As promised, here is my story titled "Crossover". For those who didn't read my first post, here is the synopsis. Crossover tells the tale of the Kelinians, an extremely advanced race that lives in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and their creation of a new technology that allows them to travel to the Milky Way in seconds. However, things go very wrong the moment they arrive. Entirely told from the perspective of its very young ship commander (captain), they must find a way to survive in an unknown galaxy filled with unknown alien races, some who may aid them and others who may want such advanced technology for themselves. This is my first ever Star Trek story so be nice. 
For most of our existence, probably from the first time that our species grew more intelligent than the other animals around us or perhaps even earlier than that, we would look up into the night sky and see, to the south, an immense, bright, and spiral-shaped cloud of stars. It was the largest thing in our skies, more so than our sun and two moons, Kalia and Talanca. For most of our history, and maybe even still to this very day, it was the most dominating thing in our lives. Our earliest cave paintings dating back tens of thousands of years clearly show it, and nearly all of our ancient texts make references to it. Obviously, there was one question that was asked more than any other.
What exactly was it?
There were other questions asked about this strange cloud. Why was it so large? What made it so bright like that? Why did it never move from its spot like the other clouds in the sky? Basically, why was this cloud so different from the other normal clouds?
For the most religious among us, the answer was very simple. The reason why this cloud was so special was because it was the home of our Great Creator, Keli. It was said that She created us in Her image, hence the name of our race: Kelinian. It made sense that someone as beautiful as Keli would live in a place just as beautiful from where she could watch over Her children. In fact, the name that our people called the cloud, Maliana Kelinas, came from an ancient Kelinian language which meant, “Cloud of Keli”. This answer came to be the most accepted one for the majority of our history, and no one dared to question it.
A couple of thousand years ago, though, a brave group of scientists decided to do just that. Risking their careers, and even their lives, they used the most advanced observation instruments of the time to make as detailed a study as they could. After doing that for a couple of years, they made a conclusion that shocked many of our people. Instead of the cloud being the home of Keli, they declared that it was another galaxy, different and many times larger than the one we were said to live in ourselves. At that time, galaxies were a theoretical possibility and not yet proven to be scientific fact.
As expected, such a stunning announcement didn’t come without consequences. For a very long time, very large, powerful, and strict religious factions ruled over most of our world’s continents. Anything that didn’t fit in with their view of the world, or universe for that matter, was considered to be heresy. Needless to say, that announcement drove them into outrage. Using their great power, they had the scientists jailed on false, even ridiculous charges. They then issued an ultimatum: either the scientists recant what they said and admit they were mistaken, or be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. A couple did, but the majority did not. The factions made good on their promise and had them jailed for the rest of their lives. Many centuries would pass before everything they said would be proven true. To this day, they were known as “The Martyrs of the Dawn of the Scientific Age".
More than a thousand years ago, our civilization and technology advanced to the point where we could send tall, chemically powered rockets out of Kelinar’s atmosphere and into space. The first rockets to do so only carried artificial satellites. Eventually, brave Kelinian explorers would strap themselves into those dangerous rockets and ride them into space. The first few times, they just merely orbited our world. However, a capsule would soon land on Kalia, the larger of our two moons. It was the first time that our people set foot on another world. Our history was changed forever.
For the next two hundred years, our people would develop bigger, better, and faster ships to travel to the other planets, moons, and celestial bodies in our star system. We learned a lot from exploring those worlds. Still, we didn’t feel quite satisfied. We felt that there was something that was holding us back from reaching the height of our long history of being great explorers.
It was the ability to travel faster than the speed of light.
It was something that had been theorized, but had yet to be proven. Many said that it was impossible to travel faster than light, mainly due to the Infinite Curve Theory. The theory went that the faster you moved, the more mass you build up. The more mass you built up, the greater the engine power you would need to move. When you reached the speed of light, your mass would also reach infinity, and therefore you would need infinite engine power. It didn’t stop scientists and engineers from trying to find a way around that, though.
Eventually, they seemed to have found a way to travel faster than the speed of light without the involvement of the Infinite Curve Theory or even the relativistic effects that came along with it. It was called the space distortion system, otherwise known as the warp drive. The idea behind the warp drive was that even though one couldn’t move though space faster than light, space itself could do whatever it wanted. The warp drive would work by forming a subspace bubble around the ship to distort space, effectively making space itself propel the ship faster than light.
When the first prototype ship carrying the warp drive was built, there were many who said that it wouldn’t work. They said the most the system would do was produce interesting spatial effects around the ship and nothing else. Some feared that it would do unknown and possibly catastrophic damage to space. However, all of their voices went silent when the test pilot, a Kelinian by the name of Manesi Solanda, took the prototype ship past the speed of light on its first flight, proving that the concept worked.
Finally, our race achieved the ability to travel faster than the speed of light and our entire galaxy had suddenly been opened for our exploration.
As one would expect, we took full advantage of our warp technology. Explorers traveled to the closest star to our own and discovered that it had its own system of planets. One of them, a world which we would call Luitin, was pretty unremarkable by planetary standards. It was nothing more than a barren, cratered world with an orange sky. It was special to us, though, because it was the very first world outside our star system on which Kelinians first set foot upon. It was basically the same way for the next fifty years, with us traveling to new star systems and exploring new worlds.
It was then that we discovered the two advanced, spacefaring races that we shared the galaxy with.
Naturally, it was the most shattering event in our entire history. It completely changed the way that we viewed the universe. For a very long time, we wondered if our species was truly unique in the universe. Many said that we couldn’t be alone as the universe was simply too big for us to be, but since we hadn’t found any evidence of other life anywhere before then. So for us to find two advanced species was immensely shocking, to say the very least.
One of those races called themselves the Deroxans. They came from a planet named Derolan. They were the ones that were closest to us in overall appearance, although there were still major differences. They had a spectacular artistic culture that even rivaled our own in several areas. A surprising thing about them was that they were also extremely traditionalist. If you were able to visit their world, it would’ve been very difficult to tell that they were even a spacefaring race as their architectural styles hadn’t changed much in thousands of years. It was probably why even though they had warp travel slightly longer than we did, they were not near as advanced as we were. It may also be why we don’t have much contact with them other than trade rights.
The other race was known as the Tahngi. They were an incredibly warlike reptilian race that lived on a harsh planet they named Cxhu’ rhugl’ ghahr, which, loosely translated, meant either “The Sacred Place” or “The Divine Place”. As suggested, they thought they had some sort of god-given right to rule over the galaxy and its inhabitants. They built a massive army and space fleet for that very purpose. They used that force to launch war on both the Deroxans and us. The first time that they attacked us happened just five years after we first made contact with them. In what many would call an act by Keli Herself, our very small militia was able to completely devastate the Tahngi forces with minimal Kelinian losses.
As a result of that incursion, we would create a much larger and far more powerful force that was called the Kelinian Space Defense Force. It was the greatest military effort seen since before the creation of the Kelinar Union nearly six thousand years ago. Although it has greatly evolved in the hundreds of years since its conception, its main purpose was and still is to defend Kelinar space and territories from any and all threats.
The Tahngi invaded our space ten times since the first war, the last one happening a hundred years ago. Each time, we won a decisive victory. It was rumored that the Tahngi hated us so much due to that they ate the bodies of any dead Kelinian they found as an ultimate act of spite. Obviously, we try not to have any contact with them.
How did we Kelinians compare to the Deroxans and the Tahngi? One big difference was that unlike them, we had no male or female split in our species. Instead, our bodies combined the two functions which made a Kelinian able to both fertilize another and give birth to our young. If an outside species had to make a comparison between the three of us, they would most likely say that we strongly resembled female Deroxans, or the female Deroxans resembled us, either way or the other. Depending on which part of Kelinar one came from, our skin tone ranged from dark to light tan with an orange tint due to our blood, our eyes from black to purple, and our hair from black to red. The average Kelinian stood nearly two natras tall, weighed 1.5 kemastones, and lived to be nearly three hundred years of age. Due to our planet having a wide range of climates, we were more highly adaptable to temperature than either of the two races, which enabled us to settle on more worlds.
Although all Kelinians were united under the Kelinar Union banner, that wasn’t always how it was. For most of our long history, we were divided into different, fiercely independent tribes. It wasn’t uncommon for battles to break out between two or more tribes. Six thousand years ago, the greatest war our world had ever seen happened. Simply called the Great War, it involved most of the tribes on four of Kelinar’s six continents. When the war finally ended, many tribes ceased to exist, and many population centers were devastated. What would become the Kelinar Union would start not long after when several of Kelinar’s largest and most powerful tribes banded together in a mutual defense pact. Although there were still a few conflicts, war of such scale never happened on Kelinar again.
Our people would accomplish many great things since then, but there was always one thing that seemed to taunt us, one thing that seemed so near but so far, one thing that captured the imagination of probably every Kelinian who ever lived. It was that great star cloud in the night sky, Maliana Kelinas. Even our fastest ships would take decades to get there, theoretically doable given our long lifespan but not feasible. Many concepts were put out but none had ever gone past the theoretical stage. Despite our advances in technology and explorer spirit, it seemed like a trip to Maliana Kelinas would never become a reality.
Until now.
Unknown to all but a very select few, in a very remote part of our space, a great ship had been constructed, a ship with the power and technology to make the trip to Maliana Kelinas in just a few seconds.
And I was the one chosen to be its ship commander.
My name is Fararacina Kilhatharin. I am a ship commander in the Kelinian Space Defense Force. I came from the city of Keli Aranara on Kelinar, the capital and largest city in the entire Kelinar Union. I also came from what could be considered an elite family. Our family had a long history of serving the Kelinar Union in one form or another. I considered my achievement to be the latest of such.
Like many Kelinians, I grew up with all sorts of stories about space. I can still clearly recall the night I really learned about Maliana Kelinas. I was about six years old then. My parents took both me and my younger sibling to an area many neminatras away from Keli Aranara where its lights weren’t polluting the sky. I immediately saw how much brighter and clearer the night sky was.
I would ask my prime parent what that bright cloud in the sky was. She would tell me that it was called Maliana Kelinas. I asked if anyone has been there since it seemed so close to us. She said that no Kelinian had ever gone there. I would then boldly declare that I would be the first. She just chuckled and patted my head. It was undoubtedly an impossible dream, but to a child, anything was possible.
It was that night that I knew space was where I belonged. I would spend the majority of my childhood dreaming and studying about it. I admit to driving both of my parents crazy with my knowledge. The only question that seemed to be left was which space agency I wanted to go to. There were three; the Space Transport Service, the Kelinian Science and Exploration Agency, and the Kelinian Space Defense Force. It took until my late childhood years to choose the latter, mainly for one reason. The KSDF was usually the first to land on unexplored worlds, something that I wanted to do.
When I turned forty years old, the age when a Kelinian was considered an adult, I applied to the KSDF academy in Keli Aranara and was accepted on the first try. I would spend the next three years learning more about space, both its wonders and dangers. I excelled in the academy, greatly impressing my instructors. Many said I would have a superb career ahead of me. When I graduated with the rank of novice science assistant, I had a new understanding and appreciation of space.
The next forty years saw me rise quickly through the ranks in the Kelinian Space Defense Force. I would explore many worlds and stars, run countless scientific experiments, and eventually become an auxiliary ship commander. All of that was fine. I was living my dream and loving every moment of it.
However, all of that paled to my greatest accomplishment; becoming a full ship commander at the very young age of eighty six and given command of the brand new patrol runner Helian. That currently made me the youngest ship commander in the entire force. It was very rare, but not unheard of, that people became ship commanders in the KSDF before the age of a hundred, the age when one was considered wise enough to be promoted to such. I remembered how proud my shipmates and especially my family were. That said nothing to how proud I was. I wasn’t the youngest ship commander ever, though. That honor belonged to someone who was promoted to that rank at the unheard of age of sixty five. I did make it into the top ten list of youngest ship commanders, however. While proud, I only hoped I could live up to the new expectations.
While I was exploring new worlds, I had to admit that my childhood dream of going to Maliana Kelinas was still intact. There were times that I wanted to tell the ship pilot to set a course for there and engage the warp engines. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to issue such orders. Still, I always wondered what it would be like if our people really could travel to Maliana Kelinas. Was it similar to our own galaxy? Was there intelligent life there as well? No one knew for certain. We may find out that answer one day, but it didn’t look like anytime soon.
My people had a saying. It went: If you wished for something hard enough, if you dreamed of something long enough, if you reached for something far enough, it will one day come to you. I’ve heard that particular saying before, but it never meant much to me. Maybe I should’ve listened to it and taken it to heart, because my dream was about to come true, and Maliana Kelinas was about to come to me.
Prologue
For most of our existence, probably from the first time that our species grew more intelligent than the other animals around us or perhaps even earlier than that, we would look up into the night sky and see, to the south, an immense, bright, and spiral-shaped cloud of stars. It was the largest thing in our skies, more so than our sun and two moons, Kalia and Talanca. For most of our history, and maybe even still to this very day, it was the most dominating thing in our lives. Our earliest cave paintings dating back tens of thousands of years clearly show it, and nearly all of our ancient texts make references to it. Obviously, there was one question that was asked more than any other.
What exactly was it?
There were other questions asked about this strange cloud. Why was it so large? What made it so bright like that? Why did it never move from its spot like the other clouds in the sky? Basically, why was this cloud so different from the other normal clouds?
For the most religious among us, the answer was very simple. The reason why this cloud was so special was because it was the home of our Great Creator, Keli. It was said that She created us in Her image, hence the name of our race: Kelinian. It made sense that someone as beautiful as Keli would live in a place just as beautiful from where she could watch over Her children. In fact, the name that our people called the cloud, Maliana Kelinas, came from an ancient Kelinian language which meant, “Cloud of Keli”. This answer came to be the most accepted one for the majority of our history, and no one dared to question it.
A couple of thousand years ago, though, a brave group of scientists decided to do just that. Risking their careers, and even their lives, they used the most advanced observation instruments of the time to make as detailed a study as they could. After doing that for a couple of years, they made a conclusion that shocked many of our people. Instead of the cloud being the home of Keli, they declared that it was another galaxy, different and many times larger than the one we were said to live in ourselves. At that time, galaxies were a theoretical possibility and not yet proven to be scientific fact.
As expected, such a stunning announcement didn’t come without consequences. For a very long time, very large, powerful, and strict religious factions ruled over most of our world’s continents. Anything that didn’t fit in with their view of the world, or universe for that matter, was considered to be heresy. Needless to say, that announcement drove them into outrage. Using their great power, they had the scientists jailed on false, even ridiculous charges. They then issued an ultimatum: either the scientists recant what they said and admit they were mistaken, or be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. A couple did, but the majority did not. The factions made good on their promise and had them jailed for the rest of their lives. Many centuries would pass before everything they said would be proven true. To this day, they were known as “The Martyrs of the Dawn of the Scientific Age".
More than a thousand years ago, our civilization and technology advanced to the point where we could send tall, chemically powered rockets out of Kelinar’s atmosphere and into space. The first rockets to do so only carried artificial satellites. Eventually, brave Kelinian explorers would strap themselves into those dangerous rockets and ride them into space. The first few times, they just merely orbited our world. However, a capsule would soon land on Kalia, the larger of our two moons. It was the first time that our people set foot on another world. Our history was changed forever.
For the next two hundred years, our people would develop bigger, better, and faster ships to travel to the other planets, moons, and celestial bodies in our star system. We learned a lot from exploring those worlds. Still, we didn’t feel quite satisfied. We felt that there was something that was holding us back from reaching the height of our long history of being great explorers.
It was the ability to travel faster than the speed of light.
It was something that had been theorized, but had yet to be proven. Many said that it was impossible to travel faster than light, mainly due to the Infinite Curve Theory. The theory went that the faster you moved, the more mass you build up. The more mass you built up, the greater the engine power you would need to move. When you reached the speed of light, your mass would also reach infinity, and therefore you would need infinite engine power. It didn’t stop scientists and engineers from trying to find a way around that, though.
Eventually, they seemed to have found a way to travel faster than the speed of light without the involvement of the Infinite Curve Theory or even the relativistic effects that came along with it. It was called the space distortion system, otherwise known as the warp drive. The idea behind the warp drive was that even though one couldn’t move though space faster than light, space itself could do whatever it wanted. The warp drive would work by forming a subspace bubble around the ship to distort space, effectively making space itself propel the ship faster than light.
When the first prototype ship carrying the warp drive was built, there were many who said that it wouldn’t work. They said the most the system would do was produce interesting spatial effects around the ship and nothing else. Some feared that it would do unknown and possibly catastrophic damage to space. However, all of their voices went silent when the test pilot, a Kelinian by the name of Manesi Solanda, took the prototype ship past the speed of light on its first flight, proving that the concept worked.
Finally, our race achieved the ability to travel faster than the speed of light and our entire galaxy had suddenly been opened for our exploration.
As one would expect, we took full advantage of our warp technology. Explorers traveled to the closest star to our own and discovered that it had its own system of planets. One of them, a world which we would call Luitin, was pretty unremarkable by planetary standards. It was nothing more than a barren, cratered world with an orange sky. It was special to us, though, because it was the very first world outside our star system on which Kelinians first set foot upon. It was basically the same way for the next fifty years, with us traveling to new star systems and exploring new worlds.
It was then that we discovered the two advanced, spacefaring races that we shared the galaxy with.
Naturally, it was the most shattering event in our entire history. It completely changed the way that we viewed the universe. For a very long time, we wondered if our species was truly unique in the universe. Many said that we couldn’t be alone as the universe was simply too big for us to be, but since we hadn’t found any evidence of other life anywhere before then. So for us to find two advanced species was immensely shocking, to say the very least.
One of those races called themselves the Deroxans. They came from a planet named Derolan. They were the ones that were closest to us in overall appearance, although there were still major differences. They had a spectacular artistic culture that even rivaled our own in several areas. A surprising thing about them was that they were also extremely traditionalist. If you were able to visit their world, it would’ve been very difficult to tell that they were even a spacefaring race as their architectural styles hadn’t changed much in thousands of years. It was probably why even though they had warp travel slightly longer than we did, they were not near as advanced as we were. It may also be why we don’t have much contact with them other than trade rights.
The other race was known as the Tahngi. They were an incredibly warlike reptilian race that lived on a harsh planet they named Cxhu’ rhugl’ ghahr, which, loosely translated, meant either “The Sacred Place” or “The Divine Place”. As suggested, they thought they had some sort of god-given right to rule over the galaxy and its inhabitants. They built a massive army and space fleet for that very purpose. They used that force to launch war on both the Deroxans and us. The first time that they attacked us happened just five years after we first made contact with them. In what many would call an act by Keli Herself, our very small militia was able to completely devastate the Tahngi forces with minimal Kelinian losses.
As a result of that incursion, we would create a much larger and far more powerful force that was called the Kelinian Space Defense Force. It was the greatest military effort seen since before the creation of the Kelinar Union nearly six thousand years ago. Although it has greatly evolved in the hundreds of years since its conception, its main purpose was and still is to defend Kelinar space and territories from any and all threats.
The Tahngi invaded our space ten times since the first war, the last one happening a hundred years ago. Each time, we won a decisive victory. It was rumored that the Tahngi hated us so much due to that they ate the bodies of any dead Kelinian they found as an ultimate act of spite. Obviously, we try not to have any contact with them.
How did we Kelinians compare to the Deroxans and the Tahngi? One big difference was that unlike them, we had no male or female split in our species. Instead, our bodies combined the two functions which made a Kelinian able to both fertilize another and give birth to our young. If an outside species had to make a comparison between the three of us, they would most likely say that we strongly resembled female Deroxans, or the female Deroxans resembled us, either way or the other. Depending on which part of Kelinar one came from, our skin tone ranged from dark to light tan with an orange tint due to our blood, our eyes from black to purple, and our hair from black to red. The average Kelinian stood nearly two natras tall, weighed 1.5 kemastones, and lived to be nearly three hundred years of age. Due to our planet having a wide range of climates, we were more highly adaptable to temperature than either of the two races, which enabled us to settle on more worlds.
Although all Kelinians were united under the Kelinar Union banner, that wasn’t always how it was. For most of our long history, we were divided into different, fiercely independent tribes. It wasn’t uncommon for battles to break out between two or more tribes. Six thousand years ago, the greatest war our world had ever seen happened. Simply called the Great War, it involved most of the tribes on four of Kelinar’s six continents. When the war finally ended, many tribes ceased to exist, and many population centers were devastated. What would become the Kelinar Union would start not long after when several of Kelinar’s largest and most powerful tribes banded together in a mutual defense pact. Although there were still a few conflicts, war of such scale never happened on Kelinar again.
Our people would accomplish many great things since then, but there was always one thing that seemed to taunt us, one thing that seemed so near but so far, one thing that captured the imagination of probably every Kelinian who ever lived. It was that great star cloud in the night sky, Maliana Kelinas. Even our fastest ships would take decades to get there, theoretically doable given our long lifespan but not feasible. Many concepts were put out but none had ever gone past the theoretical stage. Despite our advances in technology and explorer spirit, it seemed like a trip to Maliana Kelinas would never become a reality.
Until now.
Unknown to all but a very select few, in a very remote part of our space, a great ship had been constructed, a ship with the power and technology to make the trip to Maliana Kelinas in just a few seconds.
And I was the one chosen to be its ship commander.
My name is Fararacina Kilhatharin. I am a ship commander in the Kelinian Space Defense Force. I came from the city of Keli Aranara on Kelinar, the capital and largest city in the entire Kelinar Union. I also came from what could be considered an elite family. Our family had a long history of serving the Kelinar Union in one form or another. I considered my achievement to be the latest of such.
Like many Kelinians, I grew up with all sorts of stories about space. I can still clearly recall the night I really learned about Maliana Kelinas. I was about six years old then. My parents took both me and my younger sibling to an area many neminatras away from Keli Aranara where its lights weren’t polluting the sky. I immediately saw how much brighter and clearer the night sky was.
I would ask my prime parent what that bright cloud in the sky was. She would tell me that it was called Maliana Kelinas. I asked if anyone has been there since it seemed so close to us. She said that no Kelinian had ever gone there. I would then boldly declare that I would be the first. She just chuckled and patted my head. It was undoubtedly an impossible dream, but to a child, anything was possible.
It was that night that I knew space was where I belonged. I would spend the majority of my childhood dreaming and studying about it. I admit to driving both of my parents crazy with my knowledge. The only question that seemed to be left was which space agency I wanted to go to. There were three; the Space Transport Service, the Kelinian Science and Exploration Agency, and the Kelinian Space Defense Force. It took until my late childhood years to choose the latter, mainly for one reason. The KSDF was usually the first to land on unexplored worlds, something that I wanted to do.
When I turned forty years old, the age when a Kelinian was considered an adult, I applied to the KSDF academy in Keli Aranara and was accepted on the first try. I would spend the next three years learning more about space, both its wonders and dangers. I excelled in the academy, greatly impressing my instructors. Many said I would have a superb career ahead of me. When I graduated with the rank of novice science assistant, I had a new understanding and appreciation of space.
The next forty years saw me rise quickly through the ranks in the Kelinian Space Defense Force. I would explore many worlds and stars, run countless scientific experiments, and eventually become an auxiliary ship commander. All of that was fine. I was living my dream and loving every moment of it.
However, all of that paled to my greatest accomplishment; becoming a full ship commander at the very young age of eighty six and given command of the brand new patrol runner Helian. That currently made me the youngest ship commander in the entire force. It was very rare, but not unheard of, that people became ship commanders in the KSDF before the age of a hundred, the age when one was considered wise enough to be promoted to such. I remembered how proud my shipmates and especially my family were. That said nothing to how proud I was. I wasn’t the youngest ship commander ever, though. That honor belonged to someone who was promoted to that rank at the unheard of age of sixty five. I did make it into the top ten list of youngest ship commanders, however. While proud, I only hoped I could live up to the new expectations.
While I was exploring new worlds, I had to admit that my childhood dream of going to Maliana Kelinas was still intact. There were times that I wanted to tell the ship pilot to set a course for there and engage the warp engines. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to issue such orders. Still, I always wondered what it would be like if our people really could travel to Maliana Kelinas. Was it similar to our own galaxy? Was there intelligent life there as well? No one knew for certain. We may find out that answer one day, but it didn’t look like anytime soon.
My people had a saying. It went: If you wished for something hard enough, if you dreamed of something long enough, if you reached for something far enough, it will one day come to you. I’ve heard that particular saying before, but it never meant much to me. Maybe I should’ve listened to it and taken it to heart, because my dream was about to come true, and Maliana Kelinas was about to come to me.
