Catleya, of course, has very high technology. Once human technology began to intertwine with that of the gods and demons, it became very easy to go anywhere, whenever. But let’s step back and go through a brief history of how all of this happened:
500 B.C. (before cats) – this marks the beginning of the Golden Age of humans, during which the humans reached their peak and then began to collapse afterwards (making way for the modern era to begin). These humans never quite escaped Catleya, but they did have decent technology – tall skyscrapers, rapid-transit cars, etc.
In the modern era, around 6000 A.C., is when the cats finally surpassed the ancient human technologies by building a space-ship to the specifications of the excavated remains of an alien craft in the ancient sector of West Forest, Kylafrawis. This space-ship was sub-light-speed, though.
continued later
Consider this: in our sci-fi stories, we are obsessed with faster-than-light travel. While it is purportedly possible to travel faster than the speed light, the stars just that far away. Plus, most of them don’t even have planets, not to mention inhabitable ones. So no, the spaceships were not used to travel to distant galaxies.
Instead, as Catleya began to fill up, while space probes were certainly sent far off, the focus of technology was focused on creating new inhabitable satellites of Enifest and of Catleya itself. Certain large mines opened up with the objective of creating smaller outer-space satellites (since it is the surface area and not the mass of the object that defines how many people can inhabit it). The spaceships were relegated to the role of cosmic construction and ferry vehicles, and the first veritable “space travel” traversed shorter distances than to Catleya’s own two moons. While the moons were terraformed, it was much easier to first outfit these custom satellites to specifications.
The first aliens were of course the humans and cats: the humans were experimental travelers from Earth, who were split into several large ships. The idea was to explore the possibility of “effectively faster than light” travel – that is, taking advantage of the fact that you age more slowly (or, from another perspective, the distances are shorter) while traveling at near-light speeds. In essence, these humans forsook their homeland to explore, and the target planet was Catleya, which looked like a very Earth-like planet (which it was). The first humans settled down around 5000 or 6000 B.C., but the endemic viruses and unfamiliar environment forced them very far backwards in terms of technology. Indeed, knowledge was largely lost in favor of survival experience.
One ship strayed far, far off course and had to take a roundabout route to Catleya. This particular ship was the research ship and had many animals in it, used for testing. Note that time passed much more quickly on the planet than on the ship, due to the ship’s traveling speeds. By the time the ship made it back, the humans had conquered the entire planet and in fact had already gone to war with the local sentient beings, the Uriments (aka the “gods”). Although peace had been made, the humans had fallen into decline due to internal warfare and viruses that ravaged the biologically engineered crops. The ship, which had fallen into disrepair, suffered major damage upon entry into Catleya and crashed, killing all the humans on board and only sparing a couple cats that escaped when their cages were destroyed by the impact.
The cats, having the advantage of the best in technology as developed by the researchers during the long flight, not only survived but thrived, eventually forming into hunting packs and then into full-fledged cities. The cats migrated east and west from their crash-landing site, the ailing Kylafrawis.
The rest is history … .
The next alien species to be encountered were not so alien after all: because of reproductive isolation and a new environment, creatures unleashed onto newly terraformed regions rapidly speciated. These new and strange creatures might also be called “aliens.”
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