First Contact

In our last post, you learned all about humanity’s journey to the stars and their dire need for escape. We know you’re dying to discover the fate of the 21^st Ark that carried Dhondup and Hodge but that must remain a mystery for now! The next best thing we have is the fate of 20^th Ark, whose crew was relieved to have a near head-on collision. And no, it’s not because they were trying to commit interstellar insurance fraud.

When abandoning a dying planet, the last thing they were probably expecting was to almost crash into an alien tour group taking selfies with the moons of Jupiter. First contact is meant for diplomats and emissaries, not an interstellar tour guide who had only taken on this group in order to be able to pay off debts gained from backroom snail racing. From the humans’ perspective, they began to hear strange, garbled, words coming from their radio. Many of them compared it to a trout trying to do improvisational jazz.  From the alien perspective, they had been coming to see a few interesting Martian deserts, the great red storm on Jupiter, and observe a little blue marble that had been flooded by its dominant species. In fact, the tour guide, a gaseous Iodeneon named Xenick Vraifith, was midway through explaining to their tour group that the Federation had recently rescinded their observation crews around Earth. They believed that the human race were on the road to extinction and would therefore never achieve space travel. It was just as they were launching into a description of the local planet systems that the pilot of the safari ship alerted them to the incoming behemoth careening away from Earth.

A choice faced Xenick: Did they try and sneak around the surprise ship? Or would they open communication? Ignorant that the ship was coming directly from Earth’s surface, Xenick decided to open communication in order to give them a piece of his mind. The safari ship’s logs reveal that Xenick's exact words were: "Who the f*ck gave you a ship license, you blind sack of slag?! Get out of the f*cking lanes and learn how to f*cking fly you incompetent Sh*twipe!" 

Thankfully, due to a delay on Xenick’s universal translator, the humans only perceived this outpouring of profanity as a series of beeps and whistles. They responded, very politely with a greeting and identification in as many languages as were shared by the refugees. Luckily for the humans, the observation crews that had been orbiting their planet¹, had taken samples of as many human languages as possible and loaded them into the universal translation matrix². Once Xenick's aging system managed to recognise the human language, they were able to communicate. Thus the first words humanity heard from an alien being were "We apologise for the delay, we are currently trying to navigate around some form of primitive space junk."

Thankfully, they were not dismissed so easily and, as luck would have it, one of the members of the safari tour was a retired Tyndarean xenoanthropologist by the name of Skargugh Y'Bolor. He realised that they were communicating with what was thought to be a soon-to-be-extinct species and, after getting over his giddiness, began the proper protocol to initiate First Contact. How the itinerant tour guide ended up locked in the ship's toilet after suggesting brushing off the humans and leaving them to die so they can finish the tour on time, is unknown.
 

And the rest, as they say, is history.

¹Serious fact! Both the Federation and the Alliance have rigorously enforced the law that states no-one is allowed to interfere in the development of worlds that have not achieved space travel yet.

²Fun fact! This universal translation matrix is more colloquially known as Polylinguo, or occasionally Polly for short.