“Blessed Lord of the universe, who created the living and who cares for the dead, illuminate our own history and guide us on Your path.”

-from “Fleet Apprentice Onboarding Manual”, version 4.1.3.0, IKRB

Exerpt from Yan BarCarran's private notes

BOOK of SECRETS!

(am I even allowed to write this out? I’ll keep it safe lol)

ORIGINS OF HUMANITY

(in the beginning there was light, and God’s hand moved over the light… ETC)

We don’t come from Edden? Where do we come from then? Why bother telling people that life came from Edden if we just come from yet another destroyed planet… Could have just said that in the first place How did it get destroyed? How do we know it got destroyed? I guess because if it wasn’t destroyed we would have found it again? Did we save /all/ the animals and plants from it? Have they changed since leaving this ancestral home? Directly contradicts the doctrine that God scattered us to the stars @ the beginning of time but that was always one of the metaphorical ones anyway God scattering ppl to stars still happened, just not a literal physical thing Makes sense. We have to extrapolate what the planet was like based on what we are like / what conditions we are best suited to Understand day/night cycle ‘Mild’ can mean anything in terms of climate? Basically means we couldn’t have terraformed our own planet before we had that capability, so look at planets we didn’t have to terraform to compare what conditions we could have lived under God sheltered ancestral home from disaster to allow life to develop No evidence of sentient life anywhere else in universe We must actively protect our own colonies from disaster God gave us time to allow sentience to develop, formed slowly from the dirt/clay of that old home Kinda want more info on this? But I’m not a xenobio person anymore so it’s not super relevant :/ Crazy to think of people travelling through space without stardrives. Horrible. So people from the ancestral home settled all these other planets and they didn’t know eachother, and none of them had stardrives or ansibles, so they all just created their own societies How much of the cultures on those planets are carry overs from different groups on the ancestral home? Or did everybody diverge from one common point? Galena, terlin!!!, minglian, almanzil, keppar are all pretty different places Cool to think that my family comes from one of these ‘original’ colonies It says ‘surviving colonial worlds’ were there others that aren’t surviving? Seems like a pretty small amount of colonies tbh How DID stardrives develop? Everyone developed them simultaneously without contact? Or maybe one person developed it then was able to spread the idea Population explosion led to discovery of the power makes sense We literally don’t know so many things from back then. This whole document is like “from the archaeological evidence we can posit” uuuuuuuugh Why do we have so many gaps in what we know when there are a bunch of these planets that still exist? What happened that we have to rely on digging up old farming equipment to figure out what is going on Of course as soon as stardrives get invented everybody starts making their own colonies lol. Everybody loves to make colonies ig. Really the running theme of this whole document is like “and then everybody started making colonies on other planets” So when all of those isolated colonies discovered eachother it was a big mess? I guess if you’re that close to eachother (in space terms…) then it’s easy to accidentally try to colonize the same planets. Whoops. There’s really not that many desirable planets out there, compared to the number of planets there /are/ Edden probably told everybody ‘hey we originally colonized you now you must obey us’ even if that was a lie We Just Don’t Know Though Because Something Bad Happened Anyway Edden ended up on top and that’s why we have such a unified empire today, sorta Even though the Edden empire is gone it’s like… we benefited from them spreading their ideas and language to all those other planets, and colonizing a ton of worlds. Lot of this is common knowledge with new flavor (ie before we were told that edden was the original colony, now we know that they were not [how do we know that, actually?] slightly more information about how edden molded the other colonies to its will) A ton of stuff was lost from the ancient past until now but it’s cool that we do have this ability to trace back our lineage at least a bit Edden must have had a strong military to be able to take over like that. Good on them for making infrastructure too lol. Can’t run a govt without ansibles and mines and ships Was old imperial invented during this time or was it edden’s native language? Colonies that didn’t fall to the edden empire? This is new info... :O Mutiny!!!!!!!!!! The Edden Star ship!!!!! Found group of people on newly discovered planet and warned them of the edden empire Don’t know if that’s brave or stupid Hey if anyone (whoever Halen sent to spy on me) is reading this I change my mind I think it’s stupid ; ) I mean they did all literally get killed when they came home and told everybody what they did sooooo (why did they do that? That actually is dumb) That planet got to defend itself against the edden empire when edden came looking for them, banded together with other!!! Undiscovered colonies and fought Edden empire couldn’t back down even tho those other colonies were stronger so in that fighting edden was destroyed God stardrives are scary shit But why did entire empire collapse? God that’s just like Sid’s stupid fear statue thing. Fuck. They sent people to each planet and messed with everybody’s mind Must have been awful like. I can just imagine that one sensitive created this big lightning storm over the whole planet to draw everyone’s attention Make it rhythmic for good measure And then the other sends out the commands Was the command just to destroy everything related to the edden empire? Or maybe it had to be more general than that Like they could have just made everybody distrust eachother and that would lead to total societal collapse Like everybody just started destroying shit. Glad i wasn’t there for it. You wouldn’t even have to land on the planet in order to mess it up so bad. You really only need to be a good sensitive in orbit. yikes. Is there a way to avoid this ever happening again? There are things you can do to prevent yourself from joining the group meditation, maybe we should be teaching people how to survive something like this? Do we not do it because we don’t want to scare them or? How did we get to where we are after all that? All the sensitives were off planet manufacturing stardrives and ansibles. Truly classic. So they survived the mass attacks even tho they would have been more!!! Susceptible than avg Anyone in a ship also survived unscathed also Charges Rule Everything Around Me Of course the trade guild came out on top of this lol If you have ships and infrastructure to pull things together after everybody else has gone crazy, that’s great, that’s a lot of power. Still took a long time for things to get reestablished tho. Kinda a dark age Trade guild establishes home for sensitives to train them to build stardrives (classic) But of course somebody was eventually going to say ‘you know that doing nothing but making stardrives all the time sucks right’ and start to form independent entities from what the tg wants. Like how could you not predict that When you have like… a ton of powerful people all gathered together and you’re basically just like paying them a living wage to give you the tools to rule the galaxy Like… what did you think would happen I mean i love(d?) being in the trade guild but that’s… just. How did the edden empire not have this problem lol And that’s how the modern empire was founded lol It really makes sense why we have the trade guild there, because i mean they were the ones who actually brought some semblance of stability during those long dark times before the empire really established itself Like it took generations for sensitives to get together, found schools, get themselves out from under the trade guild’s watch, build public systems (ie ansibles controlled by sensitives rather than the guild), work their way into govvt on all the planets, then come together to form the actual governing body we have No wonder so much was forgotten / lost about the old times like. Not only did it get intentionally destroyed it also was just a long time! Plus some info did get deliberately buried like. The exact specifics of why the edden empire collapsed: no one knows about those other colonies that are still out there, no one knows that in order to completely destabilize a whole planet all you need is a few sensitives I can understand why we don’t talk about some of that lol. It’s gonna give me nightmares Anyway it makes sense that the empire is structured like it is Trade guild is basically independent Planets have their own govts but send reps to the imperial council Emperor rules the empire (tho like. Weirdly secretly. Anyway mostly symbolic ig b/c Sandreas is def in charge) Line of succession for voice is based on practices that were based in the academy tradition There is back and forth possible btwn imperial council and voice but yk who really is more powerful, councilhead or voice Plus all judiciary stuff falls to the fleet courts for anything that’s not govrnd by planetary law, and the voice directs the fleet idk Like this whole system obvs evolved directly from what happened aftr the destruction of the edden empire But the war? God I do not want to read all this stuff about battles……………. Whatever we’re fighting those other colonies who are still out there!!! And they destroyed the edden empire so we can’t let that happen again to us Plus if they’re sitting on planets that don’t need 50 yrs of terraforming that doesn’t hurt to take those Ig i kinda understand why it’s secret like. You don’t want that knowledge to be floating around. People would panic if they thought that smbody could come and just destroy their whole society with a thought. Imean i’m not really happy about it tbh And the fleet does actually do terraforming n exploring and stuff so it’s not technically a lie that that’s what everybody thinks they do GOD I DON’T want to read about 600 yrs of battles or whatever like. If that becomes relevant Ill come back to this at some point. But i think i got the jist. Also Halen if you're reading this: I hate you.