What happened after the last sim

[Atragon9 0]

There is a sudden blinding white light and a "deafening" silence and stillness. As their vision returns, everyone finds themselves standing or sitting at their duty stations. Everything is back to normal (this includes the engine room, completely repaired and all of the dead engineers back at their stations, alive and unharmed.)

Standing in front of each person is a translucent form, in the shape of the most important person from their past. These mentors and heroes begin speaking as one - to the individual in front of them. "Please allow us to explain this to you all."

"In your brief histories, you have encountered many races and species of evolved beings. Some have been at your level of development and some have been at a simpler stage in their own journeys. With the less advanced races, you have reacted with both exploitation and assistance. At other times, your peoples have come across others who were much more advanced than yourselves, evolutionarily. Sometimes they were considered magical and evil, sometimes they were considered powerful and ... holy. Your races needed to find some internal way to justify, to make sense of what they were experiencing. During these encounters, the more advanced races would not be able to stay in contact with you for long. They feared persecution, adoration or annihilation - theirs or yours. These races did not want to prompt any of these reactions, yet they would keep trying to make contact in hopes of a prolonged and peaceful coexistence. This would be beneficial for everyone involved. Every few millennia, contact would be attempted again, in hopes that your peoples would be ready for this coexistence."

"The reason for this discussion is to put your recent experiences in perspective. It has been many hundreds of years since the last known contact between your races and any representatives of a strikingly higher evolved race. You have an imperfect historical record of that contact that you refer to as the engagement of the Yaku and the Haiweh, before the founding of your Federation. The facts that are collected on that encounter have been reported incorrectly, but there has been no desire or opportunity to correct them for your history. In addition, it perpetuates the need for distance between the different developmental stages of the races. Many of the more advanced races were quite content to allow many thousands of your years to go by before attempting a fresh contact, but that is no longer in our control now. There is an advanced race that is eager to engage and exploit the younger races. They have recently come in contact with your Federation near a stable wormhole where you are operating a stationary starbase. This race is referring to itself as the Pah-Wraith and their contact is purely for their own benefit. This contact accelerated the timetable and it was decided to consider a fresh connection and your ship was selected. We first brought up the specter of the Yaku to gauge how your crew would react and we were pleased that you did not respond with aggression, especially with the addition of the Haiweh, once again."

"That is when we provided you with a number of trials. Borrowing from your own fiction, we exposed you to different environments, allies, enemies and stresses. We are particularly sorry for how we presented the trial with your engineering staff, yet we were very pleased with your reaction, both in resolve and adaptation."

"What this all means is that the time for your "First Contact" is imminent, once we resolve the issue of the Pah-Wraith. We thank you for your patience, your understanding and, most of all, your growth as a group of young species. In order to facilitate the trials and to lessen the impact on your current timeline, all of the trials have taken up just a fraction of one of your days. (In other words, yes that *is* Bobby Ewing in the shower!)"

"We thank you for your understanding and will leave you now. Please know that we never meant you any harm and we will be watching you, preparing for a more formal re-introduction."