History
The mri originated on the world of Kutath, an ancient world which they shared with four other races. As resources grew scarcer, a portion of them left Kutath in slowships, seeking other worlds. They would hire on as mercenaries with a race, but each time the relationship ended badly, and they left a ruined world behind to seek a new start. During each journey, or Dark, everything but the ancient traditions of the mri were forgotten by kel and kath, with only the sen retaining records of the Between they had left between. A hint of this process remained in the Shon’jir or passing song which was sung at births and deaths, but most kel of the Between thought of it only as referring to the individual.
After more than eighty such migrations, the mri settled on Kesrith, a desert planet not dissimilar to their lost home. There they encountered the dusei, bearlike telempaths who had intelligence but not the capacity for speech. The dusei established bonds with warriors of the kel, but were said to find the minds of sen too cold for their tastes. Thus the mri were found by the regul, a race of traders from Nurag, a planet of the Mab system. Various regul clans or docha hired mri as bodyguards, giving the mri the opportunity to hone their skills against one another.
The situation changed when the regul encountered humans and war broke out. Atrocities occurred on both sides, at least in part due to the inability of the regul to imagine the future. After forty years of war, the mri were nearly exterminated. The regul negotiated a peace which involved handing Kesrith over to humanity, then betrayed the mri to prevent the mercenaries from switching sides. All the mri save two were murdered.
After the human protagonist, Sten Duncan, was adopted by the mri, the human command decided to risk an experiment. Using an ancient sacred navigation record, they put Duncan and the two surviving mri, Niun and Melein, aboard a ship and sent them back to the lost homeworld of the mri. On the way, Niun forced Duncan to learn to become a mri, with death the penalty for failure.
As a result, they were reunited with the mri of Kutath, and Melein took command of one tribe. Humans and regul had followed them on their journey, and the regul were ready to commit genocide again to ensure that the mri did not hire on with the humans. However, their murderous plans were foiled, and humans ultimately established an understanding with the mri when a human scholar learned to play shon’ai.
Read more about this topic: Mri (fictional Alien Species)
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—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)