Chapter nineteen

These gregarious creatures live in giant flocks, with big enough flocks possessing a Kilthalope King, which allows the flock to connect to each other too exponentially increase the power of their shields and plasma. One particularly large herd was seen destroying a planet whose inhabitants had fired upon them.

The reveal of Humanity to the wider galaxy was disastrous.

The status quo had been going on for so long that nearly everyone had gotten used to it. So naturally no one was prepared when a newly discovered race steamrolled right through everything. After all, weren’t newly discovered races meant to be in little more than tin cans? No one would’ve thought that they’d one day meet a race with equal or better tech than they had.

The first meeting between Humanity and the Council went something like this:

Humanity: Hi!

Council: Hello, you now legally belong to us. Whose slave do you want to be?

H: Who said so? Why?

C: We said so and because we want your stuff.

H: Nah, we don’t agree.

C: You can’t do that!

H: Yeah we can, we’ve got bigger guns. (proceeds to play a video of a planet being blown up.)

C: Oh, I guess you can do that.

H: 😊

Of course, there was a lot more red tape, and all of it was hidden behind carefully constructed facades and polite language, but that was the gist.

The Council, used to supressing weaker races who crumbled easily, suddenly found themselves up against a brick wall. Used to being in a position of strength, they were unprepared to negotiate from a weak standpoint. All their blustering and threats did nothing as the human delegation systematically dismantled their arguments and revealed their traps and loopholes.

Their attempts to threaten humanity ended abruptly when their representatives were taken on a tour of a minor military outpost, and their attempts to sneak in spies also ended when the spies were teleported into the middle of a council meeting, naked and unconscious. Pirates soon learned not to mess with humans too, when a single human cargo vessel fought off an entire pirate fleet with no damage sustained.

Even as the politicians and diplomats bickered, the rest of humanity sprang into action. The governments, the militaries, even the criminal underworlds of various races were infiltrated and taken over. Human businesses and companies hurried to put their hands in every pie, churning out new products tailored to new biology for all kinds of purposes, flooding markets with cheap, reliable items.

After the Great Reveal hardly a century and a half ago, humanity had been more united than ever before, countries, companies, even criminals were roped in to help develop humanity. After all, the criminal underworld would be a good source of illegal information later.

Driven by the Ark, Humanity hadn’t just ran, they had soared. But, even as new technologies, items and advances were released almost daily, humanity had grown grim. New enemies had been discovered, their emissions matching the ones in the Ark’s databanks of Old Humanity’s ancient enemies.

Even as humanity on the surface met the Council peacefully and in the spirit of cooperation, underneath humanity was gearing for war.