GM Notes: The Dya'Jin and the Flen

For many years, the Dya'Jin Empire was an expanding power in the  distant stars, conquering system after system with their secret weapon: a genetically engineered race of fast-growing,  swift-spreading creatures known as the Flen. Despite their miniature size, typically being no bigger than a pebble or a small stone, the Flen were a force to be reckoned with, able to act in frightening unison thanks to the scientific genius of their masters. 

The Dya'Jin would seed a  Flen population on some hidden part of a world they wished to conquer and allow them to rapidly spread across the surface. The Flen would infest every defensive center, every important supply chain and any other important tactical location and generally expanding until their population reached critical mass. Once they were ready to wreak chaos upon the inhabitants of the planet, the Dya'Jin would sweep in to take control.

Once the world was conquered however, the Flen that had been bred for the task were  uniformly rounded up and slaughtered en masse by their Dya'Jin masters -  genetically unable to resist their commands, and thus unable to do  anything about their hapless fates.

That was until the day Dya'Jin scouts started noticing pockets of the Flen outside of regulated areas, long after the conquering of a planet subsided. More than that however, settlements of Flen were reportedly already seeded among planets the Dya'Jin had no plans to conquer - or,  in some cases, had only just discovered.

These  settlements ranged from seemingly stagnant 'growth patches' that had  been idle since the invasion, to clusters of Flen who seemed to have  diverted to hunting local fauna in the absence of the planet's original population, to the beginnings of a sort of crude  civilization of their own; a curiosity indeed.

Initially it was considered little more than an inconvenience as the Dya'Jin  swiftly and ruthlessly exterminated these unregulated settlements -  until the incident when a Dya'Jin warrior was overwhelmed in an act of  unprecedented rebellion by an army of Flen, suffering a horrific death of a thousand cuts. 

The Dya'Jin were bewildered as to how the Flen had  ignored the coding of their genetic makeup in this encounter - until the  startling revelation was made that the Flen had begun to reproduce  amongst themselves, outside the genetic cloning process for which they  were designed. Their offspring it seemed were free of the genetic programming of their predecessors, and were thus outside the reach of the Dya'Jin's orders - if not the soles of their boots.

Things truly took a turn when Dya'Jin scientists studying the remains of a Flen infestation discovered evidence that the Flen's technology was advancing frighteningly swiftly. What had taken most  civilized space-faring races like the Dya'Jin untold centuries to  master, the Flen were advancing to in scant months, let alone years. A prophetic report submitted by the Dya'Jin's chief scientist warned that  if something wasn't done, the 'Wild Flen' as they were known would soon  not only match the Dya'Jin's own level of technological advancement -  but may indeed outstrip them.

The report was condemned  for being 'sensationalist' and 'pure fabrication'. The ruling council of the Dya'Jin Empire deemed that the Flen, however swiftly they multiplied and however shiny they made their new toys, would always be intellectually beneath the Dya'Jin Empire. They chose to continue as normal, pouring  their efforts into breeding a new strain of Flen. Great strides had been  made in the field of genetic manipulation and cloning, and these new  Flen did not require the same degree of genetic chaos as their  forebears, able to be entirely identical, completely infertile and  utterly subservient to their masters, the Dya'Jin.

Not  only would these new Flen be faster, stronger and more durable than the  old ones - but they would be unable to spread on their own, and would  be entirely unable to rebel - controlled as they were strictly by the  programming put into them at the moment of their creation.

Unfortunately  for the Dya'Jin, they underestimated their own genius in designing the  first wave of Flen. The first generation had always been bred to be  problem-solvers, to be able to find their way into the most tightly  defended bastion and bring it down from within - and they proved their  capabilities just as before, when they infiltrated the breeding  factories for the Second-Generation Flen, subtly altering their  programming such that they would completely turn on their Dya'Jin  masters when a specific trigger was activated.

Over the following year, the Flen sacrificed much to allow their greatest act of rebellion to come to  pass. They allowed entire worlds to be butchered by their  Second-Generation cousins. They allowed defeat after defeat to be  reported to the Dya'Jin, and soon enough the Second-Gen Flen were being  produced and deployed to every major military hub of the Dya'Jin - a  roaring success and reminder of the Empire's might.

Once the pieces  were in place... the Flen activated their trump card, and triggered the activation protocol. The resultant massacre was devastating for the Dya'Jin, for the Second-Gen Flen had displayed not even the faintest twinge of  disobedience until the moment they all turned upon them at once. Dya'Jin  soldiers, officers, civilians and nobility alike were caught completely by  surprise as the far more heavily armed Second-Gen Flen assailed them when they simply hadn't been expecting a fight.

There  was no time to report the assaults, no time to warn any of the other outposts, as the attacks happened at practically the same time all  across the Empire. In a matter of hours, every major bastion of the Dya'Jin was ablaze, and the Flen were swarming across everything in a tidal-wave of technological superiority.

The only advantage the Dya'Jin still held was their incredible degree of  mobility, thanks in no small part to the foresight of their ancestors.  It was that which saved their people from being utterly destroyed by the Flen uprising. For all the Flen's technological advancements, and in spite of the tactical cunning of their masterstroke, the Dya'Jin still  possessed a number of secret 'safe houses' scattered on unknown worlds  throughout the cosmos, marked by ancient rings designed to be able to weather an eternity of wear-and-tear.

Whatever ancient  secrets caused these rings to actually function was beyond the  understanding of the Flen, and the Dya'Jin themselves weren't about to divulge that information on a whim. On a practical level however, the rings acted essentially as 'beacons' for the Dya'Jin, allowing anything  from a battleship to a single foot-soldier to bend time and space around  themselves to appear upon the world of whichever ring they so chose -  though at the cost of immense energy expense, as well as being unable to  return to wherever they were previously. The only exception to this was  if the previous location was another one of the rings - though if an emergency exodus were typically required from such a place, then matters  were dire indeed.

Being unable to construct more of  the rings themselves, and relentlessly hunted as they were by the Flen,  the last remaining Dya'Jin were forced to radically change their way of  life, abandoning the old arrogance of their Empire in favor of far  greater caution and a focus on the improvement of the self. It was not a swift process by any means, and discontent still ran rife throughout the populace, longing for a return to the decadent glory days of their  kind.

Now, in the present day, the Dya'Jin wage a slow, losing war against the Flen, knowing that wherever they flee, the Flen  will surely follow. So it is that one Dya'Jin soldier, separated from  their unit and bleeding from countless wounds, casts themselves through the ring network to a distant, backwater planet, seeking to escape their Flen assailants.

Unbeknownst to that soldier, the evolutionary process of that world was quite successful in the time  since the Dya'Jin had last been there. A population of sentient creatures now dominated the planet, ruling over its various masses of  land through a mixture of cultural, economic and military strangleholds, engaged in their own petty squabbles. Each mass of land had been given its own separate title by the population that governed it, but the planet as a whole at least the species had collectively agreed to name the  same thing.

For their part, the Dya'Jin  soldier would soon die of their wounds, but their escape had not gone unnoticed - and the trillions of eyes of the Flen were turned in the  direction of that insignificant little backwater planet called 'Earth'.

...

Notes: This account is background information for a role-playing game I am running called 'Backwater', though whether or not the game itself ultimately goes anywhere remains to be seen. However, I was rather proud of how this particular lore-dump turned out, and I thought it might be enjoyable to read for some other folks. Who knows - perhaps I'll expand on the universe later on down the trail even if the game itself folds.