1971: Not Exactly Green Babes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Listen, gathering ice isn't a hostile action. Yeah...they have a lot of ships. But they're not being aggressive - they might not even know we're here, Saturn is between us and them," you say, turning to the table. You shrug. "We've got a big fast tree. Why not use it?"
The US generals don't look happy about it. The IEG riskers all immediately nod. Part of Cam's little happy collective union quasi-hive mind bullshit was that Riskers, from the ones that sent them into battle to the ones actually doing the battle, legitimately kind of loved risking their lives if necessary. Which, you supposed...was a nice thing to see in generals.
But everyone turned to look at the two bigwigs in the room. The biggest wigs. Even if the airforce dudes would never want to admit that they were waiting to see which way a housewife from Kansas would jump.
Amanda sighed. "We should drop everyone not absolutely required off, right?" she asks.
"Of course," the first of the US Airforce guys says, while the director of Earthguard gives a nod - and since the little Belgium guy is nominally in charge of the coordinated effort to build a defensive infrastructure around the Earth has given his nod, it looks like everyone's going along with the 'just go say hi' plan.
You're still not sure how they had picked him, really.
Maybe he was tiny and inoffensive?
Maybe he was a metahuman with super-organizational powers.
Either way, he and Amanda shook hands before she teleported him down to Earth, then teleported the generals back, and all but one of the IEG riskers. The Airforce Guys then demanded, over the radio, that one of their less important officers came back. So, Amanda had to go down and snag him. While all that was going on, the Stonewall Nine gathered around as Jason weeks took studious notes on the alien ships.
"Sexy," Lisa said, immediately. "Five bucks. Big fat American bucks."
"You're on," Theo said, slamming his palm onto the table.
Marsha laughed, her shoulders actually shaking as she put her hand over her mouth.
"Never change you two," Brian said, his voice dry.
"I don't mind pointing this out but if they evolved on an entirely different planet, the chances of them actually being attractive to our eyes is...so preposterously small that it's not even worth calculating," Andi said, brushing her hands along her skirts. "Right Beta?"
"We've seen two alien civilizations, one of them within four light years, meaning the density of life in this region of space is many, many, many times higher than ew expected, meaning that there are likely millions if not billions of civilizations out there," Beta said, scratching at the back of her neck. "By my math, that actually increases the chances at least one of them finds symmetry and anthroform mammal characteristics appealing."
"So..."
"Ten bucks they're at least cute," Beta said, grinning at Lisa, who did a little jig.
"I bet they're horrifying beyond our comprehension," Rachel deadpans.
"What do you bet?" Lisa asks.
Rachel glances at me, then arches an eyebrow.
"A ball gag," you suggest.
"Collar," she says.
Lisa huffs. "You can't domesticate foxes, ladies, don't even try."
"Actually, uh..." Beta says.
"Shhhhuuuut uuuppp!"
"How can everyone be so relaxed when we're meeting the second alien species in as many months?" Sabah asks, her voice soft.
There's a long silence as everyone confronts, for a moment, the enormity of what's facing you.
"...alternative is to go crazy, I guess," you say, reaching over and squeezing her shoulder. You smile, slightly.
Sabah considers this...then nods. "Okay, I'll bet...twenty five bucks that they're really gross. Like, goo everywhere gross."
One second, the beautiful, glittering rings of Saturn. The curved, graceful edge of the terminator, glowing with the brilliant orange and yellow and gold of Saturn's clouds. The stars, shining brightly despite the glow reflecting off the planet.
The next?
The Yggdrasil, hovering in space as if it had always been there, surrounded by the twisting nimbus of stars around her - the light folding and bending as the gravitational shields held her in place. And then, over the next few seconds, the light of the Yggdrasil rush to catch up with her, causing her to stretch backwards towards Earth before the light has caught up with the entire trip. It took about thirty seconds to go from Earth to Saturn's orbit, and so, for those thirty seconds, the Yiggy stretched backwards, streaking towards Earth - the light ironically getting more diffuse the closer you got to Saturn, making unique halo effect.
It was beautiful and surreal and gave physics the middle fucking finger.
So you really couldn't blame the aliens for immediately launching what your sensors detected as six hundred thousand missiles.
Alerts squealed and you lean over the console, scowling as the radar tracker throws up indications. "Uh, guys, they're shooting at us!"
"Wait, no they're not!" Jason says, immediately. "They're not on a trajectory aiming towards us."
"Yeah," Beta runs over to your side, her bark-covered shoulder bumping against yours. You step back to let the smarties work the controls - and your hand finds Rachel's, squeezing her as she draws close to you. You're the only one that can feel that Rachel Lindt, the Houndmistress herself, was trembling.
The missiles - which, admittedly, 'missile' described basically all non-bullshit drives in space - finished their burning and...well, it looked like they had arranged themselves into a cluster of orbits ahead of, behind, above, and below the alien fleet. You knew literally everything about orbital physics, enough to know that while those missiles were using reaction drives, they were still insanely good when it came to their thrust and change in velocity, because...like, some of them had done serious plane change maneuvers to get into their positions and that cost a lot of energy.
"Well, that's neat!" Andi said, at the same time Amanda groaned and clutched her head.
You felt the same pang shoot through your forehead - like your entire brain had just decided to go 'Hey, Morgana le Fay? Fuck you in particular.' Your hands went to your temples, and you clenched your teeth as Amanda sank to her knees, shaking herself.
"What's going on?" Sabah asked - but then Amanda's body...cracked. Thin streamers of green flames burst from around her skin, shooting out, wisping up into the air, then sweeping along the floor. They rippled and struck the walls and then joined together into a webwork that shrouded the entire room. At that instant, the pain stopped and you sagged into Rachel, who was hitting you with healing surges every few seconds, whispering.
"It's okay, it's okay..."
"Ow," Amanda said. "Fuck."
And after knowing Amanda Sykes, the goddamn Progenitor, for nearly three years, after being around her again and again and again...you had the one, perfect, shining moment in your life to finally turn the tables on her...
And you completely missed it.
In your defense, Rachel soft. Girl distracting.
"Are you okay?" your fiancée asks.
"It was like someone took a tack hammer to my head," you say, rubbing your head.
Rachel frowns.
"I felt a tiny twinge," Brian says.
"I barely felt anything," Sabah says.
"I felt like...bad," Amanda says, standing up - the cracks in her skin starting to seal up. The green fire goes away. And...
You know.
You had never really thought much about this. but...like...how much of Amanda's body was actually...body. She had been pumped with more dark energy than anyone in Earth. She had the powers of a god. Every single cell of her body was blazing with the energy to remake the Earth - potential energy that could restart suns and create black holes and juggle around time. So, like...the body she had might...entirely just be her being accustomed to being white and brown haired. It might have nothing at all to do with what she was - and for a bit, that accustomization had been broken...
What would she look like if you really hammered her with energy?
"Was it an attack?" Theo asks, his hands clenching.
"No, it's not," Lisa says, her ears twitching. "It's a disruption field. My perception is perfect riiiiight up to the edge of the little drone things. I can count the interstellar hydrogen between us and them, but past them, it's all visual light in my stupid dumb baby human eyes." She points at her face with two hands. "And these suckers can just see tiny little sparkles at this range. Useless ass human eyes, honestly!"
"It's a dark energy supressor field the size of a moon," you say, quietly. "And being just this close hurt me and Amanda..." you slowly sigh. "Because we're higher Tier, we have more dark energy."
They all nod, thinking about that.
"We're getting a radio broadcast," Jason says. "Trying to process it into our computer systems."
"Part-"
"Yes, I'll partition it, don't worry," Jason says as Beta and Andi hover around him anxiously. Three little hyperbrains, all giddy with excitement. You're still trying to decide if showing up in a solar system, meeting the locals and immediately deploying the 'fuck off metahuman' field is a hostile action or...eminently, obviously, stupidly practical.
"Oh!" Sabah says. "They have metahumans!"
"Of course they have metahumans," Brian says. "Those ships were able to go faster than light."
"...well, yeah, but metahuman technology doesn't have to break the laws of physics, some of it works because of...smarts, figuring things out," Sabah says, flushing. "So, like, what if they never had metahumans and then got FTL."
"Got it!" Jason says. He punches a key.
The forward viewscreen flashes up the image the aliens are beaming. The reactions are immediate and instructive. Jason Weeks whistles and whispers. "Well, I'll be damned." Marsha puts her hand over her mouth, her eyes widening as the flowers in her hair wilts. Rachel freezes, her spine going stiff. You immediately step between her and the screen. Sabah ooohs softly. Brian laughs and holds out his hand to Theo. Theo scowls and hands him money. Lisa's ears pin back and she scoffs. Andi and Beta immediately start whispering to one another.
Tori is the one who puts it to words.
"...eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww!"
The aliens are...what if...a grub...fucked a spider.
Their main bodies are huge, pale, and bulbous and soft in a way you just know has to feel gross. That bulbous skin is drawn taut around a kind of skeletal inner support - like dirigibles, not blimps - and is kept just barely off the floor by a kind of black, chitenous exoskeleton that clings to their backs. Those exoskeletons spread out a set of six long bladed limbs, with two more at the front and back that feather out into tentacle-like masses that brush along walls, ceiling, and floor. The walls of the interior of the ship are all...weirdly familiar in the materials, utterly fucking bizarre in the construction. You see titanium and aluminum and toggles and switches and glass touch panels. But a lot of the big switches are on the floor, not on panels. The tiny buttons are all designed to be tugged out by whiplike motions of the tentacles. The screens display information in a rapidly strobing, too bright to be comfortable pattern that flickers on each of the grub-creatures faces and skeletons...and you can see that their exoskeletons aren't just black carapace.
Like...
If they were clean, it would be one thing.
But they're not.
The creatures are filthy. Literally, they are covered with mold and fungus. Eerie whirls and spreading chutes of mushroom growth spread around their bodies in ragged, irregular patterns. Spores haze the air around their sides. And...there are smaller bugs. They crawl along the big grubs legs, sweeping in and out of the fungal growths, buzz from place to place like pollinators.
It's a spaceship, right, but its also a spaceship that has been totally infested with ick, ick, ICK!
"...I mean...from a certain perspective...they...could be kinda cute," Sabah says.
Everyone looks at her.
"I like spiders," she says.
"Dear god why?" Lisa hisses, her tail floofed out behind her.
Sabah flushes. "T-They eat bugs that are bad and they have friendly eyes and...and shut up! What are they saying?"
"They're just sending us this video feed," Jason says. "Wait, no, we're getting something else."
The screen fills with a dizzy, nauseating flicker of colors. Smears of browns and yellows, flickering strobing pulses of green and white, black splotches, all intermixing so fast that you might have gotten a seizure - and sounds.
The sounds, though...are English. More importantly, they're the voice of Walter Cronkite. But you can hear the gaps and shifts in his words - like someone has taken broadcasts of him and cut them to pieces, then glued them back together again.
"Do not -approach- within -the- exclusion -zone-. No- metahumans - allowed to - contact - our race - face to face talks - with - normal humans- only."
"Huh," you say.
"I guess they did know we were here," Jason says, slowly. "Picked up transmissions, ran them through a translator. That has to be dark energy technology, right?"
"Computers can get damn smart or...they might naturally have an intuitive understanding of language, or...or they might have a hyperbrain metahuman, there's a lot of options," Beta says.
"But they seem fucking terrified of our metahumans," you say.
"Yeah," Jason says. "..oh, uh, the message is still going. It's just...Rosetta stoning us, they're sending us various words timed with the splotchy flashes - that's their written language, oh my god what does their visual cortex even look like?"
"What do we ask them first?" Amanda says, rubbing her arm with her hand. Her cracks are gone, but you wonder if she can still feel them.
---
What do you ask the grubbos first? You can vote for multiple things if you wanna ask in order, but you may not have forever so DO vote in the order you want to ask.
[ ] Who are you and where are you from?
[ ] What do you want in this solar system?
[ ] Why do you want to keep metahumans at a distance?
[ ] Have you met the civilization at Bernard's Star? What are they like?
[ ] Write In
The US generals don't look happy about it. The IEG riskers all immediately nod. Part of Cam's little happy collective union quasi-hive mind bullshit was that Riskers, from the ones that sent them into battle to the ones actually doing the battle, legitimately kind of loved risking their lives if necessary. Which, you supposed...was a nice thing to see in generals.
But everyone turned to look at the two bigwigs in the room. The biggest wigs. Even if the airforce dudes would never want to admit that they were waiting to see which way a housewife from Kansas would jump.
Amanda sighed. "We should drop everyone not absolutely required off, right?" she asks.
"Of course," the first of the US Airforce guys says, while the director of Earthguard gives a nod - and since the little Belgium guy is nominally in charge of the coordinated effort to build a defensive infrastructure around the Earth has given his nod, it looks like everyone's going along with the 'just go say hi' plan.
You're still not sure how they had picked him, really.
Maybe he was tiny and inoffensive?
Maybe he was a metahuman with super-organizational powers.
Either way, he and Amanda shook hands before she teleported him down to Earth, then teleported the generals back, and all but one of the IEG riskers. The Airforce Guys then demanded, over the radio, that one of their less important officers came back. So, Amanda had to go down and snag him. While all that was going on, the Stonewall Nine gathered around as Jason weeks took studious notes on the alien ships.
"Sexy," Lisa said, immediately. "Five bucks. Big fat American bucks."
"You're on," Theo said, slamming his palm onto the table.
Marsha laughed, her shoulders actually shaking as she put her hand over her mouth.
"Never change you two," Brian said, his voice dry.
"I don't mind pointing this out but if they evolved on an entirely different planet, the chances of them actually being attractive to our eyes is...so preposterously small that it's not even worth calculating," Andi said, brushing her hands along her skirts. "Right Beta?"
"We've seen two alien civilizations, one of them within four light years, meaning the density of life in this region of space is many, many, many times higher than ew expected, meaning that there are likely millions if not billions of civilizations out there," Beta said, scratching at the back of her neck. "By my math, that actually increases the chances at least one of them finds symmetry and anthroform mammal characteristics appealing."
"So..."
"Ten bucks they're at least cute," Beta said, grinning at Lisa, who did a little jig.
"I bet they're horrifying beyond our comprehension," Rachel deadpans.
"What do you bet?" Lisa asks.
Rachel glances at me, then arches an eyebrow.
"A ball gag," you suggest.
"Collar," she says.
Lisa huffs. "You can't domesticate foxes, ladies, don't even try."
"Actually, uh..." Beta says.
"Shhhhuuuut uuuppp!"
"How can everyone be so relaxed when we're meeting the second alien species in as many months?" Sabah asks, her voice soft.
There's a long silence as everyone confronts, for a moment, the enormity of what's facing you.
"...alternative is to go crazy, I guess," you say, reaching over and squeezing her shoulder. You smile, slightly.
Sabah considers this...then nods. "Okay, I'll bet...twenty five bucks that they're really gross. Like, goo everywhere gross."
***
So, what does it look like when a skyscraper sized, million ton tree that looks somewhat like a crossover between a willow tree and a redwood arrives in the orbit around Saturn. You've seen the Yiggy arrive a few times when you weren't onboard, so you could imagine what the aliens would see.
One second, the beautiful, glittering rings of Saturn. The curved, graceful edge of the terminator, glowing with the brilliant orange and yellow and gold of Saturn's clouds. The stars, shining brightly despite the glow reflecting off the planet.
The next?
The Yggdrasil, hovering in space as if it had always been there, surrounded by the twisting nimbus of stars around her - the light folding and bending as the gravitational shields held her in place. And then, over the next few seconds, the light of the Yggdrasil rush to catch up with her, causing her to stretch backwards towards Earth before the light has caught up with the entire trip. It took about thirty seconds to go from Earth to Saturn's orbit, and so, for those thirty seconds, the Yiggy stretched backwards, streaking towards Earth - the light ironically getting more diffuse the closer you got to Saturn, making unique halo effect.
It was beautiful and surreal and gave physics the middle fucking finger.
So you really couldn't blame the aliens for immediately launching what your sensors detected as six hundred thousand missiles.
Alerts squealed and you lean over the console, scowling as the radar tracker throws up indications. "Uh, guys, they're shooting at us!"
"Wait, no they're not!" Jason says, immediately. "They're not on a trajectory aiming towards us."
"Yeah," Beta runs over to your side, her bark-covered shoulder bumping against yours. You step back to let the smarties work the controls - and your hand finds Rachel's, squeezing her as she draws close to you. You're the only one that can feel that Rachel Lindt, the Houndmistress herself, was trembling.
The missiles - which, admittedly, 'missile' described basically all non-bullshit drives in space - finished their burning and...well, it looked like they had arranged themselves into a cluster of orbits ahead of, behind, above, and below the alien fleet. You knew literally everything about orbital physics, enough to know that while those missiles were using reaction drives, they were still insanely good when it came to their thrust and change in velocity, because...like, some of them had done serious plane change maneuvers to get into their positions and that cost a lot of energy.
"Well, that's neat!" Andi said, at the same time Amanda groaned and clutched her head.
You felt the same pang shoot through your forehead - like your entire brain had just decided to go 'Hey, Morgana le Fay? Fuck you in particular.' Your hands went to your temples, and you clenched your teeth as Amanda sank to her knees, shaking herself.
"What's going on?" Sabah asked - but then Amanda's body...cracked. Thin streamers of green flames burst from around her skin, shooting out, wisping up into the air, then sweeping along the floor. They rippled and struck the walls and then joined together into a webwork that shrouded the entire room. At that instant, the pain stopped and you sagged into Rachel, who was hitting you with healing surges every few seconds, whispering.
"It's okay, it's okay..."
"Ow," Amanda said. "Fuck."
And after knowing Amanda Sykes, the goddamn Progenitor, for nearly three years, after being around her again and again and again...you had the one, perfect, shining moment in your life to finally turn the tables on her...
And you completely missed it.
In your defense, Rachel soft. Girl distracting.
"Are you okay?" your fiancée asks.
"It was like someone took a tack hammer to my head," you say, rubbing your head.
Rachel frowns.
"I felt a tiny twinge," Brian says.
"I barely felt anything," Sabah says.
"I felt like...bad," Amanda says, standing up - the cracks in her skin starting to seal up. The green fire goes away. And...
You know.
You had never really thought much about this. but...like...how much of Amanda's body was actually...body. She had been pumped with more dark energy than anyone in Earth. She had the powers of a god. Every single cell of her body was blazing with the energy to remake the Earth - potential energy that could restart suns and create black holes and juggle around time. So, like...the body she had might...entirely just be her being accustomed to being white and brown haired. It might have nothing at all to do with what she was - and for a bit, that accustomization had been broken...
What would she look like if you really hammered her with energy?
"Was it an attack?" Theo asks, his hands clenching.
"No, it's not," Lisa says, her ears twitching. "It's a disruption field. My perception is perfect riiiiight up to the edge of the little drone things. I can count the interstellar hydrogen between us and them, but past them, it's all visual light in my stupid dumb baby human eyes." She points at her face with two hands. "And these suckers can just see tiny little sparkles at this range. Useless ass human eyes, honestly!"
"It's a dark energy supressor field the size of a moon," you say, quietly. "And being just this close hurt me and Amanda..." you slowly sigh. "Because we're higher Tier, we have more dark energy."
They all nod, thinking about that.
"We're getting a radio broadcast," Jason says. "Trying to process it into our computer systems."
"Part-"
"Yes, I'll partition it, don't worry," Jason says as Beta and Andi hover around him anxiously. Three little hyperbrains, all giddy with excitement. You're still trying to decide if showing up in a solar system, meeting the locals and immediately deploying the 'fuck off metahuman' field is a hostile action or...eminently, obviously, stupidly practical.
"Oh!" Sabah says. "They have metahumans!"
"Of course they have metahumans," Brian says. "Those ships were able to go faster than light."
"...well, yeah, but metahuman technology doesn't have to break the laws of physics, some of it works because of...smarts, figuring things out," Sabah says, flushing. "So, like, what if they never had metahumans and then got FTL."
"Got it!" Jason says. He punches a key.
The forward viewscreen flashes up the image the aliens are beaming. The reactions are immediate and instructive. Jason Weeks whistles and whispers. "Well, I'll be damned." Marsha puts her hand over her mouth, her eyes widening as the flowers in her hair wilts. Rachel freezes, her spine going stiff. You immediately step between her and the screen. Sabah ooohs softly. Brian laughs and holds out his hand to Theo. Theo scowls and hands him money. Lisa's ears pin back and she scoffs. Andi and Beta immediately start whispering to one another.
Tori is the one who puts it to words.
"...eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww!"
The aliens are...what if...a grub...fucked a spider.
Their main bodies are huge, pale, and bulbous and soft in a way you just know has to feel gross. That bulbous skin is drawn taut around a kind of skeletal inner support - like dirigibles, not blimps - and is kept just barely off the floor by a kind of black, chitenous exoskeleton that clings to their backs. Those exoskeletons spread out a set of six long bladed limbs, with two more at the front and back that feather out into tentacle-like masses that brush along walls, ceiling, and floor. The walls of the interior of the ship are all...weirdly familiar in the materials, utterly fucking bizarre in the construction. You see titanium and aluminum and toggles and switches and glass touch panels. But a lot of the big switches are on the floor, not on panels. The tiny buttons are all designed to be tugged out by whiplike motions of the tentacles. The screens display information in a rapidly strobing, too bright to be comfortable pattern that flickers on each of the grub-creatures faces and skeletons...and you can see that their exoskeletons aren't just black carapace.
Like...
If they were clean, it would be one thing.
But they're not.
The creatures are filthy. Literally, they are covered with mold and fungus. Eerie whirls and spreading chutes of mushroom growth spread around their bodies in ragged, irregular patterns. Spores haze the air around their sides. And...there are smaller bugs. They crawl along the big grubs legs, sweeping in and out of the fungal growths, buzz from place to place like pollinators.
It's a spaceship, right, but its also a spaceship that has been totally infested with ick, ick, ICK!
"...I mean...from a certain perspective...they...could be kinda cute," Sabah says.
Everyone looks at her.
"I like spiders," she says.
"Dear god why?" Lisa hisses, her tail floofed out behind her.
Sabah flushes. "T-They eat bugs that are bad and they have friendly eyes and...and shut up! What are they saying?"
"They're just sending us this video feed," Jason says. "Wait, no, we're getting something else."
The screen fills with a dizzy, nauseating flicker of colors. Smears of browns and yellows, flickering strobing pulses of green and white, black splotches, all intermixing so fast that you might have gotten a seizure - and sounds.
The sounds, though...are English. More importantly, they're the voice of Walter Cronkite. But you can hear the gaps and shifts in his words - like someone has taken broadcasts of him and cut them to pieces, then glued them back together again.
"Do not -approach- within -the- exclusion -zone-. No- metahumans - allowed to - contact - our race - face to face talks - with - normal humans- only."
"Huh," you say.
"I guess they did know we were here," Jason says, slowly. "Picked up transmissions, ran them through a translator. That has to be dark energy technology, right?"
"Computers can get damn smart or...they might naturally have an intuitive understanding of language, or...or they might have a hyperbrain metahuman, there's a lot of options," Beta says.
"But they seem fucking terrified of our metahumans," you say.
"Yeah," Jason says. "..oh, uh, the message is still going. It's just...Rosetta stoning us, they're sending us various words timed with the splotchy flashes - that's their written language, oh my god what does their visual cortex even look like?"
"What do we ask them first?" Amanda says, rubbing her arm with her hand. Her cracks are gone, but you wonder if she can still feel them.
---
What do you ask the grubbos first? You can vote for multiple things if you wanna ask in order, but you may not have forever so DO vote in the order you want to ask.
[ ] Who are you and where are you from?
[ ] What do you want in this solar system?
[ ] Why do you want to keep metahumans at a distance?
[ ] Have you met the civilization at Bernard's Star? What are they like?
[ ] Write In