You're ready.
The "tribe", both human and goblin, has grown considerably since you first arrived here. Already the humans stone and metal and glass stretch up to the sky, scratching at it like so many shimmering fingers. A great change has been wrought on the area, great glass domes fielding great masses of Earth life, golden strands of grain so long it would take hours to run from one end to another, fat, speckled beasts that bellow great calls to the empty, soulless inside of the greenhouse. They're all kept sealed away from your environment, but the humans have begun farming goblin fruit and grain as well, plants you would never have guessed were edible, or even poisonous ones like the bluenut trees. Within months the humans have created new life.
The Starborn are on your world.
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The "shuttle" is a huge hunk of metal painted black. It's scaled like a lizard, save for where thick panes of glass allow you to see.
When you enter, the ship seems sideways. You use a ladder to make your way down to a seat obviously built with humans in mind, and lay on it, pressing into the back. At the instruction of the attendant, you strap yourself in and snuggle into the seat. It seems to be filled with gel, and the fabric molds to your form better than you would have expected.
"Three" says a man over the speakers.
"Two" says the man a second later.
"One"
There's a WHUMPF from underneath you, and suddenly you're pressed into the gel hard. Crushing pressure forces the wind from you, squishes your eyes into your head. You can feel your heartbeat in every inch of you, thumping like you've just run a kilometer. Gasping for breath is an excercise in futility, but after some time the pressure eases slightly. You can still feel yourself being crushed, but now you can breathe and move, at least.
You'd taken the window seat earlier, intent on seeing the home of the stars yourself. But you cannot see any stars yet. Instead you watch in awe as the clouds approach you, and then you're in the midst of them, a soft white, cottony mist that coats the window in a rainbow of dew. While the few other humans entering space are all doing mundane things such as reading and in one case eating -well, cleaning it off his clothes- a meal, you watch the clouds dip below you. The sky is a bright blue-green above you, solid and unending. The clouds seem to drop in slow motion, great towers and parapets of mist arcing over holes through witch you can view whole oceans. As the sky above turns black as night, you stare downwards, as the horizon curves, mountains become as insignificant as furrows in the dirt at your feet. You watch the small grey spot that has been your home for three months, and the region you knew for the whole of your life, become nothing more than a spot the size of a humans fingernail. Your press your hand on the window, and marvel at how large it seems, at how small the whole of your world is. The sky is black now, and the stars are lighting, and below you you see swathes of purple, and green, and blue, and brown, and grey, and the white of clouds, the dark fury of a great storm swirling so far below you that it seems almost... serene.
When you next look upwards, tearing your eyes away from the tiny pink ball of your home, you can see more stars in the sky than you have ever seen before. No longer speckles and dots, the stars seem to fuse into mily strands, a celestial, divine dance of light and dark. Nebulas open before you, almost purple and green to your sensitive eyes. And your suns, your suns! You can almost see them move about, no different than a hundred more of the stars above. You feel so tiny, so insignificant, in the face of this majesty. You suddenly can see just how small your life has been. You cannot even pick out the area of which you know about, to say nothing of the land you call home. On that planet must be a host of goblins and creatures so large, it staggers you just to think of half of it. And above it all, floating inbetween you and the planet as you circle it and kill momentum, is their ship. You were told how large it was, but from here, it seems so tiny...
Minutes pass as you drink in the beauty of space. You could spend lifetimes here and not leave your system. Mellenia and only go the barest of drops away from home. In the face of all this, the humans seem pathetic, and your people don't register as even the smallest bug, more insignificant than a grain of sand at the bottom of one of the mammoth oceans.
The human ship, the Dunwich, is large. But so impressed are you by the vastness of just your own solar system that it seems confining, a imprisonment. You stare out in awe for an hour, watching your whole world disappear slowly and silently as the ship slowly rotates to maintain a small gravity.
Before you board the Dunwich, you are given a heavy metal vest to don. It will mimic gravity in the docking bay, which cannot rotate, as well as other static areas of the ship.
The bay of the Dunwich streches almost a kilometer in all three dimensions, enough to dock three of your bitty shuttles. But to you, right now, it still seems so small. But it seems the ship itself doesn't want you to continue your rapture. A small man appears before you, glowing orange all the way through, as if a ghost. It takes you a second to take in all the details about his appearance.
What does this "human" look like, and what is it's name?
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Topic: The Starborn [Xenofiction?] (Read 78008 times)