“We’re talking about two enigmatic, largely nomadic, cultures with a tradition of creating new lifeforms from base stock....natural DNA in the case of the Lemurians, scrap salvage and stock models in the case of the Shemarrians....and a strong work ethic. The Lemurians value life and freedom, the Shemar value freedom and their life force...Could you imagine the possibilities if they came together?”
“Too much alike or too different. It could result in glory, or it could end in tears. It’s too close to call.”
---Discussion in Interdim Dimensional Monitoring, Gamma Prime.
Shemarrians and Lemurians[]
Though there are many d-bee societies and cultures that the Shemarrians have come in contact with, both regularly and fleetingly, some note should be taken of one interaction that has not yet taken place; contact with the enigmatic Lemurians.
Extant contact between the two societies has not yet occurred to the best of anyone’s knowledge; the Shemarrians remain at present a primarily land-based warrior society. The only two Tribes known to venture into the oceans, the Wayfinders and the DarkWaters, are unlikely to run into the Lemurians any time soon. The Darkwaters, though having the largest naval presence of all the Tribes, have focused the entirety of their efforts on the Atlantic region, where their traditional enemy, the Splugorth, are concentrated. The DarkWaters have also emphasized military operations, rather than exploratory expeditions, in their actions, and at most have sent a few long range scout missions as far south as the equatorial regions of the South Atlantic, to scout Splugorth movements. The Wayfinders, though far more given to exploration for exploration’s sake, have chosen to focus their own attentions on exploring up and down the west coast of North America, but currently have been turning their attention towards the east, with an eye towards containing the Coalition and intervening in the Shemarrian Civil War. They have sent few, if any, large expeditions into the Western Ocean (i.e., the Pacific) though a few scouts have been known to have joined other adventurers on voyages to far Japan (where the gaijan cyborg/gynoids caused something of a sensation in those cities they visited).
If a stabilized and established Shemarrian Nation were to make contact with the Lemurians, the Shemarrians could be an invaluable asset to the Lemurians in their war against the Undead. Since the Shemarrian expeditions into the American New West have already established that the vampire threat is as bad as, if not arguably greater than, that posed by the Splugorth, Shemarrian campaigns against the vampires are assured at some point in the future. The Shemarrian Nation would see the Undead of the Milu as an extension of that threat, and at the very least the Darkwaters would launch an expedition force with mobile industrial base to assist the forces in the Indian Ocean. Being not vulnerable to the Milus’ necromancy, able to survive great depths, and able to mass-produce hordes of relentless warmachines and psi-borgs, the Shemarrians could be a decisive factor in stopping the rapacious Milu dead, as it were. Combined with the New Navy, a Shemarrian-Lemurian alliance would be a formidable pincered force that could overwhelm the Milu and crush the Undead.
Unfortunately, such a grand alliance is not likely to happen. The Lemurians have only a casual interest in the regions inhabited by the Splugorth; like the Shemarrians, the Lemurians are more focused on their own wars (with the Milu and the Lord of the Deep) and unwilling to open another front with yet another enemy. Worse, the Lemurians are likely to recognize the Shemarrians, even the Ecotroz Shemar, as machines, the borderline antithesis of everything the Lemurians believe in. The more conservative Lemurians might not recognize the Shemarrians as sentient at all, but as automatons with the illusion of life. The more radical and extreme Lemurians may see the Shemarrians as little better than the Undead, and deem them worth only of being junked along with the rest of the machine-loving surface dwellers and their societies.
Currently the Lemurians know little of the Shemarrians, and what little they know doesn’t make them particularly interested in them. The Shemarrians are known only vaguely to the Lemurians as yet another violent, rapacious, cold-technology-infatuated species of surface-dwellers who live at odds with nature (indeed, the Lemurians would be HORRIFIED to learn of the apparent Shemarrian love of cyborging innocent animals and plants), and who are to be avoided.
That having been said, a few Lemurian scouts and agents, scouting in the Atlantic region (or around the west coast) may decide to investigate the Shemarrians as a matter of course. The similarities between the Warmount-favoring Shemarrians and the Serpent Hunters may lead individuals of the latter to seek out their Shemarrian counterparts to see how the ‘machine riders’ stack up against the true Riders, if nothing else. Maui-Tikiriki, leader of the Mauian Order, may know a bit more from the biased view of his Splugorth allies, though he may be open-minded enough to try to see if the Shemarrians might not be possible tools in his campaign against the True Atlanteans. In any case, formal contact and any sort of alliance between the two disparate cultures seems unlikely in a century or more, and may represent one of the great missed opportunities for the forces of Good on Rifts Earth.