Tauni

The Tauni are a humanoid species that evolved on the planet Kelowna, a class M world noted for islands, tropical rainforests, and jagged mountain ranges that cut through it all. The Tauni homeworld itself was formerly the site for Iconian artifacts, and was host to a number of instantaneous transportation gates, of which some where restored to functionality.

Currently Tauni society is regaining much of its vibrancy following the end of uplift efforts. New forms of media entertainment, new flows of information with the outside galaxy, new advances in personal tech, are all fuelling social growth. However, this is also a turbulent time, with some of the same resistance groups that fought the Harmony now turning against the modern government, even going so far as to ally with criminal Yan-Ros elements.

Although the occupation of the Tauni and Kelowna is now over, there are still many Tauni who for various reasons came to live off-world. The majority of these still do live off-world, and provide a surprisingly significant population chunk in the greater Harmony of Horizon.

Physical Description
The Tauni appear very like humans, betazoids, yan-ros, and similar species in the local galactic neighborhood who bear the mark of Preserver genetic seeding. Their most striking physical quirk is a species-wide prevalence of whitish-blonde hair that appears almost metallic under natural light. Additionally, they have a cultural fondness for wearable technology and make extensive use of "smart glasses" that project images directly in front of their eyes where another species might use pads or screens.

Government
The Tauni are governed by a reconstruction of a pre-Harmony organization known as the League of Kelownan States.

The Tauni interstellar navy is operated by Space Gate Command.

Report on The Harmony of Horizon Uplift
Note: The Following report, though verified to the best of our ability, relies heavily on Tauni sources and witnesses as the Harmony itself is loath to discuss the events or open their military archives to our people.

First contact between the Tauni and the Harmony of Horizon occurred in 2253 when a Harmony patrol vessel encountered a Tauni exploratory team that had traveled from Kelowna via one of the Iconian portals that the Tauni had inadvertently inherited from a long ago Iconian colony on their homeworld.

The initial Tauni contact team attempted to play a very distant and cool game with the Harmony’s representatives by limiting contact and information from their end. This effort failed when the now alerted Harmony was able to trace Tauni radio signals to Kelowna and make their case directly to the Tauni populace.

The Harmony’s diplomats were able to apply a divide and conquer strategy to the Tauni populace by using the secrecy of the Gate program to undermine faith in the institutions of Kelowna’s major military power and destroy international relations in a blaze of blame and recriminations played out in the public sphere.

With Kelowna slowly descending into panic and global thermonuclear war threatening to break out the Harmony was then able to step into the chaos and act as an honest broker. Before the first year was out forty thousand Peacekeeper troops had been given permission by various Kelownan governments to operate in their territory and the Peacekeeper Directorate had been granted permission to set up what would become the first of hundreds of bases on Kelowna’s moon.

With their people in place the Harmony moved to dismantle local governments in exchange for technology, especially biotechnology that led to the elimination of virtually all of the deadly diseases that had stalked the Tauni even into their information age.

With their control settling in, the Harmony removed many of Kelowna’s Iconian relics, often with the permission and blessing of the local Tauni inhabitants.

By all appearances the Tauni were shaping up to be model Harmony citizens, even settling several colonies, up until the middle of the 2260's. A widespread backlash from many Kelownans about the increasing intrusion of the Harmony into Tauni daily life and restrictions placed on traditional Tauni ways of life. The Public Safety Directorate’s use of predictive analytical systems in matters of law enforcement especially galled the Tauni until what had started as generalized dissatisfaction in the 60's emerged as a full on war of resistance by the early 70's.

The Tauni resistance and the Harmony security organizations entered into a mutual cycle of atrocity, though this was mostly restricted to the military fighters of both sides for the first decade. As the conflict dragged on into 80s the Public Security Directorate adopted a policy of forced resettlements, collective punishments for family units, and increased censorship. Official Tauni death counts are unreliable but place civilian deaths in this era in the low single digit millions, while the Harmony’s own official counts are merely in the hundreds of thousands.

Though a nasty war in a far off place, the general Harmony public seems to have not paid much attention to the Tauni war of independence until the Altas Sinking of 2287. An event caused when a cell of resistance members sabotaged the weather control of the major Harmony core world of Haven: over one and a half million Harmony citizens died overnight, with the majority of the deaths occurring when the seaborn city of Altas flooded and subsequently sank for a week until the tenders Choreographer, Calligrapher, and Photographer were able to bring the city back to the surface.

The Tauni and Harmony records of the aftermath of the Altas sinking agree with the immediate consequences: Virk sab Nahzul, the Public Security Intendant of Kelowna, ordered mass arrests of anyone remotely involved with the resistance, and seemed to be planning a much more final solution to the Tauni Rebellion before he was arrested by several officers under his command.

With civilian attention focused on the Tauni Rebellion, and the Harmony’s own complicity in a series of vicious events, a public consensus was reached by the end of 2288 that resulted in the rapid completion of negotiations with a group of the most hardline resistance factions.

The Treaty of Shyenn saw the Harmony sign a treaty that that guaranteed the immediate and complete withdrawal of the Harmony from Kelowna and any other Tauni colony world that desired independence.

By the end of the first quarter of 2288 that total withdrawal had been affected. However, several colony worlds, including the major Tauni colony world of Japha, totalling a third of the Tauni population had voted to stay in the Harmony. To this day those Tauni are considered loyal and valuable members of the wider Harmony.

Unverified reports from the resistance years, not accepted even by the wider Tauni population include: Unrestricted biomedical experimentation, unrestricted cybernetic experimentation, mind control glasses, infertility drugs released into the Kelownan water supply, replacement of important politicians with near perfect doubles, the widespread killing of all esper sensitive Tauni, the summoning of extra-dimensional entities, elite cyaug kill teams, and false flag attacks by the Public Security Directorate on the Harmony’s own settlers.

As a final note: there is a consistent pattern of Harmony military and security commanders going off the reservation to devastating results, though the Tauni resistance members of the time connect that a fundamental Horizonian devious hypocrisy rather than as a consequence of the Public Security Directorate’s predictive analytical systems which seem to have been much less invasive at the time of the rebellion than they are today.