Selecia is the homeworld that Commander Seran Grey, Ardenn Ner'Aia, Taldaa Shrapnaal and Marrk Ravenn origionated from.
In The Beginning…
The general Selecian population is comprised of a natural evolution of shapeshifters. While other worlds evovled physical forms from a primordial ooze, Selecia's ooze gained its own sentience from the magics eminating from an unusual 'black' sun and the core essences of the planet. Reffering to itself as the 'Aradoon' which roughly translates to 'The One Mind', the ooze explored the physical and spiritual realms of its existance as a shifting substance, altering its form and 'body' depending on the discovored climates and terrain. With this form of evolution, it took the substance much longer than other races to reach the ideal of creating individuals from its form for traveling and communication.
After great length, the Aradoon reached a limit on how far it could stretch itself out, discovoring an imbalence between covoring the planet's surface and its own mass. Creatures with a joined hive-type mind were created over time, each developing diffrent forms of movement and senses based on the diffrences in terrain that needed to be mapped, catalogged and detailed for the One Mind to determine its own evolutional step. The most common extentions created were somewhat reptillian for the warmer climates, crustatian like centuars for the bodies of water, insectiles for cooler climates and heavily furred travel-beasts for rough terrain and chilly climates. While holding deeply differing physical forms, the hive-mind collective kept the flow of information free between all 'sub-races' and allowed for easy transformation between its extended exploritve creatures based on the needs of any sub-group in its travels.
With the exploration, however, the one mind was developing a further udnerstanding of feeding itselves and how various consumption of natural resources affected its extended explorative bodies. Fruits from the plaets natural plant development granted greater energy and agility, while general plant matter enhanced general stamina. Experiments were developed on diffrentiating metals and soil types, creating more 'solid' masses that could extend their reach and general size whiel others poisoned the cells of the shifers and quickly became something to avoid. While no other surface dwelling creatures evolved alongside the Aradoon, the crustacianoids discovored fish and other creatures dwelling in the waters and were able to extend their exploritve water skills by devouring these creatures and adding their genetic structures to the hive's collective database. This discovory added a new evolutionary step to the growing curiosity of the greater thought process.
Rather than simply consuming, deconstructing and feeding its general bodymass, the Aradoon expanded its thoughts further to studying the genetic strings of itself, then of things around it, finding itself to be able to bridge gaps in its own ever changing genetic structure with those it found around itself. Rather than simply emulating the wildlife of the oceans, the One Mind was able to become a complete mimicry of whatever it consumed, provided some of the origional genetic structure of the consumed object was retained to call upon when needed. Furthermore, the Aradoon found when a new genetic string was discovored, it could be replicated by passing on a copy of the string through the process of a meld between one exploritive unit to another, or reverting a mass of units into an oozed state.
Soon enough, the ultimate form of communication and currency developed for the hive-mind and more singular subsets of thought and creationalism began to exert themselves in the exploritive units. The planet was scoured for new creatures and the Aradoon began a crude form of farming the plants and creatures it discovored to try and generate new strings of genetic material that would further advance its mental-physical society at large. With the continued refinement of the exploritive units, the hive-mind found itself udner several subsets of thought while each unit sought to enhance their specilizations based on the work that was needed to preform certian tasks. Rather than being purely exploritive, a culture was starting to develop around a Farming class as the other creatures were studied for habits and plant life was watched and recorded for having an unusual life cycle.
During this period, a reptillian unit discovored a substance unlike any others it had encountered before that had bizzare effects on the unit that tried to consume it. An energized crystal, when consumed, scattered the genetic structures stored within the exploritve unit and rendered the information corrupt and useless, nearly destroying the otherwise resilliant shifter base genetics. Taking some time to recooperate a near death experince that was felt world wide by the other units connected to the hive, a solitary unit was found to be giving off similar energies as the consumed crystal and extra points were found weaving through the compact genetics, creating a mutation from the rest of the Aradoon. This mutation would be the first recorded history of the 'Selecian' race.
As the mutation's genetic structure was considered too unstable to merge with the other units for repairs to its stored genetic memory, the Aradoon came to a conclusion of studying its own mutation to determine if the new genes were a poison or a disease as previously experinced with other units that had tried consuming some of the devestating ores. The nonverbal creation of the name 'Selecian' derived from the mutations increasing strength and grace of shifting and became the first True Name of the growing shifter mind state, roughly translating to 'Blood of Energy'. As the study continued, strange developments became apparrent in the Selecian's behavior and specialized skills.
The two greatest impacts on the Aradoon's evolutionary process derived from this one Selecian's discovory of its own skills through accidental trial and error. While Death was not a foreign concept to the Aradoon as many of its units had been crushed or broken from natural disasters while exploring the wild terrain, the ability to change the natural fate of its own kind in tough situations reared its head in the form of an instinctual reaction to a cave in caused by an earthqauke in the region the Selecian had been exploring at the time. Rather than be crushed by the rockfall with all the One Mind watching, the Selecian exhibited abhorrant behavior and threw up its arms, parting the rockfall away from itself and splitting open the earth above itself with enough space to crawl out once the land had settled again. Influincing matter without being part of it or directly within physical contact halted all study of creatures in the reptillian areas and the Aradoon turned its focus on finding more of the crystaline matter that had caused the mutation, and the Selecian was given orders to focus its energy on the development of this strange new skill. Thus the first Mages of the Aradoon were formed and became an equally large sub-set of the race as the gene farmers.
The second impact developed as the Aradoon experimented with doses of the crystaline matter to mutate itself without destroying its exploritory units and spread the new genetic code to create the Selecian adaptation of the race. The origional Selecian began developing core thoughts of its own and became an Individual. Rather than broadcasting all its errors and triumphs at once, it began to discovor it could with-hold information much in the same way it could manipulate the magical essences of the elements around itself. Rather than keep all this information to itself, however, the Selecian went on to teach this Individuality to the other hybrid Selecians, teaching it as a way to focus the process of elemental control without overflowing the farmer or exploritive subests of the Aradoon thought.
As the Selecian mutation spread, the Mage cast began developing intrest in changing the world around them just to see what their limits were. They soon joined the farming subcast and aided an expansive growth on shaping the earth to better recive and sustain plant crops for the explorers, and creating sub-eco systems for the genetic breeders. The Aradoon and Selecian hybrids were reaching the height of its growth, when the first Great War occured and nearly wiped out the entire population.
The First War…
There are few races in the history of the greater collective of universes that have ever proceeded to frutation without some kind of conflict. Between themselves, the natures of their planets or from another invading race, conflict has advanced knowledge and technology of both sides of an issue, and the Aradoon have been no exception. With all their exploration of their own planet, they'd never really questioned the stars or the light of the sun, until the day the Uthodians arrived.
The name of the invading race changes depending on which age of the Aradoon is spoken to, but all of them agree that it was one of the worst in a series of tragedies that forced advancement of their race. The descriptions vary as each sub-set and class tries to explain how they encountered the invaders, relating to them as 'demons' or 'corrupted beasts' - those that were unlucky enough to see any of the landing squads - and of the searing pain that ripped through the skies and destroyed their fields, farms, homes and more lives of the Aradoon than anyone can really count.
The ships had an apperance of an upside down blossoming flower, a shifting darkness of an unknown origin that drifted across their skies, first just a few that were ignored, then many more than were numbered. A plague of what was considered at first to be natural beauty, until as one the drifting flowers of the skies blossomed with bright lancets of light. The weapons the Uthodians used were crude by their race's standard, as the ships would have to move over their targets while using constant pulse fire over an extended length of time, thereby draining most their power and causing them to retreat into orbit until enough power was restored for a second pass. Against a race that had no idea there was anything beyond the clouds in the sky, it was as though the stars themselves were angered by their actions. The first records of 'verbal' language from the shifter race were screams of agony and pain as these crude weapons did more than physical damage, but mass life loss was felt through the 'One Mind'.
While the first reaction was of shock and horror at such destruction being possible, the Aradoon didnt take long with a response as it felt as thought its mind were being ripped apart from the inside out. Most of those who survived the first scrape of searing lights consumed the remains of their brethren then sought to burrow into their planet, trying to reach a point where the lights of doom werent capible of reaching and hide until the terror ended. When the first inital pass ended, it was considered a freak of nature and they retreated form their holes to rebuild. Barely an hour later and panic broke out with what was left of the race as the ships returned to make another destructive attack on the planet, nearly wiping out those that were left.
Seven passes were made by these great ships as they carved their ownership of the planet in cryptic writing of their own race, starting great fires that consumed the farmlands of the Aradoon and most of their genetic breeding stock. Those unable to reach 'safe ground' through borrowing chanced life in natural caverns or deep within the oceans which the evils of the sky seemed to be ignoring. As the black sun began to set on their world, the twilight brought a new terror as the ships began to drop into the burned out regions, and great, heavy creatures armed with stranger twisted metals that emitted smaller painful lights began to spread out over the devestated lands to see what they could find.
The first Uthodians to set foot on Selecia found little to report back to their commanders, at first. They'd found very little hints of sentient life as most the world was dealing with fires and broken earth slides. Sighting no buildings or tools that would represent most forms of sentience they'd encoutnered before, they were completely unprepared when the earth itself swallowed the first wave of their men. While the Uthodians held no physical memory as the shifters did, their genetics were broken down and studied quickly, as was their weapons (which made no sense to the Aradoon at all), to be turned around and used against these strange creatures and the bastardization of their home.
The conflict that followed has been somewhat garbled as much of the genetic memory that was gathered was quickly destroyed before it could really be shared with the rest of the populace. Some tell strange stories of the Uthodian dead rising up from the earth and slaughtering the ground troops until lights of pain licked the dead and the grounds around them. Others insist the Uthodians became part of the race as brave souls lept up from their hiding places and consumed their bulky masses into their own bodies, using the extra mass to oversize their normal forms and stampede over the offending life forms. The first 'Selecians' retaliated with an experimental form of their own energy pushing the earth and great rocks and trees were torn from their resting places and hurtled against both creature and ship with their enraged will, and were supposedly the final straw, causing the Uthodians to retreat and leave the planet, convinced the land itself was haunted.
The Aradoon remained underground for several days, pulling in the survivors to one location - a great cavern - and shared information amongst itself and its sub-sets of explorers, mages and farmers. It stewed in anger as more than 4/5ths of the growth it had experinced over a lost amount of time had been completely obliterated with the vicious attack. The Aradoon and Selecian both began to formulate how to extend itself again and prevent such a tragedy again and after much debate and argumnet with itself, developed a sub-class from the mage cast, resulting in a Warrior cast.
A small handfull of the Selecian hybrids were selected to exersize their will and energy, practicing with their bodies and their newest strrengths in the ways of destruction and death while the rest of the minimal population would work on rebuilding their farms and the One Mind. So much information had been lost, the Aradoon were unsure how long it would rake to get back or re-discovor much of its lost information and grieved over how little it was able to save from the horrible Uthodians.
First Contact…
While many races in the evolutionary stage tended to have one big crippling war that could spend many years or ceturies to recooperate and evolve from, the Selician story only started with the attack from the Uthodians. As mentioned before, it was only the first in a series of events which caused the race to develop much faster and twistingly than other races. A large part of this racial twisting was caused by one individual being that had decided to use the race as an experimental toy and behave as though it were a god… Or, in this case, something greater than the gods themselves, a Watcher.