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Upon my arrival, I looked around at my surroundings. This is clearly not our colony on Sephera 3, I thought as my eyes tried to adjust to the greater light intensity than I'd been briefed about. Aside from the star, and the color of the vegetation, the pex and vulog radiation are wildly varying, something is very wrong.

It has been said that there are things too disturbing and upsetting for the mind of the sane to encompass. I hardly believed it until the events I began chronicling.

Until recently, I was a fairly typical, perhaps sub-average, member of my species. My agile mind made up for physical shortcomings, and an avoidance of more formal scholarship. What interested me, I excelled at; what didn't, I did the minimum necessary. Despite what many have told me, this is a common trait across many species. A Consarkitava hardly studies the trajectory of its lunge, it either collects its prey, or it starves. Yet the same creature will collect shiny things of many colors and obsessively arrange them just so to make a bower to attract a mate. As the day dawned on the flight test, I looked for some way to avoid the drudgery. I was not expecting to fall through a wormhole and find myself elsewhere.

I really would have preferred to complete the flying test.

The cry of rage from my number 3 position indicated a wild animal in some considerable pain.

And I have wandered into its territory, wonderful, I thought as I observed in that direction, while in my numbers 1 and 5 positions appeared more wildlife. Bilateral symmetry? Someone's being artistic, I concluded and moved on my walking tentacles to open the distance. Either sexually dimorphic or two subtly similar species, I thought on scanning their electrical control/response systems and articulation points. Both appeared to be wearing clothing rather that having wildly colored pelts. So, not animals, or very advanced pets, I realized.

That the pair had yet to take notice of me, and the creature from number 3 hadn't appeared, I secreted myself behind some vegetation. Another member of our group tried to 'attack' me with a soft light pulse. It spoke well of its stealth that I hadn't noticed until it fired. Since it continued to fire and move, I assumed these were warning shots of low intensity, but then it showed no hostility, so I reclassified them as some type of game, like pursue, where one of the play group attempts to catch another, and then it is incumbent on that member to catch another.

Then the pex radiation spiked and the more colorful one released an electrical discharge. The target's face twisted into what would be a grimace on face of a Xoth-dweller, but could mean anything. It too generated a pulse of pex, creating a shield that absorbed the blast into itself and grew stronger, not weaker. Very sophisticated manipulation. It then folded itself onto the ground and raised both its upper limbs as high as it could.

Why lower yourself, then reach upward? I considered the baffling display, my 'playmate' fired a bright, soft-light pulse at them, neither reacted with more than a grimace, Ha!, I had guessed right. Oh, more sophisticated, nonverbal communication. I watched as the brightly colored one moved in cautiously, but damped down its pex energies and began making loud noises at the other, utterly ignoring the other who put the light emitter away and brought out what I swear were primitive, writing tools. The absurd notion: this was a mating dance between the original pair, occurred to me. Not unusual, the brightly colored male displaying his prowess to the drab female, I thought, But in a higher-order species, someone is creating sports, or failed to do a better job of purging old instincts.

Then my fremling partner showed up, from position 3 and gave the impression that raising my tentacles in an attempt to duplicate the nonaggression supplication would be useless. If you can sense anger in creatures as alien as these, it is seriously angry. Its pex discharge is weak, diffuse and easily disrupted. To avoid physical confrontation, I launch into the air. My five wings biting the ebb and flow well enough to lift me easily beyond the reach of its limbs, and my own training enough to deflect its pex manipulation. If I'd done the logical thing, and pulled above the canopy of vegetation, things might have occurred very differently, but curiosity kept me close enough to observe the interaction.

It was in the canopy I encountered the last of our group. Similar morphology to the other four, but completely different mentality and psychology. It was hanging onto a tree branch, hissed and swiped at me. I had met small, hunting arboreals who exhibited similar threat displays, and were as trivial. But something that big was clearly a flawed sport. You don't give instincts of a small, hunting arboreal to a creature that size. I did note the vulog-formed claws it manifested. Someone had a very strange sense of humor. And a serious cruel streak inflicting it on a creature.

I glanced down and noted that the other four were arguing. The two drab ones were the loudest and most aggressive, and the brightly colored one seemed to be siding with the first drab one that had initiated nonviolence. 'He-who-writes' tried interjecting, and was roundly ignored. I must apologize that the animal husbandry part of me was intrigued. I realized that the drab ones might be the males of the species, and the brightly colored one might be the female. The realization struck me as I remembered they were wearing clothing, and the coloring was a choice, not an adaptation. If the males were the drab ones, they had selected, or had selected for them, the drab colors as a combat/stalking advantage.

The arboreal made an interrogative noise, waited a moment, then approached. It didn't like my scent, and quickly retreated back to its own branch. It also kept looking at the argument going on down below.

The arrival of the natives put an end to any speculation. Bilateral symmetry, quadrupedal rather than bipedal. Sorry, since upright posture was the only obvious thing I and the others shared, I hadn't mentioned their upright posture with their bipedalism, now that we had quadrupeds to compare I felt that the difference must be described. The natives had primitive weapons and body armor, substantial pex fields around themselves, and unfortunately, yet another alien language that neither I nor the arguers could interpret it. Whatever they ordered was not complied with quickly enough and the quadrupeds employed several pex manipulating devices of significant power. Significant enough that even though the Speciesist arguer threw up his own pex defense, and He-of-nonviolence threw up a defense to cover the four of them, neither proved sufficient. The knots of pex-manipulated energy battered through the first shield, sending He-of-nonviolence staggering, and passed through without restraint the Speciesist's defensive field.

The field quested towards me, and my own manipulations couldn't disrupt it. The Arboreal hissed and fled through the trees. I was about to take to the air and initiate a duplicate escape when the initial pair both screamed in either pain or mortal terror and collapsed writhing on the ground. Seeing that the natives seemed to be as possessed by the energies they were using as the energy was on completing its duty cycle, I had to intervene. I dropped from my perch, spread my wings wide and placed myself close enough to attract and survive the pex energies that were pummeling the pair. With two and five wings wide, and three and four trying to cover the pair, the energies used against them nearly ceased. I could still smell the stench of roasted meat emanating from the pair.

The natives managed to shutdown their attack, and stood in horror at me standing amid their heavy barrage, and the two peacemakers falling under the heaviest and nearly lethal attack. They clearly expected I would be in their victims' situation, yet I was unaffected.

Orders were made and people, I grant them personhood because of their ability to understand the consequences of their actions and empathize with their victims, arrived with stretchers and medical supplies. I noted that the natives while brightly colored to the point of confusion fell into a few broad categories. Winged, horned, neither and the trio of larger examples with both. The Boths were the strongest pex field wielders, and even had some vulog effects in place, or at the ready. The largest seemed genuinely horrified that the attack should have had such a life-threatening effect on someone. Six, smaller ones, the bearers of these weapons clustered around The Largest and chattered in terror, one of the winged, and both of the neithers lacrimating excessively as they spoke. Did the smell of scorched flesh affected them? I noted that during this, the male of the pair had crawled towards the female and gripped her hand in his. He began channeling pex energies, and while all their injuries didn't vanish, enough did before he lost consciousness, that their survival was in doubt rather than the obvious loss it had been previously.

I will admit to some manipulation. The genetic and psychological scans of the two so badly wounded by the natives' barrage demanded it. If they were going to survive here, they needed to change.

I felt the irony of the Speciesist and He-who-writes being so limited in their vulnerability to the natives' weapon deeply. That the two psychologically 'healthiest' by my reckoning were the least by the natives' measure was a fascinating puzzle, and fascinating puzzles always drew me in. I will not claim altruism for my manipulations when I discovered all four of them possessed a chromosomal sequence for a particular metabolism of an enzyme that is as good as a flag saying 'my people were here!' I suspect that on testing, the Arboreal will have it too. They, all four were the product, or likely the descendants of a product of one of our ethical geneticists. One who felt the need to place the proper mark on the work. I can't imagine they were a successful piece of work, but I felt a duty to even these four, obviously sentient, beings, and the Arboreal, if and when it returned.

I have removed several, eh pages, of internal monologue on the possibilities of these creatures' abandonment and concluded that either they are the very distant, fully-sentient and sapient relatives of a form who was distinctly neither. Or they were a more recent development who were released onto a fallow planet to develop on their own. I have that much faith in the basic decency of my own people to come to those conclusions.
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The man pulled out the recorder out of the pocket of his seersucker suit, and checked the tape was in it. "There are things that make you question the inherent goodness of man, and at the same time, renew your faith that there is goodness and decency in the world. April 1, 1976, an appropriate day for what became one of the strangest odysseys in this reporter's long career.

"The Windy City had been experiencing a series of storms, unusual at first only in their ferocity, then our staff meteorologist Cameron Burnside began plotting where the most damaging and powerful lighting strikes had occurred, and in that plot, I found a pattern. A circle is what the untrained eye would have seen looking at the result, but a nine-pointed star was what jumped out of the page at me during Cameron's time-lapse assembly. An incomplete nine-pointed star.

"After an argument with my editor Vincenzo, I obtained a decent camera from the photography section and camped out in the approximate location of the last of the expected lightning bursts. While Cameron would have been the choice to document a weather phenomenon of this magnitude, I had a reporter's instinct that this wasn't a series of random events, but directed by some other power. A power that our City Fathers would again sweep under the rug as 'beneath peoples' notice' or other such folderol, but something a good journalist would know the people needed to know about.

"It would become the last serious decision I'd make on Earth for some time.

"The details of my arrival would beggar the imagination of most and would immediately point to the obvious case that I was drinking. Nothing could be further from the truth. To say the companions I'd arrived with were an eye-opener would also be a lie of omission of the most staggering sort. There were only two of us among the group who were psychologically 'normal' and the other member of that fraternity was about as far from physically 'normal' as the rational mind allowed: five, identical sides, tentacles, eyestalks, wings and somehow, somewhere a decent heart." He shut off the recorder and walked after the guards who were removing the fallen. The spear points were real enough that he didn't want to chance that they'd be used.

"People are the same everywhere," he grumbled as he was once again being dragged hither and yon by the inept and obstructive forces of the ruling class.

DISCLAIMER: Harry Dresden is the property of Jim Butcher, Carl Kolchak is the property of ABC/Universal Television, Ranma Saotome is the property of Rumiko Takahashi, Sailor Jupiter is the property of Naoko Takeuchi.