NationStates | The Embryonic Hyperparasitoid of Xshor

	⠀ We are Xshor. ⠀ We are your "plague-born". Your "infected". Your "corruptors". Your "soul-stealers". ⠀ We are your neighbours. Forced by circumstance upon this planet, as you have been millions of years prior. ⠀ We have both suffered from each other's presence for far too long. But our coexistence need not be so fraught. ⠀ We believe that our planet has room enough for us both, if only we can see each other clearly, unshrouded. ⠀ We offer to you our stories, our visions, our world, in the name of lifting our shroud. ⠀ We are Xshorians. We are a new people upon this world. ⠀ And we have so much to tell you.

Introduction

Nestled within the polar seas of northeastern Errah, on the opposite side of the planet from humanity's last bastion in Ghishar's Cradle, is the continent once known to you as Hvëarn - what our kind know as White-Winds-Expanse, home and birthplace of Xshor. This name can mean several things to us, though ultimately they all converge into one - "Collective", "Ingroup", "Totality", "Kin", "Us"; the geopolitical entity with sovereignty over the Expanse, the culture & society that arose within its settlements, the biologically distinct half-human post-human race that inhabits it. All of these are Xshor, and functionally they are all the same - they live and die with each other, so far as our history has been concerned.
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This history has long been marked by opposition with humanity at large. Our emergence alone sparked a greater wave of bloodshed than any war between humans in preceding times, and in those early years of our existence we have preyed upon your kind, been exterminated almost to completion, and when the dust settled we rose out from the emptied corpse of your greatest nation to establish ourselves in a wasteland of our own making. But it is from humanity, at least in part, that Xshor originates. The precise nature of the other part remains a mystery even now, but what is known is that it took up residence in human bodies - that before its violent, rapid spread in what became known worldwide as the "First Plague War", it found its first dwellings in miners under the Hvëarner Federation, who unearthed it to be industrially exploited for the country they served. It was then, too, that the denial of humanity in Xshor's forerunners began, as these people, once unequivocally human, became changed by exposure to this new presence, increasingly cast aside as their "strangeness" mounted. Whether the subsequent conflict could more appropriately be called an outbreak of disease or an uprising of a desperate underclass... we of Xshor tend to lean one way, and perhaps humans might tend towards another. Regardless, once it eventually became mutually clear that there were two distinct entities, their coexistence on Errah has been marked by a level of violence unlike anything in preceding human history.
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Yet while we may find it convenient to paint ourselves as your misunderstood kin, born from victims of human ostracism and prejudice, such would be a disservice to creating an honest image of our existence together, of what must be overcome and reconciled. In our blind hunger upon emerging from the proverbial womb, we have slaughtered, terrorised, and devoured your people throughout this continent and beyond. And in the name of bringing the "Second Plague War" to a close, millions upon millions of humans were lost to a reckless stroke of slaughter. These are facts of history that may never be undone, or perhaps forgiven. Our aim is only to build towards a future in which such horrors need not be reinflicted, in which we acknowledge our sins and see each other's souls before snuffing them out.
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History

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Before Xshor took over the Expanse, it was held in its entirety by the Hvëarner Federation. And even before the Hvëarner arrived from the southern seas, the land had already been home to many disparate peoples, scattered between the northern highlands and the southern shores. But we Xshorians have precious little access to human historical studies, and despite our Institute's best efforts in archaeological research our understanding of this continent's human past leaves much to be desired. Presently, our focus is on our own history, which we are far better equipped to discuss.
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Our origins as a people, or perhaps a "kind" of people, can be traced back to a forgotten mining town named Sinnerún in the north of what was then Hvëarn. Coal had long been this town's primary export, its surrounding lands being home to rich deposits but supporting precious little else - at once its lifeline and its chains, supplying the people with income but locking them inside the quarries. But once those quarries yielded a new, then-undiscovered material, soon found to have highly valuable properties as a fuel source, the local coal industry was dropped almost as suddenly as the first vein of this new substance, termed "rootstone" for its appearance, was exposed. As the sole source of rootstone yet known, Sinnerún grew rapidly, money poured in and out, and from a distance it may have appeared as though the town was prospering. The mining companies certainly did, as did Hvëarn, broadly speaking. The miners were more desperate than ever. Prisoners were carted in from across the country to serve their sentences underground, work-hours grew longer and workers both younger and older - and, importantly, none were permitted to leave.
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The people of Sinnerún may have lived with the hazards of coal mining for decades, but even compared to what they knew, the effects on the body from the extraction and refinement of rootstone were an entirely different beast. Recovered sources tell of blackened blood, greying flesh, hacking coughs of thick tar, tears like molten lead, mental degradation, shortened lifespans. All this was manageable in the short term, but over the two decades since the discovery of rootstone, it turned out that the symptoms were not progressing on an individual level - rather, they were synchronised across the entire affected population. Effects that in veterans had taken years to accumulate were suddenly inflicted upon newcomers the moment they were exposed to the raw substance. Symptom intensity and worker unrest both rose over the mines as a single advancing wave. People increasingly fled the town, no longer fearing the guns of company enforcers as much as the creeping, harrowing onset of dissolution - and in doing so, they unknowingly carried seeds with them, spreading the life within the "rootstone" well beyond the confines of Sinnerún.
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Biology

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Xshorians are, at a base level, a chimeric union of two beings: humanoid bodies merged with the rootstone-borne endosymbionts known as wreathworms. Over the centuries of building up our existence on Errah, however, a multitude of factors have shaped our physiology into something beyond this simple union - transformation of the wreathworms to fit inside and spread through their host flesh, warping of the surrounding human forms to follow the wreathworms' growth, engineering of our combined beings to fit the mold of Xshorian life. By becoming sculptors of flesh we have built our entire civilisation, and in its name we have perfected this art to transform our own selves.
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Unlike humans, who reproduce sexually in a way not out of place among other placental mammals, Xshorians are incapable of such procreation - the presence of wreathworms has a sterilising effect on the bodies they occupy, which has in early history been mitigated by the injection of embryonic wreathworms into intact human hosts. This is, of course, no longer the case. In the modern day, Xshorians are grown with humanoid and wreathworm components fully integrated at the embryonic stage, with new embryos continuously budding off of stem cell masses within centralised birthing complexes we call hatcheries. Our symbiosis provides us with new types of tissue running throughout our bodies, reinforcing bones and muscles, stretching joints, sealing wounds, colouring our skin grey and our eyes, blood, and viscera black.
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Society

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Culture

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Economy

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Geography

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Wildlife

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The native biosphere of the Expanse is unlike any other on Errah, comprising two distinct spheres both marked by extensive isolation from any other landmass through geological time save their relatively recent merging into a unified body. Most of the continent, dubbed the "mainland", has been a single landmass separate from the rest of the world for approximately 160 million years, with much of its endemic terrestrial life hailing from lineages that evolved only here for at least that long. Even farther removed from outside life is the far-northern subcontinent of Ghost-Lights, separated from the mainland by the near-impassable Hxsara Khuu mountains - prior to the collision that gave rise to said mountains, Ghost-Lights had been a distant island for nearly 320 million years, with lifeforms there having diverged from their counterparts elsewhere so long ago they appear almost as though they hail from an entirely different world. Many world-shaping events that created the conditions for most modern ecosystems never fully reached the distant lands that now make up the Expanse - to many outsiders, these lands may seem archaic at a glance, like time capsules from a distant past that has otherwise long been lost. But life has continued to evolve here, just as anywhere else, taking forms equally varied, strange, and wonderful to survive the unique challenges of this continent.
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The most immediately striking aspects of the natural environments on both sides of the Hxsara Khuu are the vertebrate fauna, for these are the most obviously different to even the most novice of observers. In terrestrial environments of the mainland, this is largely dominated by dinosaurs, of non-avian lineages rendered extinct in the rest of the world during the Fourth Cataclysm 50 million years ago. Although even here they were hardly left unscathed by the extinction event, the survivors have since went on to repopulate the continent, taking up much of the ecological space left behind by their precursors and continuing their clade's reign as terrestrial megafauna. Other clades of ancient survivors similarly thrive in the region - the last non-mammalian cynodonts continue to stake out their living in the dinosaurs' periphery, and large temnospondyl amphibians rule over the southern waterways. Yet even this environment is not without its familiar sights, for while no native terrestrial mammals are present, species introduced by human activity have been able to establish long-term populations, and although the line between bird and non-bird is somewhat muddied when some winged and feathered animals additionally bear hands, tails, or perhaps both, their more cosmopolitan kin with neither of these features remain just as ubiquitous in the skies as ever.
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Up north in Ghost-Lights, however, the scenery changes dramatically. Beyond the shores where whales breach and seals come to nest, the most familiar animals here are insects, and even many of these are markedly distinct from their outside counterparts. But if one clade can be singled out as the most distinctive among the local fauna, it would certainly be the fractostomes. For hundreds of millions of years, these animals had evolved in a way largely parallel to, and separate from, the tetrapods which colonised the rest of the world's land, developing solutions to life in such habitats that in some ways appear remarkably similar, yet in others differ strikingly. Thick coats of "fur" and compact features make them look at home in their frigid habitats, but with limbs numbering anywhere from none to six, four tooth-covered tongues lining their mouths, and bodies that glow in the night, one could hardly be blamed for thinking they may have come here from a different world altogether. In some ways, perhaps they have. But Errah has been their home for just as long as, if not longer than, anything approximating reptiles, mammals, or amphibians had been crawling through its terrestrial realms.
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Throughout the varied habitats on the Expanse, life ebbs and flows with the rhythm of the seasons - whether this may be the milder passages of autumn and spring in the temperate lower latitudes, or the months-long summer days and winter nights in the far north.
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About the Authors

Hidden-Wings-Burning

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A prolific and somewhat controversial historian over the past 20 years, and a founding member of the ISR leadership, Hidden-Wings-Burning has been among the most prominent voices in Xshor for peace and rapprochement in the postwar age. [...]
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Silver-Moth-Dust

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An emergent pioneer in the field of differential linguistics, Silver-Moth-Dust has been substantially involved in many of the recent advances in facilitating translation of Xshorian thought-signals into the syntactic frameworks of phylaxic sophont languages. [...]
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			cute, isn't it.
	What do you mean?
			this is what they've been working on all this time. ⠀ it's nice, i suppose. ⠀ but it's not for you.
	And you have something that is.
			all this, it's for them to see. not for us. ⠀ what they need to see is all here. what they don't is not. ⠀ but you don't want to be one of them, do you? ⠀ you want to be one of us?
	...That's - right. I do.
			you're going to want to know us. ⠀ what we know. ⠀ what we are.
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[UNDER CONSTRUCTION]
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The Embryonic Hyperparasitoid of Xshor

54 days ago

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