Article 21: Queen Althea
In terms of controversial figures throughout the galaxy, there are few on par with Althea, the first Legion Queen. While there is very little known about her pre-Legion life and rise to power thanks to the unique situation on her home planet, there's plenty of information about the impact she and her march across the galaxy had on the shape of the galaxy today. Only a few people know Althea's deep past, and though I am privileged enough to know more of it than your average non-legion, I do not feel at liberty to divulge those private details, so for now I will focus on what the outside galaxy knows about Althea.
What is now called Planet Althea was once Earth-320, a world which was, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, plagued with clerical errors that led to its eventual state. Golden Alliance databases mistakenly had the world listed as Watcher-protected, and so it remained in its late-20th century tech level without contact from the outside galaxy. While BioGalactica Corporation's computers did not have the world listed similarly, it rather had listed the population of 6 billion in reverse, as 0.0000000006, which their computers rounded down to zero. The automated probe they sent did only simple surface and atmospheric scans, and the human-made pollution on the planet was actually the reason it was chosen as one of the first planets to be cleaned with a Galactic Seed. Their scientists figured that this world, with its atmosphere and surface so close to that of one ravaged by unchecked fossil fuel use, would serve as an excellent test of the seed's capabilities to fix other worlds that had been similarly affected by its inhabitants.
The seed itself had only ever been in contact with scientists in a clean room, and when it saw Humans in their natural environment, it quickly determined them to be the planet's primary source of pollution. Given its programmed duty of turning sources of pollutants into mechanisms for environmental terraforming, it was probably inevitable that it would find a human host and transform them into the first Legion. Given the records BioGalactica Corp kept on their test planets and the research done on seeds during the war, it has been ascertained that the actual transformation took the better part of a month to complete.
As Althea's transformation and eventual rise to power took place, the pod which carried the seed to her world continued to relay information to the BioGalactica Corporation, though it was almost entirely soil sample and air quality readings. Had it transmitted a single picture, the BioGalactica Corp researchers would have been immediately alerted to the fact that Earth 320 was inhabited and could have stopped what came next.
Shortly after Althea learned to use her abilities to convert other Humans, the governments of her planet attempted to eliminate the rapidly-growing hive. This appears to only have accelerated the rate of conversion, and within a year there were no purely Human inhabitants left. It was then that Althea turned her attention toward the sky, and again that BioGalactica Corp's poor foresight was the cause of a tragedy.
The seed pod itself continued to transmit, and Althea was long ago made aware of exactly what it was doing by biotechnicians who had studied the device without moving it. Once her army had gained all of the power it could through their pre-space civilization's technology, she hoped that the pod's tiny mahoucite drive could be back-engineered into a working spacecraft before whoever had sent the pod was alerted to what was happening on the planet. When they finally removed the pod from its landing site, however, it triggered an effect that was completely unexpected. BioGalactica had always planned for their terraformed planets to be inhabited, and they thought that having the colonists search for the seed pod that brought life to their planet would make for an exciting contest. To that end, they sent "prize ships" to each of their target worlds loaded with everything a colonist might want, a technological bounty of high-tech items loaded in a top-of-the-line freighter which, until its activation on-planet, was broadcasting a keep-away message that, had anyone broken into the planet's atmosphere from outside the system, would have terminated the original seed as a safety precaution. The prize ship was converted into Althea's personal yacht, and from its secrets her biotechnicians constructed a fleet of ships, the grandest of which was Gaia Spirit, a tremendous battleship grown directly from the planet and with so much of its resources that Althea was able to ride it to participate in off-planet offenses, maintaining a link to the hive of her home world despite any distance.
Althea's initial contact with nearby systems seemed to be peaceful. Choosing systems which suffered heavily from pollution and lacked contact with the outside galaxy, including a number of planets which appeared to be Watcher-protected, she played the role of an extraterrestrial goodwill ambassador or a descended Goddess who had been sent to reward the good people of the world. These systems would either agree to the conversion of a Queen and the building of a hive, or have it forced upon them. In either case the result would be the same, total conversion within a few months. As the Golden Alliance began to learn of what was happening through worried BioGalactica Corp researchers, they attempted to cut off access to these planets and issue warnings to its inhabitants of what Legion would do to them, and Legion's tactics began to shift to more duplicitous ones as the attempt by the Golden Alliance, and later, the Angelic Protectorate on a separate front, to halt their advance erupted into a war that would span decades and ravage the galaxy.
I'll spare you the details of the war itself, as fleet movements and dates of engagement are easily accessible parts of galactic history. At some point, though, the Gaia Spirit returned to planet Althea and all of its crew and passengers were unloaded, save one. Althea herself then left with the Gaia Spirit to an unknown destination, and with that, all of her daughter-victims were freed from the mental control which had forced them to deceive or force their fellow humanoids into conversion. In an instant, the war was over, and the one the galaxy saw either as its first victim or the singular guilty party, Althea, had disappeared.
The galaxy today has mixed feelings about Althea. Some, including nearly every Legion Queen, feel that they understand the position she was in, that she had been completely overcome by what they call the Environmental Imperative, and believe that the act that removed her from the galaxy and took with it the total control this Imperative had over the minds of all Legion was an act of extreme willpower and incredible self-sacrifice. Others believe that the real Althea had been slain by a hero who then assumed her authority somehow and ordered the end of the war. A few think that she's still out there, waiting for the galaxy to drop its guard, when she'll re-emerge, assert full control over Legion again, and restart her war machine to consume the rest of the galaxy. In AP space, she has a permanent place in the galactic most wanted list, with orders to eliminate her on sight and a bounty that could buy anyone who caught her a personal fleet. What no one in the outside galaxy, save a few MSF High alumni, know is that Althea is alive and well here and is working to atone for what she feels are sins that she is solely responsible for. Whether she plans to stay in Mahou City to teach other Legion here to help restore her legacy or she plans to make some sort of re-introduction to the galaxy once she's sure that her mind is completely her own still remains to be seen, but every interaction with her and her daughters that I've had tell me that she is one of the more kind-hearted and caring students MSF High has to offer.
