed, and one of those planets would one day be known as Basugio.

While each of the colony ships arrived on their designated worlds as planned, they stepped onto hostile, foreign planets, and they were unable to contact the homeworld. While we don't know the exact reasons or troubles they had, we know society on these colonies generally broke down and fractured within a decade. Over the following generations, each colony eventually degenerated into tribal life without any access to their once grand technology. One of the leading theories for this near-instant failure was that Actias possibly sent wealthy patrons who bought their tickets, not people who knew how to set up a functioning civilization. These colonists required contact with Actias to tell them how to build and survive, which didn't happen as communication was never established.

As for why communications were never established, it's because, in the centuries of travel for the colonists, Actias had their own problems. Actias has one central continent and loads of landmasses around it. The noble elite stayed on the central continent, and their slaves stayed everywhere else and supplied the nobles with everything they needed. The nobles' rule was cruel and barbaric, and eventually the slaves rose up. This understanding comes from the mythologies of people who descended from those slaves, so it's impossible to know how much bias is at work there.

This slave rebellion lasted for many years, and coincided with widespread famine, plagues, 'invasions from star-people', and the use of devastatingly powerful weapons which ruined the ocean around the central continent and devastated the rest of the planet.