* "Hush, He Is Wakening..." * (Just About The Perfect System; Draconis Is Near The Center Of The Galaxy, There Are Many Stars Close By, There Are No Black Holes And Few Nebula On The Map; Powerfuly Psychic Caucasian Human Male Abductee...)

^That is the survivor? Are you sure it is a he? It looks more like a female than a male...^ A feminine voice says in a language you paradoxically both do and do not understand...

^Hush, he is wakening...^ Another voice says as you **** your eyes open.

You are confronted by four strangely dressed women with pale blue skin, slanted eyes, long pointed ears, and immense breasts. They are dressed in body stockings, some augmented with strategic armor plates, and each with a crotch panel that clearly ties shut. One has blood red hair pulled up in a Faux-Hawk, one long white hair that hangs in dreadlocks, the third black hair arranged in a complex style and the fourth wavy brown hair that hangs loose.

"Hello?" You ask and they all gasp in astonishment.

^It speaks!^ the one with black hair gasps, and grabs a fairly simplistic looking revolver from her belt and points it at you.

You hold up your empty hands in the human gesture for "Don't shoot!" and she calms back down.

^Do you want to start an interstellar war Greywind?^ The red-haired warrior snaps and the white-haired woman with the violet body stocking rejoins, ^Besides how can you be sure that was actually speech?^

As you look around you see you are in what looks like a hospital room: straight out of a film set in the 1930s. You expected high technology, computers at least, then you remember that "pre-warp" means pre-electronics...

You realize you are cuffed to the bed and look at the four women in terror. "Why am I restrained, and who are You?!" You demand, and they look at you very differently.

^THAT was speech.^ The woman with the dreadlocks declares, and the fourth woman steps forward.

^My name is Empress Berylia the Twenty-Third stranger, and you were rescued from the cargo hold of a strange ship that crashed on our planet two months ago. There were thousands of others like you in the hold, males, females, and children, but you alone survive. Some few others survived the crash, but all sickened and died within days. You sickened too, but somehow have recovered.^ She explains.

You can vaguely remember that you clicked on that ad and then a shimmering beam of **** grabbed you and sucked you into the sky. After that you don't remember much, just a timeless extended darkness: until there were a sudden crash and light returned, with a stench of something kind of like ozone, but unspeakably and inherently EVIL. Your head was swimming, and you crawled out of your box into a scene from the depths of a nightmare, humans of every description dead or dying all around you, then you passed out.

"Where am I?" You ask and they stare at you non-comprehending.

^I think it can understand us, why can't we understand it?^ the one with the black hair in the black body stocking, (who you heard the other call Greywind,) asks...

"I'm a ^He^ damn it, not a ^It^!" You exclaim, then stop in shock realizing you just used their words for those things.

^Did he just identify himself as a male?^ The one with the dreadlocks asks, frightened.

^Yes, Ellowyn, I believe 'he' did...^ The one called ^Berylia^ with the brown hair and purple body stocking with gold accents declares, looking at you very differently.

^The Kilodar? Here?! By all that's holy: Fireblade, Greywind, SHOOT HIM!^ The one they call ^Ellowyn^ shouts, both draw their weapons against you in one Smooth motion, and you scream "No! PLEASE-!" Yanking your restrained hands towards your face futilely...!

There is a sudden flurry of motion and a loud explosion which you don't quite follow, but when everything returns to stillness the Ellowyn is crouched in a corner covering her face with her hands, Greywind is holding her wrist on the floor and silently weeping in pain, Fireblade has drawn a bead on Ellowyn with her pistol, and Berylia is covering Greywind with a derringer she got from God-knows-where...

^Are you hurt stranger?^ Berylia asks. You shake your head, and she nods, once, decisive.

^I ought to shoot both of you for that, But I'm not going to. Yes, he is The Kilodar, but don't either of you know 'The Prophecies of Omnisha'?! If we kill him we doom our race to destruction! Only by accepting the Kilodar's guidance and swearing allegiance to him can we survive The Great Storming!^ Berylia barks at the other two women.

Berylia turns to you. ^Hail and well met 'You-Who-Are-The-Kilodar', I: Berylia the Twenty-Third; swear me and the Berylian Empire of the Salutar race to your cause. Ours is by far the largest empire on the planet, and when it is announced that you lead us, all others will surely fall in line behind you or be crushed,^ Berylia declares.

You feel something click at that moment, some primal **** opens to you, even as there is another explosion of motion with guards bursting into the room along with medics and nurses. Through the faint vestige of omniscience and telepathy left to Berylia from the Elerian she might have been you realize you are a psychic, a powerful psychic, and you have understood what they have been saying via telepathy...

The next few hours after you are unshackled is spent learning the language. You then are shown their analysis of the system, local spacial area, and current planetary status. It is better than you have any right to hope!

Theirs is, like Earth, a Terran class planet, but the system is FAR better than Sol! You now encounter the first of several differences between Master Of Orion II and whatever you are playing, in that the system has 57 planets, counting the major moons, and NONE of them are toxic, unlike Venus.

Better than that the Venus analog is not only not toxic, but has, like their homeworld of "Serpentus", an immense airless moon. But it gets better! The venus analog is a Gaia class world with average minerals. To the locals that seemed hardly worth the effort of sending a colony mission: toxic botanical species, deadly predators, diseases they had no resistance to, and God only knows what else, but you soon put that out of their heads!

"We begin research into how to send a successful colony mission there AT ONCE," You declare, and they bow their heads in submission.

The rest of the system isn't half bad. Not as awesome as an average size, average gravity, average minerals Gaia, but respectable. Their system has three worlds in the "Inner Cauldron", ("Tiny" & "Radiated" worlds one and all) none of which are less than "average" and one that is "Ultra Rich" in minerals. The "Biosphere" zone also features one more habitable planet, though it's marginal. This Mars equivalent is not a "dessert" but rather an "ice world", buried under ton upon ton of ice and snow from pole to pole. However, analysis by the biggest telescopes indicates that some life does survive there, even complex life, with the occasional corpse of titanic crustaceans being observed trapped in the ice.

The outer reaches are home to five gas giants the smallest having a half dozen major moons, and the largest one closer to 20, while the others sit in the upper single digits. These moons do not appear to be life-sustaining, except one, another ice world not dissimilar to Sol's own Europa. Distinctively biologic compounds have been marked in its spectroscopy composition, indicating that it might hold some form of life...

The world you find yourself on is disturbingly earth like, save that Pangaea hasn't broken up. Not only does It have the same climate and roughly the same flora and fauna, but even their orbital period is identical... It gets weirder though: they've tested your DNA and it's less than a tenth of a percent divergent from their own except for the Y & X chromosome. The Y Chromosome is completely screwy as far as they are concerned, and the X is somewhat different as well, but they think that it may be possible for you to get Empress Berylia pregnant... (And other Salutar women, of course...)

Moving on for the moment though, you are shown their information on their stellar neighborhood and are quite impressed. The nearest star to your little solar system is only five light years distant, easily accessible for warp-capable ships. That's not the best part though, the map is no longer two-dimensional, it's now rendered in glorious four-dimensional realism. ("Time" is the fourth.) Even though they don't have electronic devices other than the simplest radio, lights, generators, and motors, they've built satellites, and an orbital habitat/shipyard/defense station. It's like watching a sci-fi epic from the 1930s...

Why I mention that is that their space program, though it runs off dead reckoning, primitive two-way radio and a bunch of huge abaci have allowed them to put a bunch of, (crude and disposable, but effective,) Hubble space telescope like satellites in orbit. That, combined with the wonders of draftsmanship and cartooning, have recently permitted them to make brilliantly lifelike planetarium shows of their nearest stellar neighbor's.

Their own sun is a Mishara-class Yellow Dwarf similar to Sol, thus the abundance of habitable planets. The six closest stars are all within the 17 light year range of early Master Of Orion "Scout"-class Ships, though that does include a Binary system.

These stars are as follows: a Red Giant, two white dwarfs, The Main-Sequence-Blue/Red Dwarf binary (yet another change, Master Of Orion II had no binary systems.) and, we've saved the best for last, A Brown Dwarf.

"Brown Dwarfs are the coolest stars, they're really really cool! Someday our language may develop an adequate vocabulary to describe just how cool such stars are...!"

That's the quote from the original game, and they're right. Brown Dwarfs always have some kind of system special feature, like a planet with Orion Artifacts, or a Lost Colony, or Natives, or Gem Deposits! Conversely, however, they tend to be the lair of space monsters such as Living Crystals, Hydras, Star Dragons, or Titanic Eels...

You don't tell your new allies this, better that they do not know such things exist for the moment.

The one huge difference between their system and Sol is there's no Asteroid belt or TNOs. Around here there's not going to be any kicking poor old Pluto out of the solar system because there's no Pluto to kick...

You are introduced to the Salutar males that evening and are privately horrified.

Salutar men are hulking brutes that most closely resembles a blue-skinned Orc. They have beady eyes, a piggish snout with both fangs and tusks, and layer upon layer of rippling muscles. They also are not sapients. Male Salutar is approximately the same intelligence as the pigs they resemble: bright, for an animal, but distinctively an ANIMAL, not a sapient being. The female Salutar no longer even have sex with the males except for a few major religious fertility rituals*. Instead, children are conceived via artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, with samples collected by specialized puppeteers use of highly advanced puppets.

*(Which, do not fear, will NEVER be described to any meaningful degree unless your character, [or another sapient,] is taking the place of the traditional Salutar male. I know better than to write or approve ****, even if that's what's normal for the species.)

"Well, that explains the -50% population growth..." You mutter, gagging at the stench in the pens for this city's male Salutar.

You discover that the species has been selectively breeding for lesbians/bisexuality for almost 70 years, and the few straight women either become priestesses of the fertility goddess, or end up going insane and attempting to **** the guards on the males pens to try to steal a male, whereupon they are killed.

You are also informed that for those 70 years a RUTHLESS selective breeding process has been exercised on the males, culling for aggressiveness, startle distance, and an ever-increasing intelligence threshold. They had high hopes that if they maintained it for a thousand years their males might become sapients...

You are taken to the palace, where Berylia and the others, (Who have been apologizing to each other and kissing off and on this whole time...) escort you to a lavish suite...

The room is all done up with the local equivalent of mahogany and teak, a huge four poster bed, easily big enough for seven people to sleep comfortably, sits with its purple velvet curtains drawn back, silk-covered pillows and mattress gleaming in the light of the immense electric chandelier, and you wonder who the hell needs a bed that size.

You also detect, bellow the cloying reek of perfume and incense that pervades the air, a subtle but naggingly familiar scent: something incredibly important but unpleasant...

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