NationStates Jolt Archive


The History of the Holy Empire of Asurene (FT - Info-Only Reference Thread)

Asurene
27-01-2008, 16:53
(OOC: This is a information history post about an FT nation I intend to introduce to RP within the next few days after I have established more basic info - such as a military - that will make things easier to simply jump in and begin roleplaying with. To this end, this is NOT an RP, but merely to provide a backdrop to the history of this country. Hope you enjoy.)

IC:

http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa229/we_are_kommissar/empireflagbig.jpg

The Semi-OOC/Semi-IC History of the Holy Empire of Asurene

In the 1950s and 1960s of Earth history, a large number of UFO abduction reports were filed by those who came back. They were largely ignored by the governments of the time as being hoaxes and deluded ramblings of the mentally disturbed – which some undoubtedly were – and therefore paid no attention the desperate calls of a determined few who really had been abducted by alien spacecraft.

But the majority of victims of abduction never filed any reports, because they never came back.

An alien race, their name lost to the annals of history, took an interest in the human race during this eventful time in humanity’s rule of their home planet. Abducting large groups of people over a period of thirty years, these ‘specimens’ were transported across the galaxy to a system in the Scutum-Crux arm, with one habitable planet the aliens called Asurene.

Asurene was a harsh, inhospitable place covered in tropical jungle and blazing hot for most of its eight-month rotation, and the two million humans that were abducted in total were largely left to fend for themselves in the harsh rainforests with only basic tools. The aliens sat back and watched, their objective to analyse the survivability of the human species to harsh environments compared to other races they had studied.

The human specimens showed a remarkable trend towards adaptation, effectively organising several small societies across Asurene’s single continent with responsibilities among individuals for various tasks. The aliens were impressed, allowing the humans to breed and continue their lives in a bid to explore how the race continued to develop.

It was after about a century of being on the planet that the aliens, who had mostly sat back and left the humans to themselves, noticed a distinct characteristic in the human species that disturbed them; war. It was not long before the now-three million specimens on Asurene were fighting with each-other for resources held by opposing groups, comprising brutal combat with primitive spear weapons fashioned from the trees of the rainforest. It also disturbed the aliens that several human groups were on the verge of rediscovering a form of gunpowder that could be developed from several indigenous substances, and decided that a direct intervention was responsible.

So the aliens descended to their specimens in spacecraft, heavily armed and determined to show domination to a race that only seemed to respect force. They met with the leadership of the several groups and stated in no uncertain terms that all rights and freedoms they had held on this planet were to be revoked, and that the human race was now under the direct guidance of their overlords.

To the astonishment of the aliens, several of the groups bowed in worship to them.

A century of being left largely to themselves had allowed the humans to get over the initial shock of their displacement, spawn three generations of civilisation and become more accustomed to the everyday trials for survival. During this time, it seemed that their abductors, with whom little contact had ever been allowed, had been developed by several religious denominations the humans had brought with them into some kind of deities. The aliens, or ‘Guardians’ as the general religious lore seemed to call them, had chosen these individuals of humanity to survive the coming apocalypse on Earth and had brought them to a new home in order to ensure the survival of the human race.

The aliens were astounded at the ability for an intelligent and logical species to set such store by an illogical set of assumptions with no basis in fact. Still, recognising this as a useful method to control the population, they decided that such a delusion was useful in controlling their errant specimens. So, declaring themselves the “masters and guardians of the Asurene peoples”, the aliens decreed the following; that all factions would dissolve into a single political and economic body governed by the Guardians, that technological and social aid would be given to create a better society for all, and that the Asurene humans would prepare themselves to “prepare for the battles against those who caused the Apocalypse.”

The aliens were cunning in this ruse; by creating the idea of an outward threat bent on destroying humanity and playing on the human’s beliefs that they Earth had truly been destroyed, they were able to push the ideas of dissolving all political bodies into a single entity with greater ease. The humans who had once been a social experiment were now a slave race of the ‘Guardians’, unaware as they were of this truth.

And so the continent was united and the human population began to consider themselves as ‘Asurene’ rather than their Terran ancestors. The Guardians erected military bases nearby each large settlement to serve as both strategic garrisons and religious shrines, to which the Asurene humans brought gifts of food and resources each day in fanatical devotion to their supposed saviours. The Guardians provided a gradual trickle of technological advances to their protectorate population, providing basic sanitary living and developing educational facilities to enable the Asurene people to develop their own advancements within time. Over the next three hundred years, the Asurene lived happily under the control of their Guardians, content with the provision of greater technology that soon brought the city-states of the rainforest continent up to the level of the late 20th century, small beacons of civilisation in the hostile and unforgiving forests of the planet.

The Asurene humans also served a greater purpose for the Guardians, who had noticed something about this particular group of human specimens. Left for three hundred years in a hostile environment and forced to survive on their own, the Asurene humans had begun to develop physical and psychological tolerances to harsh environments, seen in the later generations that survived in the harsh wilderness of the continent. A martial perception on education of the young in a society long ravaged by a struggle for survival and warfare with neighbouring factions meant that the average Asurene was six feet tall, physically strong and mentally sharp. The Guardians ensured this training regime for the young continued, creating an authoritarian, militarist society that viewed weakness in any manner as a disgrace. Using this and the imaginary evil created in their minds, the Guardians utilised Asurene humans as troops in several of their own wars, who gained a reputation for being fanatical and fierce fighters by whatever enemy encountered them.

It was a sudden shock to the Asurene when the Guardians disappeared. Before then, the Guardians had been introducing their servant race to the intricacies of controlled fusion and laser-based weaponry, along with using the planet as a base for several ground-based spacedocks. But the Guardians faced their own problems when an enemy reared its head on their own borders and assaulted without mercy. Guardian forces withdrew from Asurene for the front lines so hastily that much of the infrastructure was left intact, simply telling the appointed go-betweens of their servant race that they would return.

The Guardians never returned. Wiped out in the face of an unknown enemy, the Guardians – whatever they were actually called – were annihilated from history.

The Asurene waited patiently as a society for nearly ten years before the appointed leaders of the planet began to question whether the Guardians were coming back. Unrest across the planet was beginning to flare as the people began to frighten at the prospect of having lost their protectors. The Asurene Provisional Command had to do something fast to maintain society, and looked to their appointed leader to direct them.

Alexander Jacob Quill was the man the Guardians had appointed as Provisional Governor of the planet until their promised return. A man who had fought for the Guardians on the frontline against several unknown enemies, he was a poster-child for the Asurene people; strong, intelligent, deeply-tanned from the harsh sunlight of the rainforest planet he had grown up on, fanatical in his devotion to the Guardians and fearful of aliens to the point of xenophobia. Seeing the possibility of societal destruction, Quill stepped forward and made the now-legendary speech the Asurene call ‘The Call for Awakening’.

The Guardians, Quill claimed, would return as they had promised, but it was clear that this would be some time. However, as the Asurene were the chosen to survive the Earth Apocalypse, they would be expected to serve their masters even in their absence. To this end, the Asurene would have to learn to defend themselves, using the technologies left by the Guardians at their military bases to build their own empire to better serve their god-masters when they returned. Declaring the ‘Holy Empire of Asurene’, Quill proclaimed himself Emperor of Asurene as the chosen leader of the planet until the Guardians returned. Nobody argued, either because they believed the speech as truth, as indeed Quill himself, or because several groups saw the move as beneficial for maintaining their positions of power in the martial society.

Using the basis of the Foreign Legions the Guardians had created on Asurene as a military force, Quill ordered the Guardian installations seized and investigated by the educated scientists of the planet to better develop a technological base for the new Empire. As the scientific bodies of Asurene studied the technologies left over by their masters, engineers that had been used as slave labour at the Guardian spacedocks continued constructing the vessels left half-complete after the installations were initially abandoned, albeit modifying several elements of the design where technologies were not understood. The first vessel of the Holy Asurene Navy was launched three months later, crewed by those who had served already on Guardian ships as the infrastructure for training an indigenous soldiery and officer corps for all branches of the newly-formed Holy Asurene Armed Forces was created on the planet below.

It would be another seven years between then and Asurene’s first contact with another alien race, and merely a single year after Asurene engineers cracked the secrets of the Guardian’s faster-than-light drive systems, which were quickly retrofitted into the existing vessels of the Holy Asurene Navy. Seeking to explore outside the small solar system where they had been trapped for almost half a millennia, the Emperor ordered vessels to begin exploring outside the Asurene system.

It was shortly after this order that First Contact was established.
Asurene
28-01-2008, 00:12
OOC: Bump for any potential comments