The Founding of the Jotun Empire

In the city of Jotunheim there lived a young Jotun by the name of Thor. He studied the ancient Shee texts recovered from the underground laboratories many centuries ago. One day he found something so important it changed the entire Jotun way of life forever.

He had discovered that the Shee had left this galaxy, and departed for a new spherical homeworld. Why they had to travel such a distance was not mentioned, but what was mentioned was a vague list of everything they took; Norns, Ettins and Jotun. Somewhere out there were other Jotun, ones who actually protected the Shee. To them, Midgard and the Jotun on it would be a threat; a place where there were Jotun without a proper protectorate. Thor was astonished and shocked by his founding, and addressed the leaders of the different Jotun clans in Jotunheim. He was crowned Emperor Thor later that year, and began building the first Jotun ship, Red Dawn, from old abandoned Shee diagrams and technology.
The Red Dawn was a colony ship, and took ten thousand Jotun to the nearest solar system, where they founded a colony. Soon, little by little, more colon ships were sent, and then the colonies began to send colony ships of their own. Jotun civilisation took to the stars and thrived. They conquered races and adapted their technology, adding it to their own.

After six hundred years, the Jotun had colonised over 200 worlds and conquered two alien species. They had begun to rely less on Shee technology and started to develop technology of their own. When Emperor Thor CCCXIV died aboard the flagship Heart of Honour, destroyed by the Borg Norns, a new ship was built, the first of the "true" Jotun warships. It was crafted from hundreds of asteroids fused together, to let it avoid detection. It's name was Fist of Vacer and launched only eight years after construction began.

A bloody war with the Borg Norns ensues, which lasts for two hundred years. During this time, a Jotun scoutship lost in deep space finds the long-lost homeworld of Albia, under attack from the Borg Norns. A fleet is dispatched to help, and all Borg Norn reinforcements to Albia are destroyed.
The real turning point in the war came with the discovery of another alien species, the Fiends. They closely resembled giant bacterium, and digested any organic material they consumed. Their spores had landed on a planet within the Jotun Empire, and soon the planet was covered with ravenous aliens.
Seeing a tactical use for these aliens, the Jotun towed the planet into the heart of Borg Norn territory, and the war gradually stopped. After a decade of peace, the Jotun sent a small scout fleet into Borg Norn space. They found desolate cubes full of empty, technological shells and dead Fiends. The Emperor viewed this as a marvelous success, and thirty cubes were taken back to Jotun space for study.

Experimenting with Borg nanotechnology, the Jotun developed a replacement for their old, bulky vacium armour. Liquid armour became a standard issue throughout the whole Military. It is still in use with the current Military, though it has been improved somewhat. However, early attempts failed and were let loose into the wild, and became known around Midgard as 'stillwater'.
Considering the Fiends and Borg Norns could neutralise each other, the Jotun enjoyed a long period of conquering the rest of the galaxy. A dozen more alien species crumbled under the might of the Jotun Military.

However, this peace was shattered when an unknown alien ship enter the galaxy. It was thousands of miles long, and contained an alien race far stronger than the Jotun and just as warlike. They identified themselves Ljynii, but revealed nothing more. Even their appearance was a complete mystery until they landed on the planet of Skullhiem X.
Skullhiem X was a garrison world, with over thirty billion troops stationed there at the time. Thirty seconds after the Ljynii ship had warped into the system, the main fleet was dispatched there, carrying one hundred billion troops. They arrived just in time to rescue the remaining twenty troops.
The Ljynii casualties had been heavy too, as they were unused to their enemies fighting with such ferocity. Over eighty five million Ljynii corpses covered the rocky soil of Skulllhiem X, left behind as the Ljynii ship escaped as the new fleet arrived.

Hundreds of tests were carried out on the Ljynii remains, but no comparison could be made to any other species they had encountered. Their strange weapons and war machines were examined, and many new advances were made, including the Beserker battle suit. The Jotun followed the Ljynii ship to the edge of the galaxy, where they discovered a huge ring, made from the same, unknown material that Ljynii weapons were made from. The ship was nowhere to be found. The ring was orbiting around a young sun, and as far as the Jotun could tell, it didn't do anything. However, after a month it lit up with a green glow, and started to emit high levels of gamma radiation. A wormhole opened inside the ring, and three Ljynii ships emerged. The Jotun were caught off-guard, and took their instinctual reaction to attack. One of the ships was destroyed, but the other two managed to destroy the Jotun warships.

The Ljynii ships travelled slowly, but the Jotun were at a loss. These ships seemed to be far more advanced than the one encountered before, so they came to a conclusion. The ship must have built a warp gate to their home galaxy and summoned two ships as reinforcements. The ship that was destroyed easily must have been an ancient one, travelling the vast gap between galaxies without a warp gate. Therefore, these two new ships must contain even more advanced technology that the Jotun could use. It was imperative to capture as much new technology as they could.

Eight months later, the two ships were sighted in the Skullhiem system. The Jotun had prepared for this, as three hundred billion troops and five thousand warships were present in the system. A brutal battle ensued, both on the planet and above it. The planet was littered with millions of dead, both Ljynii and Jotun. Eventually the overwhelming Jotun numbers won out, and the advanced Ljynii weapons were taken away for study. In case the Ljynii ever tried to attack again, the warp gate was put under constant watch and a new weapon was developed. The Mjollnir, or 'mass launcher' could fire an asteroid at phenomenal speed, fast enough to punch a hole through a planet. To this day it stays in permenant geostationary orbit around the warp gate.

After the Ljynii invasion, thing were relatively quiet in the Empire. The assorted alien species had realised that with powerful races such as the Ljynii on their doorstep, it was wise to have an equally strong race protecting them.

Part 4

Part 6