For those of you who don't want to read my whole post:
Here's the gist of it.
An alien race from a distant galaxy sent a message to our galaxy. The message was this:
“We are the Xsiff, from galaxies far, far away. We have sent this message in hopes to trade. We have advanced in nearly all fields of study. But our restrictive government has laws against cloning and genetic enhancement. All attempts at anything like this have been stifled since it first became an option; we haven’t even a genetic map of our own. What we need is for a race to genetically engineer for us a creature. We have exactly what and how it needs to be done, but we need to negotiate before we can divulge any secret. Please contact us by sending a message of any kind to the beacon that is before you. But please, this is a secret, and any other race must not know about it”
In other words, I need someone who can draw a creature for me… Please PM me!
For those of you who want to read my whole post(It's a good story!):
Against the deep dark nothingness of the edge of the galaxy, there began a pulse; a bright, white-lit pulse, emanating a signal in all frequencies across the whole of the EM spectrum in a long, quavering, pulse. It looked much like a light-bulb flickering before its imminent demise. After a long, agitated 2 minutes, the beacon fell to silence again. Then, suddenly, there was a flash of light blue as the beacon ripped into hyper-space and re-entered conventional space, just a few light-minutes ahead of its own signal.
This time, however, the small orb-shaped beacon was glowing, a soft deep purple against the endless black.
When the signal reached its own source of generation, light merely stopped against the surface of the orb, and began to spin around it, at the speed of light. As soon as the end of the signal had attached itself to the advanced light-trapping beacon, there was another instantaneous flash of blue. A few moments later, the white signal burned through the void fast enough to reach the extreme opposite of the galaxy in just a few hundred light-years.
* * *
Life was quiet for Shruyiio. Nothing really happened in his small burrow, except for the soothing suckling sounds of his brothers and sisters feeding from his mother. He was busy cleaning himself, licking more of his family's fur from his body, and adding it to the mass that consisted of their floor. Nothing really happened on this small, Triassic-like planet, not for him.
Above his burrow, there used be the ceaseless trembling and pounding of large reptilian animals that would have looked oddly similar to dinosaurs, except for the third leg and eyeball. But, for Shruyiio’s colony, the noise had ended tens of millennia ago, their quiet, borer-feeding society had slipped unnoticed, unchanged, under a huge mountain range.
Or, rather, the mountain range had built itself above them. It turns out this colony had started out just above a fault line. These shifting plates had shoved them far into the crust, but still provided one exit just at the base of the mountain.
Like Earth, this planet evolved all of its creatures in just a limited number of ways. There were always 3 eyes, and there were usually three legs and two arms, unless the third leg, sticking farther forward than the other two, had evolved into an arm of sorts. But the insects were far different than the land-creatures. The insects had no eyes, they had no use for them. They were also well equipped for digging, boring, and more digging. They were as fast underground as an Earthling ant was above.
Like the early pseudo-mammals, the insects had long ago learned that they would have a better chance to survive if they were underground; the mammals were much fewer in number than the tiny insect-hunting reptiles above. Even the large retiles served as a threat, their gigantic feet were way larger than the Earth types, sometimes able to create craters the size of a small lake, and when the next rain came, it came to destroy entire micro ecologies with it.
Evolution was very rapid on this planet, but mainly for the reptiles; they constantly proved to kill each other out, each of their respective niches being very quickly replaced by a distant cousin. However, the reptiles had never had any need for intelligence on this planet; it was a tropical planet, perfect for growing thick jungles all about. This meant eons and eons of evolution possible for early insects to try their life in the air, on the ground, in the water, and in the treetops, but nowhere gave them any shelter from the reptilian hunters. Eventually the water-species and ground-species learned that underground was the safest place to be, feeding on roots of small trees and ferns.
Where the insects went, the mammals followed, needing food; they couldn’t dig deep enough to simply dig the insects out. So they made huge mazes and tunnels deep underground. They would dig and dig and dig for hundreds of years, piling stones against the walls and floors, waiting for an insect to fall through a ceiling or the side of the wall. Trapped, unable to go through the stones, the mammals would devour the insects.
The mammals were also trapped, like the insects. Both of them were confined to the crust of the planet, even though the mammals had vast colonies, spreading through thousands of kilometers of dirt. But they were not allowed above this earthy prison, not with the reptiles above.
But that was soon to change.
The mazes were staggeringly huge, large enough to put many Earth-sized populations of insects to extinction very swiftly. But this world was immensely populated with trees and ferns, creating an almost endless supply of insects for the mammals feeding pleasure.
These massive super-colonies meant for an evolutionary split of the mammals, the first of significance in their long existence. It started as one small colony, growing day by day, but eventually, tunnels would collapse from earthquakes or mighty crashes from the mighty reptiles above, sometimes severing families from families forever.
Collapses used to be very common for Shruyiio’s colony, but all that had changed when it started slipping beneath the solid foundation of the mountain. The plate they existed in silently slipped down into the molten rock beneath, while the plate above them suffered horribly from quakes, a few hundred kilometers away from their colony, by random chance, very often.
* * *
In the first second that the re-born signal existed, it passed a few old, dying, solar systems. Its immense amounts of energy had not been dispersed enough yet, and many planets were simply incinerated by the code.
As it passed through its first minute of existence, one planet it passed in its ever-growing 3 dimensional path was Shruyiio’s. This planet was circling a very old star. The star had been refueled by random large coffins of gas trapped in rock from super-novas many galaxies away.
This was probably the galaxy’s luckiest star.
As the determined message sailed past the system, the planet singed and writhed in pain. Immediately, forests caught on fire and oceans boiled. The thick skin of the reptiles instantly was cooked by the array of microwaves, gamma rays, X rays, and light waves. Even the top layers of ground were shaken violently by the slaughtering, speedy pulse of energy. The particles of the tightly compacted dirt began to rub against one another, shooting thousands of tons of dirt into the air in a fraction of a second; a dust storm was everywhere.
Shruyiio felt the pulse; it shook the very planet. He pressed himself against the ground and looked frantically around; instincts told him a large predator was near. He waited in silence, while his family, and indeed, the whole colony did the same. As they waited, the heat from the pulse penetrated deep into the earth, it was something Shruyiio had never felt his life. He was near the surface of the crust, relatively, only about 300 meters deep.
Like his star, and his planet, he was lucky. Any closer to the surface, and he would have cooked in an instant. He nearly did; the heat was unbearable. It immediately made him sweat, and his bare feet and hands burned from the air. His fur was singeing, and he could smell it in the air. It was the scent of his own family, which was almost reassuring, except for the fact that his family was burning. He was smart enough to understand this, and it repulsed him. He vomited from the strength of the smell. But it didn’t help; he vomited again.
This time, he moved away from the smell and towards the entrance to his house. From his tunnel, he could see a bright light. Light was something he hadn’t seen since the last time he’d been outside, like his parents instructed him not to.
His father went to find him on that day, and was eaten by a small three-legged cat-like reptile in order to save his son.
Shruyiio went into the shaft of burning light, trying to escape the heat. He felt a cool breeze coming from below, and immediately shot down the tunnel. This was no easy feat, for hundreds of other Colonists were doing the same. There he stayed in the damp, cool, crowded companionship of the Colonists for a few hours.
Shruyiio finally decided that it was cool enough to return home. He began to climb again. When he reached his house, the light above him intrigued him so much, that he couldn’t even keep his painful memories from stopping him to go up.
With easy success- all the other Colonists stayed in their homes, licking their fur to try to cure it; Shruyiio never liked his fur anyway, as odd as it sounds.
When he reached the surface, his eyes failed him as they did so many years ago(The Colonists had surprisingly long life-spans, despite their being underground mammals). After a few long minutes, they finally adjusted to the bright star above, and what he saw is not what he remembered at all. The hole he had exited was at least 5 times bigger than what he had remembered, and there were to lush trees or ferns to speak of. It was at least 20 degrees(Fahrenheit) too hot, and he could hear no sounds of the rumbling reptiles. He ventured further, abandoning caution. He came to a large corpse; a humungous, larger-than-brontosaurus, delicious-smelling, perfectly cooked corpse. He did not hesitate to dig in. His jaw hurt from ripping at the thick flesh, but eventually they tore enough of it away for him to expertly dig into it.
Being completely satisfied, he sauntered back home, where he proceeded to tell his family about the mountain of food. The word spread, and once again, the Colonists emerged from the ground.
The insects would soon be forced to follow; there were very few roots left.
The world, over the years plunged into a darkness from the few meters of soil flying loose, causing a general cooling of the planet, eerily Earth-like. All the while, the white, now weaker, signal plowed through the galaxy.
Near certain systems, it would slow down and generate a hologram of the beacon, a deep purple beacon, with the superlight waves coursing around it. There it would generate the original signal over again, pulsing for 2 minute intervals, once every year. The message read as follows:
“We are the Xsiff, from galaxies far, far away. We have sent this message in hopes to trade. We have advanced in nearly all fields of study. But our restrictive government has laws against cloning and genetic enhancement. All attempts at anything like this have been stifled since it first became an option; we haven’t even a genetic map of our own. What we need is for a race to genetically engineer for us a creature. We have exactly what and how it needs to be done, but we need to negotiate before we can divulge any secret. Please contact us by sending a message of any kind to the beacon that is before you. But please, this is a secret, and any other race must not know about it”
(In other words, I need someone who can draw a creature for me…)
