------------------------------------------Planetside Desert Drop Zone---------------------------------------
------------------------------------------(A.K.A. San Palomino Desert)--------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------Orbital Day 11, 1615 hours----------------------------------------
Twilight stepped into a bright room with nothing but a table and some chairs inside. The Walls were a dulled yellow that looked like the color of the dress that Rarity made her. Along the walls were bronze oil lamps with small flames flickering inside. The room smelled of Old leather and wood polish with the lingering scent of cinnamon in the air. Around the table in the center of the room were two chairs, one of which was occupied by the admiral who sat looking at a small square of a thin, clear material. At the first sign of her presence he snapped up from the object and stood to greet her.
“Welcome, Princess. I hope I am not being too forward, but I have provided a refreshing cup of tea for you. “ the admiral said as he moved to pull out a large leather armchair for her.
“Thank you Admiral. That was very kind of you.” She responded taking her seat.
“Not at all. We would like to make this as easy as possible; and, you can go a long way with a smile.” Admiral Von Starke said taking his own seat once more.
“Before we begin, I did say that there would be some required learning. We think that you need to know us as a species before you can speak to your government. We are a race called humans. Currently, the average lifespan for us is three hundred years, while the average life expectancy is 45.
We come from a planet more than 1400 light years away. It took us traveling for 20 million years to reach this planet. as it stands now, from one cause or another, there are only 300 million of us. At the height of our civilization on our home world, we numbered in the ten billions. We were the apex predators there. Top of the food chain is a hard place to get to without claws, fangs or armored shells. So being born without those, we forged ours in fire and fashioned them from steel.
Now, let me tell you a few things about humans; starting with a passage written more than twenty million years ago.
‘Human beings are scary.
We breathe a corrosive gas. Drink one of the most potent solvents. Our preferred method of hunting was persistence hunting, where we chased animals until their bodies simply gave up and died. We can eat just about anything we find, so we don't need to stop for food when chasing our prey. If we can't find food, that's fine. Our bodies will simply begin to eat itself so that we don't have to stop chasing our prey.
We walk upright, we sweat, we don't have much body hair, which allows us to radiate away our body heat. This means that excessive time or extreme environments won't stop our hunts.If the animal fights back against us, we can take massive damage to our extremities and lose half our blood, and still live. Our entire existence is owed to persistence, endurance, and determination. When we put ourselves to a task, it gets done, period. And this instinct is still affecting us today.
332 BC: Alexander the Great hits a stalemate with the fortified island city of Tyre. Instead of going back defeated, he builds a kilometer long bridge in order to raze the city.
49 BC: Caesar, after defeating the Gauls and invading Britain, turns a political fight into a civil war by invading Italy with only a single legion. He eventually becomes dictator, starting a world superpower whose engineering feats were only recently being broken when we left earth.
1804 AD:A charismatic French general declares himself Emperor and sets off to conquer much of mainland Europe. He is captured, exiled, and then escapes. The soldiers sent to recapture him instead lay down their arms and join him.
1961 AD: One man decides that we will go to the moon, despite much of the technology to do so not even existing yet. Just eight years later, two humans stand on the surface of the moon and look back upon the Earth.
2003 AD: A group of scientists mapped out the very building blocks of our species and made it possible to replicate it. Their first steps in that field made humans how they are today.
2032 AD: Advancements in the medical technologies came to a pinnacle when full body prosthetics were readily available to any and all persons of earth. Death by any means other than old age was now virtually impossible.
2057 AD: One man rose a corporation to such heights that it literally controlled the world's finances and thusly bought out all the world's governments. The owner forced all nations into one global government, and then just backed into the shadows as it took over and then faded into the shadows of history.
2105 AD: Realizing the impending collapse of earth's ecosystems, the previously uncooperative states that made up the Expanded Earth Government banded together to send the first of three massive colony ships out into space with a mere fraction of the then ten billion humans on the planet.
We made Railroads, Airplanes, Spaceflight,and the Internet. We made ourselves more machine than human and we built homes in the most brutal environments that nature has ever produced.
We are humans.
We fear no monsters or gods.
No, they fear us.’
We have already inherited the Earth and the stars and anyone or anything that stands in our way will be eliminated one way or another.
We forged our path from a dying planet more than 1400 light years away to what we hoped to be our new home.
We are a race of monsters, Princess, make no mistake. We are a violent, warlike race with technology far ourstripping anything your planet has ever seen. And we come in peace.”
When he had finished, Twilight found herself to be a little scared. “I don't mean to be rude or anything admiral but that was quite the intense……. lesson.” She said as she shakily tried to pick up her tea cup. It was then that she noticed that the admiral didn’t have a cup of tea, but rather a glass of a strange reddish brown liquid with a few cubes of ice in it.
“What are you drinking Admiral? That certainly does not look like tea.”
“No, my dear Princess, this is something far stronger. This is a glass of Armagnac Brandy, made in the traditional French style. This is one of the purist alcohols you can get aboard our vessels and is a pure luxury. Honestly, it is my first glass of it in over a century. Why, would you care for some?”
“You said it was alcohol? After what you just told me I do believe that it would help, so yes I will take one if you do not mind.”
“Very well, then let me pour you a glass and we can move on to the better parts of my race.” The admiral said, reaching beneath the table for the bottle.