Precursors and the Resonance

Much of the ancient history of the vaeu homeworld is unknown. What Is known, is that The homeworld itself was once home to a vast array of species that had in fact evolved in close parallel to those of Earth. That includes the dominant species itself. (not sure why this evolution was so close... yet) The singular dominant species that once ruled the world are now referred to as the precursors. The precursors craved political power over all else, and were constantly at war with one another, their different factions locked in a never ending game of king of the hill. As the centuries of endless war rolled on, the resources of the world grew scarce, and soon enough, the war machine began to slow down. Backed into a corner, one of the precursor factions devised a repulsive tactic what would turn the tide in their favor. Capturing and factory farming the various fauna of the world, the precursors were able to build themselves a new army of cheap, expendable soldiers to do their dirty work. 20 of the worlds lesser species were selected to be experimented upon, and genetically modified. After a year of trial and error, the precursors figured out how to augment these various species, to fit into different roles of their war machine. First, the creatures were uplifted, granting them the gift of sapience, and imbuing them with greater insight into the world around them. Then their vocal structures were genetically tweaked, in order to allow them to speak the precursors own language. Finally, each species was modified in such a way that their reproduction could be controlled and its pace quickened by artificial triggers. Each of these 20 species was then sculpted to fill a roll in the precursor armed forces, many of them mind controlled with the use of neural implants. More on this to come, as I delve into each species in its thread.

Coming into the last year of the war, the faction of precursors that had not opted to build an army out of the worlds fauna, found themselves quickly losing ground. In a desperate struggle to ward off the tide of sacrificial soldiers being hurled at them, this losing faction developed a weapon meant to target the augmented biology of the living weapons that they faced. They constructed a radiation bomb of sorts, that was intended to react only with the altered genes of the enslaved warriors employed by the enemy... but they did their math terribly wrong. When the bomb was detonated, the radiation it gave off, took to the complete opposite side of its expected spectrum. The 20 species that made up its target, were not only unaffected by this radiation, but protected by it, as the bomb proceeded to eradicate every other animal species on the planet. As the bomb went off, it's yield ended up being ten fold greater than expected. Its effects set off a chain reaction in the very core of the planet, which completely permeated the world in deadly radiation over the course of a day. This radiation Is now referred to as resonance. Completely invisible, and unlike any form of radiation humanity has ever encountered. More on the resonance (edited)

The resonance spared the 20 warrior species, and killed every other animal species, including the precursors themselves. In less than five minutes (on an earthly 24 hour clock) Every precursor within the planets atmosphere perished, along with every other animal species that had not been modified with the gene that the bomb had been built to target. The days after the war were turbulent. Augmented to fill various wartime roles, and mind controlled to carry those tasks out, the various surviving species found great difficulty in the task of building a new life for themselves. Uplifted to a level of intelligence even greater than that expected of an average human, the survivors possessed the intellect required to build a new civilization, but this would take a great deal of time. At the time that the homeworld makes itself known to the people of Pronova, the surviving species have been free for just over 300 Earth years. They have inherited much of the precursors technology and collective knowledge, and have built for themselves, a thriving global civilization free of war and hunger. It is not without it's problems, but with 20 distinct races working together, each of them as intelligent as the next, the surviving species were able to rebuild the homeworld into a lush green oasis, capable of sustaining their population for all of the foreseeable future. The technology left behind by the precursors after the fall, proved itself even more useful to the survivors, a mixed bag of quadrupedal races, than it ever was to the precursors themselves.