The Entochine doesn’t tell us the whole story, I learned this early on. It was early autumn, our leaves hadn’t begun turning, and the First Strife was almost over. The Conclave had been meeting for weeks then without success, and I used my emergency powers to break protocol and and have my assistant Kwoaym bring in a kinetoscope, to show what was happening outside the Conclave walls.

We watched the crowds mill about on the fuzzy gray screen. Garbled sounds of snapping wood and pulsing weapons broke on our trunks like thunder.

I was worrying a bit of peeling bark on my side, watching for the conflagration. I could just make out two of our number, my grove-siblings Kydic and Guay, embracing each other around a torch. I felt their intent through the Entochine first, but saw their deaths before I felt them. There was something more real about that than the Entochine alone.

“This must not be our legacy, dear Conclave. Our siblings continue to burn, but the violence against us will never stop so long as the raiders may profit by it,” I creaked. You could hear a leaf drop in there. One representative, young and bold Hooim, radiated passion after watching the raiders retreat to their ships with my groves cultural relics.

“Perhaps it is time we return to the old ways, to the blasting fires and boom of weapons,” he groaned, his amber eyes aglitter. “The raiders antics are not a subject of quiet debate, but real danger to ourselves and others! It is unfair to our siblings and the fallen to let this strife continue.”

Many of the raiders kin had integrated then, and it didn’t seem fair to demand sacrifice of them as payment for our indecision. But the veterans among us filled the Entochine with dread, such that I could almost hear their memories of flame and battle.

Thuaym was one, a grove-mate of mine and of the brave martyrs on the screen. I remember she chilled the room with her sad determination, though she absolutely shined with gems and shards in her branches, her thousand trophies and weapons from the oldest conflicts, before the Conclave.

“Hooim is right that it would be a violent and war-like thing to let this strife go on,” she whispered, her slightest thought as loud as the winds of winter from one so old as she. “But we have the means of change already, even if we have difficulty using them effectively. My grove has prepared new devices which can deliver our smoke unto the raiders. All of us, three hundred strong, will gladly burn to fill these devices and bring peace without need of further suffering.”

So there we had it, an ultimatum. We held a vote right then, in favor of or against war; 49 yea, 51 nay, and the remaining eight looked to me to help them decide. I couldn’t have known then how much rode on my decision.

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So the idea here is that the Unfallen, while they do have an empathic element, are not necessarily subsumed by their empathic abilities. They have a kind of shared emotional sub-conscious that makes it difficult for them to fight, but doesn't necessarily prevent them from fighting. Here, that empathic network is called the Entochine, and the smoke produced by a burnt Unfallen actually pacifies creatures specifically by allowing them into the Entochine, causing them to feel all of the same emotions as everyone else in the Entochine, potentially ending wars by making all sides feel the pain of all other sides. It is not a mind-control ability or pacifying drug, but instead lets other creatures experience one anothers emotions the same way Unfallen do.

In this situation, the starting Minor Faction associated with the Unfallen have been partially integrated into their society, but there is still a space-born military faction who are fighting the Unfallen, partly because they perceive the Entochine as a kind of sinister, otherworldly influence. After many scattered self-immolations to stop various attacks, Jukim has forced the Conclave to watch a live television broadcast (I envision the Unfallen as being a little behind the times on a lot of tech that isn't strictly necessary due to their ascetic outlook), and seeks a more permanent solution to end the conflict. Hooim is a martial pacifist, who believes the best war is a short war, and would like to bring the fight to the raiders in order to spare lives in the long run; Thuaym, a decorated ancient Unfallen veteran, would prefer to apply technology to the traditional practice of self-immolation, specifically to avoid the kind of war which Hooim has never experienced. Hooim represents a militarist view while Thuaym represents a pacifist one, though both are motivated by a desire for peace in the end.

Mechanically, as a first quest, this might require the player to sacrifice a population point, either to build their first ship or force their first truce. The war route would likely cause internal dissent, far more than the peace route, as violence may break out in the following quest and horrify the populace as a result. The military route would likely reward the player with some sort of new military school building, while the peace route would likely get some sort of tech or population bonus from the peacefully integrated raiders, maybe including an artifact or info to spark the next quest.

The style of the story and its themes are inspired by documentary interviews, Thích Quảng Đức who committed self-immolation to protest treatment of Buddhist by the Vietnamese government in 1963, and particularly "world leader" fiction and non-fiction like The West Wing or dramatic biographical movies. Here the speaker is Jukim, the leader of the Conclave, the Senate equivalent for the Unfallen where individual groves are allowed a voice by elected representatives. The faction is very concerned with maintaining peace, and the Unfallen's greatest fear is probably the failure of their efforts, whether because an enemy was too dedicated to war to be allowed to live, or because the Unfallen fell down the slippery slope and became the new monsters. Their society is particularly split between those who prefer (or demand) self-sacrifice rather than open violence, and those who prefer (or demand) war to prevent further suffering. Kwoaym, Hooim, and Thuaym would all make reasonable Hero choices, and perhaps whichever solution is not chosen, the player gets that hero, as either Hooim or Thuaym die for their cause and the other stays behind. Kwoaym, being Jukim's assistant, would not be involved in such dealings.