The Omings are green. They live on a rocky planet circling around a mid-sized yellow star. The Lower Omings were once nomadic, roaming the continents to follow patches of sun. They had to move because even when they had colonised a place first, the Woody and Canopy Omings would eventually grow up around them and starve them of sunlight.

The Lower Omings didn’t have many options. They were tied closer to the soil than the others. There was once a great Oming civilisation rooted in the fertile soil of an old volcano. The city grew and flowered for thousands of years until the Invasion. The Woody Omings somehow discovered a way to send their seeds by the wind. It was frightening to the Lower Omings, who could only creep. That’s why the Lower Omings traditionally had strong family connections. They never strayed far from their parents or siblings.

It’s all changed now. The only way the Lower could survive was by learning to uproot and move. They teach it in Oming evolutionary science, how the soil huggers learned to crawl. They crawled so fast, away from the advancing Woody invasion. They ran for hundreds of years — but the wind goes everywhere, and every colony was soon followed by more Woody spores.

The Canopy Oming stayed mainly around the equator, where it was warm and humid. Life was easier there. There was so much sunlight that even Woody and Lower Omings could live happily under the shade of the Canopys. But the peaceful sunlight and soil-rich equator was the only place where Lower Omings lived without fear of starvation.

By the time they had reached the barren poles, the Lower Omings were tired of running. So the Prime Lowers directed the smartest of their kind to develop a great weapon, one that could let them defend a Homefield.

The technologists travelled back to the ruins of their original city and listened. They used their roots to follow the rumbles in the ground until they found an opening. It was an opening to a tunnel with shiny walls. Later, they would learn that the walls had been carved out, vitrified, by an outpouring of lava from the old volcano.

They ventured down, surviving only because they carried a newly developed solar storage pack. It didn’t give them all the wavelengths they needed but it was enough to survive the journey.

After six days, the Lower Oming technologists felt a great heat. The walls began to glow. To the Oming, it felt like they were approaching a caged lightning strike. Lightning could start fire epidemics. Fire would leap from Oming to Oming, regardless of if they were Lower or Woody or Canopy. Once charred, every Oming looks the same.

The Lower Oming have learned to predict when lightning would come and could move to shelter. But still, every year, the Lowers would keen in despair at having to crawl, crawl, crawl away from enkindled loved ones. Abandonment was the only way to stop the fire from spreading.

In that tunnel, the technologists found what they were looking. There were black lumps of fire so hot it was blue. The technologists had predicted their existence and were ready. They pulled out stone boxes and collected eight of the balls. They held possible death in their hands, as they crawled back to the nourishing sun.

Later, in their laboratories, they would find that they had their ancestors to thank for the blue fire. Thousands of Omings over millions of years fueled a single black ball. With the natural blue fire as their guide and inspiration, the Lower Oming soon had the terrible weapons they were looking for.