The SiP Saga Chronicles

The Royal Wedding (Part 1 of 2)

If you were to look up at the night sky on a clear evening, you would see a host of stars and constellations twinkling down. The light from these stars is millions of years, if not billions of years old, captured in time from ancient celestial bodies.

Of the many constellations in the night sky, one of the most famous is Scorpius, one of the original twelve zodiac star patterns in the shape of a scorpion.

In the Northern Hemisphere, if you look for it with the naked eye, you will find Scorpius close to the southern horizon, while in the Southern Hemisphere, it sits high in the sky near the center of the Milky Way.

Antares is the largest, brightest star in the Scorpius constellation, a red super-giant star with a mass 12 times larger than our sun.

Now, if you had a giant telescope, which is probably unlikely as it would be bigger than the biggest house, you can imagine, but for the sake of argument, let's say you do. If you were to look at Antares through this ginormous telescope, you would see a small red dot orbiting this impossibly colossal star, and this dot would appear to be vibrating. This vibrating dot is the planet Haull.

Usually, vibration is caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, which creates the twinkle effect we are used to seeing from regular stars. But this tiny planet, part of a solar system of five nearly 11 billion years old, creates a vibration on its own.

There is no sound in space, but sound does create waves, and a planet as loud as Haull creates shockwaves so large that they are dangerous to passing starships or, in this case, the other four neighboring planets in the Antares system. The noise was so bad that the civilizations on the adjacent planets had to move; it was unbearable.

Haull is a red planet but not like Mars, a candy pink color; no, this planet is red, ruby red like a perfectly round cherry in the cosmos.

The planet has a single continent called Dinn, the size of Australia, and it is surrounded by a red ocean that covers the remainder of the planet's surface. The land, being the only part of the planet's crust poking out from the vast ocean, is an aquamarine color with different shades of blue depending on the relief of the terrain. The dark navy of river basins or powder-blue magnificence of mountain ranges all sit under a purple sky.

But where does all the noise come from on this tiny red planet, so much noise that it makes the space around it vibrate and forces perfectly reasonable and quiet planetary neighbors to relocate to a more peaceful star system?

The answer lies with the inhabitants of this floating ruby-red planet. Haull is the homeworld of a race of tiny, red creatures with enormously loud and powerful voices. These creatures are called - The Hollar.

At first glance of the average Hollar, you would assume they were a diminutive race, as in stature, they grow no bigger than a pear, even if the eye stalks that support their two bulbous eyes can elevate their height by another few inches. Their bodies are a glossy red, with two black arms and legs and, intriguingly, two mouths positioned on either side of their torso, which curiously is also their face.

The Hollar's dual orifices serve different purposes; the mouth on the right is preferred for eating food, drinking, and breathing, leaving the one on the left with a singular directive - talking. The Hollar love to talk; it is the most critical aspect of their society, their greatest strength, weakness, reason for existence, and destruction. What they lack in physical presence, they more than compensate for in vocal range.

An average Hollar spends most of their long life (they can live for millions of years under the right circumstances) talking and shouting, humming, moaning, griping, and generally making a noise of one description or another. Under normal human conditions, with normal human vocal cords, this would make for a loud and rowdy world of incessant chatter. However, the Hollar have the most powerful voices in the galaxy. So, as the other planets in the Antares system discovered, this constant conversation can be deafening, even in outer space.