The Last Days of Atlantis, Island Outpost of the Empire of the Gods

"We’ve all lived so many lifetimes. We’re so bored that we don’t know what to do with ourselves anymore. And so we continue on, across the universe, corrupting all we touch." An alien being known as Kiel made this remark long ago, when the planet we now call Earth was young, in the days before the last ice age departed, when the Pacific Ocean was greater and the Atlantic smaller. He said this with the barest air of melancholy, as only the very, very old can feel the utmost of pity in a general way, and not merely pity for themselves.

Kiel was very, very old. More than a hundred thousand revolutions of the Earth had passed since he was born on a planet in another galaxy, and incidentally, in the meantime he had become an immortal.

How the most brilliant scientist in all of the universe had made Kiel and his thirty explorer companions immortal was another story. A very, very long story. A story of intrigue, scandal, genocide, betrayal, and one emperor’s insatiable lust for power... not the sort of thing that had anything to do with this remote little chunk of rock circling its chirpy canary-yellow star.

Kiel didn’t want to be one to dredge up the past, anyway. At the moment, he was contemplating a whole new set of possibilities that open up when one’s government and home are so far away that you can do pretty much anything you want on a provincial planet and get away with it. Besides, the geneticist Hinev (pronounced HAI-nev) (generally an all-round decent sort of guy, but too much of a bossy father figure in some peoples’ opinions) wasn’t among the crew of the gigantic spaceship that had come to Gaia (Earth), or rather, Kiel3. Of course, Kiel hadn’t been the one to suggest naming this luscious green little planet after himself, no no. Even if he was the captain of the explorers’ spaceship, the Discovery, well-that of course had nothing to do with the matter.

So there he was on the bridge of his spaceship, looking fondly at the little blue ball named after him and thinking of some way to distract himself and his crew. Were they every bit as bored as he was? Probably.

"No sign of that singularity yet, blast it," Kiel said. Yes, the crew was looking for something precious on Kiel3 (a singularity, don’t ask, long story) and couldn’t leave till they found it, or Kiel would have already given the order to vacate this primitive little backwater and head back to their empire’s giant federation of planets.

"What to do? What to do?" Kiel wondered, a celestial Adonis pouting as he shook his beautiful shock of hair. His dark blue eyes were nearly always calm, but piercing in hue, like a clear sky, and with a radiant glare of intelligence and perception illuminating them. He had that je ne sais crois sparkle in his eye, you might say. His ice-blue hair was short and glinted like aluminium foil in the light (never mind that the Earth hadn’t invented tinfoil yet). His face was almost angular, elfin, and a watery color. In other words, he looked like a very studly elf under funky aquatic blue lighting.

In the midst of Kiel’s ponderings, Alessia Enassa (the shipboard Superbabe who was Hinev’s adopted daughter) appeared at the main observation window. She was a tall, willowly girl with cat-like grace (if you could call anyone at 100K+ years "girl"), and she had lovely curling long hair and super long legs. Her eyes were pretty exceptional as well, sort of slanting upwards at the edges, and a liquid, luminous sea blue that had a mesmerizing effect on Kiel’s second-in-command, the lecherous Kellar (who would insist upon being deemed "amorous", not lecherous). Kellar followed Alessia around a lot. Poor man was besotted.