Blue Darrians

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I mentioned them to Hans, in passing, in another thread.

Of course, being a TravGawd, he has heard of them.

I was one of the principals in a big discussion about them on the CotI boards that eventually petered out with no one having been convinced of anything (I know, I know, SO unusual for a Traveller discussion ;-) ). My conclusion was that they made for great folklore:

[NB: Non-canon]

Blue Darrian: A member of a mythical offshoot of the Darrians, usually described as completely antithetical to ordinary Darrians. Also referred to as Anti-Darrians, Nega-Darrians, Bizzarrians, and Drowarrians.

The myth originated on post-Maghiz Entrope as a childrens' horror story around -800. The Blue Darrians were supposedly former inhabitants of Ldenilenyibh, a residental dome that had been shut down in -887 and cannibalized for spare parts to keep the other domes in repair. The conceit was that some of the inhabitants had refused to be evacuated and fled into the wilderness where they nursed their hatred of the despoilers of their dome and plotted revenge. To survive the deadly cold and inadequate oxygen pressure, they had replaced their own blood with a super-scientific hemocyanin-based synthetic blood; it was this blood that gave them their eerie blue color. At first Blue Darrians were just the subject of scary nighttime stories, but they soon became popular for masquerade costumes and as media villains.

When Entrope came back into contact with the other Darrian worlds, the story of the Blue Darrians spread. They now acquired a fleet of Old Darrian ships, complete with cloaking and teleportation devices and planned to conquer and take over whichever world the story was set on. They also began to kidnap children, spouses, and lovers of protagonists and turning them into Blue Darrians to bolster their numbers. The process was, naturally, irreversable except with the help of a serum stored in their secret base. Blue Darrian spies disguised themselves to look like ordinary Darrians by the use of skin dyes, or they had their blood replaced with natural blood, leaving them impossible to identify by any scientific means, thus making it necessary for the protagonist to identify them using only pure deductive logic.

Blue Darrian villains have appeared in a number of literary works, including Aneres Behlene Zgenik's classic thriller "Blue Murder" and Ryihlayr Nyonolz Pehneh's famous juvenile adventure story "Zgoter and Co."

Hans