Previous Post Another Day     The world she smelled, the world she saw, the world she breathed in, wasn't the world she left, just six short minutes ago. (This is as relative as any stretch of time could ever be, of course; minutes seem to be seconds, in the dead realm, and so too do hours seem to be minutes.) Ationta was a non-traditional alien at that time, that wondrous time when pollution wasn't even in her species' vocabulary and murder was so profane that it had only happened once in twenty-thousand years. Ationta's species never spoke of what became of their sole murderer of the last eon, though its legacy surely lived to set an example as a cautionary tale.     Thus it came to pass that she was no longer on her purple atmosphered planet. No more would she thrill to vegetation that went past her neck, or roving herds of six-legged Brontosaurs who were enlightened on a post-doctoral level about the current state of post-modernist feminism in both the scaled and furred lingual studies at Atronus University. To be sure, she barely remembered those conversations with the slow-tongued, barely mobile beasts. As her eyes focused and regained their composure, it seemed to her that memories of her past life were fading as mists in the morning sun. Shockingly, as the seconds turned to minutes, her previous memories turned to nothingness, and she began to have to deal with whatever it was, wherever she was, now.     Consequently, she faced the only choice she had left. She got up, and took in her surroundings. A verdant splendor spoke of only in the dreams of poets and madmen, what stood before her was every tree and grass she could've ever imagined, and many she couldn't. It seemed she was in an environmentalist's heaven, though her species had no word that was even remotely equivalent to that concept.     Certainly, she should be used to an odd existence. While she didn't know the term human yet, it was fitting that her species looked much like conifer pine cones on the human's planet Earth. It would do her no good to learn these terms, for she viewed humanity as a practice with as much condescension and lack of notice as they did representatives of her own species. And now—now she was in a body drastically inferior to her old one.     This one was pink, and slightly hairy, mostly weak, and petite, and irritatingly gelatinous. Indeed, it had a slight simian smell to it, which she identified in her old tongue as stirank. Her new people, the humans, didn't have a term for that either, but it more-or-less translated to “stench of hundreds of dead bodies.” Seems human bodies just don't quite have the new-life smell of her species' bodies, after all.     Of course her species had a name. Their planet even had a title. But we, your humble narrators, are legally forbade from revealing any of them, or the most horrifying intergalactic species of them all—lawyers--will sue us so hard that even our atoms will go             extinct. While her species has no time for lawyers as a social group, they are certainly aware of them, and utilize them as legal hitmen. This way, their natural hiding places—forests--aren't disturbed by folks trying to get past their defenses and hunt them, or feed them to mega-squirrels, or things of a various and despicable sort such as that.     Most despicable of all was the fact that this once proud member of a glorious intergalactic race would now embrace humiliating human tasks like showering, masturbating, dealing with telemarketing calls at 7 pm when she just sat down to dinner and didn't want to particularly deal with anyone or anything. Honestly, her memories of her past life were more deja-vu of a never-was time, now.     Moments passed, became days. These days became weeks, months, and years. Then one morning she awoke to find herself no longer feeling like she was a stranger in an ever-more-increasingly-askew land. She lost her individuality, she lost her edge. She became evermore that soul-crushingly frequent human trait: mediocrity. She excelled in no way, and would not have been recognized by her previous lifemates.     Sundials eventually succumb to shade. Candles are extinguished by the wind. Stars supernova into ultimate darkness. Likewise, so too does individuality deteriorate into group dissociation from self. Therefore, the former Ationta of Atonus University became a brick in the wall of ordinary human existence, humbled like any other, and there's the real tragedy. Amongst her studymates at Atonus U, she was a real bright sprout. Best in her class, brightest future out of any of them. Tragically, that potential was never realized, because her exoskeleton was more fragile than most, and that accidental fall from the podium did her in.     She doesn't know, and won't ever know, that the first boss she has in this new life knows all that. She just knows that he always looks at her with the guiltiest, saddest look a soul could ever have in their eyes. He knows that she'll never know that he gave her the whitrakk that killed her. Most denizens of Atonus U can handle their whitrakk, but then again, they've tried it once or twice. If you've a fragile, easily compromised exoskeleton? It pretty much stones you into a coma.     Thus, he embraced the lifestyle of a willing suicide, to pay penance as a lesser being, to guide the girl he murdered through the rekkaku of the misery of human existence. So too must others learn from this experience, so that never again should anyone ever have to know what it's like to live as highly-literate sentient conifer cones and become warlike pink bipedal barely-follicled simians who can't get out of their own way long enough to stop killing each other.

With a background like that, you'd forgive her for feeling she'd got a bad deal.