I’m falling into the blackness, the blackness surrounding me and engulfing me like fire when it’s engulfing you with flames. I’m falling and I’ve been falling for hours, or that’s what it feels like, but let me start from the beginning of my childhood before I was in a world filled with war and death.

I was born on Earth in 1989 in upstate New York, where I was raised by my father and mother until my mother caught a sickness that was unknown — a sickness that nobody had ever had.

This is the story of me trying to find the source of the unknown sickness.

I was ten when I learned that my mother’s sickness could not be cured. I was heartbroken, but the day that she died, a miracle happened — something impossible — something humans do not believe in. “Aliens.” I had ran out of the hospital when my mother died. I ran straight out of her room and out the doors of the hospital, nobody stopping me. I fell down into the grass crying, my face in my hands, then all of a sudden the darkness of the night is replaced with light. I look to see what it is, and see a ship with blue light hovering over me. “No, it can’t be,” I say to myself. Before I can think anymore, I black out…

I wake up inside of a large area on a very comfortable bed or couch. I try to sit up but see that I’m strapped to the plush seat. I see a room, and a little farther away from me I see another room, and in that room I hear a lot of voices. I call for someone and hear silence overcome the room in front of me. Someone comes out — an alien girl or woman. She has a blue face with brown hair. She comes over to me and says, “You’re up, young one.” I’m very surprised that this thing, this alien, is speaking a human language.

“Where am I?” I ask with a slight sputter.

“You’re in space, young one, but we will land soon.”

I wait for an hour or so and fall asleep, and when I wake up I’m in a shipyard on this sand planet. I try to sit up and see that I’m not strapped to the bed anymore. I get up and jump onto the ground, immediately feeling pins and needles. I walk to the door where the aliens were before and see that nobody is there. I go inside the room and see that the walls are covered with guns and other weapons of all sizes. I grab a pistol and a handleless blade of some kind and put them in my pockets. I creep to the exit of the ship and see that nobody’s there. I push a button, opening the door. The shipyard has many different types of ships, some very different from the one that I had been in. I carefully creep out the door and jump onto the sand. “Wohh,” I say. It feels so different walking on a planet that isn’t earth. I walk behind ships, making sure nobody sees me. I walk through the shipyard and into the city. The city’s buildings are very different from the buildings on earth. These buildings are made completely out of diamond and other very different materials. I walk through the city seeing many different beings. I feel like they are all watching me because I’m a human, something they are not. I walk into an alleyway into a set of houses and see that it’s a dead end. I turn around to see a gang of aliens with guns and knives. Oh no, I think, do I really have to die today? The aliens come toward me, teeth showing. Then a miracle happens — the alien girl from the ship comes out of nowhere and slices the alien’s necks.

”You ran away,” the alien says.

“Ya,” I say. ”I didn’t know who you were.”

“Perhaps I should have explained to you who I am. Come with me — I need to take you somewhere safe.”

So I go with her to a small building in the corner of town. She explains that she is here to protect me from the aliens that had cornered me in the alleyway. She explains that they are the aliens who know about the sickness that had killed my mother, and they might have been the aliens who had killed my mother. I now know the alien girls name — it’s Nishinida. I now have a friend — someone that will help me find the sickness. We leave in the night to go get food and other materials. We stop at a grocery store of some kind. The grocery store has many different types of foods that I’ve never seen before. The fish are very creepy they have three eyes or two heads. Nishinida gets one of those three eyed fishes and some weird long reptilian-looking animal that is still flipping around when the fish guy gives it to us. As we leave, Nishinida tells me that we needed to make another stop. I follow her to a clothing store. “If you’re going to stay, you’re going to have to stay in fashion,” she says.

I go inside and see what she means. The clothes here are nothing like the clothes that I am wearing. I grab a sheath from a rack holding weapon accessories and show it to Nishinida. “You need clothes that fit this galaxy, you can have the sheath but clothes will help you blend in and make it hard for the aliens to find you and kill you,” she said. I walk around, trying to find something that fits, trying on big clothes, making me feel stupid and awkward. I finally find something that I like that fits — it’s a green jacket with gloves that have knives that come out of the knuckles, kinda like wolverine from the X Men. I settle with the outfit and take it to Nishinida. She stares at it for a little while and then takes it and puts it on the cashier’s desk. We leave the clothing store with my new outfit and go to the small house.

 

I wake up with my face on the floor and my legs in a chair — a very awkward pose for sleep but I guess I haven’t ever really slept in a chair. I smell smells coming from the kitchen. Nishinida’s making breakfast. It makes me think of my mother’s cooking. She’s probably making some alien breakfast and I’m hungry but I have no idea what the food tastes like so I’m not that interested in eating. I walk into the kitchen and find that she’s not making an alien breakfast — she’s making pancakes.

“Yum,” I say when I walk over to her.

“You’re up.”

“Uhh, ya,” I said.

“Well, breakfast’s ready.”

“K.” I sit down and eat my pancakes when I suddenly ask Nishinida how she knows that my mother is dead. “Some things you don’t want to know, John, but I can tell you something — the aliens are after you cause you have a power to destroy their kind and they think you want to.”

“Holy ***, me? How do I have an alien power?”

“You’re the alien, John, not anyone else.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“They killed your mother for the same reason.” I look at her like she’s crazy because my mother died from a sickness, not because of some crazy gang of crazy aliens.

“What are we going to do today?” I ask.

“I want to investigate where the aliens’ hideout is.”

And that’s what we did. We went into the city to try to kidnap the enemy aliens. We went into the city and stayed in the most well-known spots so the enemy aliens would come at us. We went to at least five different places before we actually realized that the aliens were following us, but when we realized we made sure that it looked like we didn’t know that they were following us. We went into a dead end so we could fight the aliens. Sure enough, the aliens were following us. They cornered us in the alleyway, their guns pulled out. We pulled our guns out too.

“Don’t kill one,” Nishinida whispers to me.

I grip my pistol tightly and press my finger against the trigger. The bullet speeds towards one of the aliens’ heads. It goes through the head, making him drop to the ground dead. Nishinida has killed at least two aliens while I killed that one, leaving two left. I shoot the alien on the right. Nishida jumps on the other alien and puts the alien’s hands on its back. She grabs handcuffs from her pocket and puts them on the alien’s wrists and throws him in a chair. She speaks in an alien language to the alien while she grabs a knife from her belt. She questions the alien about many different things and in the end she lets him go.

She says, “The hideout is 100 miles away from this planet.”

We run to the ship and jump in it, the employees of the shipyard trying to stop us from taking off. We get through all the craziness and we are in space. I see that the hideout looks like a giant metal planet in space. As we get closer to it, I see how big it actually is. It’s two times the size of the planet we were just on. We fly to the top of the hideout and land there. We jump out and a bunch of aliens come at us and start shooting us. I shoot back at them, killing one, but there are maybe ten or so. Nishinida throws a grenade from her belt, killing all ten of the aliens.

“We have to blow up the hideout,” Nishinida says, and she hands me a giant explosive.

I put it on the opposite side of the hideout from where I am, and then I see Nishinida’s ship lifting up off of the planet with Nishinida in the ship just as I start the device. I run as far away from the explosive as I can waiting for it to explode. Booom. I get pushed into space at the impact and this is where I’m falling into nothingness, into blackness, into the darkness of space.