Chapter Text
KIDS THESE DAYS
Ozainu Kalala sat down heavily.
His office was a mess.
His knuckles were bruised. The wall, ceiling fixtures and ornamental fish tank were worse off.
He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Brightly colored tropical fish slowly flopped about on the floor and suffocated to death as he mastered his emotions.
He would be gutted and smoked if he had to listen to one more line about the “necessity to cooperate with extraterrestrial lussi on the basis of species continuation”.
The polish chips off of his claws as they dig into the, rare deep violet tinted wood of his desk.
Blast that damned empress, may she reign for a thousand sweeps, but he was not going to just sit and watch his species be-be … be ideologically polluted by a bunch of hopped up star monkeys, who only just fell out of the damned trees.
The ornamental inkwell makes a satisfying crunching noise against the far wall of his office.
He lowers his hand deliberately.
He barely tolerated midbloods as it was and had been making decent headway with the Imperial Condescension on instituting a brown and down culling policy for all non psionics in the brooding caverns.
He has been so close! The paperwork had been in the works. He’d had the backing of a majority of the highbloods and he’d been making good headway with the Cobalts. Just a few hundred sweeps and all the useless lowwbloods without any helming or battle use could have been bred right out. It would have been for the good of the species!
The other highbloods were too busy jockeying with each other for place in the, admittedly still dangerous and complicated, world of troll politics, to care about the real root of most hemospectrum issues.
Lowbloods were just too short lived. It took forever to train them to anything approaching battle competent or higher learning and the ones who did show progress would die after barely any time at all, having wasted important military time and resources. He knew that. Didn't he. He knew that for damn sure.
He allowed himself a moment- just a moment, just to remind himself, to ruminate on the brown blood boy he had taken under his wing all those sweeps ago.
The blanket of memory falls heavily over his shoulders and he allows himself to slump down in the chair.
The surprise and joy at finding the proverbial diamond in the rough.
Watching Mosart improve, slowly at first then faster. Bit by bit, dragging himself up out of mediocrity to be nearly on par strategically with Ozainu himself. That mind. Sharp and sly, yet joyful. Always finding something new. A new angle. A new interpretation of old strategies. The conversations they’d had. Deep into the mornings it was sometimes, going over old footnotes in crackleing battle memoirs and strategy manuals from previous eras.
He almost smiles but his face quickly sours. He had loved that boy. They had been something more than moirail or kismesis. Supporting and pushing each other at the same time to greater things.
Then the blasted fool had died on him. Not of anything glorious or noble, no great combat or last stand.
Fucking dementia.
He had withered and husked away when Ozainu wasn't looking. One night having a rousing debate on mid century battle tactics over a game of chess then the next he had forgotten Ozainu’s name.
When had the boy collected all those wrinkles, or all those grey hairs, when had his hands started to shake too badly to hold a pen or to write his music? It seemed like just when their life together was looking its best the boy had abandoned him, just like-. He cuts that thought off before it can form.
He steeples his hands and controls his breathing. Closing off his gills. When had they flared out?
No matter.
Dying like that. Leaving him with dusty slow highbloods who never did anything brilliant or looked at things with fire in their eyes for what could be and what he would make it be.
That kind of fire could only burn you in the end. Damn Mosart. Damn Mosart to hell for leaving him like this.
That was when he had seen the error of his ways. Lowbloods just couldn't live up to the expectations of the true troll elite. Anything that short lived should be used for what they were. Battle fodder, batteries and if peace came to shove, industrial machine enhancers and calmers of the dead. They were a needed nuisance but that didn't mean he had to like them.
By the time they actually amassed enough true consciousness to be considered real trolls it was too late and they fell over dead and the real people who struggled and cared and put in love and time and education would be left to start the damn process all over again. Waste. He loathes waste.
Wasted time, wasted motion, wasted lov-. He cuts the thought off and exhales.
Straightening his posture he pulls up the file on the lusus aliens on his tablet. Several Hundred grubs had been shipped over and they seemed to be doing alright but what did he know about these ,so called,lusus aliens. The real information was only just starting to come in on them. The preliminary reports had classified them as capable of lussuing and troll like and the current regime, under the imperial benevolence, had fairly jumped to ship grubs over without bothering to learn anything more about these “Humans”. Well the information was just now starting to trickle in.
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Approximately 60 million years ago The planet Terra was populated by massive lizard-lusus like creatures known as “Dinosaurs” underfoot of these no6le and majestic creatures was the filthy proto-mammal hiding in the dirt. An asteroid hit the planet and while all the no6le and impressive Dinosaurs were killed, the lowly mammal survived by cowering in the dirt and eating the flesh of the fallen Dinosaurs. 34 million years after that the first primate appeared, around the size of a thum6 this laugha6ly pathetic creature was prey to all predators where it hid in the trees. Over the years primates diversified, some 6ecame larger and lost their tails, highly social creatures their 6rains started to slowly enlarge. They started to walk upright and to loose the fur on their 6odies. At last there seemed to be hope for the planet Terra with the species “Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis” They were intensely strong, had very large 6rains and lived a warrior’s life as exhi6ited by the many 6reaks on their 6ones.
Unfortunately a slightly smaller-6rained species appeared, Homo sapiens sapiens. This species now referred to today as a “human” lived in much larger groups and were skinnier, less strong and the archaeological record shows that instead of following the footsteps of the 6etter Neanderthal, they started making useless shit like 6eads and and 6ody paint. Drawing on walls whenever they were 6ored and getting stuck in tar pits. They then moved into Neanderthal territory and instead of the Neanderthals killing them like they should the humans gave them useless things such as 6eads, teaching them how to make useless things and how to paint and then INTER6REEDING with the Neanderthals until barely 5% of superior Neanderthal DNA exists in humans today, swallowing up the superior race with promises of cooperation, trinkets, and sex.
Since then their species has enveloped every inch of their planet. These highly social creatures form tightly-knit 6onds with MANY other humans creating complicated pale we6s with the intention of mass cooperation. They care for their own young and the young of others, their instincts to care for anything and everything so strong that they will take in the young of other animals to sustain this pathological care-need.
Even existing in the same space long enough as a human will make them care a6out you. They may not be strong or fast, and their skin is extremely thin and prone to damage but they have incredi6le endurance and are hardy creatures being able to withstand extreme heat, extreme cold, being able to survive without food for three weeks and without water for five days.
6e wary.
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He would have to do more research but if these humans were weak to young to the point that they would raise the young of any species then that could be the way to get a foothold in on this cross species diplomacy thing.
He stroked his chin.
That could work.