History Fanfic / ContactAtKobol

* AchievementsInIgnorance: In as much as anyone would consider it an 'achievement' to [[spoiler:destroy a planet by accident; one of the Tau’ri’s bombs accidentally hits the only piece of naquadah in the Twelve Colonies, in the oceans of Aquaria, escalating the resulting explosion to basically decimate the entire planet]].
* AlienNonInterferenceClause: Defied in various ways; not only do the Colonials attempt to impose their laws on Earth in the belief that it’s one of their colonies, but the Tau’ri also mount various subtle espionage operations against the Colonials even before the war begins (albeit just to make sure they avoid any potentially delicate issues). As the storyline unfolds, [[spoiler:the Jaffa and the Nox each make it clear they will be staying out of the war with the Colonials, but primarily because they trust the Tau’ri to handle it, although the Nox do attempt to act as neutral arbiters only to be rejected because certain Colonials think the Nox are just Tau’ri in disguise]].

* BatmanGambit: General Leong's plan to deal with [[spoiler:Spiros and his religious faction. She aimed the Ragnarok at the bunker where the Colonies' religious artifacts are kept, after deducing that Spiros cares more about his religion that he does about the lives of his people]].
* BeliefMakesYouStupid: Several citizens of the Colonies are spurred to go to war as various figures talk about how they will be protected by the Lords of Kobol, with the Spiros family in particular continuing to insist that their gods will aid them [[spoiler:even after the Tau’ri destroy Caprica City and devastate Aquaria]].
** During the battle for Hypathia the priests for the Temple of Ares lead a mob of civilians against Tau'ri tanks in the belief that Ares will protect them, with predictable results.
* BetterToDieThanBeKilled: [[spoiler:At the end of the war, Helena Cain requests a knife from the Tau’ri soldier who arrested her so that she can commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner]].
* BigDamnHeroes: During the mission to recover the ZPMS, the Akula is exposed in orbit due to an accidental ramming by a ship coming out of hyperspace. All seems lost, for both the Akula in space and the marines on the ground, until the Britannia and her taskforce come sailing in to deliver a CurbStompBattle to the colonials.
* ButForMeItWasTuesday: For the Colonials, making contact with Earth is the final reunion of the Colonies of Man, but for the Tau’ri it’s just another first contact situation, particularly when the Tau’ri know that they aren’t ‘related’ to the Colonials in that context.
* CargoCult: The Tau’ri are surprised to learn that the Colonies have twelve Zero Point Modules, which they regard as holy relics known as ‘the lights of the Lords of Kobol’, completely unaware of the modules’ true nature as a potential power source.
* CombatPragmatist: While the Colonials see them as lacking in honour, the Tau’ri justify their more underhanded tactics as a willingness to win whatever it takes (while still not crossing lines such as deliberately attacking civilians).
* CouldHaveAvoidedThisPlot: At the [[spoiler:end of the war, a Libran general notes that the whole conflict could have been averted if the Twelve Colonies had just left the Tau’ri alone as they wished]].

** [[spoiler:One of the dicier moments of the Battle for Tauron comes when a group of Colonial tanks are trapped between a line of Dragon Fire and a Tau'ri firing line]].
** [[spoiler:Later, the Tau'ri allow the Colonials to retreat from Lezbha, both to prevent this trope and to move the Colonial army onto flat open ground. This also has the unintended side effect of giving the Colonial soldiers a HopeSpot]].

*** [[spoiler:That being said, the Tau'ri do have their limits, and if the Colonials had forced their hand, destruction would have ensued. It is implied in the main story that the Colonials folded just before the Tau'ri began to resort to planetary destruction]].
* CrossCulturalKerfluffle: One of these is a particular sore point for the Tau’ri and the Colonials; by uncanny coincidence, a famous military figure in the Colonies has a personal sigil that looks almost exactly like the swastika.

** A few of these contribute to the declaration of war between both sides, such as the Tau’ri being disturbed at how some of the more religious colonies basically make children the property of their parents.
** The Colonials have particular trouble adapting to the Tau’ri’s willingness to use what they would consider terrorist strategies as part of active warfare.

** [[spoiler: By the late stages of the war, multiple opportunities to successfully pull this off are deliberately ignored, as using this tactic would throw the Colonies into disarray and make it harder to achieve surrender]].
* DidntThinkThisThrough:
** As relations between the Tau’ri and the Colonies begins to break down, group of Colonials attempt to kill the wolves the Tau’ri brought to the Colonies to represent Earth’s animal, but they underestimated the danger the wolves could pose and seven men are killed in the process of killing three wolves.
** May arguably apply to the likes of Admiral Cain or the Spiros family, as they provoked a war with another culture they knew little about without considering the risk if that culture was significantly more advanced than they were.

* GodzillaThreshold: While the Colonies can’t threaten Earth itself, the escalating conflict eventually reaches a point where Earth decides that the best solution is [[spoiler:to trap the Twelve Colonies in a time dilation field, which gives Earth five years to increase their military resources where the Colonials believe it’s just been a few months]].

* HeroicSacrifice: As in “[[Recap/StargateSG1S10E20Unending Unending]]”, [[spoiler:Teal’c volunteers to operate a time dilation device, albeit with the opposite results; everyone else gains a few years of age to prepare for the next strike on the Colonies while Teal’c spends a few months in the Colonies to protect the device]].

** The best ‘justification’ for how so many of the Twelve Colonies provoked war with Earth is that they had no idea how powerful Earth really was, and are also unaware that the Tau’ri Earth isn’t the Earth the thirteenth tribe travelled to.
** When the war begins, the Colonials are at another disadvantage as they have no true experience with guerrilla warfare, allowing the Tau’ri to use alternative tactics to what the Colonials were expecting (although Earth did provide the Colonials with rules of combat that they expected both sides to obey).

** The definition of Admiral Helena Cain’s attitude. When her actions result in a fight between the Tau’ri and the Colonial fleet because she assumed they were Cylons breaking the treaty and reacted accordingly, Cain goes out of her way to present a scenario where her actions are ‘justified’ under Colonial law so that the Tau’ri are punished for the resulting deaths while she is spared punishment (albeit presenting it as wanting justice for the Colonial soldiers who died in the fight), when she could have simply acknowledged it was just a tragic accident, accepted a personal punishment and let the whole thing go.
** To a degree, this is part of the problem in trying to make the Twelve Colonies aware of the wider universe; religion is so important to them that many of their people find it hard to accept that aliens are real when their holy writings state that humanity was given the stars by the Lords of Kobol, and only ‘reconcile’ it with their existing beliefs by convincing themselves that they have a Gods-given right to rule the aliens, even the more advanced Nox.

** This is basically the reason for much of the initial hostility between Earth and the Twelve Colonies, as Colonial law rules that Earth is their thirteenth colony and their political process has been heavily based on that idea, to the point that a priest has been signing for Earth when circumstances require all thirteen of the Quorum representatives to vote. As Colonel O’Neill (Jack O’Neill’s now-adult clone) observes, Earth cannot be held legally accountable when someone signed a contract ‘on their behalf’ without their knowledge (even before they learn where the Colonials’ Earth actually is from the Cylons), but Cain insists that under the Articles of Colonisation Earth should be considered another colony and hence subject to their laws, even when none of the Colonials know where Earth is to try and enforce that decree and nobody from Earth agrees with that interpretation.

* IronLady: General Leong, [[spoiler:Supreme Commander of the Tau'ri]]

* JerkassHasAPoint: While Teal’c explicitly states that he feels the Jaffa should help the Tau’ri in the fight against the Colonials after the Tau’ri helped free the Jaffa from the Goa’uld, Daniel acknowledges that the Jaffa have a point that they took the brunt of the Ori offensive in the last major war while Earth was basically untouched.
* KnightTemplar: Could apply to the Colonials (particularly after they learn that ‘Valhalla’ was originally Kobol), save for the fact that most of the Colonial religious leaders tend to order others to fight in their name rather than doing it themselves.
** Adar's cabinet members from Sagittaron and Gememon are unwilling to give up the fight [[spoiler:even after the destruction of the Colonial navy, occupation of multiple planets, and the reveal of the Ragnarok superweapon]].
* KnowWhenToFoldThem: Libran was the only Colony to have its majority against the war from the beginning. [[spoiler:By the end of the war, they've had enough and effectively secede from the Colonies in order to surrender. In exchange, the Tau'ri grant them status as an independent world again]].

* LetsYouAndHimFight: The Cylons contemplated doing this for the Colonials and the Tau’ri, but as the Tau’ri prove to be more powerful and reasonable than the Colonials the Cyons abandon that plan and form a separate alliance with Earth (they do later provide assistance to the Tau’ri in the Colonial/Tau’ri war, but the Cylons had no part in starting that conflict).
* LogicalWeakness: Basically applies to what the Tau’ri have discovered about the Wraith hive-ships; as the ships are living tissue, they’ve found a way to give the hives a form of cancer.
* MortonsFork: Admiral Helena Cain basically sets the stage for the war by putting President Adar in this position. Under the Colonial legal system, Earth is the thirteenth colony, so its military forces are thus subject to Colonial authority, meaning that (Cain argues) the Tau’ri should have stood down when confronted by the Battlestars, and were therefore in open rebellion when they fired on Cain. Adar can’t rule that Earth isn’t a colony without basically declaring the Colonial government invalid, but treating Earth as a colony naturally meets with dissatisfaction from the Tau’ri.
* MutilationInterrogation: Invoked; when the Colonials try to interrogate Senior Sergeant Adrik Drugov, their only Tau’ri POW, at one point Cain all but cuts his right hand off, but Drugov dismisses that wound as Tau’ri medical technology can easily grow him a new limb.
* NamedByTheAdaptation: The Number Six that came to be known as ‘Caprica Six’ was never identified by a human name in the series; here she is revealed to have adopted the alias of Doctor Jenny Oldstone, with two other Sixes posing as her triplet sisters Gina and Jane.
* NeverMyFault: Most of the initial tension between Earth and the Colonies basically comes about because Cain wants the Tau’ri to be punished for the Colonial soldiers killed in their first confrontation, ignoring the fact that she instigated the conflict that killed the soldiers in the first place.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Admittedly, it’s debatable whether Adar was ever a ‘hero’, but when the president attempts to make his meetings with the Tau’ri public to affirm that they have nothing to hide, his well-intentioned efforts cause further controversy when Woolsey’s revelations upend so many Colonial beliefs, such as the meaning of ‘Tau’ri’ and the truth about galactic history.
* NoodleIncident: The decimation of Kobol was the result of the Goa’uld Zeus experimenting with stolen [=ZPMs=]; his human slaves retreated to the future Colonies with twelve of the [=ZPMs=], but Zeus’s experiments caused the thirteenth [=ZPM=] to detonate with the force of a super-volcano.

* OneSteveLimit: Jack O’Neill’s clone (as created in “[[Recap/StargateSG1S7E3FragileBalance Fragile Balance]]”) is now an active member of the Tau’ri military, officially down on paper as Jack’s son, with the two only really distinguished in text based on their rank.

* OutsideContextProblem: As part of their campaign against the Colonials, the Tau’ri [[spoiler:unleash Todd on one of the planets to spread terror, with the understanding that he won’t feed on children]].
* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: While they are not the primary Colonial leaders as they were in canon, William Adama and Laura Roslin come across as this in scenes dealing with the Colonies’ leaders, each one recognising where the Tau’ri are coming from and offering a counter-argument to their associates’ expressed desires for war, even if they remain loyal to their people.
* RefugeInAudacity:
** As part of the Cylons’ attempts to learn more about Earth, three Sixes join the research program (one of them the would-be Caprica-Six and another Cain’s would-have-been lover Gina), with the three claiming to be triplets who don’t get along that well to justify how they never told any of their human contacts that they had sisters.
** A neat summation of the way the Tau’ri gain an advantage in the war from the beginning, exploiting the fact that so many of their technologies, such as cloaking and teleportation, are believed to be impossible by the Colonials.

** Several Colonials take this as a sign when Earth is asked to bring its ‘world animal’ and ‘world bird’ with them; the owl chosen to represent Earth eats all twelve of the signature birds of the other colonies when it’s put in a cage with them (the Colonies’ world birds all being songbirds rather than predators), and the wolves chosen as Earth’s world animal are slaughtered as a symbolic early stage of the war.
** After [[spoiler:Aquaria is ‘accidentally’ destroyed by a Tau’ri weapon, some argue that the continued existence of a statue of Hermes on the planet shows that the Colonials must keep fighting as the Lords of Kobol will help them survive, but Sharon Valerii (still unaware of her Cylon status) offers the observation that it could also be a reflection of the fate that will await them if they don’t stop fighting]].
* RulesLawyer: Cain demonstrates this to get out of her trial for the events of their first contact; as a witness from the Tau’ri is required to verify what happened, and the Tau’ri refuse to consider themselves part of the Colonial government, Colonel O’Neill is arrested for refusing to adhere to the Colonial chain of command despite his argument that Earth shouldn’t be bound by Colonial law.
* ShoutOut: At one point during the early tour of the Colonies, Torren Sheppard shows D’Anna Biers a clip from Film/AvengersInfinityWar (albeit a very different clip from what the film actually turned out to be like - the movie didn't come out until long after that scene was written).
* SmallNameBigEgo: The Colonies all regard the ‘reunion’ with their cousins as the biggest event to have ever happened in their history and believe that Earth is just as excited as they are, but the Tau’ri don’t consider it that big a deal and see the Colonies as just another culture to make contact with, with news of alien tech being used to search for Bigfoot attracting more interest back on Earth then the contact with the Colonials.

** While the Tau’ri have more advanced technology than the Twelve Colonies, the Colonials’ superior numbers make conflict between the two challenging at best, particularly when the Tau’ri don’t want to use their more devastating weapons against the Colonies to, for example, destroy their sun.

* TortureIsIneffective: Drugov, the Colonials’ only captured POW, resists their every attempt to make him give them useful information, simply making it clear that the Tau’ri are too powerful and the Colonials are going to lose.
* TooKinkyToTorture: He doesn’t actually enjoy it, but Drugov is constantly nonchalant about the treatment he is subjected to by the Colonials, likely aided by the knowledge that his injuries can be treated back on Earth.
* TwistingTheWords: Admiral Cain attempts to do this when Colonel O’Neill (Jack’s clone) is talking with the Quorom, attempting to create the impression that the Tau’ri would conquer the Colonies when O’Neill just observed that they might have moved in to set up their own colony in the system if it was uninhabited.

* VillainWithGoodPublicity: Despite psychiatric professionals having observed that she has a tendency to focus on her targets while ignoring the wider implications, Cain was still a great battlefield commander, and formed so many connections that she was able to use her popular public status to get a position in government as the war with the Tau’ri unfolds even after being officially dismissed from the military, with Adar only able to oppose her by promoting Adama to admiral as a counterbalance.
* WeaponOfMassDestruction: [[spoiler:Turns out the Tau'ri and the Colonies have very different ideas about what constitutes a WMD. The Colonials are 'much' more cavalier with chemical and biological weapons than the Tau'ri, to the point of storing a ship full of them above Caprica City. They are bewildered that the Tau'ri would respond to a planned bioweapon attack on Valhalla with nuclear weapons]].
* WouldntHurtAChild: When the Tau’ri send Todd into the Colonies, one of the few rules they give him is that he’s not to hurt children, but Todd notes that he never does that even when feeding normally.

* KnowWhenToFoldThem: The Tau'ri special forces team abandons their initial assault on Race forces when the Race mobilized helicopters. [[spoiler: They're ready for them next time]].
* LaResistance: One is alive and active on Ovea to resist the Race's occupation. Even before [[spoiler: receiving help from the Tau'ri]], they were surprisingly effective thorns in Straha's side.

** When a number of kidnapped children are discovered during a covert raid on arms dealers, the Tau'ri have to quickly disguise the below-board aspects of the mission

* AchievementsInIgnorance: In as much as anyone would consider it an ‘achievement’ to [[spoiler:destroy a planet by accident; one of the Tau’ri’s bombs accidentally hits the only piece of naquadah in the Twelve Colonies, in the oceans of Aquaria, escalating the resulting explosion to basically decimate the entire planet]].

* RealityEnsues:
** Adar sends a small fleet to Valhalla to do some saber-rattling. The Tau'ri forces see warships of a nation that has declared their intent to annex them and had thrown a member of the first contact team in prison jump inside their outer defense perimeter and immediately interpret it as a hostile force.
** While the Tau’ri have more advanced technology than the Twelve Colonies, the Colonials’ superior numbers make conflict between the two challenging at best, particularly when the Tau’ri don’t want to use their more devastating weapons against the Colonies to, for example, destroy their sun.

** During the battle for Hypathia the priests for the Temple of Ares lead a mob of civilians against Tau'ri tanks in the belief that Ares will protect them.

** The initial shelling of the Senate killed almost half of the Colonial government figures, however this simply left openings for extremists like Cain and Spiros to slide into power.

* TakeMeToYouLeader: It is a first-contact story.

* UniversalTranslator: The Tau'ri generally deal with the descendants of the Goa'uld's slaves, where the language is equally descended from Earth roots. This all goes to pieces when they encounter the Race, whose language comes from a different tree.

* CallBack: Many of the images that became iconic during the previous war, including the IwoJimaPose photograph, have been immortalized as statues in the Valhalla memorial garden.

* SlaveToPR: One of the Tau'ri's main problems when performing operations in the Colonies. Dragging brainwashed children away from their abusive grandparents is the right thing to do, but it still doesn't look good, especially when filmed and framed by a Sagittaron news crew.

* GildedCage: [[The solution for the problem of the Final Five Cylons is to have them confined to Earth, never to reach the Colonies again. Saul Tigh, at least, is happy with the arrangement and spends his days on Hawaii with an unlimited expense account.]]

* LaRésistance: One is alive and active on Ovea to resist the Race's occupation. Even before [[spoiler: receiving help from the Tau'ri]], they were surprisingly effective thorns in Straha's side.

* Plug'n'PlayTechnology: Averted. The Race's systems are so primitive that the Tau'ri have real difficulty hacking into them.

* VicariouslyAmbitious: Dr. Jenny Oldstone's plan is beginning to pay dividends. Dr. Baltar is predicted as the next president of the Colonies, and observers have no doubt that he would earn all three terms. It's predicted that she will run for President after him, capitalizing on the goodwill and public presence she's cultivated.

**

The Race to the Tau'ri and the Tau'ri to the Race

** Some of the Colonial religious extremists are prepared to [[WouldHurtAChild:kill their grandchildren]] rather than give them back to their parents.

* ForWantOfANail: There is a diversion from the timeline of ''Literature/{{Worldwar}}'' to explain why the Race are arriving now. In this world the Race decide to conquer Vantic 5 before moving on to Earth, and are further delayed by technical difficulties and unexpected resistance from the natives.

!!Tropes found in this story include:

Has a sequel ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12535251/1/Contact-of-Races Contact of Races]]'', covering the aftermath of the Colonial war in relation to a new contact with the Race of ''[[Literature/Worldwar Worldwar]]''.

Has a sequel ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12535251/1/Contact-of-Races Contact of Races]]'', covering the aftermath of the Colonial war in relation to a new contact with the Race of ''[[Literature/Worldwar]]''.

Has a sequel ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11126728/1/Contact-at-Kobol Contact of Races]]'', covering the aftermath of the Colonial war in relation to a new contact''[[Literature/Worldwar]]''.

!!''Contact at Kobol'' contains examples of:

* WouldntHurtAChild: When the Tau’ri send Todd into the Colonies, one of the few rules they give him is that he’s not to hurt children, but Todd notes that he never does that even when feeding normally.

* ObligatoryWarCrimesScene: The nuking of Disney Valhalla and its aftermath are heavily covered, and the author pulls no punches as the result of a nuclear attack on a crowded theme park.