LF Friends, Will Travel

It takes a village.

Date: 68 PST (Post Stasis Time)

"It takes a village to raise a child" - Terran Proverb, unknown origin.

It was supposed to have been his species next step forwards: "Mountain stream". A first colony outside of their home home planet, the start of a new raging river into the universe. The hopes and dreams of every Zorthian packed onto a single ship and pushed into the starry skies. The seeds sent out had sprouted into a beautiful set of cities and towns over ten peaceful years. Ten long years. Ten tenacious years.

Ten useless years, as it was all for nothing. Every monument, every building, every triumph and every memory would be reduced to nothingness: every single one of them was going to die.

The cities of glass were no more. The orange sun of this planet no longer shimmered between the towers that had spiralled high into the air. The Zorthian's tribute to a new world no longer bathed in an eternal sunset: any structure over 3 stories tall had long since collapsed into tiny shards of glass.

The artificial rivers that sprawled along the surface were no longer filled with Zorthian's living their lives. No more children played in pools, no more lovers swam tail to tail under the dual moonlit sky. Anyone left at this point would be sheltering in whatever structures that still remained: in basements and emergency shelters, surrounded by their families, simply waiting for the end.

Apart from one. In one of the few buildings still standing Fluur lay on the floor. He, like all of his species, could be described as a large 4ft long salamander with translucent blue skin, interspersed with vibrant red gills and fins.

The room was a mess: water pooled along the expertly crafted glass floors. Shelves, desks and half the ceiling lay scattered in piles of debris among what had once been a beautiful building.

Everything was shrouded in darkness, the dual moons only providing a small amount of light through the opaque glass sides of the building he was in. Fluur's only real source of light was the few blinking LED's of the one machine still online, leaving the Zorthian alone with nothing but the dread of his thoughts.

Well, alone with nothing but the dread of his thoughts and the copious amounts of intoxicants floating in the water around him, the bottles of mind altering substances he was drinking heavily from gave some solace as he lay there. Luckily the room was still flooded with 2ft of water, as intended, allowing Fluur to lie half submerged in the water while he tried to get the most drunk that any Zorthian had ever gotten. Half sitting half floating in the darkness, drinking heavily while he waited to die.

The world began to shake again, another earthquake hitting the building and forcing Fluur to hold onto anything still bolted down. Waiting the 20 seconds for the world to stop shaking and spinning, the sound of something presumably expensive breaking in another room. Eventually it stopped, letting the Zorthian to resume his through the building's translucent glass walls, at the at the moonlit skyline of the destroyed city he called home.

Fluur took another swig of the drink, enjoying the numbing agents running through his body. That had been the longest one yet, not that the quakes were going to get better any time soon. It turns out that there was a reason this planet was uninhabited, even though it was in such a prime position in the galaxy.

A strange combination of elements all mixing together in a way that the Zorthian scientists could barely understand, meant this planet was literally a timebomb; it would eventually shake itself apart, leaving nothing but an asteroid belt. The realization of what was causing the increasing quakes had only been figured out a week ago and based on the calculated timescale they barely had a day at most left.