The last war

"The last war" refers to the final world war of the precursors that ended in their own extinction. The precursors that once ruled over Yaphenna long before it carried it's new name, were intelligent bipedal creatures that were often driven by greed and hatred for those of their own kind who held different beliefs than their own. With hundreds of different nations across the three continents of the world, Precursor culture was incredibly complicated, stemming from a rich history spanning thousands of years of documented development, and several ages of undocumented species development.

The final conflict that drove the entire precursor populace into the last war was one of religious and environmental disagreement. The precursor factions that inhabited the central highlands could see that Yaphenna was doomed to a fate of unrecoverable environmental collapse if the Precursors could not move halt their rampant capitalistic advance, and they began to disrupt the worlds economy so suddenly that it ended up casting the western continent into an economic depression. In retaliation, the precursors of the western continent banded together and began to invade the central continent, claiming it's lands and slaughtering it's people as they claimed what ever farm land and infrastructure they could. This assault collapsed the worlds political structure from hundreds of nations, into two warring factions.

As the months and years of war went by, the precursors on both sides of the conflict grew increasingly desperate. So many soldiers of the western continent were losing their lives that they began looking for alternate methods of producing soldiers. By year three of the war, 80% of the troops deployed by the west were neural-interface controlled robots, remote operated by a precursor pilot to keep as many flesh and blood westerners out of harms way. By year four, this tactic had already proven far too expensive, and could not be maintained. This led the precursors to look for cheaper alternatives to the robot synthetics they had developed to replace their soldiers. Instead, the precursors decided to genetically augment the animal species of the world, and use their bodies as living weapons of war.

To do this, the precursors had to uplift these species of animal, granting them near precursor levels of intelligence in order for the neural interface technology to work correctly. 20 species of animal were selected and genetically modified in order for them to be used as living armaments in the war. Each species was selected for a different reason, but all met the same fate. They were grown in incubation chambers until physical maturity, and then surgically implanted with a neurological control module. This device allowed a precursor to connect their mind to the animal soldier and pilot their body in the same way that the robotic soldiers had been controlled in the previous year.

Once awoken from stasis in their incubation tube, the animal soldiers gained consciousness but had no control over their own bodies as the precursors operated them as though they were puppets. These creatures often woke up in the pitch black cargo bays of assault craft on the way to the front lines, and could only watch in terror as their bodies were forced to charge headlong into the gunfire of the central powers defending line.

By year six, both sides were nearing absolute collapse, but the war raged on. Desperate for an end to the war, the central powers devised a plan to deploy a nanite swarm against the animal forces of the western armada. The nanites were build to be capable of reproduction, and were meant to be coded in such a way that they would seek out and destroy all organic matter that matched the genetic profile of the 20 species that the precursors had enslaved as living soldiers. In their desperation, the central powers pushed for the release of the nanites with too much haste, and made a fatal mistake when coding the nanite swarm. Instead of targeting the 20 species of animal soldiers, the nanites set out in search of every single animal species that did NOT match the genetic makeup of their original target.

As the nanite swarm swept across Yaphenna, the 20 species that had been augmented for war were spared, and they watched in horror as every other living creature on the world was disassembled before their eyes. The nanite spared only the plant and microbial life, tracking down and eliminating all other animal life on the planet in less than a month. This event is now referred to by yaphennans as The Collapse

After the collapse, the 20 species of yaphennans found themselves in complete control of their own bodies, for the very first time since their uplifting, and began to recover from the traumas of war, leaning on one another to rebuild the broken world around them in a desperate struggle just to survive. The first few generations of free yaphennans lived through a time of hunger, civil unrest, and barely contained conflict between the rather diverse group of sapient species that now had to find a way to share a world that historically, could not even be shared by a single species.

Modern Yaphennans attribute their success, only to the neurological augmentations that had been preformed on their species during the last war. The brain chemistry of the average yaphennan lends itself to subservience, nudging vaeu and vaah alike towards helping those around them in a very strange and twisted version of herd mentality.