INTERWOVEN ADVENTURES | Circadian Earth: Book 1

PROLOGUE: What is a Trialian?

A little over two hundred years ago, Earth was hit by an extinction level event. Humanity, which had been through so much in the thousands of years before, were brought to the brink of total annihilation.

And yet, hardly anyone would be able to tell you what things were like beforehand. The vast knowledge of the Old World was completely lost, and a lot of the concepts that humans took for granted have, even now, yet to be rediscovered. Names of past civilisations were forgotten, and those who survived don’t even know what the world looks like beyond their homeland.

While very few humans are still around, the other animals that didn’t go extinct experienced a sudden transformation. Yet, all of them evolved the same way, almost as if they’re unifying as one species, with slight differences based on what they originally were. All of them share the same average height of ninety centimetres, most of the same features, and human-level intelligence. The only real difference between them now is the shapes of their ears and tails, although some of them seem to be evolving to remove those differences as well.

They have four-fingered hands, three-toed paw feet, large eyes, muzzles, and human-like hair. Their fur, eyes and hair, for an unknown reason, can be almost any colour imaginable. These colours can sometimes be passed down through generations, but it’s not always the case. People are still trying to figure their genetics out, which leads to one of the biggest mysteries regarding this evolved species...

... and that is that almost all of them are female. They outnumber males by a hundred to one, and that ratio is going up. The biggest theory is that it’s connected to the females’ ability to asexually reproduce without the need for a male, however nothing has been found that directly connects them. Since reproduction rates aren’t impacted, nobody really sees it as a problem either.

Those who lived some seventeen hundred years prior would associate their appearances with characters from “Sonic the Hedgehog”... but these creatures refer to themselves as “Trialians”. None of them could tell you where that name came from, but it’s the one they use.

They live nearly as long as humans do. Sixty years is considered a good long life, seventy is roughly the equivalent of a human centenarian. They also mature faster. The archipelago, known as Bitobia, considers a Trialian at the age of just fifteen to be an adult.

Trialians have also become the dominant species, having fought for their freedom some time ago. Humans didn’t stand much of a chance, being limited in number. Even now, their known population stands at less than ten thousand, compared to Trialians outnumbering them by thousands to one.

Despite the Old World being mostly forgotten, a lot of technology is still around. The population picked up most of what was still salvageable. Robots run rampant in certain cities, their overall numbers dwarfing even the Trialians. They’ve claimed one city of their own, and in the rest of Bitobia, they enjoy a peaceful coexistence with Trialians and humans.

But like the fight between Trialians and humans, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Some would argue that it still isn’t, but at least no mass murders have happened outside of that one fight... no, wait. There were two.