Nightmare Fuel / Alien Chronicles

• From the opening of the first book, we're introduced to the brutality of Viis oppression with Ampris - mere days old - being violently torn from her mother's arms by slavers, who view her as a valuable commodity merely for her exotic golden pelt. Her mother is left injured and traumatized, mourning the loss of the daughter she never got to know.
  • The slaver who ends up in possession of Ampris notes that Aaroun so young often fail to thrive away from their families, expecting that she might collapse from fright and grief within a couple of days. Even so, his next thought is simply the best way of going about selling her, viewing the possible death of an abiru infant a mere loss of potential profit.
  • Shortly afterwards, Israi purchases Ampris from a store that sells infants from numerous sentient abiru species as pets, highlighting how they're viewed as little more than animals in the Viis Empire.
• Indeed, the Viis Empire and its founding species as a whole are a source of nightmare fuel. It's a society built on the backs of abiru slaves, many of whom have no knowledge of their pre-enslavement past or are too busy working to avoid starvation to care. The Viis authorities are constantly on watch for dissent, with even minor crimes punishable by torture, hand amputation or being sent to a labor camp.
  • And worst of all, it's a society in decline. The economy is failing. Technology is breaking down. Unrest and poverty grow increasingly rife. And at every turn, the Viis - be it out of spite, vindictiveness or sheer divorcement from reality - act to make the situation worse, if they even act at all. And who often bears the brunt of the decline? The abiru, who were already suffering enough even when the empire was in its heyday.
  • As the Empire's decline becomes terminal in the third book, the abiru continue to suffer the worst. Many are left unemployed and starving by economic downturn, while dwindling trade with the colonies strains Viismyel's blight-ridden agricultural sector to breaking point. Israi's solution? Round up the excess abiru, and send them to death camps. Fortunately, this doesn't last long, as the authorities soon have their hands full with the activities of Ampris' resurgent Freedom Network and its new Viis Reject allies.
  • Even so, as the Network succeeds in convincing the Viis that a new cross-species strain of the Dancing Death has emerged, the Viis turn to gunning abiru down in the street to control the spread of the apparent infection. The Network's lack of weapons prevents them from fighting back, even though it's specifically noted that children are among the victims. Again, this doesn't last long, but only because Ampris' ploy to seemingly infect Israi with the Dancing Death leads to even greater civic breakdown that leaves the Viis authorities utterly incapable of maintaining order.
• Elrabin spends much of the first book stumbling from one disaster to another in his futile attempt at a life of crime. He quickly ends up in the Viis authorities' system for petty theft, forcing him to take Dlexyline - a nonaddictive but highly illegal substance that masks his registration implant's signature - from his father just so he can move about publicly without being flagged as a wanted criminal. However, at the moment he needs more Dlexyline most, his drug-addled father refuses to provide it. Elrabin winds up caught in the middle of a raid, with the Viis Patrollers very nearly using their wrist cutters on him for possession and evading arrest. While he manages to escape and have his tracking implant removed in a back alley shop, the incision becomes infected and he nearly dies as a result. He is only reluctantly saved by a gangster who takes pity on him... who later sacrifices him to the authorities as a distraction. He is then sent to the slave market, where he briefly meets Ampris for the first time before he is sold as "gladiator bait" - presumably a live target for the fighters to practice on. Thankfully, it's revealed that he convinced his new masters that he was more valuable as a servant, but by that point he'd gone from a plucky young thief to a hardened cynic with major trust issues.
• When Ampris joins the Blues gladiator team, she immediately gets off to a bad start with another, much larger Aaroun named Ylea. The pair nearly come to blows several times, including during training for an upcoming two-on-two match where they'll be bound together. Ylea keeps using her superior strength to haul Ampris around on their tether, and Ampris suspects Ylea will try to get her killed by swinging her towards their opponents. Ampris manages to find a way to use Ylea's behavior to her advantage, using it to win the match. But as the crowd cheers in adoration for Ampris, Ylea snaps and attempts to murder her right in the middle of the arena. Already exhausted by the match and fighting a larger opponent tethered to her, Ampris barely manages to get the upper hand in the fight. Even then, she's forced to kill Ylea, and is seriously wounded in the process.
• Easily the most horrific part of the series is when Ampris is crippled in a way that ends her gladiator career, seeing her sold to the Vess Vaas research lab and artificially impregnated by a Viis Mad Scientist with Half-Viis hybrids. It's all part of research into curing the Dancing Death, which decimated the Viis population and their genetics, leaving the abiru unaffected. In order to find ways of splicing this immunity into the Viis genome, he artificially impregnates abiru females with half-Viis children to study the results. This involves dissecting any female children born from the experiments, including Ampris' daughter. Ampris manages to escape with her two sons and several other prisoners before she can be forced to bear a second litter, thankfully.
  • Ampris isn't alone at Vess Vaas, either. One of the other prisoners is a Myal woman named Lua, who has been mentally broken to the point of insanity after being forcibly subjected to eight full-term pregnancies, seven miscarriages, and two unsuccessful impregnation procedures. Before Ampris can arrange an escape, there comes a time when Lua can no longer bear children, and she is taken away to be terminated.
  • In the same vein, one of the other prisoners is a Kelth named Shevin, who is stated to be 'so young she was hardly more than a half-grown lit', with 'lit' being the Kelth term for a child. Not only is she subjected to the same forced pregnancy experiments as Ampris and Lua, bearing at least one litter in the process, but she is also taken away and implied to have been killed before Ampris can escape.
  • As if this couldn't get any worse, there is a Kelth at the lab named Niruo, who works as the custodian overseeing the prisoners. His utter contempt for his fellow abiru is bad enough, but just before Ampris and Shevin are about to be artificially impregnated, he leans over a restrained and terrified Shevin to lick her muzzle and whisper something to her that causes her to moan in fear. It's worth remembering that the age of consent in the Viis Empire is established to be twenty, which Shevin is almost certainly younger than. Niruo also shows disappointment when the Viis dismiss him from the room prior to the procedures commencing, with the implication being that he likes to watch the female prisoners being violated as part of the procedure. Fortunately, Ampris kills him rather brutally during her escape attempt.
  • In the end, even though Ampris and company escape the lab and destroy it behind them, Ehssk and his staff were absent at the time. Though there's no indication whether or not he wound up continuing that particular line of experimentation after the destruction of Vess Vaas, Ehssk is still alive and active as of the third book. There's a moment in the book when Ampris comes close to enacting revenge on him, but he manages to escape and remains at large by its conclusion.

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