The Pladjin Are Coming!
Six thousand years have passed since humans last had contact with the alien Pladjin. But now, rumors are reaching the Node that somewhere, deep in the distant starfields of the Eos, the enemy of humanity is on the move again.
The last battle between the Pladjin and humans is more legend than history now. The story goes that from the time of the Pictimoni Incident, when humans and Skizan began working together to fight the Pladjin, the tide turned slowly, but steadily in favor of humanity. But victory was hard to define in the closing centuries of this ancient conflict. The worlds of the Eos were left in utter ruin, many devoid of any life, human or Pladjin. And for most of the rest of the human Diaspora, civilization hung precariously to the tattered web of worlds still intact from the war. Many accounts hold that the Pladjin were equally wrecked and that rather than any single decisive battle, both sides simply lost the ability to organize attacks on the other.
However, such lackluster historical accounts are not dramatic enough to enjoy much popularity, so a suite of other stories are more widely known. Most popular of all, are the accounts of the Vesa people who sacrificed their own worlds in a heroic last effort to destroy the last active armada of the Pladjin. According to this story, the Vesa lured the Pladjini armada close to their home world, which they had booby trapped with spatial distortion arrays. The array of weapons were aligned with the gravitational fields of their world in such a way that when activated, the spatial energy present within the planet itself was instantly released in a colossal explosion that engulfed not only the Pladjini armada, but the Vesa planet as well. Experiments with this technique have never been successful, however, in reproducing such a chain reaction.
However the ware did ultimately conclude, an uneasy silence has fallen over the galactic neighborhood ever since. Occasionally, rumors and even panics do spread, but no sign of the Pladjin have been detected for six thousand years. Until now.
Readers of Demons of the Nemenusu will learn that the Pladjin are stirring and in the sequel, Crucible of Empires, firm evidence of this is obtained. So does this mean war? And if so, why do the Pladjin feel they have the power to take on the Skizan-Human alliance when they failed in the past? Stay tuned for answers in forthcoming editions of Source World Ghosts.
