You decide to wait for Ulla to wake up before you leave.
Being a crotchety old woman, the suns have risen hours ago by the time she snorts herself awake like a hog. Rubbing her eyes, she makes you both a breakfast of boiled greenleaf and some mudthumper meat caught by one of your snares. You eat silently. Some fungigrass nearby makes a good seasoning, adding spice to your meal. You offer some to Ulla. She takes it. It's awkward.
You break camp, an easy business with only your rolls to carry, and head towards the smoke.
The smoke is coming from inside a massive crater, displaced oddly from the center. The sides are relatively steep, forming a natural wall, but you and Ulla grew up in rough, natural terrain, and you navigate it with only mild difficulty. As your head peeks over the top of the crater, you spy-
Suns and divines, it's a village!
There are small towers, square, blocky rectangles of some sort of smooth stone, painted vibrant colors with something more than berry juice and crushed leaves. Great holes in the sides are blocked by something more clear than the cleanest water, shimmering in the sun, and looped around them is some sort of shiny stone, slate grey and reflective. Some display a sort of woven cloth, finer than the finest your people could make, with sigils emblazoned upon it. You use your brain for a second and decide it's likely some sort of heraldry. It's a set of red and white stripes, with a deep blue square in one corner, covered in what you count to be 53 white symbols. Some are different however, like one pure white with a red circle in the center, and a red and white one emblazoned with a greenleaf of odd shape.
But what really catches your attention are the creatures. Pale and smoothskinned, most of them, with a few darker skinned interspersed. It takes you some time to realize where their ears are, they're so small, but so tall are they it seems they'd touch the sky. They have odd, alien eyes, dark and shadowed by their large, sloping brows, and the hair on their heads and some faces are thicker than any you've seen in your tribe. They're hands have too many fingers, and their feet are covered in strange furs, ties with string. They wear covereing clothing, the ones with smaller chests sometimes going without the top layer, but never the ones with large chests. Their young have loud, shreiking voices, with which they play strange games and run about. The adults seem to accept this behavior in stride, standing over them like trees over goblinkind.
Some of the young are smacking a ball with a stick, which sends it through one of the clear panes in the towers. There's a huge crack, and the clearstone shatters. The younglings make more loud shrieks, this time in a different tone. A adult comes slamming from the tower, waving a long stick, and the Younglings send forth a leader, one of the fairskinned ones with smaller eyes and dark hair. He bows to the man, and speaks softly. The adult doesn't seem impressed, continuing to boom and rumble. The younglings look at eachother, and pass about what looks like green cloth, before passing it to the old man.
This he takes, and then wanders back into his tower.
You have not the slightest goddamn clue what happened.
Ulla nudges you. "I'm going to head back and tel the tribe what we've found. Stay here. See what else you can learn." And with that, she scoots backwards, slides down the side of the crater, and disappears into the forest.
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Thank Jesus that Mr. Borikson took the cash. Too bad it cleaned you out paying for his window, but if the other guys hadn't chipped in you would've had to work for him for weeks!
This worlds way hotter than it used to be in Maryland. Your parents signed you up for the colonization before you were even five, but you remember clearly the white winters that naver seem to happen here. You had to leave all your friends, but being in kindergarten they weren't many.
Luckily, you made new ones! Yamamoto's the leader, since you didn't wanna be, and Yamamoto's agreed to be the best choice by the rest of you. He's a decent sort of fellow, always fair and polite. Other than that, though, he's kind of aloof. You think it's because that's the way his parents tought him to think of authority; way up higher than the rest of them, watching like a father, not really getting into things like the Guys. Por guy seems lonely since he left Japan. His older sister claims he had a girlfriend, but he was only five so how serious could it have been. Either way, Yamamoto's an aloof old aristocrat, and's the face of the group here.
You also got James, Tyler, and Steve. James and Tyler are oldest, about fifteen going on sixteen, with Steve the little baby. Steve doesn't remember anything but the cold interior of the ship, so he's always complaining about the heat. You hate the heat too, but at least you know what seasons are in a more-than-academic way. Not that spring and winter mean much here after all.
Tyler's from Canada, James is from Navada, and Steve's from North Carolina. Your... colony was picked from old Allies of the States, supposedly, but they try to stick most of the people from the same countries together, so your little town is about 80% American, 10% Japanese and 10% Canadian. You hear there's a German colony a little ways from here to the south, on an island. You gotta laugh every time you think of the poor Germans roasting away on some tropical island. You knew some Germans on the ship though, Good folk, bit apologetic still.
The whole worlds got scattered little towns of different cultures. Each country agreed that they would send out town of mixed national origin, supposedly in the name of keeping the colonies peaceful, but you noticed that they seem to be divided up by alliance. It's also devided by population, so the planet's dominated by Indians, Chinese, and Americans, in that order. Supposedly every country got representation, but you gotta feel bad for the guy from Mongolia if that's the case.
After The Star War there's not been much in the way of combat though. Each World War brought humanity a bit closer to peace, and WWIII was the straw that broke the camels back. With the U.N given emergency control over 50% of all the worlds military forces, it's not much wonder why nations don't declare war so often anymore. Now everything is subterfuge and espionage.
It doesn't matter any more, though. You're not on Earth, you're on...
What's the name of this planet again?
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Topic: The Starborn [Xenofiction?] (Read 73000 times)