About Ferro

Some planets, like some villages, are made up of the peaceful, wise, but easily manipulated. An out-of-the-way world is not as likely to learn war and diplomacy as
one that is constantly in the line of fire. The peaceful become the the enslaved, with a few aggressive strokes of the opportunistic, shrewd, warlike neighbor.

Ferro's people learned quickly that their attackers, who called themselves the Chosen, were a brutal and methodical enemy. The Chosen, for their part, failed to see the madness of a plan to exterminate the Ferrans. After decades of brutal combat, the technologically advanced attackers had to admit that some other force was at work, protecting the Ferrans. Highly efficient war machines became ineffective upon their deployment on Ferro, time after time. Only with smaller, cruder, much more bloody tools could the natives be subdued. The fighting force of the invaders became disgruntled, frightened, demoralized by a strange, demonic (for they were highly religious people) presence.

The very name Ferro became synonymous with frustration in the home language of the Chosen, as the natives fought on for an entire generation against the overwhelming technological advantage of the strangers. The Advange, as the mysterious force came to be known, could not prevent rivers of Ferran blood from flowing, but the passing years of conflict served to strengthen their resolve, for what race of people in all of history would surrender their very homeland, even if hope had been reduced to a single fighter against ten thousand.

There were many reasons for the Chosen to stubbornly fight on as well: mainly they were economic, for the Chosen home world was an overpopulated, needy world, weary from thousands of years of prosperity and conquest, endless growth and a bloated class of aristocrats whose demands weighed heavily on the workers, soldiers, pilots and wage-earners who faithfully marched forward to whatever adventure their leaders undertook. The Ferran undertaking was nothing more than an attempt to harvest the plenty of this world to provide for the vast population at home. To the Ferrans, the Chosen became known as the Parasites.

The Ferrans experienced a great deterioration of their once proud society. Not a highly technological people, still the Ferrans had a rich history, religion, education system, as only an ancient grown to maturity can obtain. The Chosen could never fathom that the Advantage was something outside the realm of technology and faith as they knew it. In fact much of the technology of the Chosen had come from other societies, through centuries of trade. As faith reigned supreme over the Chosen, much of the life of the universe remained a mystery to them.

The Ferran's Advantage grew weaker with time. Great cities were abandoned, the native people fled to the less fertile ground of the hinterland, leaving the prime farming, mining, and other natural resources to the invaders. No treaties were ever signed; no official cessation of hostilities ever occurred. Commerce began to flow, to the advantage of the Chosen. But it was always laden with complications, which was blamed on the local Demons for centuries of domination by the Chosen. Eventually much of the commercial endeavor on Ferro came to a halt. The only profit-making enterprise was a series of mines, which changed hands so often that no one could keep track of who was the real owner.

A subcontractor from another civilization came to Ferro to manage the mines. No superstitions would prevent these people from doing their work, as long as the pay was good, for they came from a desperately impoverished line of people descended from Earth and Earth 2, a pair of befouled worlds plagued with many of the same problems as the Chosen, but fully five hundred years behind technologically and politically. To the Chosen, the Earth-humans were not nearly as ferocious as the Ferrans, nor as easily frustrated as their own working classes, so they fit the job of working Ferro's mines.

Through the transitions the Ferrans remained at a distance, living in the shadow of their former civilization as strangers from other world mined steel and coal from below the surface of their own home world. To the Earth-humans, the locals on Ferro were known as Cannibals, which title dated back to the original battles. Stories of the Advantage had been twisted to include ritual bloodletting to a heathen god, whose power lasted until the true God of the Chosen had blessed the place.

To the Earth-humans these stories were distant and strange and beside the point. They needed to make a living, and they would keep to themselves of left alone.