This is the second post in a series of posts on the World-Building for my HIVE-first-published mythpunk novel Ragnarok Conspiracy. You can find the first post in this series here. The world-building part of my novel is defined as open-world, meaning there are no copy rights on the world I created for my novel. Other than the story and the characters and my actual novel, the world building is public domain and any author wanting to use my world building in their work is free to do so.
While a lot of the world-building bleeds though the actual story, the reader has to connect a lot of dots, and as it is important to keep a story from being filled with info-dumps, solid world building is like a foundation. You can feel it's there, its part of the lore, but much of it remains hidden even after connecting the dots.
In this second post I'm discussing two types of beings. The Hylobo-sapiens, and the Valans.
Hylobo-Sapiens
When you think of an alien specie from pop-culture, or try to think what an alien visitor from another planet may look like, chances are you picture a gray being with a large head and black eyes. The well known gray alien from TV shows and other popular forms of fiction, that also features in many modern day legends of alien abduction and alien government conspiracies.
Guess what. This grey alien also features in Ragnarok Conspiracy. With one important difference in narative though: In Ragnarok Conspiracy, the gray aliens aren't extraterrestrial at all. They are very much terrestrial. In fact, they are our distant cousins.
Let's look at the family tree:
If we follow the tree from the bottom op, we see monkeys on the far left, and apes on the right. Then a bit further up, we see a large branch in the middle. The great apes branch. On the right of this branch we see humans, Homo-Sapiens, with its three closest cousins: Chimpanzees, Gorilla's and Orangutans. Finally, the right branch. At the far right, our farthest well known ape cousin. The smallest of the apes, the Gibbon. Smaller in stature from the other apes and rather long arms compared to ourselves and our closer cousins.
But notice just to the left of the Gibbon, there is another cousin just as close or as far from us as the Gibbon. The Hylobo Sapiens. Where the large apes branch brought forth one rather intelligent ape, the Homo Sapiens, the small apes branch brought forth an even more inteligent ape, the Hylobo Sapiens.
Hylobo-Sapiens didn't always look like they do today. In the past, up to about 112,000 years ago, a few thousand years into the last glacial period, used to live and look not that different from modern day humans. Until the 100,000 year long alien occupation of Earth started. We will look in further detail at the Jötnar, their occupation of Earth and the liberation wars at the end of the Pleistocene in another post. For now what we need to know is that the Jötnar, a brutal intergalactic empire, attacked the Earth and the Hylobo civilization in a devastating strike using superior technology that also is a subject for another post. More than 95% of all Hylobo were killed during the short war, and the Hylobo Sapiens survived the long-lasting occupation only because they hid away deep under the ground.
Living in shimmery cities deep under the ground, always afraid of discovery, evolution helped the Hylobo in their survival. Their eyes adjusted to the dark, and their modest telepathic abilities developed into a defensive power. A power that helped their cities from being discovered. First by the Jötnar, and after the occupation ended, 12,000 years ago, by the increasingly dangerous great ape species known as humans.
The Valans
The second species we discuss here is the Valans. Valans come in many shapes and sizes. Many of them resemble familiar shapes of Earth animals. Others closely so, but for example lacking a visible head. While Valans have four up to twelve legs, their main mode of mobility is electromagnetic flight. In their natural habitat, Valans live in the vicinity of gas giants like our own planet Jupiter, where they feed on electromagnetic and kinetic energy. Their origin is a small cluster of galaxies near the border (and frontier) between our own Laniakea super-cluster and the Persceus-Piscus super-cluster, the home of the Jötnar.
At the time of the story, only a few Valans remain in our own solar system. The few now remaining Valans were brought to earth by two other alien species, The Vanir and the Easir during the first and second Jötnar war. The Vanir and Aesir, that you might remember from Norse mythology, with the help of the Valans, drove the Jötnar from our planet, our galaxy, and the whole Laniakea super-cluster, back to the Perseus-Pisces super-cluster.
To stop the Jötnar from returning and finding Earth a suitable planet, the Aesir helped create an interglacial, the Holocene, and enlisted two intelligent species into a new interspecies council consisting of the Hylobo-Sapiens, a select group of humans (the Ragnarok Society, that I'll discuss in a future post), and a small handful of Valans. Their mission: Keep the earth warm, too warm for the Jötnar, prepare the human race for fighting off a future invasion if it comes, and third, keep knowledge of the threat from the general human population.
While the Vanir and the Aesir used to ride the Valans like humans ride horses, both humans and Hylobo are too small to make that practical, besides the need for space suit technology making it impractical to begin with. Instead humans and Hylobo make use of the fact that Valans have large hollow spaces as part of their anatomy. For humans and Hylobo, the Valans are like space vessels. Sentient space vessels, with a temper.
But there is an other issue with the humans/Hylobo/Valan council cooperation. The way Valans communicate is through telepaty, what matches that of the Hylobo. However, as stated, the Valans have quite the temper. They are direct, but still demand protocol to be respected. This mode of communication that would be hard enough on humans, is too demanding on the sensitive and polite Hylobo. Next to this, after thousands of years under the ground, Hylobo lacked the 3d space awareness to be good enough pilots, might air or space battles be called for. So the Aesir came up with a plan. Breed humans with Hylobo to create a hybrid species of Valan pilots. The Aesir and their allies the Vanir left, 12,000 years ago leaving the counsil and the hybrids to fend for themselves.
In the end the hybrids as implemented turned out to be a bad idea, and the humans and Hylobo had to come up with a different way to pilot the Valans. What they found was that a Hylobo could create a channel between a Valan and a Human and thus allow for a human pilot.
Next to the Valans that the Aesir had intentionally left on earth, including Sleipnir, known as Odin's eight legged horse from Norse mythology, there was one Valan that was left behind unintentionally. A Wolfe shaped Valan had caused problems on Earth a few hundred years before the Aesir had left, and to protect the humans and Hylobo, this Valan, Fenrir, had been tied to the Earth's moon, or as mythology would have it, to a large rock.
One important detail about the Valans that needs a bit more atention. As stated, Valans feed on electromagnetism and kinetic energy. The last one is an important one. If you are fighting a Valan, the old addage, "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" truly applies to the Valans. When hit by a high speed projectile, the Valan feeds on the kinetic energy. If it's not in dire need of energy, that when inside a planet's magnetic field it won't be, the impact will make the Valan grow bigger and stronger. Anti-fragility at its best.
Did you enjoy this post?
I hope you enjoyed this little piece of my Novel's world-building. If you think these posts are spoilers or you don't like them for other reasons, please comment. If you do like these little peeks under the hood of my novel, please also let me know.
And again, if you are an author and find any of my world-building efforts interesting enough to reuse: It's all open-world, public domain world building. Use my world-building as you see fit. I'dd love to see same-lore fiction build on my world-building.