Challenge #02516-F326: Once a Sword
Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
Humans, while striving for peace, prepared for war. -- Anon Guest
Let's go in the garden, you'll find something waiting... -- Terran children's song.
This is a gardening planet. Call it Agraria. It has been specifically engineered for farming food crops for Terrans by Terrans. The people who choose to live there are called Vegans and they are, by and large, peaceful. They do not eat animal sourced nutrients and cultivate many plants that substitute for nutrients only found in animals. All in all, they've been very clever with their moral choices. They're also possibly the most sanctimonious of peoples in the Galactic Alliance and are at near-zealot levels of trying to convert others into their lifestyle choices.
One would think that -apart from an obvious social impairment- they would be the least likely to fight any living creature about anything. At least physically. The Vegans of Agraria will debate any other life form to death about healthier food choices, but that's not the point. This is about Humanity in all its forms, and how Humans revert to type in extremis.
Humans may say that they've turned their swords into ploughshares, but what many forget is that ploughshares can be turned back into swords the instant someone gets ticked off enough to do it.
Which was pretty much exactly what happened when the Vorax raiders came to help themselves to about half of Agraria's crops. Even with a specifically terraformed world, even with the densest and most intensive farming techniques in the known universe, even with everything that science could create to make their lives possible, Agraria and her people could not support such a raid. Therefore it went to war.
Though they were usually peaceful and anti-violence, the Vegans of Agraria turned to viciousness on the head of a pin. some of them didn't even bother turning their gardening tools into weapons, they just used them as they were. The Vegans headed out and committed more bloodshed in the name of peace and harmlessness than had ever been committed in the name of survival.
In brief, they put their beliefs where the sun didn't frequently shine on Vorax anatomy.
The Vorax never raided Agraria again.
Agraria, on the other hand, stepped up its defensive networks to levels of paranoia never before seen in Terrans anywhere. Which lead to a revival and rephrasing of an ancient Human saying:
Better to meet a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Morphart]
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Send me a prompt [58 remaining prompts!]
My son wants to know if there are any other animals on that planet XD
Every animal that lives there is allowed to live wild. Interestingly, it doesn't go much past insects.
Why do I have this mental image of them basically ringing the entire planet with enough weapons to blow-away an entire fleet and all but quarantining themselves? And if anyone, outside of dire emergency or direct invitation, goes to land there, friend or foe, they're summarily blown away without so much as a "why are you here?"
...you nailed it.