Lavidia tried to get some sleep, but she couldn’t. Too many emotions for one day. First, there were all those things they had discovered inside the cave. Extremely strange things that seemed to confirm the existence of another civilization on the planet before human civilization. Something totally unheard of and absurd, by the way. And to top it off, the helicopter joke.
She was about to fall asleep, near dawn, when she remembered, in the video about the Moon, that there was one of those vehicles with the very large wheels, similar to the one they found fossilised when entering the cave. That triggered all her internal alarms: how could the contest organisers know that? It was clear that Mondra and she had been the first to enter there, and no one else could know that. Where did they get that information? But what really set off her alarms was the buzzing sound that was beginning to be heard outside her house. Could it be the extra-terrestrial ship? She wondered. No, she wasn’t dreaming. She sat up, put on her pants and coat, wore her boots, went outside...
And yes, there was the ship. Suspended in the air, a few steps from her door, there was an elongated object of a greyish colour that now stood vertically and glowed faintly in the dim light of dawn. After a few moments and after a hatch opened, another hexapod creature, similar to the one she had seen in the projection the day before, came out.
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“Good morning, Lavidia. I am SAIR-Spda. Could we go to the excavation, please?”
The woman almost fainted right there, and indeed, she was about to do so when the ship, almost magically, rose into the sky, leaving that strange being next to her. It only reached her knees, although its body was elongated, extending about two steps behind what appeared to be a head.
Lavidia alternately looked at the hexapod and the sky, with her mouth open, while the ship disappeared into the distance at an unusually high speed.
“It is propelled by nuclear fusion energy,” said the being. “That’s why it goes so fast. The drone you saw yesterday was sustained by propellers because our technology does not allow us to install nuclear devices in such small objects in the presence of a warm atmosphere. Now, please, could we go to the excavation?”
That’s when the girl reacted:
“Not yet. I have to have breakfast first.”