Emissary

Science had come far in the year 3133. Space was an explored frontier; humanity explored the whole of the Sol system and attempted to depart their known space to settle amongst the stars, spreading the immortality of the human spirit to the furthest reaches of a galaxy they believed to be devoid of adversaries.

As time carried on and expansion spread further into the Milky Way, unrest began to grow among the human colonies. Wars of independence broke out as colonies wished to no longer be bound to the wills of Earth, a “dying world with no understanding of frontier struggles.” Races split, lines were drawn. It appeared as though humans would become their own worst enemy, as time had proven over, and over.

But right as things seemed at their worst, those adversaries that humanity believed to be absent from the universe appeared. Vicious, violent beings appeared from beyond the Milky Way and laid waste to the outermost colonies of humanity, slaughtering the people with no remorse and challenging the collective of humanity; “Fight, or die.” With a new enemy hellbent on their destruction, humans rallied and their divides were forgotten as a greater threat met them.

The war was bloody, violent, and detestable. Horrors that history refused to record were committed and countless lives and colonies were snuffed out. Things seemed bleak for humanity. The ferocity of these invaders, who named themselves as the “Nalesh’ka,” was paired with technical superiority. They could move faster, strike harder, and seemed more numerous than sands in the seas of Old Earth. Hope was lost.

And then, one fateful day, a hand of friendship was extended from across the stars. Appearing before human representatives, a coalition of aliens arrived to offer humans a chance at salvation. Having watched the war from afar, the aliens said they had each fought the Nalesh’ka on their own and, in return for survival, had ceded entire sections of space to the marauders. Upon seeing humanity struggle so valiantly to hold back the wave of violence, they decided it was time to push the Nalesh’ka back to wherever they had come from and wished to induct humanity into that effort.

Eagerly accepting these new allies, humans found themselves revitalized with new technology, new friends, and new hope to stop their own slaughter. Chief among these technologies was the “Slip Drive,” a miracle of technology that allowed ships to generate bubbles of gravity around themselves and travel faster than light. For once, humans could outrun the Nalesh’ka and, much to the surprise of the newly founded “Galactic Coalition,” humans began using it to engage in combat, not run away. Humans were winning.

Innovation did not stop there. In the effort to overpower the Nalesh’ka, a warlike species with generations of evolutionary progress directed toward being the universe’s ultimate warriors, humans and their new friends began developing technologies to combat them. The Fennec, a bipedal fox-like species, combined their space-faring love with human lore to create something truly special. Standing dozens of meters tall, the mech suit was created. Each one was unique, designed and typically flown by their own creators, the mech suit combined high mobility, durability, and size to create a behemoth of metal that could lay waste to battalions of warriors. The mech suit became the hallmark of the Coalition’s resistance against an eons’ old foe and more and more mech suits were created to battle these enemies.

The Nalesh’ka would not be so easily bested, however, and their adaptations came swiftly. Weapons made to kill these mech suits and their pilots began to arrive and once captured, the suits were turned against their creators. Nonetheless, the Galactic Coalition relied on the endurance and ingenuity of their species to continue retaking systems from the Nalesh’ka until, after a hundred years of non-stop warfare, the Nalesh’ka empress, Lo’Kalla’Nu’Tal, surrendered to the Coalition.

Against the wishes of many smaller voices in the Coalition, the Nalesh’ka were merely banished to a distant sector of space, ordered to disarm and never return. Many believed peace and such an offering would show the Nalesh’ka that war was an unnecessary event in this new age but the factions that believed otherwise created great tension within the Coalition, settling far away from the Galactic colonies to form new colonies of their own design and philosophy.

One such colony, a jointly-operated Human and Fennec colony led by several heroes of the Nalesh War, settled in one of the harshest segments on the frontier of the Milky Way, mining their new planet’s asteroid belt for the materials to create their new city and its defenders; a line of mech suits modeled after the very suits operated by the war heroes who led the colony.

Tragedy would befall this colony since, during explorations of their planet, they found a hive colony of the Nalesh’ka residing on their new world. Bitter combat, led once more by these mech pilot heroes, would lead to extermination of these war-like beings and solidify the survivors’ belief that the Nalesh’ka could never be reasoned with, as the Coalition believed. Settling into their ways, the colony quickly became an industrious planet over the next year, thanks to its rich mineral deposits both on the planet and in its asteroid belts, and once the development of the “warp gate” had been made, they reentered the universe as a small trade hub for metal products. The influx of wealth drove development of their cities further until great skyscrapers rose in the populous areas and “Orvlax Colony” became a brightly lit monolith to the endurance and prosperity of human and fennec cooperation.

The population never let their near-worship of mech pilots die and in the years following the extermination of the Nalesh’ka they began to hold “mech competitions” to relive the greatest battles of heroic mech pilots of the war or play competitive games operated by mechs. The planet’s love of these events drove the popularity of pilots higher and higher. If someone owned or operated a mech, they were sure to be well-regarded and wealthy.

One such person was Athriax Keltillierre, a fennec pilot whose father and grandmother both fought in the Nalesh War and flew the "Emissary," a bipedal mech suit that had seen many battles and always lived to fight the next one. Athriax, tutored in mech piloting from before he could walk, knew he would be the next in line to fly the Emissary. Daily, he would proudly don his pilot's jumpsuit, walk through the bustling docks, and see to the maintenance of the Emissary, polishing the plates by hand if need be. Athriax was a dedicated, if inexperienced, pilot. To him, the Emissary was everything.

And, by the wildest of chances, it is because of the Emissary that all life in the galaxy would survive.