Authors note: This is the prologue of my current project. I imagine it has a lot of problems, the first of it being incredibly info-dumpy, though since it is just setting the premise for my novel (basically explaining the Kelbrid-Andalite war) I'm having trouble knowing how to get the back story out. Any and all suggestions would be INCREDIBLY appreciated.
I am a huge edit-fiend and grammar/spelling stickler, so I'll most likely be editing this obsessively. Hopefully that won't send out a ton of obnoxious notifications.
Also, I'm not able to write with KA's style most likely, so it won't really hold true to that, but I'll try to make it good anyway.
Any and all criticism (harsh is good too!) is appreciated. I've had writing has a hobby for a long time, and even hope some day to have my own original work published, so I will consider all tongue-lashings to be attempts to keep food on my table in the future.
Man, I'm nervous about posting my work...so here it goes!
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Prologue
Elfangor- AndaliteNot long after the Ellimist returned me, I had been called to Apex Level Intelligence. Every bit of the way there left me fraught with panic. Had they found out? Had the doctor told them? Was I going to be punished for creating Alloran? Were they angry I had a son, a wife on another planet?
To this day, I don't know what would have been worse. Those reasons, or the true reason they called me in.
As most Andalites, I knew very little of Kelbrids. All we were told was to stay out of their sector of space, and that there was a treaty to do so. The lexicons and databases held no more information. But an exceptionally skilled computer analyst probably could have found out that the information had been erased and classified.
As I was debriefed on the Kelbrid situation, I had found there were two primary reasons all information regarding Kelbrids was classified. Not even all in the military knew about them, and no civilian councils.
Firstly, it was to protect morale, we needed to preserve our confidence for the Yeerk war. Even in the halls of the most confident race in the galaxy, one dark realization hung over the heads of Apex level intelligence: this may very well be a war the Andalites could not win.
Secondly, we had to protect our image to the people. This war had driven us to desperation. This war had its own set of rules, of conduct. No more guilt about quantum viruses. We tried those on the Kelbrids. They failed. Both sides of this war, driving each other to insanity, had stooped to abysmal levels just to win. They resorted to enslaving their warriors. We resorted to pure torture. They resorted to making children soldiers. We killed their children. They resorted to resurrecting their warriors in the most terrifying fashion.
We were killing
children. And not only did we torture them, they began torturing them for us, to make them immune to our torture methods.
Our morphing technology was laughable in the face of what they were. Their DNA was the pattern for our morphing technology. We developed the technology after stealing and researching their strange DNA. They were born morphers. Some scientists speculated they didn't even have a true form. So when they fought us, they fought us as Andalites. We were fighting Andalite children. And that was mercy as much as it was self preservation. They suffered a far worse fate if left in the hands of the Kelbrids.
This was war. This was hell.
Their demands had been simple. Stay out. But now Yeerks began to flee into their sector of space, to seek refuge from us. The Kelbrids had told us they were taking care of them...but how could we take their word for it? Could we just sit idly by while the Yeerks possibly grew their force exponentially?
We tried renegotiating the terms of the treaty. But they allowed for nothing. No spies. No reconnaissance missions. No ambassadors. Not one single Andalite soul was to set foot in their perimeters. They had to be in league with the Yeerks, what other possible explanation could there be? They promised to kill every single Andalite that came into their sector.
We did not believe them. As a result we had sparked a war so terrifying warriors were turning their tailblades on themselves. And who could blame them? How long until the screams of the ones you tortured devoured your mind? How long until one of the children you killed resembled your own child? How could you listen to your wife talk about your child’s first days of school, then go into battle to kill someone like them? The Andalites, at their core, were a gentle, honorable race. War with the Yeerks may have toughened our hides and strengthened our tails, but this kind of warfare we simply were not made to withstand. It was psychological more than physical, and the Kelbrids knew it.
That was when Apex Level Intelligence wiped the archives of all information except orders to stay out. They handpicked and hand trained the warriors and Princes that were to go into Kelbrid space and attempt to find the Yeerks hiding within, and fight the Kelbrids themselves. The heroes, the bravest of the brave, and the most intelligent of the most intelligent. Despite our impressive histories some of us still cracked. All of us left jaded. The assignments into Kelbrid space were half as long as most military tours, they were not stupid enough to subject our warriors to that kind of warfare for long without a break. Our ship medics became the debriefers, so they could send anyone home that seemed to become mentally unstable. Few complained when that happened. Notions of honor were turned on its head. This was one war it seemed more honorable to refuse to fight. The only way to win was not to play. And when we returned to the normal military, the military was none the wiser. We had no one to tell our tales of horror to. There was talk of wiping the memories of all who fought it, but that just clogged up training when it came time for repeat tours, and we needed this intelligence to remain alert, in case they came out of their sector of space.
So we just reserved memory wiping for the warriors that were damaged irreversibly. The ones that succumb to the guilt, the ones that had been tortured by the Kelbrids. The ones that went insane after we rescued after being buried alive by grinning, giggling little Andalite girls...
Kiro- KelbridThe Kelbrids, truly, have no quarrel with other races. As long as they stay out of our sector.
We have control of three planets, two liberated from The One. The One is still out there, still exists. We have no known way of destroying him, all we could do was keep him quarantined while we keep all others out.
Perhaps I should explain this being to you. If there is such a thing as evil deities, he is it.. He exists solely to assimilate, solely to control the universe. He seeks to devour the being of every individual in the universe, excising full control, full power and omnipotence.
He does this by assimilating his victims. They become completely controlled. All their memories, all their knowledge is consumed and spread to the others under his control. When you fight an assimilated being, you are fighting millions of warriors, millions of lives of experience, millions of minds merged into one. And even if you extinguish it, their memories will remain.
Despite his terrible power, we had him contained. We were immune to his mind control. The same genetic trait that destabilized our DNA and molecular structure made him unable to wrap his mind around ours. All we had to do was keep all other races out and away from him. This was never a problem.
Until the Andalites came.
The Andalites, in our first meetings, seemed relatively harmless. Idiot scientists marauding around the galaxy, as if they didn't have anything better to do. We repelled them mildly at first, we made a treaty with their leaders stating they would never come back into our territory, and we gave them no further thought.
We underestimated them. And we didn't know until it was too late. Now they have made our war more difficult in two ways, threatening the galaxy with a terrible, terrible fate.
They had unleashed a plague upon the galaxy, spreading a rampant parasitic infection from species to species, completely uncontrolled. The Andalites think they have it under control, but they are spread too thin. They have started to resort to genocide to clean up their mess, rather than preventing it. They are fortunate that we are resistant to this infection, just like the control from The One, or we would have massacred their homeworld a long time before.
After the Yeerks managed to get a hold of an Andalite host, they began pouring into our sector of space in droves. What that Andalite knew they now knew. They came here to be protected from the Andalites, fearing them more than us. And then, even worse, they learned of The One. The One got one of them, one that slipped through their ships, and his visions for escaping our quarantine became clear. If he allied with the Yeerks, he had more bodies to assimilate. If he brought the Yeerks here, the Andalites would come. If the Andalites came, we would have to engage them. His pact was irristable to the Yeerks. The Kelbrids and the Andalites wipe each other out. The Yeerks are left free to infect the rest of the galaxy. He assimilates thousands of new slaves and spreads his own infection throughout the galaxy alongside the Yeerks.
And if he assimilates the Andalites, disputably the most advanced species in the galaxy, he would become unstoppable. Their knowledge, their technology would all go to him and be spread to his slaves, and from there they would create an Andalite fleet that we could never hope to be stop. And we had learned we could not hope to possibly compete with that. If he got an Andalite there would be no hope for the galaxy.
Now you see? Now you see why the Andalites must die? At all cost...no matter how terrible the price. And the price we have paid as a society is terrible.
Some of the war council, driven to desperation by the new developments in the wars spread across the galaxy, suggested we just divulge the reason for our strict rules about species staying out. But we knew this was folly. The Andalites, in their hubris and over-confidence, would try to find a way to defeat The One themselves...or even go on some idiotic scientific mission...and get themselves assimilated. The only way to ensure they would never become assimilated was to kill all the ones that came into our borders. And if they would not learn from that, then to simply purge them all.
The council decided to enact Plan 0, our final plan for species who would not be contained. It was a 100% fix, but it was slow and required a massive amount of our military power, leaving us vulnerable in our own sector of space. We needed troops, we needed them specially trained to kill Andalites, and we needed them fast.
After Plan 0 was announced, we separated our military into three sectors. Sector One dealt with the creatures that had already been assimilated, the poor, damned souls. They were mostly comprised of veterans, heroes, people who knew the ropes and the war. They would be fine.
Sector Two would deal with the Yeerks. The Yeerks were so numerous, it was almost inevitable that some would slip through and become the responsibility of Sector One, but it was not a huge concern. Their technology was all clumsy and second hand, it was no better than our own, nothing The One hasn't seen already. The only Yeerk we kept obsessive watch over was Visser Three, and he was stationed far away on Earth. All we would do is send an assassin there to watch him until we got knowledge that he was going to leave earth, then we would give the order to have him executed. We would leave Sector Three to that. The Sector Twos were the jack of all trades, exposed to several different races, most of which had nothing on us when it came to battle. Their work load was higher, but their life was pleasant dream compared to the other two sectors.
Sector Three was the ones charged to deal with the Andalites. There was no room for failure or weakness, and the training program itself reflected it. It churned out monsters that would never be fit for society again. Got their blood and rage boiling and set them on the Andalites. The truth was the Andalites were more advanced...they always would be and they proved that to us. They had even stolen our shape-shifting abilities. So we had no choice but to win against them using brute force and psychological tactics that, in truth, left us just as haunted as it left them.
First, we enslaved our military members, placing a nano-machine in their brains whenever they join. All their memories, personality, and feelings are stored there, basically their consciousness. When they are killed by these Andalites, we take their stored consciousness and transplant them into the machines we create, huge war machines we create, golems. They control the machine like its their body, they never die unless physically destroyed, and even then if the nano-machine remains we can just give them a new body. It was a perfect solution in theory, every warrior they kill only makes the warrior stronger, though a terrible fate for the warriors, to be denied peace, to be forced into a cold, unfeeling body forever. But we just tell our warriors, fight harder, make the war end, then we can remove your phylactery and destroy it, finally granting you peace. It works. We use these machines to fight for us, along with our brutally trained warriors.
But the Andalites still persevered against them, the ratios of wins and losses split nearly down the middle. We needed more strategy against them.
So we resorted to using and training children. It barely passed through the council, some of the military threatened to rebel, but in the end the benefits were just too numerous, and the desperate need to end this however necessary was just too great.
Firstly, children learn easier, or some would say brainwash easier. They soak up the information like a sponge, they memorize Andalite anatomy and battle techniques faster than a mature warrior. They take to the Andalite form quicker and become more agile with it than warriors used to years and years being in their original form.
Also, when you put them on the battlefield with our warriors, everyone fights harder. Three fourths of our military are females; our females from the third planet are born to be more violent, ruthless and strong. It makes sense, they have an innate, protective mothering instinct that is present almost from the time they learn to walk. The mothers are the protectors and providers of their brood. Kelbrids of this planet, or this race anyway, have large families, so the instinct to nurture and protect our young is crucial to survival. No female in her right mind would let an Andalite harm a child if she could prevent it. And they fight harder than ever to try to prevent it, and their rage when they see a child fall in unmatched in the entire universe. And our young learn by example to be just as ruthless.
And, it was, sadly, just practical. With warriors dying to their blades, we did not have time to wait for a new generation of warriors to grow up. We did not have time to wait to see if these warriors would make it on the battle field or not after spending fifteen years for them to grow and another five to train.
Many expected the plan to fail, I suspect this was how a military full of surrogate mothers ever let this pass to begin with. Prove it wouldn't work, then it would never be brought up again, and our children would be safe. Despite their trainability, children are fragile in both mind and body. Some simply could not withstand the kind of war they had been shoved into, and the ones that could became terrible monsters that just one would just as soon put down. It was frightening to see the difference between an adult transforming into a warrior and a child transforming into a warrior. It was sure to fail, five years maximum, then it was sure to be shut down.
But the use of children had an unexpected benefit. It broke the Andalites more than we could break them through torturing them ourselves. Many an Andalite died to the inability to kill a child, and the children, either terrified for their lives or deluded into thinking it was just a game, didn't give the Andalite warriors the same consideration. Less warriors came back to the battlefield than we left alive. You could practically see them coming apart. Tragically, it was the edge in the war we needed. And so the program continued.
Though troop morale and faith in our people had been gutted from stooping so low, it only increased our desire to win, to make it end. It had to stop, the madness has to stop, and we fought harder and more desperately to stop it.
All I can say is pray we win, pray we win soon.
