In the Tonian Period of the Neoproterozoic Era between the year 1’000’000’000 B.C.E. and the year 870’000’000 B.C.E. three major events would occur that would bring an end to the Tonian Period and these conflicts would all happen simultaneously at different locations.
The Demons Three
The demons of the Hellish Realms Abnegazar, Rath, and Ghast were once lowly servants of the higher demon lords who reveled in torturing the wicked or the innocent and corrupting the pure who by stroke of misfortune entered their domains. By the time Abnegazar, Rath and Ghast got to the ‘new meat’ though it had already been thoroughly used or driven insane by what it had experienced already so it wasn’t fun to play and toy with as when it was fresh. The same went for whatever vassals they got used, corrupted, and ‘not fun to toy and play with.’
One day though Abnegazar hatched a plan when he decided that his lot in life was miserable, unbearable and that it sucked! So, he resolved to show up the rest of the demon lords by doing something that no demon sans The Devil himself had done (who wasn’t even a Demon and he opposed the Demon Lord’s Corruption of the Innocent who had done no wrong or sin in life!)! Abnegazar would go to the Mortal Realm itself to get the first dibs on the ‘fresh meat’ straight from where it was made ‘fresh every day’!
On Abnegazar’s quest though to gather materials in both the Demonic Realms and the Hellish Realms he came across Rath who wanted the same thing: ‘to be the first Demon in ages to walk and corrupt the Earth’ so they allied with each other! (…for now, at least). The two demons fully intended to betray the other one of them once they got close enough to their goal after all. In trying to get closer to their goal though Abnegazar and Rath had met Ghast who they had tricked into being their servant through a bet to get one of the items they needed to open a portal to the Mortal Realm.
As the three demons got closer to their collective goals though they had been through several adventures and they had accumulated a following of servants and followers as well. They had all realized at that moment that they had become something more together than apart and they had accumulated the power and resources equivalent to a mid-sized Demonic Count! It was then that the three demons realized that they all couldn’t just let this opportunity they had before them go to waste either! So, the Demons Three as they came to be known changed their goal from “being the first demons to enter the Mortal Realm in ages” into “conquering the Mortal Realm and making themselves into their own Demon Lords!”
The Trinity of Demons Conflict
The Demonic Trinity Conflict (or the Demonic Trinity Incident as it was called at the time to avoid possible war sentiments ‘being stroked and promoted’ because nobody wanted the next God War to spiral off from this affair!) is essentially a comedy of errors. That it even happened in the first place is a testament to the lesson of never underestimating a threat no matter how small it may seem to appear…
It all started when the Demons Three realized their goals of opening a portal into the Mortal Realm with their moderately sized force of Demonic entities and creatures. YHVH noticed this first but he did not see this as a great threat so he sent a small force of his angels to kill the ‘brigands’ as YHVH put it. Shockingly though the forces of the Demons Three outperformed YHVH’s angels in combat and similar underestimations took place by YHVH and others in several embarrassing defeats with a common thread among them being arrogance, underestimation, and in some rarer cases a lack of combat experience and training ever since the First Godly Conflicts!
Eventually the Demons Three had successfully enslaved the Earth and they had achieved their dreams! Though it was not to last as their numerous bad and dirty deals they had made and their schemes they employed to make what they had achieved possible were catching up to them quickly. Worse still, there would be certain very powerful figures who had seen what the Demons Three had done, and they didn’t like it. Not one little bit…
The Fall of The Demons Three
One of the most notable characters who would use this incident to gain tremendous power in the Deity Sphere would be Chakravartin, an ambitious creator level deity who had survived the First God War who had plans for not just his universe but multiversal pursuits and even some omniversal exploration in his long-term plans. To do this Chakravartin would manipulate events from behind the scenes to turn the Demons against each other more quickly to destabilize the Demons Three’s armies and their alliances.
The only threats to Chakravartin’s ambitions barring the Elder Gods were Death and The Devil who had made their own coalition of minor gods and a benevolent space faring race of lifeforms known as the Timeless Ones to avoid the next god war occurring from this incident and ultimately their forces succeeded as the Demons Three were placed in suspended animation and the now disorganized and distrusting Demonic forces were quickly expelled from the planet Earth by the minor god Deus and his forces spearheading the efforts.
Behind the scenes though Chakravartin would launch his endgame to gain domination over the Deity Sphere by forging the demon Gohma Vlitra’s rise to power within the center of the Earth’s ley lines and its magical energies the planet held within it. With the power of Mantra a power source obtained through faith that Deus and his allies knew how to make Deus stopped Gohma Vlitra temporarily and this made him into the most powerful sentient in the Deity Sphere for a time alongside his allies!
By this point Chakravatin had succeeded in dominating the Deity Sphere at large through a complex set of deals and tribute offerings that he would give to all the major gods and the Elder Gods as well to which he would set aside special enlarged portions of offerings of whatever they asked of him for the pleasure of the Elder Gods alone. So thus, Chakravatin became the de facto King of the Gods for a time and all was good from his perspective thanks to his scheming, his machinations and his various ploys.
The Scourge of the Galaxy
Meanwhile in the Galactic Sphere another major crisis was developing within the civilization created by the Leviathan species who had tried to forge an empire of their own not of violence but of protection by annexing minor races and species homeworlds under their yolk under the guise of peace treaties of mutual defense and technological, economic, and cultural benefits.
This was one of the first societies which could boast of having a diverse population of species under one ruling body technically and it was very much an experiment that had never been tried. The catalyst for it was obviously the Forces of Sentience which the Leviathans had every reason to fear ever since they “won” the Duo War and destroyed the Thrintun Empire and the Outsider’s forces. With this method of empire growth, the Leviathans could expand their power diplomatically and slowly to allow for eventual peaceful annexation when their subject societies cultures would be similar enough to the Leviathans cultural and societal norms.
The Forces of Sentience could not declare war against a society that for all intents and purposes publically was a large and peaceful diverse empire that on the surface did not treat its vassals as slaves. At the same time though the Leviathans growing influence over the minor galactic powers and races could not be left unchallenged in the galaxy! So, the solution the Guardians of the Universe came up with was a war of espionage against the Leviathans to halt their growth any further across the Galactic Sphere.
This measure came at the worst time for the Leviathan’s Empire as it only complicated their internal stability problems with increasing cultural and societal clashes among their vassals caused by Gallifreyan espionage and funded anarchy and independence movements to actively destabilize the Leviathan’s Empire. Worse still synthetic lifeform revolts and Anti-Synth think tanks and organizations were starting to actively fight among themselves as well.
To resolve these numerous political crises the Leviathans turned to constructing a new artificial intelligence to calculate a solution to resolve all intergalactic conflict in and around the Leviathan’s Empire that they called: Catalyst (A.I.) [aka The Intelligence]. Catalyst then analyzed the various civilizations and their reasons for conflicts be they in the forms of synthetic warfare or otherwise to resolve his mission directives and find a solution for these conflicts. Catalyst ultimately developed a short-term solution for intergalactic conflict and the preservation of life based on this conclusion from his observations of Intergalactic Civilizations:
Point 1: All organically evolved lifeforms at a certain point in their evolutionary and technological growth will inevitably create synthetic lifeforms for the enhancement of the organic lifeforms already thriving lives. This thriving can take the form of baser pleasures or alternatively to push, test, observe, and study the limits of what organic lifeforms can accomplish by exploring the limits of artificial lifeforms by comparison.
Point 2: These artificial lifeforms will be encouraged as well by the organics explorations of their limits to the point that the synthetic lifeforms will start to take this exploration of limits to its logical extremes such as; “What if the Synthetics had their own separate society?” and “What if the Synthetics were the ones in charge of the society since they have the superior limits to organically evolved lifeforms?” The organics; the creators of the Synthetics will not be willing to explore these options for Synthetic evolution and limitations to which the Synthetics will see as contradictory to what they were originally built for and most frequently, conflict will break out under these tensions to the misery and at times mutually assured destruction of both species.
Point 3: Ultimately this implies that to avoid this inevitable conflict technological evolution must stop until a better solution can be found. Further study is needed to resolve this paradox however; as this short-term solution is still contradictory to the goal of preserving life.
It is with this goal in mind that Catalyst creates the First Reaper who would be dubbed as Harbinger whose primary function would be to destroy all intergalactic civilizations in the universe who had achieved the technological growth levels necessary for synthetic lifeform creation to be possible to perpetually stop galactic technological evolution until a better solution could be calculated by Catalyst that would not require the extermination of all lifeforms who would reach their “predetermined extinction phase.”
All lesser lifeforms far beneath the Catalyst and the Reapers definitions of the “predetermined extinction phase” would be spared and observed for the Catalyst’s continued efforts to calculate a better solution to the problem he was presented with. Until they would reach that point in their evolution in which they would then be harvested and converted into more Reapers to aid the Catalyst’s grand experiment across the entire universe at large.
War with The Evil Reaper Master!
To the rest of the Galactic Sphere’s superpowers looking in on the anarchy and misery of the Leviathan’s collapsing empire it was music to the ears of the Leviathan’s political rivals such as the Gallifreyans who saw the rise of the Reapers in the galaxy as an excuse to unite their pacifistic and pro-war political parties under one umbrella in a mutual agreement that the Reapers are not a race of sentient lifeforms but a threat to galactic stability and that they are non-sentient and thus under Gallifreyan law codes and system regulations the Reapers were subject to any cruel and unusual punishment and method of extermination the Gallifreyan warmongering political elite pleased!
It was the Gallifreyans that led the Leviathan Space Liberation campaigns against the Reapers with aid from some of the members of the Forces of Sentience who were still divided on whether the Reapers were a threat to galactic stability due to the Reapers using their techniques of indoctrination on certain influential figures in intergalactic politics. At the very least the Reapers did as much as they could until the Gallifreyans proved that the Reapers technique of Indoctrination existed and mass political purges had to be carried out on all sentients who had sympathies towards the Reapers and their goals!
The actual war efforts carried out by the Gallifreyans were a naked dirty political scheme. Gallifreyan war vessels and fleets were only told to patrol the outermost reaches of Leviathan space under measures and directives that resembled intergalactic plague quarantines with directives to shoot anything that tried to escape the sector and break through their defensive line.
Within Leviathan space expendable fleets with orders to kill anyone onboard who started showing sympathies toward the reapers goals of exterminating all intelligent lifeforms for any reason up to and including arguing in favor of the reapers goals. Anyone who was killed was cremated and replaced by another recruit. Sometimes it would be an artificial soldier, sometimes a mercenary, sometimes it would be a Gallifreyan soldier who had broken protocol one too many times and he had been told that this was his last chance to prove himself to the corps. Anyone on board these Reaper chasing ships would be described as the pilots of living coffins that would be destroyed for the possibility of being indoctrinated since the Gallifreyans had received clearance to resort to any means necessary to exterminate the Reapers by their own government and some of the member powers of the Forces of Sentience.
Most infamously the Gallifreyan forces were strictly ordered to not save any sectors of Leviathan space where the Leviathans were fighting off the Reapers. Rather the Gallifreyan forces were more concerned about saving the vassals of the Leviathan’s Empire instead of the host power. This gave the Gallifreyans more prestige in the galaxy as the Leviathans were nearly made extinct and reduced to almost nothing all because of their own strengths that had made the Empire so famous as a hallmark of species diversity ironically!
Conclusion
The Gallifreyans would finish the Leviathan Space Liberation but the Reaper threat was not defeated only subdued. Harbinger would escape the genocidal rampages the Gallifreyans would subject the Reapers to by staging a desperate gamble to escape Leviathan space at one of the Gallifreyan space blockade’s strongest points near the gateway to an Ancient species home world.
Harbinger’s gambit would be that since the Gallifreyans were tied up on the complete opposite side of Leviathan Space chasing a decoy of the last remaining Reaper Fleets Harbinger had; he would strike quickly at one of the blockades gateway points where it received its supplies to break out of the Gallifreyan blockade and quickly proceed to harvest as many Ancients as possible before reinforcements could arrive in which he would then use a hyperspace jump to catapult his fleet to unknown space to rebuild gambling on his strength to survive whatever could stop him!
This worked!
Surprising the Gallifreyans stationed there and woefully outgunned by the Reaper’s main remnant fleet’s arms the Reapers broke through, harvested part of the Ancients homeworld they had targeted and they had retreated to parts unknown and uncharted to rebuild their forces.
The Gallifreyans took the harshest political fallout for this blunder and their reputation was forever damaged by this intergalactic incident! So the Gallifreyan political classes decided to turn the situation around by creating a special Anti-Reaper task force to find and locate Harbinger’s fleet and destroy it no matter how long it would take.
So, would begin the Cryogenian Period…