The History of the Leagues: Cause for Their Creation... (Current as of June 6, 2002) Roughly 1400 years ago(in Roman calendar year 612 a.d.), a race of highly advanced and physically powerful reptilian beings known as the Malyar responded violently to the unintentional violation of their territory... This was know as the Malyar Aggression, one of the bloodiest times in the Great Wide Universe in recent memory... To combat this powerful race, whose power rivals that of many of the elder races, The Assembly of Co-allied Worlds and Galaxies (simply referred to as the Assembly), along with the Imperial Union Under the Sovereignty of the Aphkian Imperium (also referred to as the Imperial Union or, if one wishes to speak of the central government of the Imperial Union, The Aphkian Imperium), pushed their technological limits beyond the bleeding edge. It proved insufficient in the wake of superior Malyar battle tactics and the sad fact that the Malyar were no where near pushing their technological limits. Still the Assembly and the Imperial Union/The Aphkian Imperium held their own for nearly 50 years until the Malyar decided to invade the Assembly... Attacking with sheer brute force, the Malyar generated huge casualties on their enemies in very short order... Their weapons of choice...fangs and claws. Combined with their own extremely tough natural armor and incredibly developed senses, the Malyar are innately vastly superior warriors to roughly 75% of the races in the Assembly. Their highly advanced technology equalized their differences in ability with the remaining 25%... The race of arms was growing much closer as the Assembly and the Aphkian Imperium shared important technical information. The Imperium also shared its knowledge of sorcery and natural magics - which never caught on with the Assembly Main Command for nearly 600 years. To date, The Aphkians still hold a vast, near insurmountable, lead in the understanding and development of all forms of magic (except Aura-based magics which were abandoned as primitive and easily thwarted)... The battlefield was still a realm of nightmares for the Assembly as the weapons needed to combat the Malyar were not portable to any but the strongest of races (at the time particle dissimination and EM fission weapons were not available for infantry or calvary applications). The Malyar easily ruled the battlefield for some 33 years... The only answer was to create stronger soldiers, more of them than the Malyar had, and faster... The Assembly commissioned the creation of several super-soldier programs. The one that took hold and yielded the best results, was the program devised by a Dragaseir scientist named Cliyapi. While not popular amongst her own people, Cliyapi was able to convince the Assembly Military Senate to allow her to experiment on adolescent members of a limited cross- section of races, including Aphkians of all breeds. Her work was not as successful as many had hoped and most of the Assembly Military Senate blamed the Dragaseir's own sense of immortality... She basically has no sense of urgency (Note: Cliyapi is over 80 million years old thanks to a process of reincarnation the Dragaseir developed almost exactly that long ago)... However, she was able to produce early results of over 300% gains in strength and endurance in 62% of the subjects submitted. This proved more than enough to mount solid defenses against the Malyar onslaught... (It is important to note that Cliyapi's success and her lack of good standing with the Dragaseir High Council is believed, by historians, to have led to the actions that caused the Assembly to close the Dragaseir territorial borders and effectively imprison the entire elder race within their own starsystem) The new improved (they were not great enough to be considered 'Super') soldiers were able to hold the line and eventually push back the Malyar. The superior resources of the Assembly allowed the Malyar Aggression to "burn itself out" over a period of roughly 25 years... The end of the Malyar Aggression lead to a new arms race of a sort... Among the myriad facts to be uncovered about many of the races, Cliyapi - the only one of ten Dragasier to avoid the Assembly's imposed territorial confinement - was able to discern that the Aphkians had completely re-engineered themselves, over the course of 50-100 generations, some 8500-12000 years ago. They had evolutionary advanced their species through technological intervention to be stronger, longer lived, more intelligent, more durable, and much more... Having shared almost all their Super-soldier developments with the Aphkian Imperium, the Assembly chose to continue their efforts fearing the Aphkians would re-engineer themselves into a race of super-beings. They granted Cliyapi the resources to continue to pursue the super soldier project... And she did with a wild flourish... (At this point, while the whole of the known universe used robots and droids for many forms of labor, they were never able to be used for combat. Many autonomous weapons programs, also under way before, during, and after the Malyar aggression all failed. To date, no one is quite sure why...) Cliyapi never stopped her research... Roughly 450 years ago, Cliyapi disappeared. In her place she left instructions to continue her work to develop and improve on the very concept of a super -soldier. This was puzzling to those entrusted to follow these instructions. To make things harder, the Assembly had relaxed their concerns about the Aphkian Imperium and the Imperial Union and thusly drastically reduced the priority of the super-soldier program. Almost all the resources enjoyed before were now gone... This is when a very enterprising individual, Captain Serendoe, father of Master Serendoe, decided to turn the program into a super-athlete development program... Opting not to show the results of the more advanced super-soldier products, incredibly musclebound, insanely strong, and invulnerable young subjects, Captain (that is his real name - he had some interesting parents) promoted the program as a new sports league... The League of Super-Powered Athletics was created... The immediate attention it got was outstanding and yielded tremendous accolades and profits. Which was used to advance Cliyapi's work... The first classes (six years of study and training) appeared to be totally normal, highly athletic, individuals who could run the mile in under 2 minutes without getting winded, demonstrated muscular efficiency over 200% (able to lift and hold twice their body weigh almost indefinitely), possess improved reflexes and dexterity well beyond their species' norms. This only fueled more and more heated competition.... More driven athletes produced, in themselves, exactly the results that Cliyapi and Captain had intended all along. The athletes grow stronger, faster, more powerful, and more and more muscular with each successive class... When Cliyapi returned she had found a thriving incarnation of the original super-soldier program. She wisely chose not to take over. Instead, she took up an administrative/advisorary position and is watching how well her work is doing without her... Some 420 years later, a very young (only 500 years old) Dragasier named Menikomenqolui, also known as "Meniko" had separated from her teacher, Cliyapi, and chose to pursue the same end - to create a supreme athlete/soldier (she is not aware of the soldier part for a number of years) - but by different means... Menikomenqolui would choose magic, the essence of the universe, the "other" powers in the universe to create her super-athletes. At first, for about 10 years, she could not gain any useful resource and had few recruits. Still she continued to try... Then there was a little colony on the verge of collapse in the Abragos Galaxy of the Imperial Union... There Menikomenqolui had gone to try to help in some way, being that she is of high moral and willing to aid individual - quite different from the scheming Cliyapi, only to find the colony in such a state that the Abragos regional government had chosen to let the colony fail and then rebuild from the ash. Still Meniko searched for anyone who could be helped. She was busy helping survivors few weeks... Then she found her first star pupil, Rae Iksaki, then only 8 years old... Rae took to the training with the fervor of a madwoman. She easily and quickly surpassed all her peers in her first year. Touting the success of her new star pupil, Meniko was able to attract new students and resources... The largest endowment to her new school, which is known as The League of Mystic Arts and Combat, came from the masters of sorcery themselves...The Aphkian Imperium. They offered to provide nigh unlimited funded and resource as a school for the teaching and development of sorcery (a kind of an MIT for magic in space). All the Imperium asks is that she share her research with the Imperial Council of Sorcerial Arts... To date, Menikomenqolui exercises the strictest application approval regime outside of the Imperium's own Officer's Upgrade Application process. She only keeps on 180-220 students at a time, all of whom are subject to psychological evaluation every year... However, not everyone subscribes to the same strong morality the Menikomenqolui does... The Omega League was totally unknown until just a few years ago. They seem very intent on producing supremely powerful Super-soldiers and have succeeded to a distressing degree. Little is known about them, by what process their handful of subjects gained their power, who started the Omega league, what the "Omega Conversion" is, and just who is in charge... Master Serendoe's own admitted mistake of science, The Giant's League, was a poorly considered plan to expand the limits of physical potential by expanding the physical parameters of the subjects. These giants are now completely out of control and have complete run of the original world that the "Powered League" once occupied. They are now ruled over by a giantess whose power and strength is beyond most normal measure. The Assembly and the Aphkian Imperium are both eyeing the situation closely as to hopefully prevent another "super-being catastrophe"... As time goes on, many people question the ultimate usefulness of these leagues of super- athletes/soldiers,fighters. Still, like many worlds and weapons of mass destruction, they know they can not un-invent these "leaguers" and so must cultivate wisdom to control these awesome new powers. The creation of these Leagues was a result of necessity and continued to grow because of desire... Same old story...