I'm consolidating all my old standalone contest entries into my current collections. This was written for a Blue Man Group contest!

PROLOGUE

It was, Marie concluded, a positively boring day.

The most exciting thing that had happened so far was an escaped chicken, and as it was the one with a deformed leg, it hadn't even been that difficult to catch. Sure, Mark had accidentally killed it and got a whipping from Father, but she hated when he got whipped, so that hadn't been interesting, either.

Sighing, she grabbed the water bucket from its hook on the barn wall and headed toward the woods. While the family had a well out by the cow pasture, Mother loved the clear water of the nearby spring.

Marie hummed to herself as she entered the woods, swinging the bucket back and forth. "Going to fetch some water, water, water," she sang quietly to herself, jumping as a small squirrel ran in front of her. Smiling at her skittishness, she continued on her way.

The stream was babbling quietly, as always. Marie was getting an uneasy feeling, though, as she looked through the trees to the meadow beyond where the wolf pits were dug.

Marie hated the wolf traps that had earned the village of Woolpit its name. She usually avoided looking at them as she filled the water pail, but this morning was different. People were by the pits.

Marie narrowed her eyes and looked harder. She could have sworn they were green.

Lifting her skirts so they didn't hinder her, Marie followed the stream quickly until it thinned to a crossable width. She hopped over, hitched her skirts higher (who was around to see her undergarments besides the strangers?) and dashed through the woods toward them. Midway, she realized that she probably should have walked so as not to attract very much attention, but it was too late now. She had already been as loud as a pregnant buffalo. However, she would be fine, she knew. As she could now see through the thin trees, they were children. Green children. A little girl and a little boy. And they were watching her approach.

She broke through the trees, dropping her skirts and panting. "Why, hello," she said, putting on the voice that she usually reserved for small children and animals. "I'm Marie. What are your names?"

The little girl blinked once, twice. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks. The little boy swayed slightly and then hacked horribly onto his hands. When he pulled them away from his face, Marie saw, to her horror, flecks of blood on them.

"Wait here," she said, and ran toward the village nearby.

The little girl turned to the little boy and made a series of clicking sounds that no human would be capable of. "I told them. I told them you were too weak for this."

The boy coughed again. More speckles of blood dotted his hands. "I will be fine, Sister."

The boy was dead within the week.

*

Thousands of lightyears away, a green man turned from his position at the supercomputer. His wife approached him, picking at her blue skin nervously.

"Our son is going to die," her husband told her, sorrow in his voice.

The woman put a hand over her mouth. "She told us," she remembered, clicks muffled by her hand. "Our daughter told us he could not do this."

"We will have to send more," her husband pointed out. "We cannot collect enough data about the human race with one little girl."

"No, of course not. The blue ones will be ready in a few thousand years. We can deliver them then."

The man looked out of the window at the speckles of stars and the dead planet they were orbiting. "It irks me to be so close to so much knowledge. Every other intelligent creature in the universe has been catalogued here, observed carefully. Humans are the only ones we have failed to study."

"Don't be angry. Our daughter might not do so badly."

"Her brother was the one cut out for this line of work. She will become one of them. You wait and see."

The man was right, of course. In twenty years, her daughter would look like an Earthling, having forgotten her former family, even her brother.

But the blue ones would not. The blue ones were prepared.

Chapter One

The men glanced around at one another, hearts steeled. One picked at his blue skin, a habit received from his mother.

The trio could not talk. It was their father's doing. What had been the downfall of their sister thousands of years ago had been the ability to talk, to socialize and learn the human language. "Learn how they speak," their father reminded them constantly, "but not how they feel."

Each man had a small camera implanted in the corner of their eye, in case the supercomputer was to fail. The spaceship was getting old. Once their parents, universe-renowned explorers, received the information on humans to finish their millennia-in-the-making book, they would collect their triplets and return to their home world. Roughly translated, its name was the equivalent of Saint Martin's Land.

The triplets were prepared. They knew they could pull this off.

*

"You're the weirdest men I've ever met," said the jolly, fat human sitting across the desk.

The trio had been working for over a year now, learning the language and performing in various small establishments. The people loved them.

Their father had warned them that they would have to become famous to understand everything in the human world. They just hadn't expected it to be this easy. How had their sister failed such a simple task?

"We want to make you a contract. A tour, boys, how does that sound?"

The eldest brother recited the proper response in his head. Sounds good. The middle brother struggled to decipher the human speech--he was still having trouble. The littlest brother was the only one who knew the correct thing to do was nod his head in the affirmative--he was a fast learner.

*

The crowds screamed as the men effortlessly performed. Again, how could this be so easy? Everyone seemed to find them amusing and talented so quickly...

But then, these human instruments and dance forms were simple to master. Honestly, couldn't they have been given a more challenging task?

The brothers discussed this often. While they could not speak--at least not audibly--they were immensely skilled in reading each other's body language and had developed a sort of sign language. It helped them to communicate with each other, but not the outside world. Just as they liked it.

*

The people here spoke a different language. The third brother had already come close to mastering it, writing down phrases on the napkins and pads of paper in their hotel, a delightful human resting place.

It had been most satisfactory when the three blue men were given the chance to travel internationally. They couldn't learn all they needed to about the human race from the simple place they had been beamed down to--they would have to explore the human world.

So that is what they were doing. Their roles had fallen into place. The first brother was most adept at observing different social skills and cues, such as smiling, hand-shaking, and variations of other facial expressions and greetings, along with other things. The second brother recorded anything he could find about the human's past--he had a much easier job reading the human language than he did understanding it, so he preferred to spend days immersed in a history book. The third brother was given the challenging task of mastering every language he came across.

*

All of the information was immediately uploaded to their parents' supercomputer. While they were nowhere near being done collecting all the information, their parents wanted them to soon return, to keep them company again while the next batch of strangely-colored children were sent to Earth to pick up where they had left off.

The brothers refused. They could not leave Earth. While they may have lived on their mother ship centuries longer than on Earth, they had been studying the planet for so many years that they were attached. They loved the Earth, its people. Performing. Especially performing. It made people so happy. Happiness was their favorite human emotion to observe.

*

The three blue men were occasionally lonely. They had each other to comfort each other during this time, but truly, they wanted to connect with the Earthlings they had come to love, the people they performed for regularly.

Their father had destroyed all chances of that, however, when he removed their ability to speak in any language.

So they performed. They put their heart into their work, both on the stage and off it.

The Blue Man Group did what they did best, and observed human happiness.