A Kastrian, tall, lean, blue skin, white eyes, stood on a cliff in a barren piece of land in the middle of the ocean. She looked back as her purple hair glowed under the four moons shining in the blue sky that resembled her body. She looked at the excavation site that had dug up an entire city beneath the sand. She looked ahead at the sea that stretched till the horizon and jumped off of a cliff. She dived down into the ocean beneath and left behind bubbles as she swam to the depths on the ocean. Slowly, the dark lit up with lights and she could see an entire city. There were markets and more Kastrians were swimming across the waters. Some had blue skins, others had pink, black or green. Everyone was talking in a foreign tongue.

The Kastrians of Kelgester, a blue planet that is 80% water and 20% of the land. We spend our lives predominantly in the sea and the time moves slowly here. So, if I live for 50 years here, I can live for 5000 years on Earth.

Kastrians are the species that grow extremely fast. Within seven years, our bodies are developed and we are mature enough to get a partner and extend our bloodlines. We die by the age of fifty. Our youths are long from seven to forty-seven, and only after that, we start ageing. This is the reason why Kastrians are recognised as eternally youthful, exploited by other species whoever visit our planet.

I am Ameradite. An archaeologist who has devoted her life towards finding out the history of our mysterious planet and why we resemble those who live on Earth if at all we resemble those who live on Earth. I swam across the waters and reached one huge rock on another end of the ocean. Our planet is entirely water with small rocks or tiny islands patches at certain places. That is why our species has adapted itself to the marine life.

But were we always aquatic organisms?

I swam upwards and pushed my head out of the water. He sat on a rock, purplish-blue skin and neon blue eyes staring at the sky.

"Xelveyni," I moved towards him as I crawled my body on the rock like a frog and sat beside him. He was the most attractive Kastrian I had known. Nobody had a body as vividly coloured as him.
"Can you see that planet?" He pointed at the sky and my eyes dilated.
We've got strong senses, vision, hearing, feelings, trust, every emotion among our species is stronger.

"Where?" I looked at the rings of Saturn. He was pointing towards that same galaxy.
"That blue planet, it looks just like ours,"
"Yeah, it does. It's called Earth. I wonder if people live there,"
"They do," He looked into my eyes and my face reflected in his big, blue eyes.

"I've heard of those organisms. Our anatomies match to a certain extent." I said.
"They are called "Humans". They have been living there for more than five thousand years and have a rich history. Wars, mystical disappearance of civilisations, industrialisation, everything you learn to read about,"

"I'm not interested in the history of other planets,"
He laughed. What a contagious laughter he has. "My next mission will be the Earth," He got up and reached his arms to the sky. He looked at that blue planet like it was everything he wanted. His coat glowing under the satellites and stars, "I want to be a part of that world and make some human friends."

"When will you be free?" She asked.
"This will be my last," He smiled, "Once I return, we can be together,"
"I hope so, Mr Astraunaut," I smiled.
"Hey, I'm just doing my job,"

"Your job always gives me anxiety. Take my powers, you can control water, try controlling the wind."
"It's really not needed," He said.
"You never know,"
We pressed our heads together. That was the last time I touched him.

.

"I'm kinda scared..." His green eyes looked into mine as he stood in front of me, wrapped up in human skin.
"Whenever you're scared or anxious, just looked at the stars. No matter where you are, they will connect us together."

"What if I'm in a thousand pieces, collapsing inside?"

"Stars are born when a gaseous nebula collapses. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth,"
.

"Ameradite!" My very close friend and a remarkable spaceship architect, Clanthido, shouted as he grabbed me into his arms, "I am nominated for the Xelveyni Quintessence award for Astronomical ethos!"
It was the highest award to be nominated for named after the remarkable physicist and astronaut, Xelveyni. He was a genius. By the age of seven, he had already visited two neighbouring galaxies and written about two thousand alien civilization research papers. By ten, he managed to create a time suspender which could cancel out the fourth dimension, time and make travel through space faster. But we lost him in a space mission to Earth, about fifty-three billion light-years away from us.

I winged my fingers together and smiled at Clanthido.
"Bah! Too early. Do that when I have the prize in my hand,"
"Okay," I laughed.

How did it become like this?

I remembered the day Xelveyni left. The four moons were shining in their respective four directions and he stood at the middle with his helmet, dressed up in a human skin suit. He got on the craft and gave me one final look. He smiled and whispered,

"I promise I'll see you again"

But he never came back.

Our government is hiding something.

"Maybe he's stuck there?" I told our minister.
"He's dead," He concluded without any evidence.
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because we went to look for him and found broken parts of his spaceship in the ocean,"
"You didn't find his body there though,"

"If the spaceship crashed, he couldn't have survived,"
"But what if—"
"This conversation is over," He threw me out.

Well, this is over for you, not me. If you can't help me find him, I don't need you. I will go to Earth myself and find him. Clanthido's team helped me out with that. They were building another spaceship, but without Xelveyni, it's taking much longer than it should have.

"What if he really is dead?" Clanthido asked as we swam across the ocean. I looked at his yellow eyes.

"He cannot die, he just can't! He promised me he'll see me again" I told him, "But on some nights, my fear grows stronger. And my brain asks me—What if he really is dead? But then my heart shakes my fears off. What if he is alive and needs our help? Everyone around me is losing hope that he might never return. If I lose hope too, he really will never return. As long as one spark remains, it can rise a fire."

"Ameradite..."

"He has to return, he just has to. And if he has forgotten about us, I'll go there myself and whack his head. And tell him, "Hey, fucking weirdo, it's time to come back home. Enough of humans!" And then we'll bring him back," I looked at Clanthido. He smiled, "Likewise,"

We are already so close, we can't lose hope now.
We reached his workplace and he decided to offer me a drink to warm me up before I left for the excavation site. We sat at a table.

"I'm wondering...Why didn't he send us an SOS electromagnetic signal?" I asked Clanthido. He drew something on the white table. It was a diagram of the universe, and he highlighted two galaxies placed opposite to each other in the universe and drew a line joining both of them.
"This is our galaxy, Persiniux and this is the galaxy where we sent Xelveyni, they call it "Milky way". Milky way is alone 100,000 light-years long. He travelled there faster than light by creating a time loop within the centre of the universe,"

"The intergalactic bulge?"
"Yes. Now, let's say he wants to communicate with us using those electromagnetic signals." He drew a few blue concentric circles emerging out from Milky way. "We are so far away that by the time the arc of this circle reaches our galaxy, the human civilization would have been wiped out from Earth. And we reach there after civilization dies out."
"So, we can't wait for the signal,"
"We can't. Besides, their civilisation isn't powerful like ours. I've read about their technology, it can't help him,"

"I figured that."
He began walking and I followed him.
"You know the universe is expanding and so to prepare for an eventual energy shortage caused by the accelerating expansion of the universe, we can gather stars and capture their energy using structures known as Dyson spheres."
"And then?"
"We install them in the spacecraft, in case something happens, they would hold enough energy to take us back to Kelgester."

"We are like at two opposite ends of the universe, how will we cross these stars?"
"We pass from one galactic centre, use the Dyson sphere to cancel out the fourth dimension and then reach the Milky way's galactic centre,"
"Galactic centre?" I was an archaeologist. My knowledge of the universe was very scarce. I wasn't even interested in it until I lost Xelveyni.

"The Galaxy Centre is the epicentre of all galaxies in No Man's Sky and the only direct gateway to the next galaxy in numerical order. A faster and more reliable method of galaxy travel is the restart of the simulation. Reaching the galactic core will send you to an entirely new galaxy. Your inventory's contents will remain, as will your units, but your ship, multi-tool, and Exosuit's upgrades will be broken and all need repairing. It will be risky, we might encounter other unfriendly space creatures while we are at it."

"I don't care,"
He took a sigh, "My friendship will kill me,"
I laughed and decided to leave for the site. He got back to the trials of the spaceship. My team had collected from pictures from the site. We found some irregularly shaped skulls wrapped up in clothes in the old structures of the civilization. There were writings on the walls. Some old language I couldn't understand. We clicked a picture of everything and packed it all in a journal.

We sent all the skulls to the forensic lab for testing. While I was cleaning up my room, I saw an old book Xelveyni gave me. It was a novel called "River God," written in English. He knew English. He learnt it by himself by observing patterns and relating them to their own language. He had translated it for me to read. I decided to give it a read during my travel so that I wasn't bored at the spaceship.

A week passed by and Clanthido gave a green flag to the spaceship. Finally, after four years, it was my time. I had a look at the forensic reports and tried to decode the language. I got on the spaceship with Clanthido and he launched the spacecraft. I took the research papers and the book with me to read them on my way. We both got into our artificial human skinsuit in case we needed to blend in with humans. But I wanted as less human interaction as possible.

He started the spaceship and it went up with a gush at full speed, leaving behind flames and smoke.

https://youtu.be/BzOjc0g4v1U

I was anxious and excited. But when we finally jumped out of our magnetic and gravitational field, the spaceship slowed down. Clanthido was making adjustments to take up another action.

The most difficult part of our space journey was about to come—Looping the spacecraft through time. That was the first greatest risk we had to face.

Because we were about to cheat on time.

-To be continued

Ameradite
5500 Rebellion