Talk:People's Charismic Cattirian Union/@comment-27404954-20160522213714

It was a peaceful day in Cattiria. The prevailing mood was one of exhausted contentment, as families across the country sat down for dinner in their tenements after a day of grimy, grueling factory work. Cattirian politicians began the first course of their weekly lavish dinner parties, and Cattirian inspectors examined the Protoss ships. None of them knew what was coming.

Shadows slid across Earth's atmosphere, slowly dipping inside. Like a knife blade, they cut through the air, the CCU's primitive radar systems inadequate to get past their cloak. They hovered at a certain altitude, and waited. Soon, the fleet spread out in a specifically calculated pattern, and the force of their formidable air-to-ground transmissions arrays were directed across the country, transmitting a very special set of data packets... the First Wave.

Across Cattiria, the country went black. Civilian power stations recovered easily, but all major communications hubs stayed down, and military bases were entirely bereft of power. The insidious malware had gone to work, the rootkits slipping invisibly into the CCU Defense Grid mainframe during the outage. And as one, across the country, military bases simply... shut down. Fleets were trapped in their hangar bays, their main systems shut down, while fighters couldn't even lift off, their systems frozen. CCU's defense systems, on the other hand, just didn't respond to any query... blind, mute and deaf.

The ships in the atmosphere slipped closer down, and the real work -- the Second Wave -- began. Railguns fired in waves, the momentum of their slugs enough to nudge a moon's orbit. Cattirian ships, frozen on the ground, were powerless to defend themselves as the brand-new Protoss ships were utterly decimated, their engine blocks wiped out and their weapons systems splintered. The railguns soon moved down the list of priority targets, doing the same to the Cattirian dreadnought -- the inoperable one under construction spared -- and the CNASFFS, then on to the Reliants and the Balastien classes. Any ships below those were spared the force of the ruthless bombardment.

Then came the Third Wave, thousands of Griffon-Cs screaming from Macharian-class supercarrier hangars, descending like a swarm of locusts upon the Cattirian airfields as the CCU Defense Grid began to recover from the First Wave. Any operable anti-aircraft equipment was too obsolete to combat the swarm effectively, and within minutes, the grounded Cattirian Air Force was decimated, their operational airpower reduced to a mere 32% of the whole. In the following minutes, their airpower would drop below 20% before the Third Wave was recalled.

The CCU defense grid had finally reactivated, and the remnants of the Cattirian fleet valiantly charged the Aneph ships hovering over the country, complete with whatever was left of the CCU Air Force. Their suicidal charge ran head-first into a wave of synchotron weapon blasts like a shotgun, and their ships and planes lost power, plummeting fast to the unforgiving earth below. The Aneph ships finally fired their main weaponry, massed 2040 rounds tearing the obsolete Cattirian ships to pieces.Yet, even when the Cattirians could have run, upon reactivation of their engines, they did not. Even though the only option that awaited them was suicide, they still came, firing whatever was left of CCU's nuclear weapon arsenal after the destruction of the silos.

Almost derisively, if point-defense weapons could be said to be derisive, the nuclear weapons lost their power to synchotron beams and then were safely destroyed by laser pulses. The Cattirian ships now turned to run, abandoning their fighter escort, and were destroyed under withering fire, unable to warp out thanks to the warp disruptors on the Aneph ships. Only a handful escaped, perhaps slightly over a hundred. The CCU fighters, on the other hand, came on to the last, expending themselves in fruitless charges against the Aneph antiaircraft defenses. In the next half-hour, the skies were utterly silent, the only sounds that of fallen debris impacting the ground and the hum of the Aneph propulsion systems.

In that moment of horrified clarity, the Fourth Wave began. Hundreds or thousands of drop pods were fired from Aneph missile tubes, impacting all around the Cattirian military bases and inside the capital. As Cattirian soldiers tentatively drew within firing range of the gently steaming pods, they suddenly forgot all about their mission and their weapons. All was replaced with gibbering, senseless terror, as the infantry ran under the influence of the pods' concealed speakers transmitting terror-memes. Some simply flopped bonelessly to the ground, or sat reciting meaningless glossolalia, or simply ran as far as they could.

Then, the pods opened like some nightmare flower, and the fruit of nightmare burst forth. Creatures half the height of a man, with the look of some sort of crocodile and some sort of snake and some sort of quadrupedal animal. As the Cattirian soldiers soon discovered, their muddy green hides were near-bulletproof, and their teeth and claws cut through body armor like scissors through paper. And the terror only increased, feeding the terror-meme's effect even more. As the kappas advanced, tearing through the CCU front line like a scythe through wheat, the rest of the Aneph troops arrived.

Dropships flew from the hovering carriers, depositing Aneph walker tanks and rocket launchers onto the battlefield, along with heavily-armored troops, bearing heavy particle weaponry and repeating railguns. The Fifth Wave had begun. Any buildings that the kappa could not breach, the rocket launchers flushed with O2F2, and any vehicles that the kappa and the soldiers could not destroy, the walker tanks destroyed with a railgun slug, their armament and armor far superior to the Cattirian tanks. The Cattirian army collapsed entirely in the targeted areas, and the military bases were the first to fall, already damaged beyond repair by the earlier attacks. The capital fell last, and the Aneph flag was raised five and a half hours after the attack first began.

Three images became icons of the Cattirian Decimation, as it was soon called. The first was a picture of an Aneph Kappa Handler unit after the CCU unconditionally surrendered, posing on the steps of the CCU Department of Defense building with their beasts, now as placid as well-trained dogs next to their masters.

The second was a picture of an Aneph walker tank raising one leg, ready to impale and crush the turret of a disabled CCU battle tank, the commander staring out of his hatch in horror.

And the third and final image was of Aneph troops taking down the Cattirian flag -- streaked with the blood of the men who had died defending it -- at the top of the Capital Dome, and raising a pristine Aneph flag in its place.

The reasons for the Decimation were hotly debated for a decade. Was it their terrorist activities that had brought this retribution? Their acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and heavy capital ships? Or was it simply spite or imperialism? Nobody found a true answer, and the director of the attack -- Commander Silas Tierce -- would only reply that he was not responsible for answering the questions of the press. What was done stayed done, and conscience is foreign to war.