The Aduuni

An Elder Race in Younger Times
The origins of the hardy warrior-hunters of Aduun are long lost to time. Their existence as a technic race predates the Progenitors and Maran-uoun, but how they rose to technological sophistication isn't rightly known in the pre-imperial era. What is known is that contact with the Progenitors and Maran-uoun, and by extension their ideological conflict, forced a rapid neo-modernization in a state that had, to that point, more or less failed to rapidly and consistently advance both its technology and its industrial base.

Emperor Tenaid was the first to force this transformation. Though the Aduuni were not vastly behind the two powers, the ease at which they meddled with the hardy aliens, even planting their own installations on the soil of Aduun, is reminiscent of Terran parallels of European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. It became clear that the Aduuni needed to master their own empire in order to prevent further encroachments and enslavement of their race; the drawback of resources as the Progenitor-Maran war drew to a fever pitch created the perfect opportunity.

Emperor Tenaid's seizure of power was brutal and ruthless; a madman of thought-to-be sociopathic tendencies, he tore asunder the fabric- mores, traditions and all- of Aduuni ancient society and forged in its ruins a truly advanced and industrialized state capable of projecting warfare across a long distance. The empire was given a revitalized scientific sector and a military caste granted the best weapons and borne to combat by ships of steadily better and more powerful design and technology. The Aduuni sense of ruthlessness was applied like a hammer, both in Tenaid's time and later on; many races, who live on to the present and bear a blood vendetta against the Aduuni race, were swept aside and pushed out.

The clans had always existed; Tenaid created the caste system to impose order on the otherwise fractious division of Aduuni. The five castes survive to the present day, despite a return to more "traditional" forms of life; the Uliru'ida, the builders, the Reydamaya, the scientists, Namiir, the movers and traders, Liritinadi, the nobility and rulers, and the Damai-ka, hunters and warriors. All five have their roots in this time, and all five have become the foundation of modern Aduuni statecraft, with even the name Pentarchate- the best Anglic translation of the concept- derived from this. In Tenaid's time, they were the state in a very real sense.

The aliens proved both powerful and brutal to the point of self-destruction, making no allies in their campaign to modernize and carve out space, while drawing the ire of both the warring superpowers for their refusal to absorb into either empire. Whether Tenaid was truly broken before taking power or if it was a result of something else, the constant slaughter and violence of war drove him steadily madder and madder until his own people saw fit to depose him by force. By this time, it was too late, and the superpowers, Progenitors especially, struck the "killing" blow with the use of bioweapons. Facing destruction and the collapse of their empire and indeed even their race, the Aduuni chose to retreat, hide their technology, and leave only seeds of their civilization in the galaxy.

In the aftermath of the Progenitor-Maran War, the near-galaxy was a quiet place. The war, in its latter stages, had come down to fleets of drone ships fighting one another to destroy planets that, more often than not, only had a handful of people left anyway. Those races- like the Askari- who escaped the destruction were most fortunate, for the war consumed thousands of sapient species and annihilated many terraformed worlds. The Aduuni, consummate survivors, came forth to reclaim ground and rebuild the empire that the war, and the other races, had destroyed.

This period of advancement, which spanned many thousands of years, was deliberately slow. The Aduuni are not, and have never really been, a people interested in hegemony. Their space was their space; if others stayed out of it, that was all that mattered, and they moved to what they needed when they needed it, with the brutal regimen of their coming-of-age ritual, a return to Aduun and challenge to live on its surface without technology, helping to ease population growth problems. This changed, however, when an Aduuni battlegroup discovered the Kulviir in the aftermath of the Askari War and the Terran Golden Age. Though events were relatively small, they began a chain reaction which eventually led to the Kulviir invasion of the Orion Arm, and in many ways shaped the galaxy even in the after of the Flame.

Technology
Aduuni technology is extremely sophisticated. It is on par or surpasses Terran technology of the 46th century CE, and is in turn only surpassed by the eldest races, many of whom had existed, advanced, progressed and regressed over a very long span of time. Chief among their advancements is the use of reliable magnetic screen technology, and extraction of energy from efficiently produced antimatter and, some say, zero-point energy. Precisely how, or even if, the aliens produce such power is unknown to modern observers. It is known that Aduuni use relatively standard-known weaponry, including high-speed meson streams, missile weapons and other directed energy devices, and their use is both efficient and deadly; their tracking computers are optimized for great outnumbering, as this was often the case in their recent history, and given in large part over to synthetic-digital creatures known as Ibnasi.

Doubly strange is their philosophy to infrastructure; most of it is orbital and/or situated in more frontier-ward regions. Even in the modern day, Aduun is largely undeveloped with few small exceptions, a wildland of inhospitality in both climate and fauna. While the flora is not overly hostile, the mobile lifeforms are either powerful predators or adapted to self defense; many predators use the local terrain and its features as lures, while prey creatures are seemingly designed to protect themselves. It is this crucible in which the Aduuni were believed to have evolved or been planted- researchers have not been allowed to do cross-testing to determine the origins of the Aduuni and Aduun's fauna- and it is, at least psychologically, what makes them excellent soldiers. A byproduct of this is a strange two-sided approach to Technology; it is advanced, but most directly as thanks to the Ibnasi. Aduuni do not shun technology, but they prefer- and likely, if given the chance, would go back to- a fairly primitive hunter lifestyle.

Culture
To mistake the Aduuni for primitivists is equally as foolish as labeling them technocrats; they can be called both and neither at once with equal accuracy, for the strange Aduuni proclivity toward the primitive life and existence within the savage wilds of their homeworld is countered immediately by their vast feats of construction and orderly military and civil service wings.

The Aduuni operate on something not unlike a democratic oligarchy; the clans provide impetus to a leader, who then must make decisions based on that impetus. Unlike the confusion and decay of many human group-command systems, the Aduuni do not often come to unresolvable impasses, and their ability to get things done is remarkable given the "soldado" for their ancient home and traditional life.

Dimorphically, females are typically considered the subtler and quicker, with slightly softer flesh and an ability to take multiple roles, with males being extremely heavy with an almost-chitinous, hard flesh and dense masses of muscle. To destroy the superpredators of Aduun, a male is often needed in the hunt, equipped with something more than flint and ash wood. In this respect, the Aduuni harken more to early humanity than to the flat-plane perspective of transhuman Terrans, who lack significant gender roles.

Aduuni are, first and foremost, manipulative by necessity. They guide and "correct" other races in order to prevent themselves from being dragged into war, sometimes by assassination or tweaking of memetics. In societies where this is most extremely difficult- as in the partly decentralized Morningstar Republic and the deeply nationalist and exceedingly well administrated Terran Directorate- the Aduuni may resort to war or may resort to alliance and advisement; in either case, this is typically a more direct form of manipulation. While not especially ill-willed, the Aduuni do not have any lingering doubts about what must be done about an existential threat.