In 2106, a colony ship crashed onto the planet Solen, a marginally-habitable world tidally locked against its red dwarf sun. The terminal band hosts a diverse array of life, biomes smashed into each other by the world's peculiar configuration. At first, it seemed like a harsh, but ultimately safe world to colonize. Until the Spore got into them.

The earliest colonization effort involved using the husk of the colony ship as shelter against Solen's violent weather, its many fierce predators, and the slightly toxic atmosphere. However, there was need to range out into the wild, and the rangers soon contacted an intelligent species they utterly failed to identify: the Spore.

The first colony managed to barely hold on, despite great losses early on, and after a generation or two, it seemed to be stabilizing. They had managed to tame the land to produce edible food, and had found ways to adapt to the atmosphere. It seemed theirs would be a hard path, but one with the possibility of success.

Until the first Sporelings were born. The Spore spent years adapting to this new species, and finally found an angle of attack. The infection spread quickly, claiming many lives, but converting the survivors into its kin. Once turned, the Sporelings didn't see the humans as their kind, but as invaders. They banded together and, with little but the most primitive weapons, and a remarkable capacity for violence, they destroyed the human civilization on Solen.

Fewer than 2,000 survived the civil war, all of them Sporelings, but the Spore was able to adapt them to the world better than they could have done with all their technology. They flourished on Solen, with an explosive birth rate, and an injection of genetic diversity by way of the Spore which counteracted the negative effects of their population bottleneck. In a matter of centuries, they expanded to every corner of habitable land, and began to chafe at each other's borders. War was inevitable.

Not much is known of Sporeling culture in this time. As remarkable as the Spore's genetic memory is, it is not a videocamera, and the minutiae of the human experience do not merit permanent encoding into racial memory. What all seem to remember is that the Arcori and the Dekari split manifested during this time--although they remember it happening long, long ago. The rest comes from the Abelites.

In the 24th century, an Abelite probe ship arrived in Soleni space, and saw signs of intelligent life (barely). The Abelites monitored them for a time, and judged them to be poor candidates for direct reunification. It was not hard for them to determine what had happened to their lost brethren; they identified the Spore and its characteristics, thanks to a few abductions in the name of Science. They decided that the only chance to save the Sporelings was to work with, rather than against their cultural memory.

They sowed an idea into the minds of a chosen few, that they would find deliverance from the gods amidst the hellish dangers of the hot and cold sides of their world. Bold adventurers sought these divine gifts, and in time they managed to harness them, as they had been meant to. They were given the gift of space travel, and a course that would take them to meet their "gods".

And so they did, encountering the Abelites, who explained that they alone were wise enough to learn the truth of their existence. They explained their origin, and the infection of the Spore, and that they were invited to rejoin their species, and to help the Abelites "cure" the rest of their kind.

They did what Sporelings do. They fought.

The sneak attack won them access to real interstellar craft, whose operation they took to with remarkable speed. When these conquerers returned to their world, they spoke of aliens with amazing technology, who live on a faraway world, ripe for conquest.

And so, the Sporelings invaded Abel.

It wasn't much of a war, admittedly--only a few long-range ships, carrying several hundred. Still, the Abelites were blindsided by the violent betrayal, and were not equipped to deal with an invasion. The conquerors managed to crash-land on Abel and invade one of their cities, raping and pillaging along the way. It was glorious, and incredibly stupid. After managing to recreate the lost art of weapon-crafting, the Abelites repelled the invaders, and, as ever, consulted the What-If Machine to determine the appropriate response.

Generations later, the Sporelings barely remembered the tale of the Sky Pirates, who hijacked a Ship of the Gods and sailed it into a divine realm, presumably dying gloriously. They certainly hadn't reported back, and the matter was soon consigned to song. So one can imagine their surprise when an invasion fleet arrived, carrying millions of robotic enforcers. The Abelite Imperium quickly and brutally suppressed the population, overwhelming them with massive technological superiority.

From gleaming white ships hovering in the sky, the invaders explained themselves. They were here to cure the Sporelings, to restore their true identity. All that was needed was peaceful compliance. They brought cures for all diseases, for famine, for war, for all their ills. Those who resisted were captured alive and sent to be reeducated. The blow to the Sporeling psyche was immense, but there was nothing to be done. The enemy couldn't be beaten...not until

(to be continued)

More detail to come, perhaps.

The ancient art of pah-hri, or "Ghost-Waking", appears in many forms, depending on the context.

D'kori

Among the D'kori, Ghost-Waking is seen as superstition (albeit a superstition taken fairly seriously by virtually all D'kori, with an intensity level about on par with modern sports teams or psychics). It exists in an odd sort of superposition of real and not real. In everyday life, it doesn't really exist, although that is almost seen as the result of belief, as if all the knocking on wood and throwing salt over your shoulder is what keeps 21st century Earth non-magical.

There are certainly odd things to be experienced in the wild places of the world (explainable due to the wide variety of ever-evolving toxic spores to be inhaled; even D'kori aren't immune), and plenty of people devote themselves to the mysticism of their home world and those with similar flora and fauna. However, Tempus is, by any account, a very modern world, and the divide between the Built World and the Natural is quite severe. D'korran cities are largely purified to the extent of being livable by non-sporelings (a rather useful thing for interstellar commerce), and the vast majority of modern D'korrans on Tempus are what their more wild-dwelling counterparts might call "fallen from grace".

As mentioned, there are some who choose not to dwell in great cities, but small settlements, in a harsher, less stable equilibrium with the world's deadly flora. They exhibit tendencies unsettling and undesirable to their more civilized brethren (easily explainable via the mind-altering toxins they breathe in regularly), but tend to be stigmatized and marginalized more due to their status as descendants of exiled clans and dishonored families than their wild ways. Among these folk, though, pah-hri is very real, and their shamans can often exhibit abilities bordering on the supernatural, such as making very believable claims about perceiving via the eyes and ears of forest creatures miles away.

The reality of pah-hri on Tempus is that it is an exponential slope--as one sporeling's ability to perceive and act upon her connection to nature grows, it pulls at her, tempting her, empowering her, and anyone with the talent to exceed the seers and shamans of the wild clans ends up losing their identity, merging with the planetary consciousness (so their adherents say), and leaving behind a body without a useful mind.

The Arcori opine that Tempus is far too vivacious and bio-diverse to practice their art. They go so far as to say that the D'kori tribe is nothing more than a degenerate race, more human than sporeling, with their nature diluted to the point that they can remain disconnected from the World Spirit (with the help of their technology, of course) in order to practice modern business, commerce, and warfare. They don't blame the D'kori, of course, but rather the Abelites for forcibly modernizing their world--then again, little of their behavior suggests they would have thought of any version of the inhabitants of Tempus as other than barbarians.

It is worth mentioning briefly that the vast majority of worlds outside Tempus with a controlling population of D'kori are much less Spore-infused than Tempus itself, making them even less metaphysically active. The cold, clean space stations of the Foundation are--naturally--devoid of any significant Spore activity, as are most regions of civilized colonies and virtually the whole of every other Homeworld, where every non-Sporeling humanoid, animal, plant, and otherwise have been immunized against the Spore, to avoid conquest by infection.

The Arcori surround themselves with life, whether in their massive city-sized space stations, their elegant spacecraft that evoke carved and shaped wood and other organic features, or their planet-bound settlements. But, crucially, they surround themselves with carefully-chosen and curated life. They wish to be connected to their environment, and the memories of their ancestors, but not overwhelmed by them. Where Tempus is a massive, overgrown garden of chaos, Arcori settlements are like Japanese tea gardens, every tree a bonsai.

Pah-hri is an accepted reality among the Arcori, although most do not practice it beyond a system of beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life. A few rise high above this background level, jealously hoarding their ability, and claiming nobility above other Arcori by right of their power. They tend not to enjoyable verifiable superpowers, besides excellent health, longevity, intelligence, etc...all of which could well be explained by genetic engineering (and foreign scientists even allow for the possibility of a sort of naturally-evolved agent to curate their DNA, allowing room to believe their claims to the contrary).

Generally speaking, peak metaphysical presentation among this population is comparable to a P1 or possibly P2 in the Institute, with typical, verifiable abilities including:

• Recitation of detailed memories of ancestors, with statistically-significant verisimilitude

Non-verifiable abilities commonly claimed include:

• Out-of-body experiences, both humanlike (think astral projection, interacting with other travelers, ancestors, and cosmic beings), and transcendent (difficult to explain or even recall after returning to normal)
• "Natural" healing of conditions that are not expected to improve without state-of-the-art medical treatment
• Prediction of important events, such as deaths in the family