• Articles

by Gerry Harris
©2003, 2006, 2007 Æther Traveller

Nearly a half million years ago a star-faring race travelled hundreds of parsecs from their mysterious homeworld to Earth and proceeded to tinker genetically with the locals.  Along the route they encountered numerous sentient or semi-sentient species, but they chose to ignore them in favor of working with wolves and primitive humans from Earth.   Why?

The answer lies in the Empathic abilities of the Ancients and the position of Earth in relation to the multiverse.

The Earth sits at a natural nexus of the multiverse, making it a crossroads of countless proto-dimensions.  This position also makes Earth a massive Empathic beacon.  The Ancients, being powerful Empaths, were naturally drawn to this tiny, obscure planet.

At the time the Ancients contacted Earth, there were three species of intelligent hominid:  Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis and Archaic Homo Sapiens.  Of the three only Homo Sapiens showed any Empathic abilities and with a little genetic manipulation the Ancients were able to bring these talents to the fore.  Strangely enough, the only other species showing any sort of Empathic abilities at this time was the wolf [1].

Unfortunately, the same thing which drew the Ancients to Earth also made it easier for the Dark Ones to enter our universe.  While attempting to understand the underlying Empathic phenomenon governing Earth and the multiverse, the Ancients unwittingly released the Dark Ones into our universe.  The Final War was not about a slighted Grandfather taking revenge on his offspring, it was a fight for existence between the Ancients and the growing evil pervading the universe.  Being Empathic, the Ancients were very susceptible to the influence of the Dark Ones.  Grandfather, however, was powerful enough to resist and eventually fight back.  Over the next two millennia he tracked down every vestige of the Dark Ones in this universe and eradicated it (sometimes destroying whole planets in the process).  For reasons known only to him, he spared the Earth this fate.  However, when the smoke cleared all 420 of Grandfather's descendents were dead.

Grandfather sealed the gate on Io through which the Dark Ones had entered this universe; that seal prevented all but the lowest-level infiltrations by Dark Minions into this universe until the mysterious aliens reopened the gate in 1983 CE (-2538 Imperial).

[1] This may explain why the wolf was the first animal domesticated by man.