Kzer-Za (Character)

Slave revolt
After twenty five centuries, the Dnyarri grew lax in their dominance, and loosened the mental chains connecting them with their slaves, at times even allowing temporary moments of self-control. A Green Ur-Quan scientist named Kzer-Za, during such a moment, realized that the Dnyarri masters disconnected from dying slaves in order to avoid being dragged down into death as well. Once Kzer-Za was assured of this fact, he seized an opportune moment to inject himself with a lethal dose of acidic poison. His extreme pain and impending death forcing the Dnyarri to release his mind, Kzer-Za broadcast an extremely powerful transmission across the whole planet and into space, making public his discoveries.

Upon hearing Kzer-Za's message, Ur-Quan everywhere began a mass movement, seizing any moment of weakness on the part of the Dnyarri to injure themselves in any way possible, inflicting whatever pain and physical trauma was necessary to distract the local Dnyarri controller enough to track it down and kill it. The Ur-Quan gained longer and longer periods of self-control, during which they developed a variety of torture devices such as the Excruciator, a device that could be implanted in an Ur-Quan brain and provided gruesome levels of agony that left the Ur-Quan physically functional yet continuously protected against psychic domination.

The Ur-Quan finally succeeded in purging the Slave Empire of the Dnyarri. Only a few scattered, terrified Dnyarri remained, on the planet Glilandy, for which the Ur-Quan decided that death was not fitting enough a punishment. Instead, the Ur-Quan used their genetic engineering skills to transform the Dnyarri into nonsentient biological tools, the Talking Pets, to perform the most demeaning task of translating to and from the languages of alien races, whom the Ur-Quan now deemed grossly inferior.

All of the surviving Ur-Quan rebels had only survived by subjecting themselves to intense, continuous pain for years. Driven by a deep, core conviction that their enslavement was an aberration that must never happen again, and that had been allowed to happen by the Ur-Quan's weakness in allowing other species to exist freely, they established two radical, different paths to ensure their eternal freedom. However, while the two resulting paths appear overtly insane to other sentients, the enslavement by the Dnyarri and the induced pain necessary for revolt significantly traumatized the Ur-Quan race as a whole such that they see the paths as internally reasonable and acceptable behavior