Introduction
Welcome, young traveler. Please hold while I recall this planned message… Alright. As you may have heard from your friends already, aliens exist! That especially includes me, and I am here to offer you any number of a vast array of services, for the low price of me offering you other services! It’s a stupendous deal, as you see, the human body is not designed to hold in all that old blood. So I wish to relieve you of your poison, as I can make use of it where otherwise it might kill you. In return for this, simply name it! Entertainment, education, purification, communication, transportation, guidance, happy dreams; I preside over all domains of the mind. Medical care comes free with all transactions! Consult your local authorities to determine which services may be available in your region. Certain actions are prohibited by local laws, including but not limited to life saving, provision of necessary medicine, bone fractures, disease, mental instability, vice, education, transportation, video, audio, text, alarms, scheduling, or memoranda. I am in no way responsible for any harm caused by human actions or by natural terrestrial phenomena. Make sure to participate in local elections, and stay safe while I work hard to bring you the best possible service.This standard announcement has been broadcast across the globe , in every language, to most countries. The typical imagined first-contact would have been something more like a TV broadcast, or a ship landing, or even an invasion- But none of these would have the correct impact. A television broadcast would barely be seen, even in the lands with screens everywhere. A ship landing would send the knowledge down a cascade of human-filtered relays. Is it invasion if it's in your own territory? Much more effective would be a telepathic announcement, to maximize future transactions.
Analysis
However, this probably isn’t a story, so the narrative kinda ends with that. Instead: This world exists to document the state of the universe. Most things go unwritten, but piece by piece it accumulates. To begin with, it might be good to be aware of one main setting: a weirdly harmonic star system, of three life-filled worlds, all inhabited by similar kinds of creatures.All such creatures, as well as plants, parasites, and all kinds of microbes, are composed of string-like elements. These strings, for most forms of life, are themselves composed of cells- understood to be the “baser machinery” that drives strings, which in turn form every living thing that you might read about.
Most forms of life make use of shape-altering processes, mostly to do with the outermost layers. Each animal makes use of it in some specific, though rarely universal, way. Polypi , as the name suggests, do not have specifically eight tentacles, but any number of them. Many kinds of simian-adjacent creatures especially use shapeshifting for socialization and communication, within and between species.
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