albertnothlit

The going will get tougher, that's for sure!

Thanks a lot!

Thanks! I like the name Echo quite a lot, too

Thanks for reviewing, EagleIsaac! The next chapter is packed with revelations

Ah, the cliffies and I, we cannot part ways...

Thank you!

Thanks!

LOL, don't worry, the wait won't be long!

Chapter 16. Echo Walking through the wilderness of Tantalus with Jim was a very different experience from my unauthorized exploration session, when I had only recently come to the planet. Back then, I’d had no idea of what I was seeing, and just a few minutes later I’d been worrying too much about staying alive to be able to appreciate the true beauty of the world. Now, I found it hard to see anything else. I didn't let go of Jim’s hand as the two of us walked in the direction of the ne

Yeah. I think we can all agree at this point that nobody likes Commander Wylon and what she represents. Sadly, I think I have a little bit of her in me. Maybe we all do, but thankfully we do our best to be decent people and not go around killing furry little guys.

Thank you for the review! I'm really glad you're liking the story.

Thank you! they left behind some very fun toys indeed.

Furballs tend to mostly to stay away from things they don't understand, and the Spire makes them uneasy and sometimes downright scared.

Oh, and I am only getting started on the revelations…

Aww thanks! I have to admit I'm getting more attached to the furry guys myself, lol.

That was a very interesting read. The idea of planet-wide beings who can send their seeds across the interstellar void and have them survive is very intriguing. Regarding mechanical civilizations, while they do seem to outpace organics in many areas, I think the real question remains one of motivation. Organic creatures are programmed from the moment of their birth to make copies of themselves and survive, spreading throughout an environment and perhaps later throughout the universe. Machines do not have that directive, unless they were created with it specifically. What motivates a machine to copy itself then? Why would it ever attempt to reach the stars?

The Furballs have spent a long time essentially on their own, without having found another species with psionic potential.

Yup. The Furballs aren't really capable of designing things like Temples and so. They are more preoccupied with eating and finding nice places to rest.

Chapter 15 Jim and I held on tight to each other’s hands as we sprinted away through the ancient dimly-lit corridor. Furballs were ahead of us, urging us forward with high-pitched keening and its mental equivalent. I tried to ask the aliens where we were going, but only received an echo of the earlier exhaustion I had felt. The greater Mind had done too much too soon and it was having trouble recovering. All I could glean in exchange for my question was an image which made no sense. It was a

Fun fact number two: Tantalus is a moon located in a very peculiar star system. Argos, the gas giant which it orbits, is the fifth planet from its sun. Tantalus is not tidally locked to Argos, and it orbits the gas giant at a very considerable distance. The combination of these two factors made life possible in the narrow habitable zone of the system's star, code-named AX-3b. The star is on its way to becoming a red giant, and cosmologists estimate that its solar system is at least three times as old as Sol, the home system of the human race. This fact is clearly evident in the four planets which orbit the star. Of those, the three closest to the sun have lost their atmosphere due to the expanding solar disk as the system's star ages, its inner Hydrogen percentage now dwarfed by that of its Helium isotopes. The fourth planet was initially considered to be habitable, but the first drone explorations of the planet named Sisyphus revealed that geological instabilities inside the planet's core had been continuously exacerbated by its proximity to Argos and its enormous gravitational pull. Through a process that lasted several millions of years, Argos essentially tore Sisyphus apart, fracturing its crust to the point where the energy differential between the planet's core and its surface was several orders of magnitude less than what was needed to maintain habitable temperatures in the few pockets of undisturbed terrain. Sisyphus is now a blackened hulk of roiling lava that slowly cools, never to heat up again. Its atmosphere is forever shrouded in clouds of ash, and its surface temperature is just 80 K. it has been speculated that life may still survive in the border zones between lava surges and the frozen surface, but this fact has not yet been tested since entry into the planet is considered extremely hazardous. Link to Tantalus: https://www.gayauthors.org/story/albertnothlit/tantalus

Thank you very much, Cannd! to answer just one of your awesome questions, the only animals that were changed by the ancient inhabitants of Tantalus were the Furballs. You'll get to learn a little more about these people very, very soon. I've also started a post in the story discussion forum where I will be adding fun facts about the world of Tantalus, which you might want to check out!

Thanks, Carlos! I do try and flesh out the background of the worlds I create before writing. I find it helps enormously

Feedback greatly appreciated, as always!

While not as powerfully psionic as Kyle, the Furballs were definitely aware of her when she went out to try and join them...

Fun fact number one: For the taxonomical description of the aliens called Furballs, I came up with the nameVanadiis lyraxis tantalosi for a couple of reasons. First, the system for taxonomical classification of Linnaeus that we currently use is intended for creatures of a single planet only, and so I imagined that in the future it would be necessary to add a final category to the usual litany of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. the final category would be the planet of origin, which in this case is Tantalus. The name also honors a researcher from the planet Cora, a brilliant xenobiologist named Martha Lyrax. She was a pioneer of the study of indigenous lifeforms on Tantalus and she was a senior member of the first scientific delegation to land on the surface. Although not normally shown on the public record, Dr. Lyrax had a small measure of psionic latency. She was deeply moved at having found a species that hinted at intelligence and self-awareness, and she was a fierce advocate of the movement to reduce the Planetary Government's scale of involvement in what should have been a civilian endeavor: Researching Tantalus. Unfortunately, her interest in the Furballs soon turned into an obsession, which led to her death just a couple of years after discovery of the new alien species. The automated monitoring system inside her base of operations has a recording of Dr. Lyrax procuring an exosuit late one night. She left for a destination unknown and turned off the transponder inside the suit after one minute and thirty-six seconds. She was never heard from again.