Binary Star

Chapter One: Initiation

When I finished dressing, I took the elevator up to the initiation ceremony. But, to be frank, 'ceremony' was a bit of false advertising. It was more of a debriefing than anything.

The Commander would give us our mission, location, and the Earthian we were to be paired up with, before beaming us down to the planet's surface and leaving us to take care of our own business from there.

Us Lilliputians' search for a new home had taken us to a distant planet in a faraway galaxy. Out of all the planets we investigated, this place, apparently named Earth, was our best hope for survival. The rest of the options were either uninhabitable to our kind or populated by dangerous native races. We made the decision to travel to one of the planets where the local inhabitants shared our genes, but that turned out to be more difficult than we had originally anticipated.

The first location, a colony in the Pleiades Star Cluster, was populated by a race of colossal carnivorous monsters known as Nephilim, who possessed a very dangerous taste for Lilliputian blood. At that rate, the diminiutive remainder of our kind would end up on a plate. The second, Hanabira, seemed nice enough, until we discovered that the planet's air was oversaturated with oxygen, and therefore unbreathable to us. The others were much too far for the S.S. Lillium to reach with its limited fuel supplies. So we went for our last closest option- Earth. It had everything we needed. Food, water, breathable air, stable climate- it seemed perfect, a little too perfect, for that matter. 

But there was a catch. That catch being the planet's dominant sentient species, who we paled in comparison to. Next to them, we were little more than insects. The humans, or Earthians, as we liked to call them, were terrifying, no doubt, but we were at our wit's end. We couldn't keep wandering the expanse of space forever, waiting for some perfect planet to drop into our laps.

Lillius was gone. We needed a new home- and fast. Even with Earth's giant natives, this was the best chance we would get.

So, we started sending transmissions. We sent coded messages in the universal language of mathematics, which the humans were thankfully intelligent enough to pick up and decipher. For a few months, there was a lot of back-and-forth messaging, lots of questions about what Earth was like, whether or not we came in peace, things like that. Of course, we never intended any harm. Even if we did, we would have no chance of defeating the Earthians. We weren't imperial warlords, we were refugees from a dead planet, and the meager weaponry we had left could not be wasted on an unwinnable galactic war.

The message to the Earthians was simple: we didn't come here because we wanted to, we came here because we had to. As it stood, we were entirely at the humans' mercy. The future of our race hung on whether or not they would let us stay on the planet. But by the grace of the universe, we came to an agreement. We would share our technology, stay out of their way, and allow life on Earth to continue as normal in exchange for us to colonize Earth and call it our new home, under the protection of the Earthian governments. At last, it seemed like the Lilliputians had a future.

Unfortunately, we would have to learn to survive the hazards that nature entailed, and adjust to living alongside our new massive-sized neighbors. To accomplish that, Scouts like Berenice and I were sent down to Earth on missions to learn more about humanity and their world. For females on the S.S. Lillium, there was one of two fates: to be a concubine, or to be a Scout. My sister and I chose the latter.

We studied and trained hard for many years to become Scouts, and now, our day of reckoning was finally here. We could be sent to anywhere on that huge blue planet, for any reason. Berenice and I would likely never see each other again. We were both keenly aware of that fact, but we accepted it anyway. After all, this wasn't for us. This was for the future of our species, for our children and our children's children, for the mother and father we had lost so tragically all those years ago, and for all the poor unfortunate souls who weren't lucky enough to be taken away on the S.S. Lillium. That was what our mission was for, and I was determined to accomplish it- at any cost.