Contact

The Outlander, presently going by the name Joshua, tapped his fingers on his desk. It was not imperious, it was not intimidating, it was merely distracted.

It was still enough to terrify the woman on the other side of the vid-call. Because just yesterday, he had turned the boggy continent of a PAC-sponsored colony that had attempted an unprovoked assault on his people into a smoldering crater of which only the edges rose above the water.

He suddenly shook his head as if undergoing a small seizure, clapped his hands together, and rubbed them vigorously, "Hoo, it's cold." With that simple observation, he turned his chair around and turned off the fan behind him. "Sorry, got a little distracted, as you were saying?"

The woman cleared her throat, "It would be profitable for b--"

"Ah, there you go, using the 'p' word again... I'm sorry, but, you're talking to probably one of the few leaders in the galaxy who just doesn't care about profit. Need I remind you how swiftly your profiteers died, because they couldn't understand one simple message? Because they thought fewer guns meant less powerful forces? You saw what one of our carriers can do to a continent."

He leaned back, a pair of clicking mandibles signaling that his commander had arrived, his glance too swift for the PAC representative to notice.

"Don't make me show you what our starships can do to a solar system." He closed the line with a smirk of satisfaction as he had noted she went utterly pale.

His people were outsiders. Through some cosmic miracle (many were claiming Murphy was at fault for this one), they had arrived in a galaxy not entirely unlike his home's. Hell, America, or as they called themselves here, PAC, was still completely full of itself. He could handle persons, but people were simply idiotic in his eyes. Not that he didn't adore his people, but there was a world of difference between his people, and those people.

Namely, that they had all trudged through hell together. Literally, as some would point out.

He turned to Naxxius, the insectoid thing staring at him. After a full minute's silence, Joshua finally gave in and sighed, "You know, when I close the line, you're free to make your report."

"Noted, master." The insect-thing normally would have been incomprehensible, simply because it didn't possess vocal chords capable of human or human-like sounds.

That's where text-to-speech devices come in. "Planets AG-2374 and IN-489 report completion of symbiosis experimentation. Additionally, IN-489 reports presence of humans that have revived celtic cultural norms. Specialization suggests equal parts designation: Purity, and designation: Harmony."

Well, if they were trying to return to their celtic roots, Joshua, the Outlander, rationalized, it makes sense. The celts were proud to be celts, and humans too, but they also shared a level of connection to their environment.

"Diplomatic channels available." Naxxius didn't say anything further. Which meant it was the Outlander's turn to speak.

"Alright. Tell 'em I'll be available in the morning." He said, standing up and walking out of his office.

"And stop calling me master!" He shouted back into his office while walking, knowing the futility of the command.

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Hey Civfanatics. This is the first part of a series I'm hoping to post, involving a brand new faction that quite literally stumbled into the Civ multiverse. The Wolves of Outland (not the most inventive name, I know).

Contact is "Volume 1" of the series, involving events that are (relatively) immediately after their emergence. Don't be afraid to toss your comments into this thread, and critique my writing and story.

General Slayne was not pleased.

In fact, the synthetic life forms that served as his body guard informed him he was emanating a killing intent. A thing, they pointed out, they should not be able to feel.

General Slayne had seen hell on Earth. He had, in his homeworld, contributed to that same hell, albeit unwittingly. And now he was looking at a very different brand of hell on Earth. He had been sent to speak with the Russians, and was one wrong word from telling them all that he has never seen a more colossal f___-up than the one he was looking at now.

The representative of the Slavic Federation opened up with one wrong word. And was now flat on the ground, staring up at a man of herculean strength, despite a very lean frame.

One of Slayne's bodyguards, the uncreatively named Left and Right, restrained Slayne, ensuring that the rest of Slayne's abuse fell strictly under the verbal category. Eventually, the representative managed to calm Slayne down, but not before his proverbial podium had been torn to shreds, and he had been made thoroughly aware that neither of them had the moral high ground, but Slayne was more than willing to end him if he proved even more reprehensible than Slayne.

And silently, after having heard about the things Slayne had done, the representative, Vadim Kozlov, admitted that he would have deserved it, if Slayne proved correct.

But to Kozlov's relief, the proceedings were an uneventful, if tense, conversation, and not the massacre Vadim had expected.

"Vadim Kozlov, we're done here. The Wolves have not found any fault in the Slavic Federation. But remember this: we are always watching."

Those were the last words Kozlov heard before the ship, the ship that Kozlov had thought impossible until he saw it with living eyes, took off.

. . .

Admiral Slayne's face appeared on the younger, male Slayne's display. He immediately shivered.

"Who died?"

"Nobody. Well, unless the virginity of Daoming Sochua counts as a casualty."

There was a reason he feared his mother. If he was a brigand, she was a demon, he had observed. Not concluded, not theorized, not thought. Observed.

"Alicia Slayne, you are a monster."

"No, Marcus Slayne... but I am the mother of one." She shot him a grin that put in his mind the image of the mythical Echidna. And he closed the connection as casually as he could.

Left visibly shuddered. "General Slayne, we request thirty days of leave."

"So do I." None of them would get it, he grimly thought.

The Kavithan Protectorate's colony on B-789 was a wall of self-protective white noise, with tiny pockets of sanity.

Of course, on the physical plane, nobody noticed. That's because the physical plane didn't include cyberspace. Where the Outlander's master A.I. and near-clone, Homer, had recently wreaked havoc to vent after having to deal with his mechanically-born nephews and nieces. He found a Protectorate mainframe, and half-mad half-genius trickster that he was, decided that the local supremacists needed one thing very, very badly: culture.

And what better way to mind-ra--enlighten such a cute backwater people, than to introduce them to Homeric literature.

And then lock the door on his way out.

He maintained orbital surveillance and giggled like a schoolboy as the Apostles would let out a solid wall of screaming whenever their A.I. cores were reactivated, ensuring they remained powered down. He had trapped them in a loop. While they were powered down, they were having hours, upon hours, upon hours of droning literature crammed in their brains.

Then just when their masters thought it was safe...

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA--" They'd turn them on only to flip the switch again.

Homer was evil. Then again, he was made by someone who, while he tried to be a decent person, had an evil sense of humor. One he never turned on his friends. That was the rule, it's funny if it happens to someone I don't know, but it's grimly serious otherwise. That rule applied to Homer too.

And he hadn't even heard of the Kavithan Protectorate until this morning.

"Homer, Josh needs you back in his office." One of the machine-born nieces of the biomechanical, neural clone of the Outlander, reported. He could feel her 'staring' at him with worry. In cyberspace, his avatar, a young man with curly brown hair, black horn rimmed glasses, and a gray jumpsuit with a brown jacket, turned on her with a grin that told her he had just crippled a planet's military for giggles.

"I'll be right there."

His niece was terrified.

Good. He hasn't lost his edge.

Great story. Will it still be continued or that's it?