SmackDown #ooorah!

The rise of the fire dragons

When the Union collapsed, some blamed the disaster to a linguistic mix-up. Others insisted it was the visit of a lenjan fire-walker to the prospering settlement on Oykot 21. A few believed the fault laid with the bloke who invented artificial intelligence.

In the end, all versions come down to the same string of minor mishaps in the people resources department of the Union of sentient planet dwellers, the USPD.

To put the tip of my claw on the point where exactly events derailed and accumulated to a destiny-turning dimension, it's safe to single out the moment a chrzrrchn secretary confused Oykot with Tokyo.

Of course, no one in their right mind would blame the silicon-based swarm-mind for such a banal mistake. It was a known fact that chrzrrchns struggled to make sense of concepts like left and right or back and front. Not to mention their incomprehension of the need for archaic languages built on consonants and vocals. No need for speech if you communicate telepathically with your 25 073 personal entities.

So, in all fairness, the AI who'd assigned a chrzrrchn to human affairs in the Union's communication hub was blameable. In consequence, the turn of events almost went down in history as the ultimate proof AI were unsuited to master the finer arts of interspecies relationships. Not that organic lifeforms did a better job, but that's a story for another day.

Anyway, in the aftermath of the fire-walker incident, not many found pleasure in analysing events rendered long since irrelevant by time flow. So the lesson to be learned from the story was forgotten with most of the interesting details.

The reason the human council called for a fire-walker in the first place were the antics of  Sakurajima. That's not the name of an exotic alien species, but of a restless volcano sitting on a promontory in southern Japan, planet earth. The mountain had developed a hiccup. Now, everyone, their grandmother, and their pet wimot knew a hiccuping volcano was bad news. Especially if said volcano was attached to an over-populated island in the major industrial region of a USPD core-member planet.

While it was an open secret fire-walkers were not as mythological as they liked to appear, they remained rare visitors to the hub planets. Their homeworld Lenja wasn't considered a goldilock planet by other sentient races: Too close to the sun, to geologically active. Mean temperatures would vaporise a chrzrrchn in seconds and turn humans or pirilli into crisp meatballs before they'd find time to curse the heat. Only shoshoshan might take a bit longer to cook, due to their sturdy exoskeleton.

Communication with the lenjans had been a challenge since they first popped up in USPD space. Literally. One of their hot-fusion ships broke down in close vicinity of the trade hub Cheerio 69. It was a sight to behold, the closest to a supernova populated space had ever witnessed.

When the always-altruistic pirilli sent a rescue party, the situation would have escalated into a major barbecue disaster except for the intervention of a shoshoshan scout squad. The insect-people's metabolism and chitinous body armour allowed them to approach their barge close enough to pull the pirillis out, mostly ungrilled, and douse the lenian ship with a cooling sprinkle of Arcturnian ring-ice.

The scout carried enough of the coveted trade good to allow the surviving lenjans to get their ship under control and shut down the glowing drive. Glad for the spectacular and timely rescue, the USPD didn't ask why the shoshoshans shipped an undeclared load of the precious ice. Instead, they were declared heroes of the day, and everyone overlooked the fact the evidence of their smuggling had been vaporised in the process.

Stranded in the centre of activity and interest, the shipwrecked lenjans were left without much choice. If they wanted to get back to their fiery home, they had to interact, as inconvenient as it was. The heated diplomatic squabbles brought up every interspecies prejudice and unfortunate incident, beginning with the first encounter between humans one shoshoshans. The later feasted on the human emissary, misinterpreting his attempt at communication, thinking he was sent by his machine masters as main dish for their banquet. But these had been the old days before everyone became civilised.