The following is a set of biographical materials for an upcoming Star Trek Adventures PC, that I rather got carried away on. I'm posting this mostly so I have an easier way to link this than Discord's useless snippet feature, but I'm proud enough of it that you might enjoy it anyhow.

A Brief History of the Bes'zaal

Much of what was, has been lost. Besz is no more, but her people still live, though some believe that existence itself is a curse, and they had better to be taken by the Void.

Long ago, our people were the envy of any world, a great empire that spanned the whole surface of Besz, ruled by the Crown Triumvirate: the Diadem, the Mitre, and the Mortar, each representing State, Temple, and Academy, the pillars of society. Through might, faith, and knowledge, Besz stretched the very bounds of its world and began to reach out into the stars, settling its system and seeking a route beyond.

Yet from this well of ambitions would rise its doom. The 34th Diadem of Besz, his name forever cursed to be Unspoken, determined to cross the veil into the very Void itself and claim its power for himself. He declared himself the Night Emperor, abolishing the Triumvirate, and making him god-king of all Besz.

The precise nature of his dark work is still unknown, but in his ambitions, he reached into the Void itself and was infused with terrific power, but in his greed he doomed the world. Besz was sundered from the galaxy, shattered, and pulled into the Void. Those who survived were forever changed by their new home, starved of the very energy on which life relies, and yet somehow damned by this curse to live on. They took the name Bes'zaal: the Cursed.

Would that our torments had ceased there. In time, despite our seeming banishment from the galaxy as you know it, we were found by the mortal world beyond. The great Shattering had left tendrils across the cosmos, linking us to scattered realms but none so strongly as Elas.

It began as freak accidents, anomalies, but soon the Elasites discovered that through the link between worlds, they could "summon" our people across the rift and bind them to their will. Our time in the Void had changed us, and when pulled back into this world once more, that change manifested as strange abilities. Some among us could see glimpses of the timeways, read thought as if it were speech, and even manifest or transmute small objects.

The Elasites believed they had discovered magic, and began pulling more of us through to perform their "miracles", and the starving Bes'zaal at first thought they could bargain with the people of Elas. Instead they were bound, enslaved, and soon pulled across in such large numbers that the link itself was strained to breaking. In a great Second Cataclysm, what remained of Besz was lost forever, and only the survivors now in bondage on Elas are known to have survived.

With the link severed, our own gifts waned, and with it, our usefulness. The religious order of Elas saw its opportunity, having ever distrusted the practice of "magic", now turned against the Bes'zaal. They branded us as "demons", spun wicked lies about our "unholy" and deceitful ways. Many were killed outright, but the healthy put to forced labor or exiled to the wilderness.

It was only with the intervention of a passing Federation ship that some among us were spared. The USS Asuncion, on a routine survey visit, discovered the planets inhabitants, and by chance encountered some of our exiles living beyond the wall. Elder Garus, recognizing the opportunity, pleaded her case before its captain, and despite the Prime Directive was convinced to help evacuate who we could on the grounds that our people were not native to Elas and had already developed spacefaring technology in our past.

These refugees eventually settled on a planet of their own, an undesirable backwater near the border of Federation space, with hostile wildlife, and equally hostile neighbors, but in time we have come to rebuild.

With the Federation's knowledge, we have learned that the "gift" that touched our people was likely the same "strange energy" encountered by the crews of the Cerritos and the Enterprise, as well as traces of subspace energy that seem to line up with our traditional descriptions of what the elders called the "Void".

Whether Besz' fragments still exist somewhere in subspace remains a mystery. Certainly the link on Elas has been broken, but others may still exist elsewhere, and perhaps even other populations of "summoned" exiles, to say nothing of those that still survive under Elasite bondage. Official Federation policy is that a full liberation of the latter would violate the Prime Directive, but every day Bes'zaal live under the thumb of Elas, and so the colony on Bes'noc has sought membership in hopes this may give them the leverage to authorize the rescue of our people.

Excerpt from "Notes on the Bes'zaal Species" by Dr. Cmdr. Sular, USS Colombo:

In general physical appearance, the Bes'zaal are horned humanoids, standing typically around 2-2.5m on digitigrade, hoofed legs, with a long tail customarily adorned with jewelry. Their skin is brightly colored along a red-to-purple spectrum of complexion, and their eyes are notable for being actively luminescent, giving off a faint yellow-green glow.

According to custom, their original homeworld is said to have been of an arid but cold climate, but extant populations on Elas and Bes'noc, as well as scattered other refugee examples have shown reasonable adaptability to other environs. Of note however is their general preference for a nocturnal lifestyle, and a mild sensitivity to bright light.

Their most remarkable traits however, are their unusual energy signatures and resultant propensity for minor psionic manifestations. Scans and subsequent deeper analysis show that they remain almost imperceptibly out of phase with normal space-time, and they leave a faint subspace signature almost like a warp trail, albeit of substantially lower power. Bes'zaal are even conscious of this connection, and some connect it to their own spiritual beliefs and legends of "the Void", from whence their homeworld was said to rest.

Similarly, those gifted with psionic ability or similar manifestations show traces of the so-called "strange energy" identified by Drs. Leonard McCoy and T'Ana, though not nearly to the same rampant or exponentially expanding degree as incidents like those about the Enterprise and Cerritos.

Known effects of these energy manifestations include minor object transmutation, short-term temporal clairvoyance, telepathy, weak telekinesis, and an unusual gift for sensing warp fields. However, it is to be noted that the experience for many can be quite emotionally or even physically painful; this author speculates that this may be a kind of epigenetic cultural imprint, due to the history of exploitation of these talents by the Elas.

Lt. Commander Mazhda, the first Bes'zaal to be accepted into Starfleet service, described to Dr. Yokohara of the Hokkaido her own experiences of what she calls "Void-Time" ("Aal'oc" in the native tongue), short painful glimpses of potential futures superimposed together in her "mind's eye". Further study of this phenomenon would be fascinating, but was not pursued in depth in the interest of cultural sensitivity.

Extract from Personal Log, Lt. Cmdr. Mazhda

I grew up on Bes'noc, of course, one of the first of the new generation to be born on its soil. It was ... hard. When I was but 4 winters old, Kalexi raiders sacked our village. My mother fled with me in tow, but my father stayed behind to fight. I never saw him again.

In my 8th winter, I first went on hunting party. With father gone, someone had to take up the slack. Uncle Dashya taught me to hold a phaser. That night, as we slept beneath the stars, a fen'dahl pack attacked us. The largest of them took my Uncle's left arm, before I managed to relight the fire, and they fled.

While my Uncle rested, I went out that night on my own and by morning the village had 6 new fen'dahl pelts for the next winter. My Uncle was buried with that silver coat.

When I came of age, I joined the Ky'besz guard. I was tired of fen'dahl and raiders and burying our dead. I thought I could make a difference, to help secure our safety, but time and again we could at best only hold them back. I learned to fight men as well as beasts, I learned to sleep with mind's eye open, but we were few, and the threats were many.

In my second year, Orion slavers came and threatened the colony. Demanded tribute or we would be bound once more as we had been under the Elas, and their ships had all the weapons they needed to ensure it. It was then the Federation came to our aid a second time, and it was in seeing their captain at work that I understood who I must join with if I was to truly defend our home. I demanded I be allowed to join Starfleet then and there ... but the paperwork and the exams took a bit more time.

The Academy was ... an adjustment. I was unaccustomed to so many faces, to the soft comforts of Federation lifestyle, and they were unaccustomed to one from so harsh a world. The humans especially did not trust me; in their history there are legends of beings not unlike us, and the tales they tell ring of the Elasites' libels. Fights were had. But also learning; I took to studying their lies, hoping perhaps to find clues in their history that might lead back to Besz.

My performance however was acceptable. Combat and tactical training went as well as it should for any of the Ky'besz, and I found my niche in academics. In time I earned the respect of one of my instructors, Captain Galah, who sponsored me personally to join his crew when he returned to active commission aboard the USS Hokkaido.

The Cardassian War was on, and I eagerly volunteered to head with him to the front. We fought on many border worlds much like my home, and at first it seemed an honor, but then a frustration, a daily reminder of the precarious life I had lived on Bes'noc. It was hard to say which was worse: the worlds we helped, knowing my own still lived on a knife edge, or the worlds we left at the mercy of the Cardassians.

Then came the treaty. Starfleet said the war was over. There was peace. There was no peace. Instead, we were put on the DMZ, patrolling and sometimes fighting and capturing the very people we had once been sent to protect. We watched whole worlds handed over to become little Beszet, and then we were sent to arrest the Maquis who fought to liberate those people.

The final straw came on Argus IV. It was a small colony, just inside the Federation side of the border from the DMZ. Intelligence said there was a Maquis cell in the mountains, and we were sent to investigate, only to arrive and find a Cardassian patrol ship already there ahead of us.

They had the same intel we had, only more so. Claimed a Maquis cell leader who'd attacked a Cardassian outpost was on the surface, confirmed by one of their spies. I begged the Captian not to trust them. He wanted to negotiate. Offered their captain the leader in exchange for the rest being turned over to Federation custody.

Against my objection, I was assigned to an away party to handle the prisoner exchange. Starfleet Intelligence was able to get us a contact on the colony who set up a meeting. When we arrived, there were only a dozen scared, mostly unarmed smugglers, all Federation citizens. The alleged "leader" was nowhere to be found.

It didn't matter anyway. The Cardassians had traced our transporter signal. An ambushed wiped out the smugglers, while the Cardassian ship blasted their hideout from orbit, then fled the system. None of the alleged Maquis survived. Three of our team were killed in the firefight. I got a new scar.

When I returned to the ship, I submitted immediate request for transfer, and the Captain accepted. He knew what he'd done, and I would have no more part of it. I haven't spoken to him since.

It shook my faith. The Federation had saved my people, but now I understood that it only did so because of people more like those Maquis than the men who lead that war. It remains to be seen which this new captain is.

The Bes'zaal, we take our oaths seriously. I vowed to protect my people, and the Federation. All of the Federation. Even if I must defy it to do so. Time will tell.