THIS IS VERY CRUDELY WRITTEN but it serves to get the concept nailed down (will rewrite one day)
So the Anrayalle (they haven't gone to cerulea yet) society is societ-ing along but is very internally focused, has only a minimal and fickle space presence. gamma ray observatories have been looking at an extremely bright gamma ray source ever since they got launched, its always been there but its been getting larger. Blah blah blah its close enough to look at now and its discovered that it is some sort of decelerating alien interstellar spacecraft with an advanced antimatter-matter reaction drive, spewing out huge amounts of ionizing radiation. Theories go wild a bit but soon everyone figures out yeah its an alien spaceship.
now the issue here is that this alien spaceship looks like its heading right for cell system. so we're gonna meet the aliens right!?! wrong.
the amount of ionizing radiation this drive is spewing out is on never-before-seen levels, rivalling that of some exotic stars. (I'm planning to use the stranger endless model for this ship, maybe retcon entropypunk while I'm at it) what this means is that the Anrayalle people are gonna be irradiated to high fucking hell and probably all die. This is not good.
Gonna say that after preliminary calculations i did im gonna give them three years to prepare before the radiation levels get too extreme. so the best idea here is to go deep deep underground as this will give them the best radiation shielding. So they build huge underground cities with simulated skies and etc. One movement moves a significant population to the moon of Cerulea, hoping its distance from the inner belt where Anrayal is located will help alleviate some of the radiation effects. A few more plans are tried most most will fail.
After three years or so the radiation starts becoming much more intense and the anrayalle hunker down in their underground cities while the new ceruleans do the best they can to shield themselves.
After the ship arrives in Cell orbit it shuts off its engine but the period where both moons receive the most exposure is when the ship is closest. From now on they only use secondary maneuvering thrusters so no more radiation :)))
EFFECTS
now the issue is all this radiation has completely stripped the atmosphere of both moons of ozone. So all the solar radiation can reach them until the ozone layers repair themselves which could be several decades to centuries. In addition extreme DNA damage to all lifeforms fucks up the anrayal ecosystem (cerulea is lifeless) and total plankton death leads to a collapse of the food chain. This, in combination with the extreme DNA damage and massively increased solar radiation leads to the death of all multicellular organisms on Anrayal (besides the main race ofc). only single-celled organisms survive. A short period of global cooling, acid rain, and increased ambient radiation is also triggered.
THE AFTERMATH
ANRAYAL
The Anrayalle were less affected by the Bleaching than the Ceruleans, hunkered down in their rad-hardened subterranean city-bunkers. Problem is they couldn't come out of them since the ozone layer had been completely destroyed, along with a myriad of other hazardous phenomenon. But they had planned for this, and were able to survive for hundreds of years. Radiation took a heavy toll on them, giving them some resistance, but not close to the amount the Ceruleans have. Over time they would become highly adapted to living in cramped spaces and fostering senses of community between each other.
CERULEA
Although they have decreased exposure to the radiation due to their distance, they are mostly exposed to it on the surface. They end up taking more casualties to radiation than the Anrayalle. Few survive. The ones that do are then subjected to a brutal period of darwinism where the increased solar radiation kills those who are too intolerant to survive, while sparing people naturally hardened to radiation. Over the several generations it takes to fully colonize the surface of Cerulea, the Cerulean people gradually become extremely radiation-hardened, with large genetic mutations also taking place from the ionizing radiation.
With extinction looming, at first both factions had no real time to pioneer scientific research, all their effort focused on not dying. Communications were impossible with the Anrayalle, and so both worlds remained isolated, believing they were the last pocket of their species left. About 200 years after the Bleaching, the Cerulean nomads of the sparkling seas and seared land would begin to band together into expeditions and scientific communities, while the Anrayalle deepdome networks began focusing once more on research. After a few decades of continuously pumping ozone into the atmosphere, the inhabitants of Anrayal finally stepped out onto the surface for the first time in 300 years. What they found shocked them. The red verdant world of Anrayal had been transformed into a dead, white boneyard of ruined buildings and rotting carcasses. It was decided that the deepdomes would be maintained until Anrayal could be fully terraformed to its old self.
They also made contact with their long-lost siblings, the Ceruleans. Both sides were quite surprised to find one another, yet relations quickly turned sour. Each side found the other transformed, for the worse. Both blamed each other for the unnecessary death of many of their people, positing that if they had just sticked together they would've already ascended to the stars. And so, within only a few days of reunion, the Ceruleans and Anrayalle had already become enemies. ~~human~~ nature.
500 years PB, post-bleach, both worlds have consolidated themselves into factions, the CNSPAC and PANTA, and have begun a new race to the stars. But this time, riding incandescent torches of nuclear flame.
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