In a sidebar included in the Doc Steel entry, and in a little more detail in the background on the villain The Lord of Mirrors, there are mentions to a couple of enigmatic, ancient, and very powerful races that warred against one another back in the misty ages of pre-history. Here’s the skivvy on that little item:

Eons ago, long before there was any known civilization on Earth to even consider recording history, our planet was the site of experimentation by a star-spanning race of immense power. The Acathii were one of the oldest and most advanced races in existence then, and their influence was felt over the span of entire galaxies. Their technology allowed for terraforming, vast and complex genetic manipulation, and the construction of a gate network linking points hundreds of thousands of light years apart.

One of the great houses of the Acathii sponsored exploration into the area containing Sol. Constructing one of their gates near the fourth world in our system, the Acathii began studying the phenomenon that first attracted them here. This phenomenon was an interspatial nexus or spacetime “shallow” which made this area a natural juncture not only for the spacefolds used by the Acathii for their gates, but for transit between this and other dimensions, other realities.

Expanding their research out among the other worlds in the system, the lords of this house wanted to determine what effects this unusual but seeming natural spatial anomaly had wrought on the lifeforms indigenous to this region of space. They discovered that life existed in abundance on only one planet within the system, the third in orbit from the star – though the fourth could theoretically also sustain life, both planets being narrowly within the “green zone.” To their great surprise, several of the non-dominant species on that world (the dominant being several gargantuan strains of reptile) exhibited an inborn genetic flexibility, a trait that marked them for important evolutionary potential. While such flexibility was hardly unknown to the Acathii, they had never before seen it extant in an entire species, or naturally occurring to such an extent. The geneticists among the house’s scientists received permission to begin experimentation and started several long-term examinations of possible manipulations among the genotypes encountered. They likely would have continued their experiments in exploiting this propensity for mutation for millennia, if not for the tragic results of the larger experiments their brethren conducted.

After centuries of examining the nexus effect in this isolated little system, the great minds of the Acathii civilization determined that they could use what they had learned to increase the power and range of their existing gate network. Regrettably, they modified a section of the gate network to reflect this “upgrade.” When the modified section of the network went active it did indeed push the range of the network farther then the Acathii had dreamed possible. Unfortunately, it also pushed the folds in directions its designers had never intended or even foreseen. The gate network literally punched a “hole” in the fabric of creation, connecting this universe to another reality.

Even at this point, the Acathii had yet to recognize danger in the situation. This changed after their first encounter with the dominant power in that newly found universe, The Rha’Zhaketh.

Long millennia had passed since the Acathii had encountered anyone or anything that could truly present a threat to them. In that time they had acted the role of enlightened patrons to those sentient species they had encountered, and, when necessary, had quickly and easily neutralized those races that had proven violent. Those few species with technology and development anywhere near the level of the Acathii had proven amenable to negotiation, to peaceful and mutually beneficial coexistence. The Rha’Zhaketh were different. They had power enough to give even the Acathii pause, both as individuals and as what passed for a society, with caste divisions based on personal strength and influence. Naturally psionic, the most powerful among the Rha’Zhaketh also warped their reality at will, seemingly imposing their whims on natural laws around them. They ranged from small and mindless animals used as fodder by their more developed brethren, to mighty lords of their kind, the size of small moons, with abilities it was difficult for the Acathii to even gauge. Worse, they were voraciously territorial and aggressive. They had raped, consumed, or despoiled every resource their own worlds had to offer, and slaughtered or enslaved every other race they had encountered, expanding further and further out until there was nothing left to them but to fall back on one another in a horrific cycle of self-destruction and Darwinism at its most appalling extreme.

And now the Acathii had given them entire new horizons to conquer.

There began a war. Never before or since have the forces used during that terrible conflict been seen in this universe. The Acathii faced an enemy every bit their equal, who not only threatened the Acathii civilization, implacably and with no possibility for compromise, but one that promised horrors undreamt of for every other species that called our universe home. Peaceful explorers, scientists, and scholars, the Acathii were now forced to turn their great resources toward destruction, developing weapon after weapon, and desperately searching for a way to counter the encroaching darkness.

The Rha’Zhaketh adapted to their new objective. They found ways to compromise the gate network and use it to enter our space from a dozen different points. Outside of the more easily fortified Acathii home systems, worlds fell one after another. Entire civilizations and races disappeared during those long nights, in some cases almost as if they had been erased from existence. The Rha’Zhaketh hollowed out entire planets to use as impregnable bases of operation, and the Acathii detonated stars to destroy those enclaves. Acathii technology stalemated the Rha’Zhaketh’s natural abilities, but Rha’Zhaketh numbers stymied the best Acathii tactics. While themselves telepathic, the Acathii lacked the number and strength of their enemy. To compensate for this, they genetically “bootstrapped” a young and psi-active race known as the Saeduun, greatly enhancing their abilities. Saeduun psions became a buffer force, but it was not enough. To face the Rha’Zhaketh physically, and with time too great a luxury to breed entirely new soldiers, the Acathii developed methods of augmenting members of the various races that now desperately clung to their banner for protection. Once augmented, their physical abilities enhanced, these soldiers became shock troops used against the worst of the Rha’Zhaketh incursions – successfully over all, but often at terrible cost. But this too was not enough. The Acathii realized that, unless they found a way to stop the Rha’Zhaketh from replenishing their numbers, this was a losing battle.

Finally, the Acathii accepted the necessity of their only remaining option. They would have to destroy the gate network, and do so utterly, to deprive the Rha’Zhaketh of their only way of entering this universe. At this point, powerful Rha’Zhaketh had taken up residence in the null space between some gates, much too firmly entrenched to ever be rooted out with military force, and they, in turn, were wedging those gates open as conduits between their reality and ours. It would mean the end of the civilization that the Acathii had built and that depended on the ease of transit the gates provided. Without the gates it would take years to move from one end of the Acathii home systems to the other with even the best of their conventional starcraft. Some of their colonies and outposts would find themselves at such great distance from home that it literally would be the travel of centuries, if not millennia, to cover the distance. However, it was this or lose everything to the Rha’Zhaketh advance.

Using one of the gate hubs as a crude “bomb,” the Acathii managed to collapse the entire network. The passages were closed, trapping uncounted Rha’Zhaketh either in their own world, or between universes, with no way to access our continuum. What few lesser caste Rha’Zhaketh were left in this universe were dealt with relatively quickly. Viewing the aftermath, and the cost of the war, the Acathii had a moment of peace to collect themselves before beginning to rebuild. Little did they know that they were not yet finished with the cost of their victory.

Little noticed by the Acathii in the grand scale of destruction surrounding them that day was the damage resulting in the far-off star system of Sol. In order to quickly reach their experiment site, the Acathii had constructed a gate on the third moon of the fourth planet in that system. The resulting gravity wave from the collapsing network overwhelmed the gate’s aperture and literally crushed the entire moon, though the gate itself proved practically indestructible. The first after-effect of this devastation was that the fourth planet made a minor, but very important change in its orbit around the sun – forever altering its climate and life-sustaining potential; the second was that an enormous chunk of the former moon, thrown from the explosion, crashed into the surface of the third planet, throwing into the atmosphere uncountable tons of debris and inflicting a dire, albeit temporary, change in that planet’s climate. Automatic systems in the gate immediately interpreted this disaster as an attack and used its defensive systems to cloak itself from all forms of sensor technology it could counter. Even today, it still “hides” within the wreckage of that moon, now an asteroid belt floating between the fourth and newly fifth planet.

Ironically, in the days leading up to the Acathii’s final gambit, their enemies had placed into motion their own endgame. Masters of their psionic abilities, the Rha’Zhaketh had developed a naturally self-replicating telepathic “virus” specifically targeted at the Acathii. Disseminating throughout the masses of their enemies’ forces, from mind to mind, from world to world, the virus was quick, certain, and without cure. The Rha’Zhaketh had intended to sit back and amuse themselves, watching the Acathii descend into madness and tear down their own civilization. Though they were deprived of their first hand entertainment, their handiwork more than lived up to their intent. As a race, the Acathii’s connection to one another had always been their strength. Now it was turned against them. The simplest mind-to-mind contact was enough to transmit the virus, which then broke down the mental processes of the infected, driving them into manic and psychotic rages. Planets were incinerated by their own defense forces, families murdered each other in their homes, and the great works of the Acathii, that had survived even the terrors of the war, now burned at their own hands. The greatest civilization this universe had ever seen fell into ruin, and her builders into a self-perpetuated extinction. Aside from those races that benefited from their intervention, only ruins today mark that the Acathii ever existed at all.

Note from Editor: The Algernon Files, and all other related content is designated as Product Identity material of Blackwyrm Publishing and is used with permission.

The War of Pre-History | Atlantis | Organizations | Camelot, Gods and Metahumans | Groups and Independents | The Atomic Youth

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