Touchstone 1 - Stray

the ‘primary school’ textbook version of the past. Establishing a timeline will help. I’ll write it down in Earth years because Tare years are just too stupidly short.
    @ 1500 years ago – The Lantaren caste on Muina screw up royally by creating Pillars which start tearing apart the fabric which divides real-space from the Ena. And then they’re almost completely wiped out trying to fix their screw up. I missed this little detail before – the people who set up the Pillars died almost at the outset, leaving a serious information and leadership vacuum.
    @ 1500 years ago – Entire towns and cities begin dropping dead, and Ionoth plague the rest. The remaining Lantaren caste frantically evacuates everyone they can to other planets by walking thousands of people through the Ena (some through the kind of spaces I’ve been to on rotation, and others through something called deep-space).
    @ 1500 years ago – One group arrives on Tare, which is a wet rock constantly pounded by storms. They run for the nearest cave and struggle to survive underground. The Lantarens as a distinct caste disappear at this point, but the bloodline remains mixed into the general populace. Plenty of minor psychics about being useful, but they’re treated as a necessary evil because for centuries it was considered a bad and tainted thing to be linked to the Lantarens, who are blamed and hated for what happened to Muina.
    @ 1400 – Muinans finally start to get the upper hand on Tare, and their life becomes less of a desperate struggle for survival. The population starts to go up instead of down. Proper written records start being kept, or stop being lost. Even at this point the Tarens have a kind of nanotech – all those white buildings on Muina are basically grown, not built, from a kind of ‘living mud’ developed by the Lantarens. The Tarens managed to bring some with them and maintain a seed stock of this mud and have built structures with it ever since, even though they had no real understanding of how it worked until the last couple of centuries. House-building here is ultimately bizarre: they start with a big vat of white goop which they feed with raw material to make more white goop which they then ‘instruct’ using little models to create big versions of the same. So long as they kept some of the white goop ‘unformed’ they could always make more white goop. Since the white goop hasn’t absorbed the whole planet yet, I guess it has a mechanism to stop it spreading everywhere.
    @ 900 years ago – Tare has a strong and stable civilisation at this point, and is starting to branch out from the original island, Gorra, and establish on other islands. World exploration phase, somewhat hampered by extremely violent oceans.
    @ 300 years ago – The attitude toward psychic ability finally shifts enough that it’s considered a good rather than a bad thing, and the Tarens actively try breeding for it. Later, once they figure out how to boost it with machinery, they find that psychic talent of some sort is almost universal in the population, although they don’t have anyone who can even come close to the level of the old Lantarens.
    @ 200 years ago – Computer age begins.
    @ 120 years ago – Advanced nanotech age begins. At this point they’ve passed Earth’s current level of technology and are beginning the first roll-out of the bio-powered interface.
    @ 100 years ago – Tarens build ‘spaceships’ which will allow them to travel through the interplanetary gate again. This gate (or rift) goes to deep-space and is thick with aether and doesn’t seem to be like either the gates I’ve travelled with First, or the gate which took me from Earth to Muina. The Tarens start hunting for habitable planets/Muina, which is by no means easy. They send off and lose a lot of drones.
    @ 90 years ago – A planet called Channa is located, which has an ex-Muinan population. It’s a rocky, arid world and not very attractive as a colonisation prospect, so the Tarens set up some mines on an unsettled continent, and indulge in long ethical debates about what to do about the ex-Muinans who are living a harsh, nomadic hunter-gatherer life. Instead of stepping in and trying to take over, the Tarens disguised themselves, learned the dialect, and have been feeding them small technological advances, turning them into a more agrarian culture. Since Channa’s Ionoth infestation was relatively minor, they’ve left it at that until recent years