[trekverseworlds]

Entry 431: The Teplans

Home World: Teplan

Occupation: Disease-ridden peasants of the week

First Appearance: “The Quickening” (DS9 1996)

Summary: These space-capable humanoids were once a thriving and powerful species. They had magnificent cities, and the technology to travel to other worlds… until the Dominion came. To the surprise of many, the Teplans managed to fight off the Jem’Hadar, but they had their revenge in the end: the entire planetary populace was infected with “The Blight”, a horrific, incurable disease that infected fetuses in the womb. The Blight caused immense and painful facial lesions, which turned from black to red when the disease “quickened” at a random point in the victim’s life. After the quickening, the lesions spread across the victim’s body and destroyed it, agonizingly killing them. The Teplans, unable to find a cure, slowly began to regress. People suffered and died. The population began to fall off, as not enough people grew old enough to reproduce. The fact that almost any electromagnetic field would increase the quickening’s speed made things worse, and advanced technology began to fall apart. After a couple centuries, the world had been thrown back to the dark ages. The Teplans were nearly obsessed with death, and chose to ease the pain of the Blight rather than attempt to find a cure. Other species were immune to the tailor-made Blight, and some off-worlders attempted to find a cure… but only one ever succeeded, after two hundred years. The Blight was eventually cured by Dr. Julian Bashir of the United Federation of Planets, though it worked more like a vaccine – pregnant women given the “cure” would pass the immunity to their babies.