[b][i]— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: Earth’s Extraterrestrial Embassy[/i][/b]

With the rice cake consumed, a dehydrated nitroxcide-infused cockroach chaser crunched profanely in Fran’s half-open gullet as she ambled over to Zuorn, took one look at the new alien ambassador, and made the type of conclusions an overly-opinionated secretary is wont to do. The news blared behind them, and painted a rather grim picture of Earth. She muted it, and unmuted her mouth.

Maybe she was wrong, but it looked like the prelude to a panic attack.

[i]“Wild, isn’t it? No matter how different we seem, our feelings are universal. Here, honey, take this kleenex, it is for collecting mucus or to just have something soft to hold on to.”[/i]

Fran pressed it into Zuorn’s hand, and flicked her arm up to adjust her gull-winged spectacles, and prattled, [i]“All we can do is focus on what is in front of us. Look at this data pad, nothing on it. Sterile, just wiped it down myself. Wouldn’t it be nice if it told us here on Earth what your people need and the type of assistance they require? Now if someone could put that all down into words, well, now that’s doing something.”[/i]

[center]… Ϟ[/center]

[b][i]— Earth-F67X: Second Alien Contact: Neptune[/i][/b]

No meme immediately emerged from beneath the dense hydrogen-primary atmosphere of the blue giant, Le Verrier’s planet, Dalain van, Tangaroa, … Neptune. But it wasn’t silent, not in that broader sense. As with all planets in the F67X Sol system, it possessed a deep-well military counter-incursion facility. One that, at the behest of New Roswell’s Symbiote, enacted a prescripted sequence.

Serendipitously for the oddly polygonal spacecraft, it wasn’t a lethal action; perhaps because it wasn’t hiding, perhaps because it wasn’t attacking in a way that threatened so much as caused cause for clarification.

A fold in subspace was migrated from THE STORE and unfolded …

A serialization of quantum potentialities reached out and around the intruder and then actualized from the foam as an out-of-sequence tightly-packed plank particulate cloud that, due to the observer effect, seemed to emanate from Neptune’s depths as a black finger, crooked, reminiscent of an Ikeda map, but any implied order was a trick of relativity, for it all happened with a stunning, strange simultaneity. With a reflective index of just 0.003, it was completely invisible to all but the most precise of electromagnetic sensors. Arranged, it morphed into a bismuth net, like an array of inter-linked space shuriken able to penetrate the defenses of most starships Earth had thus-far encountered and, among other things, produce technical woes.

It existed to answer the question of how Earth should deal with information warfare or, put perhaps just a lone troll.

Which is why, if it was able to be detected by the alien ship, the bismuth cloud’s tendril-shape summoned, curled into a fist, and then extended from that a single, prominent digit that waved back and forth in a universal gesture of [i]‘no, no, no — you better not do that’[/i] — and awaited a response.