The challenges

Table of Contents

In Alien society, all individuals are ranked according to the number of points they accumulate throughout life, thus determining the social hierarchy, what rights and duties they have, and what jobs they have access to. The challenges in which they earn those points are therefore central to their culture.

Characteristics of the aliens' challenges

Goals

Determine people's place in the global ranking in which every single alien participates. This ranking determines people's place in the social hierarchy, and consequently their social and legal rights and duties and which jobs are available to them.

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Categories

Challenges are sorted through categories. Babies are born with access to only the first category. To unlock a new category, they need to successfully finish a challenge in each group that are required for it. Some categories also require people to have a minimum total number of points.
Categories themselves are ranked by level, and they form sections (e.g. basic, top, supreme...). Someone's current top category or its section are used as a short hand for their place in the global ranking.
However, not all categories form a smooth progression for bottom to top. Some categories are ranked sideway from each other and simply indicate a progression to a different type of challenge rather than to the superior level. Those are called parallel themes.
Examples of parallel themes:

Puzzles

Poetry

Music

Literature

Physical

Psy duelling

Politics (a group of high level categories giving access to political posts).

Throughout their life, most aliens complete all level 1 categories, but most then choose to specialize in a parallel type to then hone onto it and more efficiently progress in the global ranking.

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Points

Points are earned through:

Completing a challenge.

The time it took to finish a challenge.

The method used to complete a challenge and the grace with which it was done, as decided by an official judge or jury.

A popular vote from spectators to the broadcast of the challenge (especially true for popular challenges or famous contestants).

More generally, anyone can start a popular vote about anyone else if they think they deserve to get points and if a recording of the event occur. If enough people agree with them and participate in the vote, the points will be officially accorded. Examples are:

Someone doing or saying something impressive on TV.

Someone going through an accident/attack/disease in an impressive or graceful way.

A popular vote can also be held to allow someone to directly pass to the next level of a challenge series.

Examples of challenges

The challenges belong to different types: exams, trials, competitions, and demonstrations.

Exams

Every school test, placement exams, and school sport challenges gives points for the global ranking.. This allows people to have a steady progress throughout their school years, and help determine to which school they can apply and what career is open to them.

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Trials

People are not in direct opposition to each other, although the time they take going through a challenge can be compare (even though those challenges often differ slightly between each session).
Examples:

An obstacle course

Simply solving a puzzle in isolation

Escape rooms requiring solving puzzles and/or using psy abilities

Those challenges often have different phases, each with different difficulties or theme. For puzzle trial, completing a phase but falling to complete the challenge might allow people to skip all already completed phase when they'll try again the challenge. For obstacle courses, this is rarely the case, as the exertion and tiredness of going through all phases one after another is part of the challenge.

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Competitions

Competitions directly opposes people or teams to each other, resulting in winners and losers or a tournament ranking.
The most popular type is a tournament, and each sport has its own tournament, starting locally, with winners going on to the planetary cup.
Tournament can be:

Transversal, i.e. occurring once or regularly at a fixed time. In that case, people ending the tournament with a fixed ranking.

Continued, i.e. never stopping, with winners going on to the next tier match while losers go down a tier. Completely "winning" the tournament means graduating to the next challenge level, and one person or teams get to do that regularly, while the others get to keep competing indefinitely until they manage to win.

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Demonstration

This is a demonstration in isolation of a new skill, an invention, the creation, delivery or performance of a masterpiece, ...

Aliens' challenges vs the human scientists' experiment

The babies' life among the humans' scientists has always been centred around challenges.
Indeed, the babies were created as part of The Baby Experiment, an experiment aiming to investigate the phenotypes of alien genes and how they interact with human genes. As such, the Company constantly pushed the babies into dangerous challenges so as to trigger them to manifest special psy skills, not caring about their safety along the way.
Now that they have been captured by the Aliens and are forced to integrate into their society, thei new life does not look so different at first glance. That is, however, a false impression...

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Danger

Common points

The challenges are dangerous and people risk injury or even deaths.

Differences

Aliens challenges
People can chose which challenge to go through and so can choose something adapted to their level.
There is also no need to risk death unless someone wants to get to the top of society. Even during leadership challenges, the goal of would-be leader is to get their rivals to submit to them, rather than to kill them and to lose powerful allies, thus weakening their rule.

The scientists' challenges
Their goal is to push the babies to their limits, and they don't truly care if they kill some of them along the way - although they do need to keep a few alive for the sake of the experiment.
They also like to see them injured to be able to study the biology of their healing and to see if this is going to help them develop the weird alien's skills.

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Recording

Common points

The challenges and everything people do or say during them are broadcasted and recorded.

Differences

Alien challenges
Everyone can access record of previous challenges to prepare themselves for what awaits them.
Because of this, some challenges have to be slightly different for everyone so that people do not get an unduly advantage by knowing how others solved them.

The scientists' challenges
The different teams of babies were sometimes allowed to observe how the ones before them were solving the challenges, and sometimes they could only exchange a few hurried words with each other before it was their turn.
The scientists and company owners were the only one with access to the recording afterwards. In addition, even every single instant of the babies' daily life was recorded and carefully examined.

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Humans The World of Alien Monsters · Humans and the Company's Research Space Station · The Babies Aliens The Aliens · The challenges · The Aliens' romantic relationships · Alien Characters · Shapeshifting ceremonies