The Elaine With Back Pain 🏳️‍⚧️

Report of First Contact with the Yukionnan People's Union by Priestess Si-Na, 2212.8.15

Our Revered Elders have been in a confused state as to how to accept the presence of other forms of intelligent life beyond our own. Our scholars have been aware of the presence of alien beings attempting to make contact with us, but we have shied away from attempting to contact them in return - it is not the way of the Ridzazin Path to extend our reach, rather than to contemplate the nature of ourselves, and of our role in the Path.

You can imagine my surprise then, and dismay, when first contact was breached to my temple on Ridzazib. The speaker seemed as confused as us, although I can only imagine its strange form, like crystals of ice on a frozen lake, was more confusing to us than ours to them.

Transcribing begins now. Testing. One, two, three? These things never work. My crystalogist says that it's my crystalic resonance. She ALWAYS says that it's my "crystalic resonance." I think it's more that I'm hopeless with these communication devices. Whatever is the point? We can communicate just as well without them. If Atsuyo didn't insist on this record keeping, I wouldn't bother.

Oh, it seems that it is working. Very well.

A lot has changed in the turn of the century - it's a tired cliche that no snow particle falls in the same way as another, but it is true. Since my election to the position of Kristalis two years ago, we have launched our first sublight spacecraft, the ISS Nagayama. The difficulty our scientists faced in allowing our people to merely survive outside of our homeland of Kris, much less to calibrate our crystals to the reaches of deep space, was long thought insurmountable. I, for one, do not know the word "insurmountable."

Oh, for Lasoura's sake, Himichiro, I know I just used it. I am transcribing an important historical document, could you... yes, Himi, I love you too, just... not now, dear... you are intolerable.