Written by Blackharvest
The “Great Leap Project,” after years of research and funding, finally gave its fruits. With their intricately engineered and heavily maintained warp technology, the aliens managed to find answers to their burning questions. Or so they thought. As they had hoped, the aliens came face-to-face with an extraterrestrial organism. The organism itself offered much more than they expected from such a puny creature. Darwizzy was much more than an ordinary alien for them; whatever remnant of his primordial essence somehow allured the aliens to worship him, though the aliens had their own choice to do otherwise. The “wisened one” offered them an escapade from all of the mundane and purely materialistic aspects of their old lives, and after seeing the creature speak their tongue with no effort, they decided to give into the delusion of a false messiah. Darwizzy’s otherworldly aura appealed to their illusion even further, with five aliens from the exploration team of six giving an oath to the creature to never stray from his path of transcendence. These five led the way with nonsensical joy and fictitious fulfillment. Meanwhile, one of them was filled with anxiety, as if all of these events were foreboding in nature.
While the rest of the team returned to their spaceship to bring the crew and set up a smaller colony near Darwizzy, the skeptical one, named Yaboy, hesitated to rally his people like the others. Yaboy watched from afar when his teammates and the rest of the crew came down to assemble the colony, convinced that everything here was for a stupid reason. The expedition team had come for answers, but they were seemingly leaving with delusions instead.
In the most vulnerable stage of the alien civilization, this creature appeared and manipulated almost everyone around them, at least according to him. The planet was magically illuminated, as if it were receiving direct starlight. It retained an atmosphere capable of refracting some of the incoming light. Sure, it looked supernatural. However, there must have been more behind it, thought Jaboy. It just could not be providence, purely a message for his people… The creature, however, seemingly wanted nothing to do with the aliens, always avoiding confrontation and not even desiring to stay near them by any means. This should not merely be a test of devotion for the people who worshipped him. The creature was simply not a part of this “grand plan.”
Some of the crew stayed in the colony, revering and studying Darwizzy while also gathering data across the star system on a smaller scale. The initial exploration team went back to their homeworld, Samana, to report their findings. Things were about to change drastically. What they have told the council was a paradigm shift, completely turning their perspectives upside down. The councilors were shocked by the findings, emotionally vulnerable to surrendering to their faith. It was true that the five team members’ zealotry affected the councilors deeply. However, Yaboy was also present in the council, ready to explain his perspective on the discoveries. Outnumbered five to one, he did not attract as many councilors as the zealots did, but his impact was far from negligible. After the fervent team members concluded their speech, Yaboy turned to criticize both his teammates for their zealotry and the councilors who supported their perspective:
“It is unacceptable for our society to go through such changes. That is not who we are. We have yearned for the accumulation of knowledge and scientific pursuit over millennia. But this... cult... is a betrayal of everything we have worked toward as a society. We have no empirical proof and concrete reasoning to accept—”
He was interrupted by another councilor with a stern voice:
“You are going to speak of this no further!” Standing up to address the rest of the room directly, he continued, ”Our society sought the answer to the ultimate question of what lies beyond our material universe. This creature not only holds important secrets about the material space, but also about what lies beyond. Your teammates were correct about their observations: such a creature living on a supernatural planet with an otherworldly aura cannot be ignored. I stand by my faith in ‘the wisened one’.”
Yaboy was surprised by how oblivious the believers were to the fictitiousness of their faith. “Do your ears hear what your mouth utters? Is there any possibility that your statement fits into our council, let alone makes any sense? You cannot be thinking of this, of a radical change to the council! It is going to jeopardize us all!”
One other councilor agreed with Yaboy, “This young man is right. It is blasphemous to utter such nonsense.”
Then, one of the teammates angrily responded, “What you are saying is the actual blasphemy, not ours!”
From that point on, the council descended into utter chaos. Words flew back and forth, each side trying to discredit the other with fervent shouts. Some claimed an absolute truth. Others argued it was incompatible with their identity. Some even called for the creature’s immediate extermination. The room was filled with accusations and desperate cries, each more frantic than the last.
With the rising tensions and the unraveling chaos in the council, the sides separated from one another more and more with each day passing. Since the believers were the vast majority in the council, they enacted laws that prioritized worshiping Darwizzy over many of the pursuits, reshaping their entire philosophy. As the changes were radical, society actually abandoned their pursuit of knowledge in general, and the aliens started to stagnate on a massive scale. Many of the technological developments were halted, with other projects about discovering star systems also being stopped with the new pursuit of the wisened one. As Darwizzy constituted a major part of almost everyone’s lives in the republic, the planet where Darwizzy lived became a massive pilgrimage site for everyone to participate in at least once in their lives. The planet was decorated with religious buildings and decorations, with Darwizzy being placed in the middle of all of the construction for everyone to behold.
Things took their toll the most on Darwizzy himself, as he became the integral piece of worship and society. He desired solitude for further introspection, and yet it was everything he could not have. Despite his worshippers, he was being reminded of his everlasting torment and his futility. The prayers directed to him were for naught since he was powerless to bestow anything upon his believers. Surrounded by thousands of visitors desiring to interact with the creature every single day, he did not have any boundaries to be respected. The incessant cries and yells of the worshippers flooded his desperate mind, sometimes even overwhelming his inner dialogue and thoughts. There was nothing for Darwizzy to do, but he tried to take everything up to the chin, at least to the extent he could. He was descending into a spiral of anguish deeper and deeper every day. The memories of his primordial kin and his primordial past were lost, but he remembered being much more than a puny alien, and that he was punished for a transgression. Knowing this, everything seemed to be planned as a part of his penance for him.
As Darwizzy suffered more and more every day, the cult-like belief was taking over the aliens like a wildfire. Things seemed dire for everyone involved in this crisis, even more so for the renegades that refused to believe in the creature. Seeing how the faith slowly collapsed the society, the renegades came to a boiling point, as they desired to do something to pull their kin out of this madness. But they could not. It seemed so dire for the aliens that the renegades, led by Yaboy and other powerful councilors, decided to declare their independence from the republic. The renegades wanted to preserve the pursuit of knowledge that their older selves had while living outside of any dogma that shackled their individuals. Seeing this attempt at independence, the faithful declared the renegades as heretics, stating that their pursuit of sovereignty is sacrilegious. This triggered a civil war, consequently, as the zealots desired the utter exile or extermination of the heretics.
Zealots declared war on the renegades after the renegades desired independence. The war was irrefutably in favor of the zealots, as they possessed the majority of the resources as well as the manpower, unlike the renegades, who constituted a smaller percentage of the aliens. The renegades were first hunted by the military in the star system that Yaboy’s crew discovered, as the settlement was not completely done, thus only a few aliens lived in the colonies there, let alone even fewer renegades. Then the war showed its effects on the homeplanet, where most of the renegades were slain or imprisoned. The remaining managed to escape to other orbital colonies found across their star system. Other planets inhabited by the aliens were also cleaned of the renegades, making the renegades retreat to other colonies as their predecessors had done. Casualties were higher on the home planet, as the greatest part of the military was stationed there, resulting in stronger assaults. Out of seven planets present in the star system, only one of them was being maintained by the renegades, which was actually a massive leverage for the renegades to use as their base of operations. The only issue was that this planet was the farthest away from the star, and with how expensive warp travel was, that meant that any means of traveling was not going to be feasible for the renegades settled there. The orbital colonies could be used. However, their capabilities were much smaller, therefore placing the inhabitants at much greater risks.
Overall, the war was fleeting, due to how overwhelmingly strong the zealots were. Many of the renegades were slain, and about 10% of them were imprisoned. Renegade cities and other sorts of settlements were razed to the ground, with many of the buildings being repurposed into raw materials. Several symbols from the old culture were burned or thrown away, as they were not even seen fit for disassembly due to their “tainted heretical essence.” Some survivors were imprisoned. They either stayed behind bars or were used as slaves in many kinds of labor. The remaining survivors found refuge in the orbital colonies and the 7th planet, Etha, which inevitably put the war into a stalemate due to how attrition grew on the belligerents, as well as the travel being harder with further targets hindering the assault.
Seeing the stagnation of the war, both sides decided to sign a ceasefire, bringing an end to the conflict and preventing future wars. Both sides were also forbidden to interact and trespass in any territory in space treated as part of the other side. The zealots reveled in their massive victory against the renegades and lived in their delusions happily; meanwhile, the renegades found the chance to recover some of their losses and come to a stable state as the representatives of the old republic. It seemed as if both sides settled their feud to some extent, so much so that neither of the sides would disturb one another. But everything was going to take an unforeseen turn. Realizing how their losses were too massive to maintain stability and recover properly, and how the zealots could attack any time soon despite the ceasefire, the renegades came up with a plan. One plan that should not go wrong under any circumstances, or it would be the end of both the renegades and the original identity of the aliens. The plan, led by Yaboy and some other renegades he gathered, consisted of kidnapping Darwizzy and interrogating the creature, ultimately to decide upon its fate. They had one chance, and one chance only, so they came up with their best of the best to formulate the plan and execute it as flawlessly as possible.
SC in this doc:
Yaboy - Season 1 (Ya Boy)
Darwizzy - Season 1 (Darwizzy)