Werewolfs

Created Wednesday 12 April 2023

The Blattids first major breakthrough into Humans. They found ways to make otherwise normal, stable people suddenly and effectively lethal. And then they started getting good at being able to find and affect particular people.

The fun here is in thinking of how they could create a psychological phenomemon among Humans that the Blattids could use to hone in on particular people---or mor eliekly people in certain positions or roles. What psych-residing/infiltrating thing could serve as recon?

More Hydes (given the inspiration I got this from/during) then werewolves, but really just guys becoming more dicks. Just the normalization of dickheadedness by just not stop being a dick. Not an inelegant social parasite. They contribute the bare minimum to society (take out whatever government assistance they can---unless it would be to help caste-like outgroups, then none of those free handouts) but won't---can't---stop being a drag on society. Either you put up with them or descend to retaliate. Either way you loose.

And so when the Deciders get inklings of HOWARD, their first query-if-its-there is how to handle Werewolfz^[And yeah, that haz to be the spelling a dat]. The the query is answered (by someone, some non-localized Ai using a network of IT systems, so maybe HOWARD?^[And yeah, making that all caps rankles up my down style.]. The answer is to descend and retaliate; declare them the enemy to all---and only those---who need to know, and firebomb them. Genocide. Well, that's what some random Ai said.
And they were tempted. And they didn't even know it was a Blattid attack until several decades later.

That's a lot of time for a wound to fester. For a forward observer to gain intelligence. (And literally so; the Succubi invade through an ecology's trophic cycle, but the Blattids by learning to at first mimic and then usefully synthesize intelligence in that species' type of intelligence.

And so they should have, but didn't.
And so became more like that. The next generation of dickheads just did what the first did but worse. A simple strategy that sure didn't stop working throughout the lenght of this opera. To fashion it well, Humans would get jerkier and jerkier as the pan-generational story (that I can't see interstellar stories being anything but) dragged on. And who wants to write that? Or well, read it at least.

So, why "werewolf"? Well, in-story it's because the ones noted in the common culture as "Werewolves" turned out to be the earliest-known occurance of the Blattid invasionary force. And the Werewolves were a fight club that (a) were very successful, even becoming a landless nation in the end, and (b) prone to go out on a given day of the month---their day and not a day for others---and have their "period" when they bled. Or, well, made others bleed for them: They're not the ones who end up bleeing. So, anywhere they were, you just did not go out one day a month. Which day varied between gangs, of course, and none that could overlap geographically overlapped days also overlapped days. (To do so would be to start a fight to the death (which happens).) And yeah, so the actual civilians in bad areas actually usually had five or six days a week when they couldn't go out. And some tense days in between.