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<11/01/2010 - 13:15 | Saffrin Middle School (Gymnasium), Austell, GA, USA>

With everything on my mind, my day flew by me without my noticing, even though I got to experience the maximum level of awkwardness given our situation. As it stands, Lumina still remains connected to me via telepathy, something that won't change until the long day's end. But between our last real conversation and the gym class I promised I would be part of, there were countless little moments where I could feel her very presence here with me. No, not as in she was here physically. I mean – there would be moments of time where she would pay extra attention to my surroundings through my senses, even when she never explicitly stated that she would. Not only was there a lack of absolute privacy, but any moment that she tried to key in and focus on anything happening around me in particular, that strange buzzing sensation in the back of my head got stronger, ever so slightly. I kept monitoring the weather outside in between class transitions; not once did the temperature go anywhere near the upper fifties. The chill in the air was here to stay, as does she appear to accompany my presence.

But once she got to see the inside of my gymnasium, all points of her silence were finally off. "Wow! It's such a big open space to be in!"

I never did anything in particular to get Lumina's attention prior to or during my walk into the gym. Her response and reaction was automatic, which proved to me she has been obsessively monitoring my own surroundings more than her own. I said nothing, and yet she knew the moment I stepped foot into gym, complimenting the free open space all on her own. I felt the need to give her props for sticking to her promise to leave me alone until now, but I couldn't bring myself to - having known about her passive snooping. "Nothing to get excited about Lumina. It is just gym after all. Good old exercises!"

"Still, it is the first time I'm getting to see the inside of your school this way."

"So you keep saying." My mind went adrift after coming in here, unsure what to expect of this situation. On my way to gym class, I took the liberty of using a bathroom break to change into my gym clothes using the large empty stall. I wanted to skip the locker room altogether with Lumina in tow, so I was able to participate the moment I showed up here, and nobody asked me any questions about it. But just being in here again, the sights, the scent, the ambient low humming noise from above, all reminded me of what was soon to come. Despite how I may have sounded earlier, there was never a time when my body was fully prepared for this. "Oh what am I kidding? Gym fucking sucks!" I've always disliked any physical exercise, ever since my first asthma attack. I wasn't remotely obese, but I also had no built muscle. I always discounted any purpose to exercise, since it was never any fun and never led to any major improvements in my physical appearance. So my current attitude was to be expected, since these coaches force us into this against our will.

"It sure fucking does."

Is that the same foul and fun language I hear her using? "Ah, so now I'm teaching aliens how to curse. What ever will I do?" I wasn't really concerned or ashamed that Lumina would learn how to speak more like myself, nor was I sorry about dropping an F-bomb. It's always considered sinful to curse using such language, but I have every right to say it if I'm only thinking it out loud. As for Lumina hearing me, well, that's her fault for linking to me telepathically in the first place, not that she seems to mind.

"No, you're not." Lumina's tone filled with minor disdain as she corrected me, one that clued me into the idea that she has heard it somewhere else before. She wasn't hesitant to rain on the tiny parade of arrogance filling my mind. "I learned that a long time ago, from the evolution of many human language variants."

"Human variants?" The leaning conversation reminded me of something, a caveat that I was finally ready to demand of her in person. It's something that's been bugging me for a while now. "How is it that you can speak my exact language? I don't see it likely that you just picked it up over the years using your powers. It's too convenient!"

"I promise, I can explain everything. But please, one long story at a time Reed. First, I'll need to tell you about—"

Before I knew it, Lumina's voice was cut off by someone far louder than the both of us, hollering to project her voice throughout the ordered 6 by 12 line of students sitting on the polished gym floor. "Let's warm up with twenty pushups! Come on, get the lead out!" Ms. Jennifer, one of my two gym coaches tried motivating everyone, following up her chant with the brief blow into her whistle.

Since this was routine for me, I didn't lag behind the instructions, nor did I complain openly about this. Gym would always begin this way now, starting with general exercises and stretches before any activity were to begin. The coaches never cared if we could do well at this or not, so long as we tried. But I could hear Lumina stuttering slightly, confused as to what was going on, and proving to me that she has really never been in a classroom setting like this before.

Startled by the chaotic change in pace of my situation, she wasn't really able to say anything right away, so I started to reassure her. "Go on Lumina. I'll just keep doing this while you talk." Despite what I knew I was capable of, it was still difficult, having to speak and listen to Lumina while dealing with the outside world simultaneously at the same time. But I tried my best anyway, pushing my body off the ground and straining myself somewhat in the process. My thoughts were also a little twisted around by the change in pace. I really wanted to know why Lumina, being an Altiri alien would know such perfect English, but as she stated, it was a story for later, reminding me that she could probably speak to me about this all day long and still never get through explaining what her entire world is really like.

"Okay then. I want to start by talking about our Altiri history."

"The very beginning huh?" History lessons about the Altiri sounded interesting enough, and it led into my previous assumption that their world peace did not used to always exist.

"We know nothing about our origin of life, of when it began, or where we came from. All we have are predictions about what era of life our population started in, based on mass population recordings down the line."

"Yeah," I strained, struggling to keep my body going with my mind fully charged in a separate thread. "Join the club. Humans have no clue about their origin story either. Our teachings of the Bible say some crazy things about how God put us here, but factually speaking, nobody really knows."

"It really makes you think, doesn't it? Some human scientists talk about human evolution, as if people had somehow evolved from a tadpole or a monkey. But not only has there been no proof of that, the mystery expands when we think of ourselves by comparison. We would have had nothing to evolve from being born on Karnak. Our home planet has no other animals, houses no other species, and carries no bacteria. Plus, no Altiri were ever born on Zinod. So, where did we all really come from? How did we get here? Why were our bodies so perfectly adapted for the freezing cold environment? And why do we have certain abilities that we don't actually need to survive? When I think about it, I wonder what kind of hallow experiments might have gone on back then to bring us here. What if we were genetically engineered from some other group of people that never survived to make it back here? And if that did happen, why put us here?"

While I had the freedom to switch between pushups and sit-ups, it gave me room to really consider where Lumina was coming from. She wasn't just saying all of this for my sake, but for her own as well. The mystery of the beginning of the Altiri race was just as much a mystery for humans when considering our own origin, only with more impossible vectors and variables to consider. I could hear some fear of the unknown possibilities in her voice, the uncertainty of where her life really began in the first place. As I tried to imagine such a crazy scenario, one in which some alien breeding space ship engineered the Altiri to live on Karnak, only to go missing, possibly perished to the dangers of space, what would it mean for the Altiri if that could be confirmed? It also highlighted the ultimate question moreover; where did we all come from? "That's crazy to think about, but I don't know a thing either. God put us all here, but for what purpose? And what would it mean if other Altiri people put you over in Genosis?"

"We also have to start with how we used to record the passing of time. Like you would expect, we record the passing of time based on every rotation Karnak makes on its axis, with one full rotation being one day. Only we didn't used to call them days; we used to refer to them as cycles. And until we discovered the Earth and became familiar with your time keeping standards, we never changed our own."

"So you simply use our own time format now? How does that work?"

"Karnak is a slightly bigger planet than Earth, but its rotation speed is also slightly faster. Basically, a full day of Earth is slightly shorter than a full day on Karnak. The difference is so small that some default to using Earth's time format entirely. However, we mainly just use synchronization technology to keep track of both. We have the cycle count for Earth and Karnak, and track the star dates separately within the same system simultaneously."

"What about the amount of time it takes to revolve around your star?"

"Our planet, nor any other solar objects inside the radius of our Phobium Cloud revolve around the star; they don't even move for the most part. Even objects nearby Karnak do not normally revolve around Karnak. The spacial gravitational effects in our space behave strangely in a number of ways. So, using the day / month / year format is still highly popular for us."

"Great," I complained while continuing my sit-ups. "More technical babble I won't remember." I barely understand basic gravity, and I've never heard of spacial gravity in my life.

"Well, you can always ask again later if you forget."

She isn't even going to slow down for me anymore? I guess it's my fault now if I don't raise any misunderstanding with her. Lumina must be in a rush to explain as much as possible, so I just kept performing my exercises and continuing my stretches.

"Anyway, it all leads back to the main point I was trying to get onto earlier, that all Altiri are always born as female. It's basically mapped into our genetics."

All of the Altiri are born female? Every last one of them? It's such a weird thing to hear, especially since there is no specific reason why. "So you propagate using parthenogenesis, and at the same time, none of you are clones of each other?"

"You've seen my sisters, and I've already told you once that we aren't clones of anyone. Everyone is born with their own unique personality, their own unique soul, their own talents, and even their own unique appearance."

"Okay." I knew I shouldn't suggest they are clones given that exposition. But if there really are 32 million Altiri souls out there in another world, why isn't their presence a bigger deal to us? I can't be the only person who knows about them!

"Through the beginning of our time, we started successfully tracking our own history by the time our gradual population was in the lower one-thousands, according to experts. And for a few thousand years, we kept multiplying this way without a problem. But one day, this bio-singularity encountered a glitch."

"A glitch?" What kind of glitch? What does a glitch in birth mean?

"That's what many here will call this situation. One Altiri mother gave birth to a child with a genetic mutation, one different from all other Altiri people. We never had much of name for this type of mutation in the beginning, but our sciences later came to realize that the difference was simply one of gender than anything else. He became the very first and last Altiri male to ever be born into our world."

"An Altiri male?" I tried not to let my internal voice shake from the stress to my body, as I was now jumping left and right, transitioning between jumping jacks and some other lazy dance. But I managed to keep up with Lumina's words, surprised to hear that there was at least one Altiri male.

"Yes," Lumina agreed with her voice turning tense and rancid. "His name was Legasso. And since he was so different from the rest of us, he was treated as a rarity."

"Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?"

Elaborating her previous meaning, Lumina restated her point with further displeasure. "Because he was so obviously different from the rest of us, he was treated like a king. No, more like a god. Nobody knew why he was so different or why he came to be, but nobody faulted these qualities. Instead, everyone chose to worship him, while also appointing Legasso as the new leader of our colonies for the next several thousand years."

Thousands of years? I had to quickly remind myself about Lumina's specific age, and the fact that Altiri do not age like other humans to. They simply don't die, not unless some kind of accident kills them. It was still crazy to imagine going through life for that long, but hearing about worship also made me consider an interesting factor that didn't register with me until now. If someone were to be born differently, not with a minor variation but with a huge difference, one of two things could happen. The first and more likely possibility is that person being bullied and treated unfairly, usually out of fear or jealousy. The other possibility is the reversal of the last, being treated with unbound respect and worshiped by others as some great leader. Legasso fell into the second rare possibility among the Altiri then. "What happened after that?"

"Legasso also wanted to know where we came from, but his interest was focused mostly on maximizing the use of our own surrounding planetary resources. By this time, we still had not fully explored Karnak. So, he gathered together several teams of the smartest people he knew, forming scientific communities that would eventually break through the most successful endeavors and technological revolutions this world has ever seen."

I tried to ensure Lumina knew I was paying full attention, but it was harder to think or speak with how exhausted I was already just from the few minutes I put in. I was huffing and puffing from all that exercise, trying to recover myself enough to stand on my own two legs. I could tell that my own heavy breathing became a little distracting for her, as did another announcement from Ms. Jennifer following her annoying plastic whistle.

"You're all good for free period now."

Several other boys and girls around me made that same loud sigh having the chance to finally relax. I was a little happy to hear the news too, not just because I could use the time to walk in rectangles around the gym, but also because it would give me the perfect buffer to pay more attention to Lumina's interesting history story. "You said technology. But on a barren world with nothing but ice, snow, and rock, what resources did you even have access to?"

"Every now and then, a small meteorite would crash into the surface of our planet. Our galaxy used to have many more of these rocks, many of which were rich in a number of raw elements we would extract and use in some way. Our atmosphere layer is not hot like it is on the Earth, so asteroids falling from above do not burn up as much as you would expect. So when one would come down, we would harvest all we could from the meteors."

After having begun a long looping walk around the gym, I managed to charge my focus back to the subject, wanting to know every single detail that I did not get before. Every little inconsistency mattered to me by now. "Yeah, but harvestable with what tools? I don't get which came first. How can you dig into an asteroid without the tools needed from that same asteroid?"

"You're taking our natural strength for granted, Reed. I told you before how we have a few natural abilities. It is strange thinking of the reason why, but every Altiri person has a few traits that set us apart from humans, one of them being powerful physical strength, which we would use to beat through the outer layers of meteors."

"So you can just Hulk-smash through anything?" This really is out of a book, isn't it? Super-human capabilities? Adaptation to extreme cold? If Lumina were here in the flesh, she might be capable of becoming a super-hero!

"More than that. Our natural senses are superior to humans too. However, using telepathy like this, you wouldn't really notice any enhancements spilling through to your own senses. If what I can sense is beyond your physical capacity, you won't be able to experience that sensation at all, and the same goes for me. If you had an extra sense that I did not, telepathy would not allow me to experience it."

I think I understand that bit, but I want to know more about these super-human abilities of hers. "How extraordinary are these abilities Lumina? How strong is strong?"

"Well, please don't take any offense to this, but Altiri have natural better senses than humans, as well as physical capabilities. We have better strength, speed acceleration, reaction timing, you name it. By punching or kicking something, if we put all our power behind force, we could break through the solid welds of steel. Aluminum, titanium-alloys, if it's thin enough, they're like paper in our hands."

"No kidding." So they really are like super-powered espers! I haven't seen enough TV shows to fully grasp what espers are, other than to say they have incredible psychic powers and great physical strength. Nothing about her appearance alone would suggest that much strength, but it must be high if she can bend any kind of steel in her hands like it was play-dough. "Hi!" With my mouth and my body functioning on autopilot, I returned a similar greeting coming from someone walking right by me, Jaiden specifically. She wasn't interested in actually talking to me, so we both just waltz by each other. My only intension for today was to be as inconspicuous and normal looking as possible, so that I may focus entirely on this other more interesting matter. But separating my projected thoughts from vocal dialogue so quickly put my mind under a full mental load, luckily this time only lasting for less than one second, as Lumina ignored that interaction as well.

"If we were to sprint at top speed, we could reach two-hundred miles per hour, after acceleration. And with training, it's easy for us to flip through the air, since we don't weigh much beyond ninety pounds."

"Holy H—" Unable to prevent my thoughts from fragmenting away from that single detail, I forced myself to imagine it, an Altiri running at 200 miles per hour. Would such a person even be visible, or a blur? How is it even possible for a body to move at such a speed? Lumina? Just what kind of beast are you? That's more impressive than a vampire or a werewolf!

"Our sensory input seems to be finely tuned, with acoustical ranges slightly beyond that which is native to humans. Our sight and hearing doesn't seem to die out either from what we've observed."

"Seeing as you don't age, I shouldn't be surprised."

"Our hearing sensitivity for example is three times stronger than that of a human, which might not outclass some of the hunting wolves in your world. Of course, we can just as easily reduce our hearing input if something gets to be too loud for us. And our sight—" Lumina did not cut herself off to say something else, but she needed to pause, shutting her eyes to concentrate on something I wasn't yet aware of.

In the middle of my walking, I was forced to abruptly stop. Without warning, the entire world all around me once again became overlapped with the interior deck of Lumina's space ship at about seventy percent transparency. I could tell that she was doing that on purpose, forcing me to see again into her world after her eyes opened with her intentional concentration of an unknown energy. The buzzing sensation in my head became even stronger, as I could tell she was looking through my world at the same time, probably seeing everything in the same way. I was too amazed by what I was seeing to comment on it right away, though Lumina continued where she left off.

"It's far clearer than I thought it was by comparison. Seeing through your eyes shows me that."

"What do you mean clearer?"

"Sharper," she replied happily. "Better defined; more detailed; higher quality. Like I said before, telepathy doesn't enhance our senses towards each other. So every time I shut my eyes completely to see through yours, there is some quality loss. It's minor and not that big of a deal to notice, but the difference in image quality is noticeable with a comparison."

"So it's like a fine sharp image, like HDTV? Blu-ray?" I didn't have anything else to compare it to. HDTV and especially Blu-ray video quality are a newer aspect in 2010, and I've seen a demo of those qualities before. Blu-ray seemed to look ultra-realistic, almost better than my own natural eye sight could align things in nature. I have to assume this is what she means by quality. If so, I'm already jealous.

"Far stronger than 4K technology."

"What's 4K?" I've never even heard of that before. Does Lumina have knowledge of human technology that even I do not? If so, I want to see whatever this 4K resolution looks like.

"Don't worry about it. The point is, Altiri people are very strong and resilient, so long as we stay hydrated. Therefore, extracting materials from space rocks was not difficult for us. Neither was melting some of the snow around us so that we could drink it, an ability most don't remember using anymore. When we eventually had a surplus of stored materials, we tried putting together our very first space ship under Legasso's directive. And when I say we, I mean those who came before me, since I wasn't born during that time."

So they used asteroid materials to build a metal space ship? That's simply incredible. Since thousands of years would have passed before then, their science would be in range for that challenge as well. "So how did that go?"

"Poorly, sad to say. Even though the first ships only seated one pilot, there were deaths involved in the testing phases, after trying again and again to get it right."

"So then the Altiri can die..." I felt that was the truth anyway, but I wasn't so sure how easy it really was. They cannot age or get sick, but something strong enough to damage them or obliterate their bodies can still kill them; thus, the Altiri are not immortal.

"Oh certainly. It's not that hard for us to get killed by something stupid or unfortunate. Our outer layer of skin is rough and tough, and it feels like thin layers of bio-hybrid metals. But we can still be impaled by sharp pointy objects, or bullets."

"Ouch," I projected with little enthusiasm. Hearing about the ability for an Altiri to die was just a little gruesome, but it drove home a point I needed to understand; that nobody is immortal, even if they wanted to be. It means many Altiri people have died before, and one day, Lumina will die too from some stupid freak accident. "So I'm guessing space ship crashes are one of the big killers."

"Not many survive the impact when ships are pulled back into our gravity well and mangled into the ground from collision. But eventually, the additions of safety features got us into space under Legasso's directives. However, we later discovered another natural killer, and this time, we could only avoid the danger, not remove it."

"Which is what? Bad design? Bad technology?"

"Bad luck!" Lumina emphasized her annoyance to the twist as if she were part of that moment in history, when it was only her sympathy for the others long past coming through. How horrible and terrifying it must have been, achieving the accomplishment of entering outer space only to open a door to many new fatal problems. "We ran into a plasma storm. I don't know how to properly describe it, since we've never seen one outside of our own solar system. It's a white, hot nebula in outer space, one with some of the most unusual properties. The nebula is very small compared to others on a galactic scale, only a tiny fraction the size of Karnak, but deadly enough to all those in space."

"So some nebula over there has the same properties as a storm cloud over here?" Unsure if I was even close, I had little to go on. It sounded like Lumina was describing some kind of electrical storm in outer space, one that could look similar to what we have here on Earth.

"In some cases, visual properties are similar. The nebula behaves like a storm cloud despite never dissipating. But there are more unusual aspects to this. Most nebulas do not behave this way, nor are they this size. It's still gigantic to us, but a flake compared to what else is out in the universe. And this one also ignores our usual laws of gravity and physics."

"That's crazy." I struggled to imagine what she was describing during my never-ending slow walk around the gym, blocking out all the other sounds around me by ignoring them. But I don't even know what the laws of physics for a normal nebula would look like, let alone an unusual one by Lumina's standards.

"Most of the objects in space do get moved around a bit by solar wind activity and other energy disturbances, but not enough to make a significant change. Unlike your world, our star and everything about the solar system is motionless in space. Everything on a dial scale is motionless for the most part, unless something other than gravity acts on it. For that reason, nothing in our solar system orbits any object on any path, including our ships should we shut our engines down entirely. The only other exception applies to smaller asteroids that could revolve around Karnak."

"So Karnak doesn't revolve around the star at all? What about the planet's rotations?"

"Solar objects here rotate without issue if there is a reason for it to. The planet's core here is obviously not made out of ice or molten metal, but there is some kind of core inside for it to rotate and generate gravity. However, the rules of revolution do not apply to you if you are a renegade plasma storm."

"I see where this is going. Nothing revolves around the stars or the planets. But this plasma storm is the exception, revolving around Karnak?"

"Correct. This storm is the only solar object ever recorded in history to have such a violent movement pattern. It revolves around Karnak all the time, shoots massive bolts of energy hotter than anything we've ever seen outside our star, and changes its own speed within a set range randomly. Each bolt of plasma it releases has an extremely explosive impact to any object it strikes."

She keeps saying the word plasma instead of lightning... "I'm guessing these plasma bolts are not the same as electrical bolts found in a thunderstorm?"

"Not even close," Lumina clarified. "The ionic structures are different. The storm might appear beautiful, but the inside is extremely deadly. Under ordinary conditions, each bolt forms in random various places where a reaction is taking place between two points, so even with the best preparation and protection, just being in the storm for any circumstance is dangerous. There is new and recent evidence that this storm might be slowing down on us at last, due to the loss of Zinod so long ago, but it's too early to say."

Explosive effects huh? And here I thought lightning was dangerous. I never knew something so crazy could exist in space. "So what happened to the first ship to make it up there?"

"Our reasons for wanting to get into space was not merely just for exploration. We found out long before that the same kinds of meteors that came down before were more abundant near the edge of space, orbiting our world slowly. So, the ships we wanted to get up there were heavy extractors, focused on the capability of harvesting the materials from the rocks in space and bringing them back down. And before you assume anything else, Altiri cannot breathe without our normal air; we would die instantly if exposed to the vacuum."

"Understood." I never assumed as much in the first place.

"What ended up happening to our first successful extractor ship, was that it met with this plasma storm. That storm ripped the ship to shreds. We lost good people in the process, and firsthand learned of the danger of that plasma storm."

"Wow..." I couldn't think of anything to say on that. Hearing something so far out was crazy enough, but I couldn't imagine flying into such danger.

"Each bolt of plasma is not attracted to electrical sources of energy like you might think. But they are attracted to heat sources, sometimes even dormant ones. Whether it was aimed at our ion engines in the rear, or the external heat released from other systems involved in energy generation and air conditioning, the outside of our ships generates enough heat for this to be a problem. Normally, a plasma strike when passing through the storm would occur at a random chance. But with our ship designs, the probability would jump to 99% of taking a direct strike due to that property of heat generation. It took a long time to get everything just right so that we could invent a process that would allow us to pass safely through that storm."

"How big is this storm exactly?"

"It does not dominate the entire gravimetrical zone of Karnak. But it does revolve around Karnak every 1,003 years to average. It's the most unusual thing we've seen so far. Therefore, nowhere is safe in space if you are near Karnak's gravity well."

"Yeah. The ships end up getting hot, and then the plasma bolts from the storm want to strike them. That's horrible." I wondered what this had to do with her history, but I didn't interrupt her lead on the story. I was already hearing enough interesting details about space ships and crazy killer storms.

"Naturally, we tried turning the ships off to eliminate the heat when a storm would come passing through, but this only created more chaos for us. For one, the main reactor powers our air conditioning system. Since we can handle any level of cold while heat isn't normally generated inside the ship, that alone would not be a problem for us, but the life support system also runs on the same subsystem. Without that, we breathe through all of our air in about 18 hours, or less if the ship size is smaller."

"That's tough." I kept most of my thoughts to myself, not because I wanted to hide them anymore, but because I didn't want to interrupt her. I was having one hell of a time trying to process everything at once. While I could keep up with her details, part of my mind lagged behind trying to imagine each scenario as it played out. If they shut off the ships too early, they suffocate to death with the loss of their air filter. The moment they power it on and enter the storm, they're certain to be blasted to dust. It's a lose/lose situation.

"To combat that issue, our ship sizes became much larger, and the design for air storage attached to manual release valves allowed us to mitigate the issue of breathing without power in multiple areas of our rooms. But in most of our larger crafts we had to build later, we needed to use a combination of gravity core engines and anti-gravimetrical core refactors."

"Please tell me you are going to define that."

"The gravity core engines use special technology to produce artificial gravity all throughout the ship, and to some effect gravity around the outer hull as well. The anti-gravimetrical core refractors are more important. They stabilize all external negation fields of gravity so that the ship is no longer affected by its external pulling forces. Karnak has a different gravimetrical factor both inside the atmosphere and outside the atmosphere. For objects outside this atmosphere in outer space, Karnak's gravity pull within the well's radius is quite powerful. If our ships drop enough speed within this range, the ship is abruptly pulled into the planet by its outer gravity at such an acceleration that nothing would stop it. The anti-gravimetrical core refractor prevents our ships from being pulled in when our movement speed is zero."

In a nutshell, it stops outer gravity from affecting the ship. What an incredibly intelligent design!

"So, by shutting off all power to the ship, we would be shutting down those two vital systems as well, causing the vessel to fall prey to Karnak's outer gravity. We even tried setting the core refractor to operate on backup power, but it only operates for a short period of time. Once that's gone, if our ship isn't brought back in time, it will be too late. Once we start getting pulled in, there won't be enough time to recover in most cases. These days, we create our ships with the armor of Ion Steel, which is a combined substance only found in our world. Once properly assembled, ion steel becomes the strongest metal we have. It's so powerful, that no Altiri warrior could ever break, bend, or warp this metal if it is one-foot thick or more."

"That must be some tough stuff if even you can't break it."

"Yes, but even Karnak's surface can pull apart the metal welds if the impact is hard and fast enough. The ships that did crash after that new design did so in a way where the ion steel while separated could easily be recycled and built back together again. The same could not be said for most of the other components, assuming gravity from the core refractor failure was the main cause. Even so, we were far more worried about the safety of our pilots."

"So Legasso helped to invent space travel, but in the end, the operation was a total failure?" That can't be right, not if Lumina is in outer space right now.

"Because that storm moves around, it eventually worked out, since we didn't have to deal with it for some intervals of time. The advancements in further technology spanned from more successful extractions of asteroid material. We also plotted the routes of that horrible storm so that we could avoid having to run into it, and eventually, our efforts allowed us to explore the moon of Zinod. There, we all learned so much, everything at once from just a small expedition team."

"That's right," I remembered, holding my hands to my hips with a growing excitement. "You Altiri can all share sensory data with telepathy limitlessly! With a team to land on the planet, all that information can be shared at range." My guess had to be correct, but something felt a little off. "But wait, why not spy on that planet first using clairvoyance?"

"Because," she began with another reminder. "In order for clairvoyance to work, we would have to use it on a living creature capable of a minimum level of intelligence and psionic attenuation. However, during that time, we didn't even know how to use clairvoyance, as that was an acquired skill later on. We only knew how to use telepathy, and even then, our natural telepathy is fairly limited at range if we do not know the person we are trying to reach. That isn't the case right now, but that's how it was back then. Using telepathy at full power took some knowledge and skill."

"Right." She's the expert on telepathy, I guess.

"Soon after they landed, many more were inspired to build ships and head over to Zinod, to see it for themselves. At the same time, the harvesting operation became expanded. More and more resources were pouring in from the asteroids, and some would even come in from Zinod."

"What was Zinod like? Were you born during the time it existed?"

"As a matter of fact, I was. Zinod was incredible, indescribable!" Lumina's vocal pitch lifted with her words, expressing her emotion from imaging such a world. "I've only been near the planet's surface one. I've never been on the planet itself. But from what I was able to see in telepathy from the others, there were blue skinned horses, several kinds of birds, a few rodents, a few worms and bugs... There was even naturally melted pockets of water, and several mountains..." Lumina let herself get lost in the old memories of the past, memories that were transferred to her by someone else with advanced telepathic aptitudes. "The highest temperature ever recorded there went up to forty-five degrees Nixus, with the lowest being negative ninety. But the average was just below the freezing level of water."

"It sounds like a real paradise. Hell, humans could actually live there! And the fact that you had horses with blue skin and fur is something else."

"In the year 39,000, a certain individual became more popular. We refer to her in this context as Lady Q."

"Lady Q? Why not use her real name?"

"Lady Q is the same person who is currently our Altiri queen. The thing is, both now and back then, nobody seems to remember her real name. The queen isn't willing to hand out her real name either, for whatever reason. So, we call her Lady Q in historical context."

It was a bit of a shock to hear someone alive for that long. The year for them at the time Lumia wants to refer to now is 39,000, but that's not even their current star date. They must have had one long moment of time.

"During the time where exploring Zinod became more popular, a few mishaps continued to happen between Lady Q and Legasso."

"Slow down there." I needed to finish the last consideration I was trying to make, but it wasn't going to work without reference. "How long has this queen, I mean Lady Q been alive for? What current year is it for the Altiri if back then it was 39,000?"

"Currently, our queen is more than 100,000 years old. I don't know her exact age, but it isn't far beyond that."

My body ceased all motion, while my mind flipped around trying to comprehend something so impossible. "A hun— A hundred thou— Thousand— A hundred thousand years old?"

"Yes, and she still doesn't appear to be much older than 40 to the appearance of a human. Our current star date is 149,566, or Avion 148."

So the Altiri have been alive for over 149,000 years? The thought alone made my body tremble, as if it were about to melt. I wasn't afraid of what she said, only too shocked to move or continue any further thought. Humanity has been alive for how long now? 9,000 years at the most? But not them. They've been alive for far longer. They don't eat, sleep, or age, but still... Is there no limit to how long they can survive?

"But during that time, Lady Q was still young and energetic. She first wanted to become friends with Legasso. But for some reason, after she apparently met with him for the first time, her total attitude towards him changed forever. Ever since then, she would constantly challenge his style of living, his decisions, his tactics, leadership, effectiveness, and everything we could think of. We didn't understand at first what came over her, but the two of them did not end up as friends as she expected."

"Why?" Legasso was alive for a while too, right, much older than Lady Q at that time. What did she see that others did not?

"My guess is that Lady Q noticed how Legasso was taking advantage of a life of royalty, where his only real difference to everyone else was something as trivial as gender."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Remember how I mentioned before that Legasso was worshiped since the beginning of his upbringing back in the year 2,100? Legasso never did things perfectly, but under his leadership, scientific teams successfully brought down resources, built space craft, leading to more science, leading to the exploration of our sister planet, and brought more harmony among the populous with other tools. Our society grew and expanded throughout Karnak. Because he was in charge as an official leader for so long, Legasso wasn't just king by difference anymore. His status was by then a combination of circumstance, demonstrated achievement, as well as his existing popularity from before. However, after all that time, Legasso grew a level of arrogance and snobbery given all he had. He also presented many specific qualities that you would mostly compare to something you humans call masculinity. Most ignored these traits, but seeing them firsthand upset Lady Q the most, who had a different impression of him prior to their meeting."

"Like a fan-girl who realizes for the first time that the person they idolize turned out to be a real douchebag."

"I guess? Anyway, the point was, Legasso looked down on others. He thought better of himself over everyone else, because for countless years, that's just how the Altiri treated him. Lady Q was too wise to give into that behavior at the time, so she was immune from any of his intimidations. Of course, when she openly criticized him in every way possible, you could imagine how that went down for her - socially."

"Right," I realized, only having two examples to compare this to. "It's the mob mentality effect. Like if a highly respected church member is openly criticized in public for doing something wrong, the people who he is friends with will dislike the same person pointing out his flaws, assuming there are any. Or how if somebody trash talks one of the popular jocks on the football team, it's suddenly much bigger deal around the school, even though it would be no deal at all if the jock were instead a nobody. If Legasso was being treated like a king, and some random lady were criticizing him... They must have wanted to kill her!"

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

"Even during those times, the Altiri did not go around killing one of their own. But Lady Q was publicly shamed everywhere she went, their words on her so harsh that she had to move her living location to another remote area. However, for reasons we still never understood, soon after Lady Q had challenged Legasso's ideals, his own behavior began to shift radically!"

"What?" What does she mean by that? Why would a guy act differently when his own status defeated someone below him?

"It was a very slow, gradual, and ongoing change within him. He started up his own council and hosted meetings within those councils. Without us knowing what he was trying to achieve, some members of that same council had a few feuds with Legasso. Most of the discussions were supposed to be how Legasso would be treated as leader of our world, but it would often devolve into arguments about what was better for the Altiri, rather than what was best for our god. Even though it would have been obvious to those who've seen it before, it was not immediately clear to us what was happening. Legasso favored himself above all other priorities. Any discussion that took attention away from him was treated by Legasso as lower priority. In the end, it began this slow awakening of people who saw Legasso as nothing more than an Altiri, same as all of us. Others began to realize that he was no god, despite all that he had helped accomplished. A man such as himself was also just an Altiri. Regardless of that awakening, many continued paying our respects to him, but over time, the man became more paranoid about his own standing to the populous."

The man sounds like a tyrant, someone who desperately clings to power for power's sake. Since the Altiri never age into death, Legasso would have been king forever. But then, if Zinod is no more, and Lumina is here to tell me this story, something must have happened to him. "Reminds me of Adolf Hitler. A man who craves power above the needs of his own people... What happened then?"

"We have to remember that during the start of all this, Lady Q was the very first person to see his true nature. But when she was forced into hiding, our world's society slowly fell into a more chaotic state. Before all of this, all us Altiri really knew was kindness, sadness for those we lost, and our pride for who we were and what we had accomplished together. We were never before exposed to any other feeling. Because of Legasso's slightly damaged pride, he felt the need to increase control over the council and scientific groups that he initially assembled. He would test people's loyalty to him, asking such horrible and unnamable things of those who were closest to him, while waving around his god status as the badge to carry out his disgusting deeds. That was the only reason why Lady Q's initial examinations of his character began to spread throughout all the other Altiri colonies. Since our telepathy shares both thoughts and emotions about every situation, it spread to us like wild fire."

Lumina continued while I walked the gym in silence, trying to process it all, to imagine this tyrannical creepasaurous doing horrible things to the Altiri women. But I never knew how far that horror would go, or how many people were involved. "Because of this, loyalty towards him even among those he was closest to dove below his impossible expectations. And every time they would, Legasso would unleash his rage and fury on anyone he could, violently attacking any disciple. He would beat some of them until they were bruised from head to toe, forcing them to comply with whatever he demanded, no matter how sinister. Each time, the cycle would repeat. For nearly nine thousand years, this gradually became worse, until there was a total breakdown of all leadership throughout the colonies."

"I don't understand," I paraphrased. "If he was such a terrible person, why not do something about him?"

"There was a point where some tried, but they failed, getting themselves killed in assassination plots. Legasso always made certain to have many who were still loyal to him. He did whatever he had to – to keep such bodyguards around. His abuse to them was mostly physical, but there were some whose minds were twisted beyond anything we could ever imagine. Legasso always tried to be quiet about this, but there were some who he had killed if they posed any kind of social threat to him."

Taking another sip of her water, Lumina let the second of silence transition her into answering my last question. "The bigger problem however was the telepathy. Even back then, we were all still trying to figure out how to use that ability in different ways. We couldn't understand why some of the older Altiri women could so easily invoke long-range telepathy with others while the younger ones and children could not. But we also had little control of our emotions when they were pushed into us by another who felt some way strongly. Legasso stirred rage, hatred, and fear into those around him, and then those Altiri transmitted their madness to more, until it echoed everywhere no matter where we tried to live... I remembered how it felt a little."

"So then you were born at that time? That's terrible!"

"I was born shortly after Lady Q showed up and became negatively famous in her own stunt. So when I was growing up, I think I had a happier life. But it wasn't long before I too was forced to feel the horrible emotions that everyone in my village was experiencing, them feeling that way from the echoes cast out from the source of evil. Legasso never was challenged before, so he never had a reason to reveal such hatred onto others, but it was clear that he only wanted to control us because we were all different from himself. We were all Altiri female, but he was the male. With all the confusion and anger, most of us didn't actually know what to do with those emotions. We didn't realize where it was coming from. We never knew what to do, and we never tried standing up directly to Legasso, most of us anyway. The whole sensation left most of us too confused or stunned to act as we normally would; the reason for that was that these emotions were too new to us. They very easily controlled us, so much that their propagated anger twisted even more minds, spreading like a plague."

"Pure evil spreading like a plague? That sounds like something right out of hell itself. Still, all of this was started because Legasso hated women? I don't believe that! Who would fight and struggle over something as stupid as that?"

"But Legasso never wanted to fight. He didn't even want a war. All he wanted was absolute devotion from his loyal subjects, his net to cast over our entire planet. A false god who is driven to madness because some people stop worshiping him for his own transgressions; that is who Legasso really was deep down. Even though most of us never thought to express the remote possibility of what would happen if we didn't treat him like a god, we were all shocked to find out what consequences he would have in store for us by disobeying any directive, or simply not showing enough faith to him, though most of us knew he was no god even before that point. So, our world was thrown into a time of darkness and death. Those of us who wanted nothing to do with it fled to the other side of the planet, where his corrupted disciples who only wanted to harass everyone had a harder time finding us. Those who were already on Zinod decided to stay there once they heard what was going on, allowing them to live more peaceful lives."

"How long did everyone live in peril?" I wasn't asking her anymore because I was simply curious. The story she was telling me sounded like something that would only happen if the devil himself became king of a world. I'm not so sure I could imagine worse, but there has to be an upside to this somewhere.

"For quite some time. By the year 48,000 prime, Lady Q brought herself out of hiding, not to face Legasso himself, but to reclaim her social status among what was believed to be some of her previous friends. Because of that, her popularity quickly exploded, and several people were talking about her. Lady Q wasn't affected by the mind waves the same way others were, and she used that as a means of bringing other people to their senses, revitalizing some of the villages that were in such disarray from some who lived there. Legasso obviously heard all about it; the surfacing of his most wanted enemy. It must have drove him mad, especially when the world began to believe that Lady Q could fix whatever was causing Legasso to lash out. However, before she could come up with anything, ten years went by, and Legasso exposed a plan he had been hatching in secret."

"This sounds absolutely horrible, but keep going."

"He launched what became known to us as the great Exodus. Legasso and his closest teams began rounding up every Altiri citizen, all who had daughters anyway. He only took those who were pregnant or those who had shown to give birth before. He intentionally left the children and anyone under the age of 108 alone, aside from ripping them apart from their families by force. He rounded up about 94% of the entire Altiri mother population, which at the time leveled one million. Then, he took all of these mothers, stuffed them onto a massive unveiled fleet of transport ships, and sent them to Zinod. The ships numbered in the hundreds, and the flight navigations were hardwired to fly a pre-programmed course and landing cycle to Zinod's twelve platforms. So even the skilled pilots could not pull out of the program."

"What the hell?" This man must be their version of Hitler. Who would do something like that? Legasso separated one million Altiri mothers from 32 million children; young, inexperienced, defenseless children, and I can already guess why. It would be easier to control the population if the remaining were too young to understand proper defiance and organization. This gives him the chance to separate the intelligent minded women from his domain.

"He obviously wanted to separate the children from their more intelligent parents, making it easier to keep his reign under control. This went on until the year 49,000, but about 6% of the hunted managed to escape and go into hiding, including Lady Q. Very few of anyone left were willing to fight back, afraid of what might happen if they rebel. So, that's when Lady Q decided to take direct action."

Does it finally start getting better? Please tell me that bastard didn't kill any more people.

"She assembled all of the Altiri children into a massive crowd for defense and unity, bolstering the idea of safety in numbers. In the meantime, she copied part of Legasso's idea by building a massive fleet of assault ships in secret, using the manufacturing plants as cover to do so. By the time it was finished, it was the largest military fleet anyone had ever seen. It took years to build, with the target count being 5,000 combat capable ships."

"Why ships though? Why not some other kind of weapons?"

"We were all afraid of a faction war breaking out. We had strength in numbers, but Lady Q foresaw Legasso trying to twist half our population against itself to bring down more control of our rebellious actions. Fortunately, that part of his plan never got any lift off. Only 266 spacecraft short of having the whole fleet, Legasso was reported as missing. They sent a whole search party after him, but could find him nowhere on Karnak. It was soon discovered that his absence was the result of a hasty retreat onto planet Zinod."

"That slime ball!"

"Legasso was intelligent too. He knew that the massive amount of people on Karnak could outnumber him if they become brave enough to stand up to him. So he fled to Zinod in secret, thinking he could fare better against only one million Altiri women. It was a bold escape plan, but rest assured he had insurance policies for just about every situation. When we found out where he was, Lady Q and her followers wanted to launch the entire fleet early, springing the entire might of her new unity into action. However, too many of us were too scared to think of trying something so dangerous. We knew our situation, but were unable to act on our own. Eventually, Lady Q became the newly appointed queen of the Altiri by popular demand, just before initiating a mandatory military draft to power the mechanical fleet of capital ships we all helped assemble... I was in that group; many of us were. I was forced into the draft, forced onto those ships, and put into a dangerous situation I knew nothing about. I was scared to death of everything, wondering where my mother was, wondering why it was all happening to me. And because each fleet was divided into the aggressor group system, I was also forced to work around all of these strangers."

My walking pace slowed to that of a snail, hearing what it felt like to be drafted against her will into a situation she never understood. It wasn't until right now when I realized how she was all part of this; her fear, her bravery, her past life. Even if it happened in the past, she could never forget about it. "I'm sorry you had to undergo that. Wait a sec!" I realized the value of her very last statement just now. She said she was forced into an aggressor group of strangers! If they are strangers, then—

"Sorry Reed. But the term sisters is used differently for us than it is for you. You must have thought we were blood sisters."

"Now you tell me!"

"In truth, the Cy-Stars are not biologically related at all. But after we grow up with friends we cherish so much, or after we learn to get along together as well as family, we call each other sisters to commemorate our love for each other. For us, sisters is a term equivalent to that of a best-friend."

What a weird way to use that word. I got so confused this whole time thinking Lumina's mom was popping out babies by the dozen. "But you weren't sisters in that moment, correct?" I couldn't imagine how awkward that would be.

"Right. We were not sisters at the time, only strangers. So, we didn't get along at all, especially considering our collective moods of fear and anxiety."

"Can't you control those emotions?"

"When so many other people feel them and transmit them at the same time, those feelings can dominate your own mood, especially when you are not as familiar with them. Lady Q had a resistance to this effect, presumably because she must have felt this way before about many other things. We aren't too sure how."

"Okay."

"But Lady Q understood this about us, so she used other psychological tactics to her advantage. Her promise to stop Legasso and his reign of terror once and for was an inspiring speech, one that stabilized most of us, uniting us with both understanding and bravery, as well as the promise that we would get to see our loved ones again when it was all over. She directed us with navigation training, and gathered the fleet and all crews of the aggressor groups to the newly constructed Altiri Temple. From that temple, we constructed a larger hangar and continued to intensify the orbital fleet and ship quality, so that any person and co-pilot who wanted a capital ship of their own could receive one. At the same time, we were all given rigorous combat training that would dominate any enemy."

"Damn! You were pushed into the future by war? War against a single missing man? All by yourself?"

"I was forced to train with the others, using all kinds of military tactics, to fight in hand-to-hand combat, and to swing around a special sword design made out of ice."

I let her continue talking, but her words started to remind me more about those lucid dreams that I had. I remembered Lumina's fighting tactics more clearly than before, mainly because the dream version of her kept trying to kill me with that same sword. She would also run at impossible speeds in the dream, probably at 200 miles per hour as this Lumina stated earlier. It was incredible to see little comparisons being tied together in so many ways.

"At least, that was the idea. They only appear to be made of frozen water, but their real substance is a mixture of ice and some kind of ethereal charge linked directly to us. The swords can cut through anything so long as we want them to. But if we break, so do the swords shatter."

"That's cool, something right out of a fairy tale, but also quite harsh considering..." If everything connects back to what happened to me during the purge, then all of this only proves how much depth there is to this story, whether it be from my own insanity, or an impossible new reality.

"We eventually tracked Legasso's personal ship heading to Zinod. He was supposed to be there to begin with, which meant he made another trip back to Karnak without anyone knowing, and was about to return to Zinod the same way. Only this time, we tracked it on light-spectrum RADAR, right as the whole of the fleet was properly put together and ready to act, but his ship was far quicker in speed than what we set up. The queen tried to send out a warning to those on Zinod, but her words never reached them. The chaotic state their minds were in made the task difficult. Even then, our clairvoyant abilities were never fully developed."

"I see where this is leading to." Every time it seems like Legasso is about to be caught, something else bad happens.

"Remember what I mentioned about the effects of experiencing waves of negative emotion echoed onto everybody else? Lady Q quickly put a cure into us for that, but she could only do this for all of us Altiri children who rallied with her from Karnak. Not one of our ships had yet to land on Zinod to help them come to their senses, so most on Zinod were rioting and hurting each other in their own towns and cities. Luckily for the City of Jue, the place had a couple of amazing leaders; Lissy and Sana."

"Lissy and Sana used to be inhabitants of Jue, until they showed themselves out among the growing violence. They both refused to take part in that, displaying their resistance to the mass hysteria of confusion and rage. So, they rallied the citizens of Jue together for one of the most amazing speeches. It was uplifting and hopeful, giving the people a better area to target and unleash all of their stored anger, as well as a reason to fight for their lives back, for their children back on Karnak. There was an action plan too, for word had spread locally about Legasso's arrival in one of the nearby hangars of Zinod. This meant he was now vulnerable."

"Finally," I blurted out. "They must have realized that killing him was the only option left, right?"

"Precisely. But there were unforeseen consequences to waiting as long as we did. Remember when I said that Legasso had a plan for just about everything? There was no way he alone could forcefully bring the population of Zinod under his control, and he had already lost control of the now powerful fleet of the Altiri children. So he reverted back to psychological tactics combined with physical threats. His plan never had a chance to develop completely, and we never found out about it until after the conflict was over, among the wreckage fields. His plan was to land on Zinod, then reveal to everyone there that he had planted a newly designed elemental bomb on Zinod, as well as several more on Karnak. Elemental bombs were a new discovery made by Legasso and his closest escort teams, designed for the purpose of destroying an entire planet in a single blast."

"So this is the equivalent of a super nuke?" This man is a thousand times worse than Hitler. To wish death upon an entire planet, simply as a mechanism of threat is the worst thing I have ever heard!

"Let me get to that," Lumina requested, continuing her explanation. "Nobody knew at the time what Legeas was planning to do or that he had set up remote detonators. All we really knew was his general location from the landing pad. Luckily, the citizens of Jue also obtained the same information in their own way, and were the closest settlement to reach that hangar. Lissy and Sana gathered everyone together on a mission to assassinate Legasso as a unified team, and they all mounted on horseback to reach the hangar from their position, a drive that would take about thirty minutes. Even though Altiri can run faster, we would tire out on foot too quickly. Our ability is only good for short controlled bursts, not so much for distance. They were also going to need to fight. The defensive staff at the hangar could not be trusted, not with their loyalty or with their skills."

"That's amazing! But then, how exactly hard is it to fight as an Altiri? Did Legasso know special fighting moves?"

"Not quite. We Altiri used to know an ability that let us easily condense and melt the ice and snow around us so that we may drink it, something we forgot how to use after we built the water purifiers which do the work for us. But we have other natural abilities too, one in particular that the queen taught to all of us during the training sessions. It was actually one of Legasso's tricks, one he taught to an Altiri traitor. It's the ability to concentrate particles of airborne molecules of moisture with density shifts to create a long-range thin beam of ice."

"A beam of ice? How does that work?" There's no way she can shoot beams of ice from her hand.

"Actually, I can just show you right now. Just pause whatever you are doing." Lumina stepped aside from the wall she was almost leaning on, walking to a place she would normally go to practice her skills.

Without saying another word, I did just that, stopping my legs and giving them a needed break. I didn't realize nor care how much of a goof I looked to others just walking around the gym with my eyes wandering randomly. My focus was now dead set on Lumina, who just told me she would demonstrate an impossible ability right before me. Can she do it? Can she show me something incredible that would also prove her existence?

One of the first things Lumina did was to enhance the connection again, using the same trick as before to make sure I was forced to see through her eyes, even though the transparency effect allowed me to see both worlds on top of each other. Once that was established, she stood facing down the center of some colorless bull's-eye with her feet apart and her entire arm and hand aimed at her target. "This is one of our powers of destruction." During her charging of energy preparation, we could both hear this strange resonating hissing sound with a linear up-scaling pitch, winding up with the same charge of her special energy. Once it was ready, Lumina unleashed her powers onto the wall her hand was aiming at, lighting up her right palm with a blinding cyan concentration of light and mist that transformed into a potent beam. This beam of light slammed against the wall and held stable for about half a second, revealing the wall that was now covered in several inches of thick frozen ice. So much mist in between was quickly condensed, leaving a small puddle of water already freezing from her ambient air temperature. Lumina struggled to stand straight afterwards, the demonstration draining much of the life out of her, and she stopped using her unique ability to boost my ability to see through her eyes.

I couldn't move, and my eyes were wider than any night owl. Explain what I just saw! That's the demand I quietly made to myself, but I couldn't make any sense of it, other than remembering that moment play back on loop. She really did it! She really fired a solid beam of intense ice like it was nothing, and it froze half the entire wall from a single touch! Who cares if it drains Lumina in the process? I can't believe the Altiri have that power! She acted as though it were a natural ability, but I wondered if it were some kind of magic instead.

"It's based on a similar ability that we can use, one that allows us to transfer some of our body temperature to the most immediate space around us of from our hands, though it stings a little to use. This version of it wasn't easy to learn, but those trying times caused all kinds of changes to our population. This ability just happened to be sitting dormant within us, until Lady Q revealed it. It's normally not really fatal if it hits another Altiri, since we are cold blooded anyway. However, if that beam were to hit our face or crush our lungs from the outside, we would be dead in seconds. If we use the lower level version of that power on ourselves however, we could use that to seal any open wounds if they are not bad enough."

"You really are like a super hero with all those powers. And none if it is magical?"

"Nope. It's all biology and science. I'm not the expert on it, but is has to do with the way we can condense and flash-freeze the air around us while simultaneously altering density using spinning air redirection from our hands. Our pours open up slightly in the process, which is why it stings when we use it. And only an Altiri well hydrated could pull it off." Lumina started to dunk down another bottle of melted purified water, trying to restore her stamina. "However, there were other abilities throughout history that we lost for some unknown reason."

"Like what?"

"During the part of the story where I left off, back on Karnak, every one of the Altiri children, including all of us in the queen's new military lost the ability to procreate and get pregnant. Once we got to the ages of 108, it just stopped happening to almost all of us at once. That natural ability never returned, even to this day. It wasn't a sudden change, rather gradual. It happened to me so long ago that I never understood why some would birth girls while I could not. But eventually, it spread to everybody. I am an Altiri child, now an adult, but with no child to call my own. My sisters are the same way. It was one of the many adaptations that made no sense to us. Others believe it may have been a protective mechanism for what was to come, but we have no proof either way."

Hard as it was, I continued walking again, trying not to draw attention to myself. I wasn't able to hide my shocked face upon seeing a beam of ice shot from her hand. If Lumina is a fake person, then this has to be the most realistic hallucination I have ever had. "So wait... Your population of 33 million is no longer growing? You can't have kids?"

"Not through parthenogenesis. And right now it's only 32 million as of today. Whether sexual births are possible is something that has never been attempted, so it is impossible to say."

"Okay, so you lost that natural skill, and your population declined?"

"Sort of. The Altiri mothers who already gave birth never repeated that cycle ever again. At the age of 108, there is a five year grace period for an adult to become pregnant, even if they already have before. But once they are past 113, that grace period is over regardless. However, the children including myself lost that ability a long time ago, before we were even of age to try it. Attempts to restart the process again later have failed, but in the moment, Legasso was the bigger concern on our minds. I'm only mentioning it now because we became most aware of it then despite ignoring the issue."

"This is a bit much." Why do I feel so sick to my stomach? Everything she was saying is something I can't personally prove anyway, but it's such a horrible thing to hear. On top of Legasso, they lost their one and only chance to give life again? They aren't immortal if an accident happens, which means their fate is already sealed!

"It gets a whole lot worse. Lissy and Sana were somehow capable of sending a warning message to the hanger they believed to be involved, but they were already fighting Legasso. It was a horrible battle that he dominated using that same ice beam ability I showed you. One hit to the neck or the face was all it took to ensure a death, but he could also immobilize their legs in ice and beat them down as well. The situation at the hangar was a bloodbath. If that wasn't bad enough, one of the scouts there reported back to Lissy and Sana before their departure to the hangar that Legasso had smuggled and prepared an element bomb set to remotely detonate and destroy Zinod. Whether or not it was armed can only be assumed, but Lissy and Sana decided to double down on such danger. Learning what he had in store for us, Lissy and Sana planted their own element bomb, which they acquired from friends of theirs during Legasso's first visit to Zinod. They planted their bomb on a timer set for 32 minutes right before departing with everything they cheered on."

"Lissy and Sana planted the bombs?" That makes no sense! Why would they try to destroy their own planet?

"Yes. They also had a remote switch, one that would disarm the bomb from a great distance. The plan was to catch Legasso at the hangar, or prevent him from leaving at all costs. Legasso was likely going to detonate his element bomb after using the same hangar to leave, sacrificing Zinod to show the rest of us not to ever mess with him again. But if Lissy and Sana could stop him from leaving, they could disable the entire detonation network and save everyone instead, if they could catch him in time. That's why the hangar became the point of interest."

"Wow!"

"That's where we came in. One of our earliest Scryers somehow got word of what was going on, the basics that Legasso's ship docked in that specific hangar. The queen then gave us order to ensure Legasso will be trapped there. She sent my team, the Cy-Stars on an emergency mission to fly to Zinod and intercept Legasso's ship before he could take off. We were also to land on the surface to find Legasso directly, then to capture and kill him. At that exact same time, Legasso's stash of unarmed element bombs were found in his cove on Karnak. There were more than twenty-six of them, more than enough to destroy Karnak ten times over."

"He was planning to destroy them both!" Did this monster believe he was god, that he had to eliminate in mass genocide the entire Altiri race just to get back at their lack of worship? Did he have something to do with the sudden infertility of the Altiri populous? Such a weapon proves he is a monster!

"He could have. We believe his plan was to blow up one planet, then use the threat of that devastation to force all of us remaining survivors into submission, holding Karnak hostage to do it. The Cy-Stars were the closest ones to Zinod, though we were still well out of range to initiate a landing sequence. Lissy and Sana were much closer to Legasso than my team was. Down on the planet, they intercepted the hangar in time to stop their timed detonation, but not quickly enough to stop Legasso from reaching his ship and taking off from the platform. Like I said before, our ships were still out of range to intercept him should he already be in motion."

"So they didn't make it?"

"No they didn't. Not long after, the ground on Zinod started breaking apart because its internal gravity was misbehaving, a consequence of an element bomb detonation. We knew already that one might go off, but we had no idea when. Legasso planned to have his detonate a little later for his own safety, but the bomb that went off first was the one that Lissy and Sana armed personally. Before everything ended, Lissy and Sana sent out a powerful psionic burst transmission; a long complicated web of memory directed to the nearest Altiri team. And then, Zinod was destroyed."

No way! An entire planet is so easily destroyed by a single bomb? What weapon of mass destruction would even be capable of that? Zinod and everyone inside was just blown to death? "I can't even imagine a whole planet just blowing up like that."

"I can. We all saw it happen with our own eyes; the horrifying experience stopped everyone. Our aggressor group team was the closest to the planet when it all happened, so our ships took some significant damage, on top of being hit by the EMP. It was a good thing we were rescued from it all."

"Zinod was destroyed..." I kept reciting it in my mind, but the truth didn't want to register within me. The prospect seemed too impossible. An entire planetoid being destroyed just felt too fake. But every other part of me was forced to react to such horrible news. I couldn't walk anymore, and my stomach twisted with how sick this all sounded. It wasn't just Zinod either, but the million Altiri souls on its surface who perished, all because of the bomb that went off. "Lissy and Sana destroyed Zinod!"

"Incorrect!" Lumina yelled in her own telepathic voice, aggressively shutting my last statement down with a purpose. "This was not the fault of Lissy and Sana. While it was their bomb that went off, the explosion ensured Legasso was caught in the blast. Had it not gone off, Legasso would have had enough time to escape from Zinod, and remotely detonate the device he planted instead. We would have been incapable of pursuing him with the limited speed on our capital cruisers, and also unwilling to try the moment he felt safe enough to warn all of us the planets he held hostage. All those two did was ensure Legasso be caught up in his own mess."

"How can you even say that?!" Does she think that their sacrifice somehow absolves them from what they did? Lissy and Sana were the ones who pushed the trigger; they destroyed Zinod and the millions of Altiri souls within, all just to kill one guy! "They could have waited! They could have tried anything else, like waiting for your ships to hunt him down!"

"What part of remote detonation do you not understand? Legasso would have demonstrated the destruction of Zinod on his own, and used the fear of a repeat event against Karnak to keep all of us from opposing him. We didn't even know about the other bombs until long after Legasso had perished. Lissy and Sana did not destroy Zinod; their world was already doomed from the start, because we all ran out of time."

"So, Lissy and Sana... The sacrificed their entire planet to..." I already understood what she was trying to say, but it was too difficult to register on my own. It seemed too impossible. Would they really have gone that far to kill one guy? Was he really that dangerous, that they would sacrifice themselves and an entire planet just to ensure he dies?

"Lissy and Sana knew about the other bombs before we did, which is why they went through such extremes. They sacrificed Zinod to kill Legasso, because they knew what more damage he would do if he had left the world a minute later. We consider them heroes for what they've done. Even though the price was steep, it saved us from certain doom."

"How many..." I could barely speak my own mind, and my body sank to the floor on my knees. I could barely breathe properly, and I had to fight a growing nausea. "How many people were on that world?" I was told the answer before, but I need to know for certain how many people died that day.

"At the time, there were about 32 million of us from Karnak, plus the one million that were on Zinod. In short, this claimed the one million lives, a majority of the population that were our own mothers on top of everything else. That day, on September 22, it was the worst moment in all our history, something that dug into all of us forever."

"So then, Legasso killed a million Altiri people..." Sick as I was, struggling to keep curious attention off myself and my reactions, I did my best trying to fight through sympathetic pain. If that all really happened, then it would mean Legasso was the worst person in the universe, a man far worse than Hitler and any other evil I could think of. And why? All because not enough people worshiped him? Give me a break! "I can't believe any of this. It's all too unreal!" I had to make that call right here and now. If everything Lumina was telling me was somehow true, I didn't want to handle the weight of it anymore, but I still had to consider that she was just an illusion, her and her stories. If it never happened, I don't have to feel this way. "Something as big as a planetary explosion would have destroyed everything around it, including Karnak!"

"Oh, there was plenty of fallout from the catastrophe. A few aggressor group fleets were wounded and killed by the new debris field blasting outward from the force of the blast, as well as the burnt asteroid shower falling into Karnak and killing more people below. Even our own ships were damaged, and we needed to be helped into the Altiri Temple with most of our controls fried."

I again wanted to protest her reality versus my own, but the fact that Zinod's destruction did in fact cause additional mayhem only added more layers of possible realism to me. Such an event would only be plausible if nobody outside of Zinod died from a planet fragmenting into several million pieces and being thrust outwards in all directions, but according to Lumina, that did actually happen. Now I don't know what to think.

"Karnak itself was going to be fine, but our people were hurting from the aftershocks, and the rest of us were too traumatized to take action. Anxiety and panic attacks were traded between so many of us, but as for me and the Cy-Stars, we had a different experience. Since we were still the closest aggressor group to Zinod during Lissy's burst transmission, we were also the only team that received the data."

"So nobody had any idea about their sacrifice until you all received that information?" Even though I was still new to some terms, I understood the words burst and transmission. When mixed with telepathy or something similar, I could easily imagine what it must have been like, suddenly receiving a huge collection of another person's memories out of the blue.

"All of us Cy-Stars received the same transmission, moments after the destruction, and we were able to remember every detail. When we mentioned this to the others, the queen called in an emergency meeting after everyone had been treated, and we were at the center of those meetings. We were forced to recant the entire story of what happened down there from Lissy's perspective, more times than we were comfortable with. At the same time, the shock and sadness of what happened overwhelmed so many of us, including the queen. All of this happened because of one man, one evil person who killed a million of us."

"Evil is an understatement."

"After we had some time to recover a little, the queen called upon this action, this specific type and set of behaviors displayed by Legasso to be that of a heathen."

"That word sounds familiar." It wasn't just her use of the term heathen that I was reminded of. The entire historical moment felt a little more familiar after it was all told, as if I had heard a few pieces of the story before. I think I remember having dreams about the Altiri, dreams of their dark historical moment in time... But I can't remember them all too well. I wonder if the purge was trying to show me that moment.

"That word was given a special meaning to all of us, one that differs from your version of the language. For us, a heathen is a person who presents themself with most or all the qualities or behavior traits similar to Legasso. But we also knew by then that such qualities could only be found more often in the male gender."

Only in males? "I'm guessing this is why your entire race are female?"

"While his specific birth was coincidental, it is a correct assumption that we would have been very critical of any new male Altiri if he were ever to be born. We weren't really having new children at that stage, so the threat of giving birth to another male Altiri was not exactly a real concern to us. Nevertheless, Legasso, and all heathens like him were declared public enemy number one, direct enemy of The Unity. If we ever found one again, our automatic response should be to kill on sight."

"Jesus! You people must hate anyone like Legasso. But that extends to anyone who is male?" Is this why I felt such hatred against men last year? Is this the reason Lumina harbors such strong feelings?

"Specific kinds of men, yes. Those most specifically related to the same personality traits present qualities that your people refer to as masculinity. In a nutshell, they are one and the same."

So it's only masculine men? I had a difficult time imagining this, since I didn't actually understand what it meant to be masculine in the first place, but I didn't push against her on the subject, not right now anyway. It only makes sense that the entire Altiri would hate all heathens as a result of what happened... But then she said the Unity again. "I heard you say the word Unity for the second time today."

"That phrase is the political term to describe all us Altiri. We became united during the days when the queen rose to power. She started calling us the unity, and it stuck. Because of her desires for our own prosperity, we decided to keep her as our queen for as long as we wanted to. In time, our nation, the Unity, would thrive in the days of our recovery and all time afterwards. But we still lost so much in the process getting there."

"It had to have been a sad day then, one nobody could forget."

"Most of us who survived the event lost more than just our own people. For 94% of all the Altiri, which included myself and my sisters in the Cy-Stars, I lost my own mother that day, when the planet was destroyed."

Just as I recovered my body and coaxed my legs into a soft walk, the realization of her words forced me to halt yet again. Lumina had been telling this to me all as if it were some story, one I struggled to believe. But regardless of whether I believed her or not, the loss she must have felt by losing someone she loved in her own family was too real to be simulated. I could feel her own sadness spilling into my heart, the shame of my own assumptions coming from within. "Oh my gosh Lumina... I'm so sorry!" Lumina, Lumina and all of her sisters lost their personal mothers that day, people they would never get back no matter how much times goes by. I could only feel sympathetic to her moment.

"Why apologize? It's not your fault."

"I must apologize," I recanted. All this time, I have been so concerned with logically speaking to Lumina, trying to get her to gauge whether she was real or fake. Because of that, I've never taken the time to consider how she must feel about all of this. Since there is still a 1% chance she and the Altiri are real, I can't bring myself to treat her like an inanimate object, not after hearing all of this. Her sadness is real. Her desperation is tangible. What I believe deep down won't change the way she feels about what happened in her past. I never had any right to dismiss those feelings for any reason. Even if I decide after today to never speak to her again, it wouldn't be right to shut out her sadness. "This has to be hard on you. I can't even imagine something like that happening to me." All of the things she must have went through, all of the horrible moments in life she must have suffered all happened to her. No matter her essence, that is the kind of person Lumina is, the way she grew up.

"After that horrible chaos, the queen ended the draft, allowing everyone to return home to Karnak."

"Somehow, I'm guessing that you and half the fleet chose not to."

"It didn't surprise me that half the entire military refused to return to their old lives. What life could I return to down there, without a family to call my own? Me and the other Cy-Star members decided to comfort each other since there was nobody else. It was the reason we grew closer together, becoming best friends, sisters that we trusted best. So we and the other fleets like us stayed in space, in the name of honorable planetary defense. Even though half the fleet went home, even more Altiri on the surface of Karnak decided to join that lifestyle, coming up here voluntarily to join the Altiri military."

"Your sisters, the people you are closed to now, Junko and the others... You call each other sisters now because you are all really close to each other, right?" I can't believe all of that happened to her, and Lumina was forced to become partners with the people around her, since she had no other family to return to. No mother, because she was killed by Legasso, and no father, since most who were born as Altiri were never born as men.

"Yes," she admitted happily. "I love my sisters now, and I would do absolutely anything for them. They would also do anything for me."

Now I understand why they call each other sisters. They have no other family, but they live together in the same group, and have done so for countless years. Even if they are not biologically related, they might as well be sisters to each other, friends brought together in unity by impossible circumstances.

"Over the next long duration of about 100,000 years, we gradually recovered from those old wounds. New technology and science gave us access to all kinds of amazing powers and gadgets. New jobs were created all over the map so that we may all serve a purpose of our choosing. Life for us became different forever, calm, but satisfying."

"But, if you have a population forever in decline..." She must realize the consequences by now. The Altiri will die out over time.

"We have to be very careful. There is new technology that has helped us since its upbringing, but it isn't always perfect."

"Hold on a sec. I'm noticing a huge inconsistency." It was part of what had been bothering my subconscious during the telling of her historical story, something that at last failed to add up to what she was saying earlier. Lumina is supposed to be 3,616 years old, born in the same era of Legasso. But more than 100,000 years have passed since? "You said that you were born in the years of Legasso and Lady Q. Hundreds of thousands of years then pass, and you are only 3,616 years old?"

"Oh, I forgot to explain that."

How does that work? What is there to mention that could explain this?

"But it leads into where I was going anyway. See, back then, when an Altiri person died, that was the end of their life. Shortly after the Legasso incident ended, one of our top scientists came out with a new technology that would allow us to resurrect our fallen friends."

The weight of another growing montrum spun the back of my eyes around, as I grappled with an even more impossible concept to reality. "R—Resurrection? You mean, coming back to life, from the absolute dead?" If that's true, then the Altiri really are immortal! If they can never die, they would be true gods of their own world.

"It's not as perfect as you might imagine, but essentially they perform that purpose. They are enormous machines of massive size and take up the most amount of dark matter energy. I have died countless times from random accidents, and come back renewed and alive again. When we Altiri do this, by tradition, we reset our age counter back to zero. Of course, our bodies are not actually reverted to the age of infancy, not physically or mentally."

That's beyond incredible! "So then, you're much older than 3,616, aren't you?"

"Yes. Honestly, I've lost track of exactly how many days I've been alive before my last rebirth."

"Is it even beneficial to live that long?" There has to be a downside somewhere, there just has to be!

"I don't mind it, but it does have a few consequences. One of which is targeted memory loss, specific to the last four months of memory prior to our last death. No other memories are affected however, and our bodies are repaired rather than regenerated from infancy or any other age setting. Still, being alive that long has one disadvantage. It's boring up here. It can be really hard sometimes just to find something to do or study. That's why everything here changed so much since our discovery of the Earth. You can't begin to imagine how wonderful it was for all of us to have something so fresh on our minds."

"Basically creating a mass hysteria of curiosity." I completed the thought for her, since it was easy enough to imagine from that point, but it was still an amazing thing to hear from her. Their population decline problem has really been solved then!

"Yep. However, there are several limitations on whether a person is viable for resurrection. One of the most well-known is that the person cannot be dead for more than ten days. Any longer than this, and the machine will never work on that specific person."

"Why ten days?"

"Nobody knows. It has something to do with astral properties that we do not fully understand. On top of that, the second condition renders our healing impossible if any sustained wounds we take are too great or too specific to vital areas. The machine takes several scans of our bodies starting the process, then uses predictive DNA mapping to repair the damage using channeled and biometric matter replication via rapid regeneration. But if we take a massive hit to our head, or take too much physical damage to our body, repair and revival won't be possible."

Interesting. So they could still die even with that machine. All it would take is a critical hit? "So it would have to be a soft death."

"I'm afraid so. As I said before, anytime anyone comes back to life from this process, they lose somewhere between three to four months of their memory, specific to what they last remembered in their previous life cycle."

"So then... Damn! You still have a declining population. Even though this helps stabilize the numbers, all of you are still in a very slow gradual decline."

"It reminds us that we are all capable of death and will experience a permanent version of it one day. We never remember anything about what we saw after we die, and none of us really try to. Still, the dark moment of Legasso was the only dark moment in our history. Everything has so far improved for us since that moment. We all live better lives now, even if our time is more limited than it used to be. If the Altiri die out, that's just how it will have to be. We cannot restart the cycle of parthenogenesis."

Her plight reminds me of humanity in a way. Humans have no issue reproducing at a fast rate in life. However, the planet itself is still limited in both size and resources, we all die easy, and our life expectancy is much lower than an Altiri. One day, all of humanity will die out too, becoming extinct. It was a truth I had to accept, even though the causes were a little different than in Lumina's case. I felt kind of sad for them, that their race would one day die out. "If the Altiri are going to die out anyway, why then would all of you decide to purge humans?"

Lumina had no problem answering my question without hesitation. "Initially, it was an experiment to test the possibility of Altiri-to-human telepathy. When the experiment proved some success, purging became more of an accepted practice, so long as we had permission from the Altiri queen of course."

So was it the queen's decision, or Lumina's decision to purge me? I wished I could find out, but I wasn't sure how that would work in the first place. "I would very much like to meet this queen."

"I'll think about it."

I sensed her strong disdain to the very idea of it, wondering why she would be so hesitant to introduce me to the Altiri queen in the first place. There are obviously more mysteries to all of this that Lumina has not gotten to yet. I now had a full picture of what the Altiri history was like for them, for Lumina especially. It was a lot of detail to take in for such a short period of time, but I somehow felt better by the end of hearing her explanation. Before I could ask any more about why Lumina was waning the idea of showing me her queen, the school bells tolled once more, forcing the class to come to an end, and suggesting I hurry on to the locker room to change before my final class of the day. Still, the bell and its timing was totally unexpected for me. It didn't feel like a whole hour had passed around me, but that discussion must have been longer than I realized. "Looks like that took up all of gym time. I have one more class to go."

"You want me to explain the rest to you in your next class, or wait until you get out of school?"

There's more to this?! I sighed in stress, holding both sides of my head trying to decide what to do. Lumina really could go on all day about this after all. Maybe it wasn't history she wanted to talk about anymore, but something totally different. "Honestly, I feel like my head might explode if I learn anymore!" I have so many thoughts happening all the time per minute. But now, almost all of them were occupied processing and remembering everything I've heard from her today. I wasn't really in any pain, but the mere thought of learning anymore was scary to me. "But it's not like I will say no either. My music class is not that interesting."

"Excellent! I can talk to you some more then!" She sounded too excited to reveal that to me, so much that it raised my own suspicions.

"Did you actually enjoy talking about all of that?" I would be most concerned if she was happy to talk about something so dark and depressing. Could she be the psycho here?

"I only enjoyed talking to you about it. Other than you, I've only had my sisters to talk to about this for the past 100,000 years, officially speaking."

Why only her sisters... "Oh, right. The communication ban... That rule is way too harsh! How did you ever stay sane?"

"I really don't know." Lumina did not expand any further on that thought.

As for myself, I felt sluggish moving or thinking about anything. I became a little lightheaded from the massive amount of information that was dumped onto me in such a short time. I had mixed feelings about all of it too. I could understand how I was supposed to feel, but also conflicted about the reality of such stories in the first place. The lag nearly made me late for my next class, but it was located literally through a door connected to the gymnasium, so I still showed up in time. Despite everything I learned in gym, I knew going in that my music class would be just as crazy.