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Family History
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Naabal
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Not much is known about Kiith Naabal, prior to their dramatic emergence at the end of the Heresy Wars. There are a few scattered mentions of them in the records of the major kiithid of the first epoch, but the name Naabal arises only in terms of tradesmen or heretics. Kiith Gaalsien were particularly vehement in the persecution of families under the Naabal flag, and there is some evidence that it was Gaalsien persecution that drove Naabal to their hidden valley refuge, blasted into the edge of Kharak's tiny northern ice cap. Based on the fact that the Naabal crest, a Kharakian silhouetted against a background of tiny circles and stripes, loosely resembles symbols found etched into panels on the wreck at Khar-Toba, some anthrocists have put forth the theory that the Naabal are actually direct descendants of some sort of engineering core that ran the ship that brought us here. While the theory is convenient in terms of linking the unknown past with the present age of exploration, the evidence is just too circumstantial for most scholars to give it much weight.
Kiith Naabal itself seems uninterested in clearing up the distant past, and the hard facts only begin to appear in the years directly before the Naabal intervention, when the kiith moved to end the Heresy Wars and establish the Daiamid. In those three centuries of chaos, Kiith Nabaal had almost completely cut off contact with the rest of Kharak. Traders or refugees who accidentally stumbled into the valley were welcomed with open arms and given a place to make their lives anew. There is no record of any rejecting this offer, so we are not quite sure what the alternative might have been…. Small parties, always made up of families with direct fealty to the kiith'sa, were sent out occasionally to bring back texts that were in danger of being destroyed, usually because the cities that held them were being constantly sacked. Sometimes these parties would even spirit away scholars imprisoned for heresy. It wasn't until Ifriit Naabal-Sa came to head the secretive Kiith that a less isolated philosophy began to take hold. Ifriit realized that the wars were dangerously close to destroying the last of the infrastructure that kept the bulk of the Kharak people alive. Fields were being burned, dams demolished and sand traps torn down simply to deprive the enemy of valuable resources, and under such an onslaught the days of civilization on Kharak were numbered.
Though Naabal were self-declared pacifists, much of the knowledge they'd discovered and hoarded had direct military application and so, when Ifriit Naabal-Sa finally proposed intervention to his people, it only took a few years for a military force to be assembled. The Naabal had been keeping the secrets of explosives, steam and refining for more than a hundred years, and when they rose, they swept out of their hidden city of Tiir like the gleaming servants of Jaakul himself. Steam-powered vehicles towed cannons to bring down the walls of despotic kiithid, while handfuls of soldiers carrying repeater rifles and wearing hardened armor moved to route marauding armies 20 times their size. Ifriit Naabal-Sa spoke at every holding, village and city his army liberated, and offered their people all the fruits of Naabal science and technology if they would but lay down their arms and end the pointless destruction. Unlike the major powers in the Heresy Wars, Naabal-Sa did not demand renunciation of former Kiith ties; all he asked for was an ending. The lesser kiithid, brutalized by nearly 300 years of war, gratefully accepted his terms, and soon the Naabal army had grown 50-fold with kiithid whose only desire was to end the Heresy Wars any way they could.
And in three short years they had done it. Ifriit Naabal-Sa's last act before stepping down as Sa was to establish the Daiamid in Tiir as a place where all Kiith, powerful and weak, could gather to resolves disputes and set policy for all of Kharak.
In the decades to follow, Naabal rebuilt the damaged infrastructure of Kharak and improved upon it with their no-longer-secret construction and metallurgical techniques. Any minor kiithid were accepted into Naabal if they simply wanted to learn new crafts and trades. These same kiithid were then allowed to go their own way if they chose, and many of the major industrial kiithid of the modern world began under Naabal's wing. By the Time of Reason 200 years later, Kiith Naabal had replaced the perilous sand-sail routes to the south with rail-mounted steam cars, and had given Kiith Paktu-Sa of the southern polar region a permanent presence in the Daiamid.
Kiith Naabal seemed content to fade slowly into history for many years, but the discovery of Khar-Toba seemed to change all that. From that point on, Naabal formed permanent alliances with both the Sjet and Saban Kiith, and began to influence first the excavation of Khar-Toba and then the exploitation of technologies discovered there. Again, the Naabal-Sa have been careful to spread the wealth and knowledge, but have been adamant about driving forward with the Mothership project and returning to our ancient Homeworld.
While the Mothership has neared completion over the past five years, Kiith Naabal has once again begun pulling back behind the scenes both politically and industrially. Financial analysts have noted heavy Naabal investment in off-Kharak facilities, especially in the asteroid belt, and in proposed research facilities on the moons of the Gas Giant Haarsuk. Others have noted the slightly higher ratio of Naabal kiithlings amongst the cold-sleep volunteers waiting to be loaded onto the Mothership at the conclusion of Her trials. Most analysts agree that this is another sign of Kiith Nabaal's desire to be part of whatever future our people will find amongst the stars.
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