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(3x02) Meij Endaren: Part 1, Episode 2

As the Ancients provoke the Nurbal further in their acts of sabotage, and prove more than capable of defending themselves against the Nurbal counterattacks, the use of violence gradually escalates to the point that the Nurbal consider the use of nuclear weapons against the Ancients, who seem committed to an unyielding total war to stop the Nurbal from dooming their entire world again. But the Ancients demonstrate that they possess magical abilities comparable in destructive power to nuclear weapons, having learned to draw nearly limitless amounts of magical energy through a "cosmic egg" as the Nurbal mockingly call it, a relic of the "gods" of whom their goddess Geiana is the offspring.

With this level of destructive power at hand, the other nuclear powers of the Council of Nations threaten to retaliate upon any nation that engages in the use of such weapons, forcing the conflict between Nurbal and Ancients into a global cold war fought largely by proxy in the fringes of the less-developed world outside the core of the Council that has by now united most of it. Besides low-level long-term proxy wars in those places, espionage becomes the name of the game in the more direct conflict.

In one of their most daring missions ever, Nurbal secret agents manage to kidnap an egg of the ruling Meij line, the child Endaren. They plan to use him and his connection to the Ancients' collective consciousness to the Nurbal's advantage in the war, controlling him by connecting him to their own nascent mental network as well, using their own far less sophisticated nanotechnology and a primitive artificial intelligence called The Machine, something that verges extremely close to another Ancient religious taboo dismissed largely as superstition by the modernized world of Niarba.

Next: Meij Endaren: Part 1, Episode 3