Backgrounds

Sitting on the bed, she was thinking about all that had happened in the past few days: she had a family and home, she lost her family and home, then she discovered that aliens do exist and her parents had worked with them and somehow built a mass transporter unit in their house only to accidentally set it off and end up God knows where. Speaking of God the presence of these aliens started making her question what she had know her whole life. Did God create them and did they have a soul? They certainly did not seem to be like animals that, she was taught, did not have souls.

Over the next few days as they traveled to the nearest similar planet as earth - an Uxe class planet. This was an unofficial word and was unfamiliar word to Natalia. This whole concept was strange to her, space was strange to her. There were no windows but on the bridge there was a screen that could show a video of the outside. Natalia liked to look at that, to her, it was fascinating. She would watch whoever was minding the controls - which, in themselves were very odd. Whoever was piloting seemed to know exactly what everything did and what it looks like when something is wrong. She tried to figure it out on the second day but she could not read any of the labels, they were in whatever Sue’s native language was. Which got Natalia thinking about how she does not know anything about any of the people she was traveling with, which was not a good thing - she did not even know if they were telling the truth about anything. So, she decided to talk to Sue first. She learned that Sue is from a very far away planet that is similar to Earth. She has been on earth for about fifty years.

Natalia’s parent’s predecessors were the first ones on scene to collect Sue. Sue was sacred, hurt and confused. She had been sent away on an exploration voyage to what humans call the Milky Way. Her species had only recently (a hundred years before Sue’s time) discovered a way to travel through space. She wasn’t the pilot or anything like that she was there as a custodian, but she watched and learned a ton while she worked, she had some limited knowledge of engineering and since the controls were clearly labeled it was not hard to figure out what everything did. But, someone sabotaged the trip causing them to force a crash landing on Earth and leaving only three survivors and an un-flyable ship. The organization detected the ship in distress when it was still over Earth and managed to approximate the landing site. They manage to not let the ship be disintegrated as it entered the atmosphere. The organization managed to get out three of the aliens alive the rest of the crew were dead on site. Sue had been knocked unconscious and remembered little of this but remember waking up on the grass surrounded by humans muttering things that she could not understand. Several years later and after the death of the other two survivors Sue wanted to check out the wreckage and see if it was salvageable. It was and for several years afterwards she and a few others worked on restoring the ship to working order - they finished a few days ago.

Rob and Shelia were exiles. They were leaders in a political movement that did not go over so well on their home planet of Viibs. Their culture had strong traditions in terms of politics and religion. Shelia was the main voice in their movement, they and all of the followers were exiled to different Uxe class planets only permitted to come back after a certain amount of time - their time would not end until well after they should be dead. Natalia couldn’t get too much out of them, but she got the impression that it was a violent movement. They were dropped off by military escorts and they tried to find their own way around but kept running to people who were scared and the organization picked them up after reading the tabloids.

Earl, he was very strange, not just in appearance but his story too. Earl left his planet intentionally, by space bus. Yes, space bus. He had no opportunities there anymore and wanted to start over. He went to several planets that his had made good contact with while leaving the rest alone. He went through all of them never finding what he was looking for. Then finally one day he decided to go some place new that was not affiliated with his home planet but there in lied the probable the bus would not go just where ever so he hitched a ride with a cargo ship and paid them to drop him off somewhere along their route and it happened to be the Earth that we all know and love. He did not fit in at all. He had to hide or get hunted by monster hunters, and like Rob and Shelia he got too many articles in the tabloids.

Art just told her about her parents. Nothing about himself he did not seem like he wanted to share about himself, like he was not ready yet. He was working with her parent with translations of whatever alien texts they needed to. He told her some anecdotes about them and stuff like that. Thinking back she remembered her parents talking about work and who they thought were strange and odd and stuff like that but Natalia never paid any attention to that sort of thing.