When the Great Old Ones came to Earth they needed slaves; to worship them, build their cyclopean cities - and to be eaten. These they picked from across time, favoring humans above others because of their fertility, abundance - and mental and physical weakness
They brought these humans to the Carboniferous period using Landing Beasts: dimension-crossing creatures part ambush predator and part spacecraft. Landing Beasts would snatch captives right out of space and time, suspend them in eggs, and fly them back to the Earth of 300 million BC.
There, they break atmosphere, most landing within the shrouded continent-battleground that lies behind the Mist Wall. Whatever fate befalls them there is unknown to any (sane and living) human.
However, many Landing Beasts descend off course, disoriented as they enter fully into our universe, or lead astray by Hyperborean sorcerers. Those human that survive the crash landings that follow, are quickly recovered by opportunistic raiders, slavers, and magicians.
Male survivors are quite rare and so assumed to blessed in some way. Women however are seen as nothing more than prime slave stock; arrivals from brutal cultures where only strong but submissive females get to live.
Here's a breakdown on the origins of most of these females, found in abundance at any Hyperborean slave market.
Ancient North Eurasians, 24,000 BC
The ancient north Eurasians are a people that survived the Last Glacial Maximum; a world of drought, deserts, and titanic glaciers. They persisted in the Siberian steppes before mixing with neighboring peoples as the planet warmed again – spreading a new trait they had evolved; blonde hair.
Siberian females are considered difficult to break, but once trained are especially servile to their Hyperborea masters. This is because their earlier lives were worse.
Shang, 70,000 AD
As climate change baked the planet, along the equator and tropics the Earth was abandoned; people moved to cooler temperatures - or tunneled underground.
Among those who descended where the ‘Shang’ – tribal descendents of those East Asian nations that lasted long enough unlock the underworld. Mostly ‘Chinese’ in origin, 50,000 years of change has made the term meaningless. It is a concept lost in time, along with their once great technology.
The Shang are genetically engineered with better disease resistance, stronger bodies, and faster recovery. This makes them more valuable and strenuous and outdoor roles, such as farming and mining.
Life in the underground caves was marginal; while hunters would often come back with large game, low status females survived on mostly foraged diets of rock scums and blind insects. Raiding between tribes was common, with men slain and women enslaved. As such Shang females take readily to their new lives: they are little different from their old ones.
Neolithic Anatolians, 12,000 BC
The Neolithic saw the development of agriculture and with it the mass organization of tribes into settled, temple-building, communities. At the forefront of this cultural shift were the peoples of Western Asia. They quickly spread into Africa and Europe; their descendents traveling as far as England where they built Stonehenge.
The success and booming population of the Anatolians is what draws the Landing Beasts to hunt from them. They are no better adapted to surviving slavery than any other group, but they are numerous. Hyperboreans prune their Anatolians aggressively.
Bharaji, 2200 AD
Great Bharaji is an city of 10 billion people under the Subcontinent. It was built as a refuge against climate change, and while the Shang world collapsed into tribalism, Great Bharaji survives run by an ancient, artificial intelligence.
However, it is simply too large and populous to be closely governed. Great Bharaji is a fractured mess of competing, giant, underslums. While those who control the slums enjoy great wealth and power, most however live crammed in beehive-like cells, with access to no better than Bronze Age technology.
Bharaji slave girls are genetically engineered for good health, long life, and marginal living conditions. Raised under the powerful social control of the teeming slums, Hypberborean slavers find them pliable.
Iberian Beakers, 2800 BC
The 'Beaker People' are a culture that expanded across Western Europe, reaching from as far north as Scotland to as far south as Sardinia. Like the Neolithic Anatolians, their sudden growth is what draws the landing beasts to raid them.
Ansaru, 31,000 AD
While the Shang and Bharaji survived underground, a new civilization rose out of the jungles around the inland sea of terraformed, Central Australia. These were the Ansaru; a blended people of Eurasian genetics. They expanded into the transformed world creating a sea lane empire from the Pacific islands to the Straits of Sumatra. Their power derived from their sailing galleys, salvaged dark age machines, and mass slave breeding plantations.
Like the far future Shang and Bharaji, Ansaru are genetically engineered for health and fitness.
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And that’s it for the biggest groups brought by the Landing Beasts! Later, I’ll be doing a post on the ‘native’ slave girls of Hyperborea.