Ancestors (Sburby Durby)

The Essayist
A wide-eyed young troll mulls over a book on the screen, pointed teeth drawing rust-colored blood as he bites his lip. Sparks fly from his fingers as he turns the page, barely held back from burning the paper. He looks up, eyes darting around cautiously, then hastily hides the book under his coat and scurries off.

The console skips ahead on its own. He’s somewhat older now, though still young. A mess of paper covers the desk he’s sitting at. You can read fragments of a passionate argument on some of them. An argument against society, the castes, the world as a whole. He’s writing on a separate sheet of paper, referring back to the argument frequently. He appears to be concealing the essay in flowery poetry, with the first letter of each word making the essay when put together. He burns each page of the essay as he finishes with it.

Skip. He managed to get published under an alias. Internal Sparks by Uolila Nebwer. No one suspects a thing. You see him speaking with an oddly familiar jadeblood in what seems to be a friendly manner. He slips in words that are far too revolutionary to be safe.

The console skips one last time, and… oh. He’s dead. The faintest hint of jade blood is on his nails.

CW Ancestor
A shadow.

Darkness is, of course, the natural environment of any troll, but this shadow is remarkable mainly in what casts it: not moonlight, not lamplight, but SUNLIGHT, burning against the plains. Death walks in the day, they say. No one can stand the suns rays, they say. You would have to be insane to go out into the light, they say. The Daywaker doesn't call himself insane, just focused.

A shadow, bending before a Jade blood, listening to his mission. A shadow, cleaning his guns. A shadow, donning his gear.

Fire. Pain. Blood. Some miserable collection of rustbloods and freaks have been having delusions of freedom. The Daywaker brings death and misery to their collective. He shoots the eye of a Oliveblood out with a single well aimed shot. The Daywaker barely holds back from vomiting. Lightning strikes and-Skip

A bronzeblood, alone in his cell. Sparse, almost empty. Little more then a holding place, somewhere for him to stop and resupply between missions. He breaths. Skip.

The Daywaker sits in an empty desert, typing away at his computer. Some idiot seems to be trying to upload himself onto Her Majesty's mainframe. A few swift keystrokes disrupt the program, leaving a trojan that should cause deadly feedback into the poor bastards brain. Skip

A corpse lies in the desert at high noon, a bullet in its brain.

Ectobiology Intro:
A peaceful, feminine troll with a Jade sign is patting a low blood on the head as she smiles up at her. She is saying soothing words and making promises.

The console skips ahead. The low blood from before is older, and lying dead on the ground. The Jade blood smiles gently and watches the entire hive stem the low blood lived in shudder and collapse in an earthquake. It and the low blood vanish underground, no sign that they ever existed.

There’s a skip. Then gentle looking jade blood is fussing over a sickly gold blooded grub. “Oh, you poor darling, don’t you worry about a thing, I will make sure this never happens again.” There is a sickening crunch. She turns to a subordinate. “Cull the entire batch. I want only 5% pupation rates from gold for the next three sweeps going forward”.

A final skip. The jade blood is old now. She is dictating to her loyal followers, ensuring that her policies, the ONLY way to keep the species strong, will live on past her death. Her followers have a nearly religious fervor to them.

Notes:
The Motherly used knowledge of psychology to influence Alternia's culling policies for millennia, caring little for any genetic results of such policies. Advocating severe culling policies to "cleanse our race" (a viewpoint she did not share, but did exploit), she had several high blooded supporters. While outwardly a soft, welcoming troll, she ruthlessly eliminated any obstacle to her goal of leaving a lasting legacy.

The Mushroom
A Tealblood, young and idealistic until seeing the murder of lowbloods in swaths. He's crying tears of fear, but also of anger.

It skips ahead. He's older, and rallying people behind a message of violent, bloody revolution, his chains now a symbol of those in captivity and slavery strangling their masters with the very bonds used to hold them. A purpleblood lies at his feet, asphyxiated.

Another skip, showing the hell unleashed when a gentle man goes to war. A city in ruins, the ground salted and wells poisoned with radioactive cobalt. The stronghold in the center is destroyed utterly, and the dying and wounded cough up blood as their organs fail, skin sloughs off, and cells turn cancerous or die in droves.

Another skip- his trial. Guilty of crimes against the empire, and sentenced not to death, but to eternal life, locked beneath the ground where he will remain to be driven mad by solitude. The Empress delivers her life-extending touch, and grins wickedly as he is carted off.

Ectobiology intro
The console once again shifts, this time to a fairly young olive blooded troll. He seems to be spending much of his time on his computers making... something. You don't have the technical knowhow to know exactly what it is, but it looks impressive for a troll so young.

Fast forwarding a few sweeps, he is in a large crowd. There is a troll on a large stage talking to the crowd, when a number of highbloods attacked and a number of trolls died. The troll you're following survived, but his eye got struck bad. He might never see again.

Fast forward a few days he is getting fitted with a robotic eye by a jadeblooded troll. His entire head was modified to a degree so it could work. He is testing what he can do, and he can almost completely change electronics by touching them now.

One more fast forward later, he is writing code, but he is plugged into his computer VIA his eye. He hits a button and waits, but then he falls unconscious. His eye stopped glowing, and the computer reads one last thing.