At The Bright Empire....

Reboot time!

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave1.htm

It’s been just over ten years since Shadar posted the original version of THE GWYNDYLIN –first book of the Shore Leave series – at Aurora Universe: Other Worlds. Last April, I mirrored the most recent edit at The Bright Empire (along with the second book, PRIMAL WAR) to tie in with a new Alisa Liddell story, PASSION PLAY.

At the time Shadar was writing Shore Leave, I was still working on the last episodes of ORDINARY VELORIANS – the series he had begun in 2002 that had introduced Alisa Liddell. Earlier in 2003, he had posted “Alisa’s Story,” the account of her (ill-fated, as it turned out) affair with Captain Peter Durgin aboard the Anders Flame. Even before that, I’d given her a part in THRONE OF THE GODS, and made her a lead character in “Pictures of an Expedition,” a prequel to Throne and sequel to Shore Leave – then still in the final stages of composition. But a lot has happened over the past decade, including another major Alisa Liddell story, ENCOUNTER AT WESTFOLD, and in looking over Shore Leave recently, I thought it was time for an overhaul of the mirrored version – and even time (Shudder!) to make a stab at completing the series – the third part of which has been in virtual limbo since 2004. That’s a major gap in the Alisa Liddell saga, as is a yet-unwritten story of what befell Andre Liddell at the Lost City of the Old Galactics. This reboot is part of the groundwork for that.

Some of the changes are only a matter of convenience. There were characters named Tyla and Tala, and Mara and Marla, which might be confusing to some readers, so I changed the latter in each case to Frida and Gudrid – old Nordic names, those. I also decided to Nordicise some titles – Prester for priest and Lawgiver for senator, both actually adopted by the progeny of Vikings after they became acquainted with the rest of Europe. Prester was a variation of Presbyter (hence the Presbyterian Church), but in Medieval times it also took on the meaning of patriarch, notably in the legend of a Christian kingdom in Africa ruled by a Prester John (possibly inspired by vague reports about Ethiopia). Of course, here signifies a matriarch. Kirke, likewise, was the Nordic word for church.

Shadar had described Tala, head of the Gwyndylyn salon as “Mother Superior,” but I thought that was confusing because it made the salon seem like strictly a religious order – and yet it is locked in a power struggle with the Church. So besides changing her name to Frida, I made her title Heysta (Highest), and had Mara Kaltquest address her as such. In the same vein, “bishop” seemed an odd title for the head of the Lawgivers (senators), so I replaced that with Vorstaler (a Nordic portmanteau word for First Speaker, a term used in sf by both Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven). In the case of Marla (now Gudrid), the new terminology clarifies her role in playing a double game as a disgraced former Gwyndylyn now working secretly for the Kirke. One other thing: to be consistent with my other AU3 stories, I toned down the effects of a Velorian removing her gold – that could cause some real problems in tight situations.

Despite making these changes, I wanted to keep the complications of Rostran political intrigue – and how Alisa and Andre and then Durgin and his men become unwittingly involved in them. I wanted to keep the problematic details, such as the roles of the child woman Lara and the Goddess Tyla/Aayla, and the connection between Sanctuary and Rostran. And I wanted to keep the raunch – can a Shadar classic be stripped of its raunch and remain worth reading? But for me the core of the story is the development of the relationship between Andre and Alisa, even if they don’t realize it yet, and the extant version seemed to lose track of that – Andre disappears from the story after his chance encounter with the human underground (and is hardly mentioned in Primal War).

Alisa sometimes seems slow on the uptake – from the start, I thought it was important for her to come up with a theory to account for the origin of the Rostrans, based on what the Culture Section thought it knew about the time it had been settled. When she learns from Lara that Durgin is launching a rescue mission, she seems slow on the emotional uptake, her reaction is just too casual. I wanted to convey how fearful she must be about in face of what may happen – and how frustrated that she can’t do anything about it. For a hard-headed scientist, moreover, she seems all too gullible during her tête-à-tête with Excelsia, coming out of it as practically a convert to the Rostran cause – like the “useful idiots” on Earth who bought into Soviet-style Communism in the 20th Century and are buying into religious fundamentalism (Christian or Islamic) in the twenty-first. So it my version, she is playing a game – a game which she can only hope to win. That’s not to say Alisa won’t make mistakes, in this or other stories, but the very last thing I want her to be is a useful idiot.

But I’m trying to remain faithful to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the original story. You won’t catch me trashing a crucial Aurora Universe story the way J.J. Abrams has trashed STAR TREK!

--Brantley

You've been busy, Brantley! My goodness. You are the awesome at extending, connecting and fixing the problems that came from my being more interested in making new stuff than with fixing and pulling together what I left behind.

But I love reading what you do with my old stuff, and how you add such interesting new angles and tweaks on characters. Also the great writing you do in putting together stories that knit the AU together.

I am also enormously pleased that you are doing a JJ Abrams on the AU. I am literally unable to watch his Star Trek "adaptions". I try, I look for the good (I love Star Trek), but I just can't do it.

Of course. Peter Jackson isn't doing so well on the Hobbit now either. The LOTR movies were pretty good (except for the growing trend toward violence by the third movie), but now Peter's gone completely into gratuitous, video-game level violence. (On the other hand, Evangeline Lily is hot -- she just didn't have very good writing.)

But I can't resist seeing any movie that deals about Middle Earth. I need to see Desolation of Smaug one several times before I talk too much about it. An Unexpected Journey grew on me after a few viewings.

Shadar

shadar wrote: You've been busy, Brantley! My goodness. You are the awesome at extending, connecting and fixing the problems that came from my being more interested in making new stuff than with fixing and pulling together what I left behind.

Shadar

Speaking of "new stuff," how about the lead-in to FIRST PROTECTOR? I would have done more of the story of Vespyr's journey to Velor, maybe even finished it by now, if...

--Brantley

By the way, ever hear of her? Was she around in 2003, I wonder:

twitter.com/theyarndemon

--Brantley

Just realized I had to make another tweak early on, regarding the physics paper Andre and Alisa are working on. No reason for an imminent deadline when they're way out in space; presumably the paper could be presented only when they get back home.

Hope that's all. Happy Winter Solstice, everyone!

--Brantley

Anon wrote: Usually I'm [not] too interested in the AU, not because I don't recognize the effort and the quality of the story, but rather because it's too big of a deal for me. Even so I can't but plaude at such a monumental effort from Brantley. Excellent work is all I can say.

THE GWYNDYLYN was Shadar's story to begin with, and is still mostly his. The same will be true of PRIMAL WAR. But the third part, CHANGING GODDESSES, will be at least half mine because Shadar and his collaborators got bogged down and lost any sense of direction. I hope he'll return to writing other AU fiction. We'll see...

Shadar (then posing as "Sharon Best") was my inspiration back in 2002, and even later. COMPANIONS and EMPRESS OF THE DAWN were both inspired by ideas of his, but the writing was all mine.

--Brantley

Thank God for JJ ABrams and his new take on StarTrek. He's essentially wiped out 30 years of nonsense, And his ST movies rocked. Don't get me wrong, I was a huge fan of the old stuff.....But after mistake, after mistake....Nonsense after nonsense I'm relieved that in a way.....All those episodes with gigantic plot holes left unattended by future episodes, have effectively been wiped out, as if they never even happened

I agree about how Abrams has wiped out everything as if it never happened. He's completely reinvented Star Trek. What was lost was the original humanity, emotion and humor, along with that sense of optimism about the future. A vision that humans would become better, less warlike and more evolved and more humane. That's all gone, and that's what I loved. Its been replaced by gratuitous violence committed by people with the maturity of teenagers.

It would have been better if Abrams hadn't used the label Star Trek and had come up with something else that he acknowledged was "inspired by Star Trek".

But... one thing about attempts to remake movies... you get a lot of different (and strong) opinions about the process and results. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and they all weigh about the same when placed on the scale.

Shadar

d_k_c wrote: Thank God for JJ ABrams and his new take on StarTrek. He's essentially wiped out 30 years of nonsense, And his ST movies rocked. Don't get me wrong, I was a huge fan of the old stuff.....But after mistake, after mistake....Nonsense after nonsense I'm relieved that in a way.....All those episodes with gigantic plot holes left unattended by future episodes, have effectively been wiped out, as if they never even happened

For some reason, there have been a lot of hits recently on my 2005 story "Houseguest." Maybe random Googlers have been looking for some other story or article with the same title. But I just looked at it myself, and saw that it needed some minor edits (mainly updating Arion references to Aurean). And it's closer to the kind of ubergirl fic SWM fans like to read than my usual (these days) stuff. So you might want to check it out.

www.brightempire.com/Houseguest.html

--Brantley

I've just noticed that clicking on the link using Safari as a browser brings up the new version, whereas on Firefox I get the old version on my former office computer but the new version on my laptop. Can anyone tell me if they're having the same problem?

--Brantley

brantley wrote: I've just noticed that clicking on the link using Safari as a browser brings up the new version, whereas on Firefox I get the old version on my former office computer but the new version on my laptop. Can anyone tell me if they're having the same problem?

--Brantley

Using Bing and even Dogpile search engines at Firefox, as opposed to Google, brings up the Dec. 21 update at this computer. Internet Explorer as well as Safari works. Just why I'm having problems with Firefox I don't know, but the Start page for this computer (which I got from the office as part of my retirement package) includes an appeal for donations by Mozilla, whereas the Start page on my laptop doesn't. Hope it isn't a shakedown. Anyway, use Safari or Internet Explorer or Bing or Dogpile for:

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave1.htm

--Brantley

The link works with Firefox as well(V26). The pictures of the old version have been removed?

somat

somat wrote: The link works with Firefox as well(V26). The pictures of the old version have been removed?

somat

The pictures were exclusive to Shadar's original version of the story at Aurora Universe: Other Worlds. They never appeared in the mirrored version at The Bright Empire. Incidentally, I've noticed that on my desk computer's Firefox display, the Dec . 21 version comes up if I delete the www from the address and re-click on the URL.

--Brantley

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave2.htm

We can't compete with Super Sunday, and there isn't even any reference to Scrumbles in today's update at The Bright Empire. But we hope veteran fans of the AU will want to know more about how the game is afoot on Rostran in a revised version of the second episode of Shadar's Shore Leave, which originally appeared at AUOW a decade ago.

Updating Shore Leave is a challenge, and it's been even more of a challenge with Primal War. It isn't just a question of what happens, but who knows what – and when. The last time we saw Andre Kalik in The Gwyndylyn, he had accidentally made contact with the underground of Ordinary humans. Only, he drops out of the story after that, and never appears in the original version of Primal War. Alisa makes it clear in that version that she meant for him to be enhanced, even though she had never brought that up in conversation with him or (except by implication) with Gudrid. That makes for a story line I thought worth pursuing in new chapters for this version, which also has to account for Gudrid's interest in his enhancement -- and for why he and Alisa are kept apart. The fact that they long for each other, but neither realizes their longing is reciprocated, adds some spice to the relationship. But that will have to be further addressed only in Changing Goddesses. Durgin's awakening from enhancement by Lara is also being deferred, as I think his recovery time would be longer than Alisa's. NB: If you're using Firefox, and it takes you to April 2013 version of Primal War, you can access the new version by pasting the link into the URL box of Safari or Internet Explorer.

--Brantley

I've finally started work on Book Three of Empress of the Dawn, the saga of Kalla Zaver'el, Velorian Companion to successive Patriarchs on the seeded world Andros. She is a free woman now, having outlived her indenture, but she is still deeply involved in fostering progress on her adopted world. In preparation for Book Three, however, I have retweaked the epilogue to Book Two, adjusting the chronology a bit. I've also added a new image of Nestor, the young Patriarch, based on a Russian movie actor who once played the young Peter the Great. The experience of Peter has inspired a new angle for the story of Alexius, a young Androssian destined to become involved with Kalla in more ways than one -- with the blessing of Nestor. More about that anon.

www.brightempire.com/Empress-2.pdf

--Brantley

Some 222 people have accessed Book Two and 65 Book One over the past seven days, most of them since I uploaded the retweaked Book Two Saturday. Total readership has been about 9,000 for Book One and 5,000 for Book Two. That's certainly a vote of confidence in the series, even if nobody else here has posted about it. I hope I can live up to expectations for Book Three.

-- Brantley

www.brightempire.com/Awaken.htm

Another anniversary. It's been nine years since the first fiction post at the present incarnation of The Bright Empire. And while there hasn't been time to get Empress of the Dawn III or an update of First Protector ready, I do have a conclusion to When We Dead Awaken, which started as a round-robin story here at SWM eight years ago, was mirrored at TBE, and last updated two years ago after Matt Reyes added a chapter. I've waited for more robins since then,, but none have alighted, so I decided to wrap it up myself, dealing with (or papering over) some of the complications as best I could. I think the story is still in keeping with the SWM school of superheroine fiction; nothing overly Deep about it. But one reason for finally posting it now is to show off a pict of "Caramel Fox" that I'd wanted to use ever since I first found it online years back. Feel free to re-mirror the whole story here and, if anyone is so inclined, they're welcome to try a sequel or sidequel.

--Brantley

Let me try:

1) It begins with the Galen, a very advanced alien race who discovered that humans are both intelligent and resilient, and have a genome that's easy (for them) to create "client races" who can populate Earth-like planets across the galaxy. They've secretly been abducting people (and whole villages in ancient times) from Earth for thousands of years, with their peak activity taking place a bit over a thousand years ago. The abducted people are tweaked to be able to live in the various environments on the worlds they want to populate. There are now thousands of human-populated worlds out there

The only people who don't know any of this are the people of Earth, who the Galen keep in the dark so as to not corrupt the wild seed source of their genetically-engineered human races. Basically, we're a seed bank, and we're being mushroomed. You know, kept in the dark and fed sh*t.

2) The Galen have been fighting with another ancient alien race called the Elders for millions of years. Somewhere along the way, the Elders managed to render all Galen females infertile, presumably with some bio-engineered orgasm that even the Galen couldn't stop. This dooms the Galen to eventual extinction, although they live a very, very long time.

3) The Galen decide to bio-engineer a group of humans to become procreators, or surrogates, to allow their race to survive. They look for a very narrow, simple to manipulate gene pool, and decide to abduct a village from the middle north of what is today Sweden, over near the current Norwegian border. Given that the Galen are very powerful beings, they have to greatly enhance these new abductees with their own DNA so they are able to survive the act of mating and also to protect and raise their immensely powerful children. They enhance these humans and dump them on a gold-cored planet named Velor, thus creating the Velorians. When on their gold-cored planet, which has about 5 times Earth's gravity, the Velorians are still several times stronger than normal humans (even allowing for the heavy gravity). The Galen call this new race of humans, Homo Sapiens Supremis.

They also engineer in a control mechanism so the Velorians can't escape Galen control, and they base the control on the presence of gold. The Velorians themselves don't know that when someone is taken by the Galen to become a procreator, she begins to metabolize the intense energy of the Galen, called Orgone, when out of the gold field. When that happens, the Velorian women become more or less as capable as our comic-book Kryptonians. These procreators never return to tell the true story to the people back on Velor.

Also, the Galen care nothing for Velorian men given it's only their finest females, a genetic class called Prima-1 that they want for procreators. They install a Maternity Engine on Velor that purifies and tweaks the ova and sperm before in-vitro fertilization to ensure their needs are met and the race doesn't mutate or diverge. So all of their reproduction is done via this machine. This way they crank out both the Primas to be their surrogates, but also lesser classes of people to support them.

Also, given that the Galen goal was to create Procreators, they amped up Velorian's pheromones and hormones to make them extremely sexual beings. After all, they had only one use planned for them, and they wanted them to be very willing.

4) A religious group of Velorian Natural Lifers eventually emerge who believe that old fashioned reproduction is the sacred way of life, and they believe the Galen plan of using them only for procreation is an abomination. The split in Velorian society is huge and leading to civil war when the Naturals discover an ancient Galen transporter and flee to a planet they name Aria (or Aurea). They all leave, once again restoring peace to Velor.

The split is so acrimonious, however, that these new Aureans (Arions) attempt to eliminate any reminder that they were once Velorians. Since Velorians are 100% blonde and blue-eyed, the Aureans decide to release a wild retrovirus into their population on Aria to insert the dominant gene for hair color (black) back into the population (blonde is recessive). Something goes wrong, and the infection reduces the physical powers of most of their people (the Betans) and enhances the physical power (even above Velorian levels) for a small percentage, the Primes.

5) Both Aureans and Velorians are fortunately trapped on their own planets, since both are gold-cored, per the Galen's plans. Only the Galen know they exist, and all they care about is using them.

This holds until an alien race of traders called the Scalantrans discover Velor. They find nothing to trade on that backward planet, but find to their surprise that the small number of humans who work on their trade ships are very taken with the Velorian women. Velorians are all unimaginable beautiful blondes, and sexually willing to the extreme. Since the Velorians are desperate for something to trade, they take the Scalantrans up on the radical idea of offering some of their young women to become indentured servants to the Scalantrans. The plan is for the Scalantrans to transport these women (who they call Companions) to worlds with wealthy Terrans and sell their contracts for vast sums of money. In so doing, they discover (in almost disastrous ways) that these women become incredibly power once they leave Velor. They gain the strength of a thousand men, the ability to fly, to see through things and burn things with their eyes, and they cannot be injured by any known weapon. The Scalantrans nearly pull the plug on the whole program when they realize that transporting these superwomen is very dangerous. That is, until they discover that a band of gold around a Velorian's neck (think slave collar) will reduce their strength to a dozen times that of a human, and eliminate all their other abilities. (Gold interferes with the pituitary gland which controls the hormones that allow Orgone metabolism).

The Velorian Council, who by now has had a taste of real wealth, accelerates the sale of its daughters into indentured servitude to gain the hard capital they need to trade with the Scalantrans. They make laws that guarantee that Companion contracts are inviolate for 100 years, and order Companions to serve their contract holder in any way he or she wishes.

Once the Terrans on other worlds (the billionaires) realize that they can buy a 100 year indenture for the most beautiful women they've ever seen, they all want a Companion. Not only to warm their bed, but to protect them (think Supergirl as your slave). These Companions can protect them and their families, ensuring they can create a dynasty. Companions are handed down from one generation to the next until the 100 year contract is completed. (Velorians live for a thousand years or more). Many Companions become so bound to their new families, and so estranged from Velor, that they remain after their contract ends. After all, if you were Supergirl, would you want to go back to being ordinary?

6) As this horrific trade in human flesh unfolds, the horrified Aureans go on a conquest to sweep the Terran worlds into their Empire, and in so doing, hope to end the slavery of the Companion program. They believe that they, Velorians and Aurean, the Supremis, should be the dominant humans. They also believe that only through shared strength and military alliance can they protect humanity from further exploitation by alien races.

7) As the Aureans become successful at taking over worlds, the Companions find themselves having to defend their contract holders. But they are outclassed by both the ultra-powerful Primes and a new weapon called a GAR (a weapon that shoots a circular laser beam to evacuate a tunnel to the target which they shoot a bit of anti-matter down). The matter/anti-matter reaction at the target is like a micro-nuke. These weapons can actually harm a Companion, although not with a single shot. Also, while Companions are educated and skilled at many things, especially the loving arts, they aren't trained as warriors.

8) One Companion decides to break her contract and travel back to Velor with information about this GAR so a defense can be created. She winds up kicking off a revolt on Velor that leads to the collapse of the Companion program. Soon after that, a Galen allies herself with Velor, and begins to further enhance Companions into warriors that are even more powerful than Aurean Primes. In such a way are the Protectors born.

9) Velorian Protectors are soon stationed on many Terran worlds to protect them from the Aureans. On some worlds they are visible, and they form the Enlightenment, an alliance of worlds which oppose the growing power of the Aurean Empire. However, on undisclosed worlds, like Earth, they operate secretly.

10) Earth is unique in that the Galen will not allow either Velorians or Aureans to operate openly for fear of spoiling the seed bank.
They don't want the people of Earth to realize that there is a vast galactic civilization out there, mostly populated by tweaked humans.

However, a few humans become friends with the Velorians on Earth and work with them to find undercover Aureans who are infiltrating governments and corrupting Earth. The Aureans are hoping for a total breakdown of our society and subsequent wars that are so disastrous that they can force the Galen to relent and allow the Aureans to come in and salvage their wild seed stock by making Earth part of the Empire. Or so goes the yet unrealized Aurean plan.

An underground war is now being fought on Earth between these two forces, but we ordinary humans usually can't see it. We see the disintegration of culture, war and terrorism that results from the Aurean's attempts to subvert Earth. They are behind all the instabilities and chaos.

This, then, is essentially is the story-space for all AU writing, with the additional caveat that many stories also take place on the seeded, terraformed worlds out there.

Hope this helps and wasn't too long-winded...

Shadar

Woodclaw wrote:

brantley wrote: www.brightempire.com/Awaken.htm

Another anniversary. It's been nine years since the first fiction post at the present incarnation of The Bright Empire. And while there hasn't been time to get Empress of the Dawn III or an update of First Protector ready, I do have a conclusion to When We Dead Awaken, which started as a round-robin story here at SWM eight years ago, was mirrored at TBE, and last updated two years ago after Matt Reyes added a chapter. I've waited for more robins since then,, but none have alighted, so I decided to wrap it up myself, dealing with (or papering over) some of the complications as best I could. I think the story is still in keeping with the SWM school of superheroine fiction; nothing overly Deep about it. But one reason for finally posting it now is to show off a pict of "Caramel Fox" that I'd wanted to use ever since I first found it online years back. Feel free to re-mirror the whole story here and, if anyone is so inclined, they're welcome to try a sequel or sidequel.

--Brantley

At the cost of looking like a tenderfoot, I nevr fully understood the version story of the AU. Can someone help me on this?

I would add that Velorian Protectors are now extremely highly regarded by humans on the seeded worlds, despite their inauspicious beginnings. They uphold the right of self-determination and freedom of all mankind. Yet they are not allowed to interfere in the local affairs of their protectorate, even to stop wars, if those wars are solely human caused. Their sole responsibility is to keep the Aureans from interfering with human destiny. They are bound to the Galen's Prime Directive.

What I hoped to show in the AU was that heroes can come from the most desperate, despicable and unlikely origins. The Velorians were created to merely be surrogates for a more advanced race, a biological tool to serve their own needs. Even worse, all of the Velorian contact with ordinary humans for hundreds of years was as Companions -- indentured servants who were little more than whores in the eyes of many of their contract holders.

From that modest and indecent beginning, the mighty Protectors of humanity evolved, based only on their own determination to rise above their creator's plan for them.

Also that the Aureans, who were truly trying to protect humanity against the aliens in the beginning, and who wanted to stop a practice (the Companion trade) which they saw as little more than sexual slavery, became mankind's worst enemy. By binding humans together under the iron yoke of their Empire, supposedly for their protection, they turned ordinary humans into second class citizens. And in some cases, truly slaves.

My idea was to show that good intentions don't always turn into good governance, as if we didn't already know that. Also, that absolute power *usually) corrupts, as it has the Aureans.

But there is hope. It is admirable that despite all their power, the ability to single-handedly destroy all life on any Terran world, the Velorian Protectors will not and cannot be corrupted. They have a very high ideal to uphold -- that of allowing humans to decide their own fate. They are born to give their lives to that cause.

Yet in the midst of all that, they try to find fulfillment by living among Terrans. Even finding love. Kara for instance has married a human man on Earth.

The currently running Kiraling story on SWM, written by a long-time reader of the AU, is a continuation of the story of Kara and her daughter Xara, along with Sharon, a Scribe of Velor who is on Earth to ensure that the Galen directive of non-interference is upheld. (Something she's not very good at.) The POV character is Joe, who like a handful of humans before him, is now deeply involved in the Velorian story. He has three Velorians, one of them a mighty Protector, who owe him their lives. But as he finds, trying to live around Velorians and be friends with them is very challenging.

Velorians cannot truly escape their biology, which is that they were engineered for a single purpose -- to be procreators. If their mere presence doesn't turn an entire room of people on, then the trail of alien-enhanced pheromones they leave behind them will ensure that nobody is thinking straight -- or can sit down. One bit of fan-service that I put into the AU was that Velorian pheromones, once concentrated enough (as after a kiss), tend to make a man inhumanly virile and strong for a few hours. Some men can handle the overdrive, others might die from the rush. But for those who can handle it, they will remember those intimate moments forever.

Who doesn't want to be a superman, with a supergirl in their arms, if only for a moment.

And of course, the difference in power between human men is very minor to a Velorian. A strapping testosterone pumped jock isn't significantly more capable than some nerd who sits too long on the couch, at least in the eyes of someone who is thousands of times stronger than any human who has ever lived. It has nothing to do with their visible physical attributes. If you have the right latent gene to handle the pheromones, then you're golden. If not, you'll overdose and pass, possibly even die. A couch potato with the right gene trumps an All American football hero without it.

And so we come to the inner core of the AU fantasy.

Shadar

shadar wrote: Let me try:

1) It begins with the Galen, a very advanced alien race who discovered that humans are both intelligent and resilient, and have a genome that's easy (for them) to create "client races" who can populate Earth-like planets across the galaxy. They've secretly been abducting people (and whole villages in ancient times) from Earth for thousands of years, with their peak activity taking place a bit over a thousand years ago. The abducted people are tweaked to be able to live in the various environments on the worlds they want to populate. There are now thousands of human-populated worlds out there

The only people who don't know any of this are the people of Earth, who the Galen keep in the dark so as to not corrupt the wild seed source of their genetically-engineered human races. Basically, we're a seed bank, and we're being mushroomed. You know, kept in the dark and fed sh*t.

2) The Galen have been fighting with another ancient alien race called the Elders for millions of years. Somewhere along the way, the Elders managed to render all Galen females infertile, presumably with some bio-engineered orgasm that even the Galen couldn't stop. This dooms the Galen to eventual extinction, although they live a very, very long time.

3) The Galen decide to bio-engineer a group of humans to become procreators, or surrogates, to allow their race to survive. They look for a very narrow, simple to manipulate gene pool, and decide to abduct a village from the middle north of what is today Sweden, over near the current Norwegian border. Given that the Galen are very powerful beings, they have to greatly enhance these new abductees with their own DNA so they are able to survive the act of mating and also to protect and raise their immensely powerful children. They enhance these humans and dump them on a gold-cored planet named Velor, thus creating the Velorians. When on their gold-cored planet, which has about 5 times Earth's gravity, the Velorians are still several times stronger than normal humans (even allowing for the heavy gravity). The Galen call this new race of humans, Homo Sapiens Supremis.

They also engineer in a control mechanism so the Velorians can't escape Galen control, and they base the control on the presence of gold. The Velorians themselves don't know that when someone is taken by the Galen to become a procreator, she begins to metabolize the intense energy of the Galen, called Orgone, when out of the gold field. When that happens, the Velorian women become more or less as capable as our comic-book Kryptonians. These procreators never return to tell the true story to the people back on Velor.

Also, the Galen care nothing for Velorian men given it's only their finest females, a genetic class called Prima-1 that they want for procreators. They install a Maternity Engine on Velor that purifies and tweaks the ova and sperm before in-vitro fertilization to ensure their needs are met and the race doesn't mutate or diverge. So all of their reproduction is done via this machine. This way they crank out both the Primas to be their surrogates, but also lesser classes of people to support them.

Also, given that the Galen goal was to create Procreators, they amped up Velorian's pheromones and hormones to make them extremely sexual beings. After all, they had only one use planned for them, and they wanted them to be very willing.

4) A religious group of Velorian Natural Lifers eventually emerge who believe that old fashioned reproduction is the sacred way of life, and they believe the Galen plan of using them only for procreation is an abomination. The split in Velorian society is huge and leading to civil war when the Naturals discover an ancient Galen transporter and flee to a planet they name Aria (or Aurea). They all leave, once again restoring peace to Velor.

The split is so acrimonious, however, that these new Aureans (Arions) attempt to eliminate any reminder that they were once Velorians. Since Velorians are 100% blonde and blue-eyed, the Aureans decide to release a wild retrovirus into their population on Aria to insert the dominant gene for hair color (black) back into the population (blonde is recessive). Something goes wrong, and the infection reduces the physical powers of most of their people (the Betans) and enhances the physical power (even above Velorian levels) for a small percentage, the Primes.

5) Both Aureans and Velorians are fortunately trapped on their own planets, since both are gold-cored, per the Galen's plans. Only the Galen know they exist, and all they care about is using them.

This holds until an alien race of traders called the Scalantrans discover Velor. They find nothing to trade on that backward planet, but find to their surprise that the small number of humans who work on their trade ships are very taken with the Velorian women. Velorians are all unimaginable beautiful blondes, and sexually willing to the extreme. Since the Velorians are desperate for something to trade, they take the Scalantrans up on the radical idea of offering some of their young women to become indentured servants to the Scalantrans. The plan is for the Scalantrans to transport these women (who they call Companions) to worlds with wealthy Terrans and sell their contracts for vast sums of money. In so doing, they discover (in almost disastrous ways) that these women become incredibly power once they leave Velor. They gain the strength of a thousand men, the ability to fly, to see through things and burn things with their eyes, and they cannot be injured by any known weapon. The Scalantrans nearly pull the plug on the whole program when they realize that transporting these superwomen is very dangerous. That is, until they discover that a band of gold around a Velorian's neck (think slave collar) will reduce their strength to a dozen times that of a human, and eliminate all their other abilities. (Gold interferes with the pituitary gland which controls the hormones that allow Orgone metabolism).

The Velorian Council, who by now has had a taste of real wealth, accelerates the sale of its daughters into indentured servitude to gain the hard capital they need to trade with the Scalantrans. They make laws that guarantee that Companion contracts are inviolate for 100 years, and order Companions to serve their contract holder in any way he or she wishes.

Once the Terrans on other worlds (the billionaires) realize that they can buy a 100 year indenture for the most beautiful women they've ever seen, they all want a Companion. Not only to warm their bed, but to protect them (think Supergirl as your slave). These Companions can protect them and their families, ensuring they can create a dynasty. Companions are handed down from one generation to the next until the 100 year contract is completed. (Velorians live for a thousand years or more). Many Companions become so bound to their new families, and so estranged from Velor, that they remain after their contract ends. After all, if you were Supergirl, would you want to go back to being ordinary?

6) As this horrific trade in human flesh unfolds, the horrified Aureans go on a conquest to sweep the Terran worlds into their Empire, and in so doing, hope to end the slavery of the Companion program. They believe that they, Velorians and Aurean, the Supremis, should be the dominant humans. They also believe that only through shared strength and military alliance can they protect humanity from further exploitation by alien races.

7) As the Aureans become successful at taking over worlds, the Companions find themselves having to defend their contract holders. But they are outclassed by both the ultra-powerful Primes and a new weapon called a GAR (a weapon that shoots a circular laser beam to evacuate a tunnel to the target which they shoot a bit of anti-matter down). The matter/anti-matter reaction at the target is like a micro-nuke. These weapons can actually harm a Companion, although not with a single shot. Also, while Companions are educated and skilled at many things, especially the loving arts, they aren't trained as warriors.

8) One Companion decides to break her contract and travel back to Velor with information about this GAR so a defense can be created. She winds up kicking off a revolt on Velor that leads to the collapse of the Companion program. Soon after that, a Galen allies herself with Velor, and begins to further enhance Companions into warriors that are even more powerful than Aurean Primes. In such a way are the Protectors born.

9) Velorian Protectors are soon stationed on many Terran worlds to protect them from the Aureans. On some worlds they are visible, and they form the Enlightenment, an alliance of worlds which oppose the growing power of the Aurean Empire. However, on undisclosed worlds, like Earth, they operate secretly.

10) Earth is unique in that the Galen will not allow either Velorians or Aureans to operate openly for fear of spoiling the seed bank.
They don't want the people of Earth to realize that there is a vast galactic civilization out there, mostly populated by tweaked humans.

However, a few humans become friends with the Velorians on Earth and work with them to find undercover Aureans who are infiltrating governments and corrupting Earth. The Aureans are hoping for a total breakdown of our society and subsequent wars that are so disastrous that they can force the Galen to relent and allow the Aureans to come in and salvage their wild seed stock by making Earth part of the Empire. Or so goes the yet unrealized Aurean plan.

An underground war is now being fought on Earth between these two forces, but we ordinary humans usually can't see it. We see the disintegration of culture, war and terrorism that results from the Aurean's attempts to subvert Earth. They are behind all the instabilities and chaos.

This, then, is essentially is the story-space for all AU writing, with the additional caveat that many stories also take place on the seeded, terraformed worlds out there.

Hope this helps and wasn't too long-winded...

Shadar

Woodclaw wrote:

brantley wrote: www.brightempire.com/Awaken.htm

Another anniversary. It's been nine years since the first fiction post at the present incarnation of The Bright Empire. And while there hasn't been time to get Empress of the Dawn III or an update of First Protector ready, I do have a conclusion to When We Dead Awaken, which started as a round-robin story here at SWM eight years ago, was mirrored at TBE, and last updated two years ago after Matt Reyes added a chapter. I've waited for more robins since then,, but none have alighted, so I decided to wrap it up myself, dealing with (or papering over) some of the complications as best I could. I think the story is still in keeping with the SWM school of superheroine fiction; nothing overly Deep about it. But one reason for finally posting it now is to show off a pict of "Caramel Fox" that I'd wanted to use ever since I first found it online years back. Feel free to re-mirror the whole story here and, if anyone is so inclined, they're welcome to try a sequel or sidequel.

--Brantley

At the cost of looking like a tenderfoot, I nevr fully understood the version story of the AU. Can someone help me on this?

Woodclaw wrote: Thanks Shadar for the history lesson, although this isn't quite what I was looking for. What I meant was that I found some references while browsing AU related websites to AU1, AU2 and AU3 stories (I think you mentioned this to me in a e-mail once). Hence I guessed that there were some different versions of the same universe floating around and I wanted to understand how that element worked.

Different incarnations of the Aurora Universe are a matter of Internet history. Shadar created the Aurora Universe around 1995, and the initial focus was on the character named Aurora. Some years back, he posted a link to an archive of her original story:

velorian.net/aoa/Menu2.htm

I gather he took a break for a while before launching AU-2, which focused more on Sharalyn the Scribe, Kata Zor'el and the actual history of the Velorians and Arions going back to the war of the Galen and Elders. Here's a Wayback Machine archive of that incarnation:

web.archive.org/web/20030220081458/http://velorian.org/

But just as important to AU-3 was the late Douglas Macbeth's Lillith of Velor at Infinity Bridge:

web.archive.org/web/20130117091608/http:....infinitybridge.net/

And another site, AK's Julie of Velor:

web.archive.org/web/20080216121115/http:....infinitybridge.com/

Aurora Universe 3 emerged gradually from works by Shadar (before and after his 2003 vacation and reboot of his site) and myself set on seeded worlds, and involving new elements like the Companions and the Sclantrans (mentioned briefly before, but never described until Velvet Belle Tree weighed in.). But AU-3 fiction, as the suggestion of Tarot Barnes, replaced Kara Zor'el with Kira Jahr'ling to break the connection with DC Comics. And I began calling Arions Aureans because in a work-in-progress set on Earth during World War II it would be confusing to have both Arions and Aryans. As for Aurora, Tarot gave her an entirely different backstory in the last AU fiction he wrote before setting out to create a new universe of his own:

www.brightempire.com/Aurora-1.htm

Hope this helps.

--Brantley

I would further add that Brantley is the keeper of the AU3, which is the culmination of about thirty years of development of the AU. Brantley is doing a great job filling in gaps in the universe, rescuing stranded and abandoned stories (my biggest weakness), and expanding the universe into something that is much more cohesive and linear than I could ever make it. Closer to proper SF than ever before.

The other bit of trivia is that the Velorian concept actually predates the internet as I was posting stories on bulletin boards about female empowerment back in the early 80's. I remember 1983 for sure, not sure how long before that. That's when the earliest concepts were developed. Stories were posted on a dial-up bulletin board that eventually evolved into the Diana the Valkyrie web site many years later. Most stories on that board featured women beating men up kind of stuff, but my writing fit poorly into that genre as my heroines liked men (probably too much!) even if they were vastly stronger. My wife once said that from the very start, I was just trying to get a date with Supergirl. She knows me too well.

I have some of those old hard disk drives in a drawer that haven't been powered up in twenty years, and won't even plug into any system I own today. Remember the IDE hardware interface? Some are early SCSI. This was all before ATA and SCSI-2 AND then the SATA interfaces, et.al. Way back stuff that would take a geek from the computer museum to fire up today.

The first AU internet website was hosted in Australia in 1992. Lets call that AU-0. The traffic was so high (mostly from the US) that it trashed the severs and clogged the rather wimpy cross-Pacific internet communication lines of the day, and the AU was kicked out of Oz. Some funny stories there. Amazing that was only 22 years ago. Seems like yesterday.

New writers kept coming on board to add their voices, most recently anonxyzus with his Kiraling story and that kept things going. Some tragedy too. Two writers died while writing their best works. Mac when the wing of an airplane came off while he was doing a loop in a biplane (how often does that happen?), and shortly before that, a bandleader from Houston named Toomey Sparks who wrote a very interesting series named Susan. He dropped dead while driving his car. One other writer (Tex Beethoven) walked into the Utah dessert canyons and was never seen again, although he was a bit a chameleon, so he might have emerged as someone else. For a while I began to wonder if the Arions were closing in on us. Scary.

So I guess I'm an oldy but moldy type. I'm here on SWM because I still love this genre, and between the Bright Empire (for AU3), a few things still on velorian.net, and SWM (for the larger universe), this is where it's at in 2014.

Shadar

brantley wrote:

Woodclaw wrote: Thanks Shadar for the history lesson, although this isn't quite what I was looking for. What I meant was that I found some references while browsing AU related websites to AU1, AU2 and AU3 stories (I think you mentioned this to me in a e-mail once). Hence I guessed that there were some different versions of the same universe floating around and I wanted to understand how that element worked.

Different incarnations of the Aurora Universe are a matter of Internet history. Shadar created the Aurora Universe around 1995, and the initial focus was on the character named Aurora. Some years back, he posted a link to an archive of her original story:

velorian.net/aoa/Menu2.htm

I gather he took a break for a while before launching AU-2, which focused more on Sharalyn the Scribe, Kata Zor'el and the actual history of the Velorians and Arions going back to the war of the Galen and Elders. Here's a Wayback Machine archive of that incarnation:

web.archive.org/web/20030220081458/http://velorian.org/

But just as important to AU-3 was the late Douglas Macbeth's Lillith of Velor at Infinity Bridge:

web.archive.org/web/20130117091608/http:....infinitybridge.net/

And another site, AK's Julie of Velor:

web.archive.org/web/20080216121115/http:....infinitybridge.com/

Aurora Universe 3 emerged gradually from works by Shadar and myself set on seeded worlds, and involving new elements like the Companions and the Sclantrans (mentioned briefly before, but never described until Velvet Belle Tree weighed in.). But AU-3 fiction, as the suggestion of Tarot Barnes, replaced Kara Zor'el with Kira Jahr'ling to break the connection with DC Comics. And I began calling Arions Aureans because in a work-in-progress set on Earth during World War II it would be confusing to have both Arions and Aryans. As for Aurora, Tarot gave her an entirely different backstory in the last AU fiction he wrote before setting out to create a new universe of his own:

www.brightempire.com/Aurora-1.htm

Hope this helps.

--Brantley