//------------------------------// // 17: A letter home by NachoTheBrony // Story: Xenophilia: Shotglass Oneshots // by TheQuietMan //------------------------------// A letter home by NachoTheBrony ************************** {CRASH!} ... {CRASH!} Aristotle Michaelis, age 61, had been violently woken up by the first horrid crashing sound. By the second sound, he entered his disappeared son’s bedroom and saw it with a new well and skylight. Looking down, he was in time to see the kitchen’s floor give way and {CRASH!} send whatever-it-was to the basement. And, sticking out of the cloud of dust, he saw something like a leather-bound tome on a silver tray. Down in the kitchen, he picked it up and opened it. The very first page was a dedication from his long-lost son: Dear Mom and Dad: I know I must have disappeared from Earth some nine years ago. Probably some more, but nobody here really knows. ‘Thirteen years, seven months and three days, not that I’m counting’, thought the old man. Anyway. I was abducted, like in ‘flying saucer flies off with me’. Weird, isn’t it? Well, some equinoid aliens then rescued me, but with no way to ask my abductors where they had picked me from, the government gave me citizenship and welcomed me among them. I have been preparing this scrapbook since, a month ago, a friend told me that he may have found where I came from. I’m sorry, folks, but I’m not coming back: that day when I was abducted I lost a life, and the ponies have let me make myself a new life among them. I am a part of the community. I have friends. I have three beautiful, smart and fun wives. I have a dear stepson and, through genetic engineering, now I also have a beautiful baby daughter with one of them. Your granddaughter’s name is Lauren Hope, and she’s five months old now. I want to be as awesome a parent as you always were for me, so I can’t leave her behind. Thing is, she isn’t human, her three moms aren’t human, and I will not leave them for anything. Besides, what would be my opportunities upon returning? Here I am a physical therapist, and well paid enough that it took me a year to pay off a little house. Back on Earth, I would be a thirty-something guy with a diploma from a non-existent college and three wives who aren’t even human. And I can’t ask you to come with me: my other siblings are still on Earth, and I don’t want their Mom and Dad to just banish on them. Please have Mnemosyne, Erebus and Damocles known that their big brother is well and says hi. Well, images speak better than words. Enjoy the scrapbook, and all the little notes we wrote in it. My friend says he can help us send one every year. Cheers. PD: My friend brought back a bunch of newspapers, showing that the Earth is in a bad recession at the moment. I’m sending you a couple months of my savings, changed into gold coins. Pass them to my siblings if they need them more. And don’t sweat on it: not only is gold cheap around here, but all the girls are well paid enough that we won’t feel the difference. PPD: My friend says he also wants to send a souvenir. He’s as crazy as he’s rich, so I hope he doesn’t send anything too over the top. Thus, Aristotle began leafing through the scrapbook. Eventually, Hope returned from her bridge club night. He silently guided her to the kitchen and sat her down with him. They learned about their daughters in law: Twilight, a graduate student working on psychokinesis research (which apparently was a very serious science over there). Rainbow, an acrobatic flier and the regional coordinator for weather manipulation. Lyra, a constable, an Army reservist and a grandmaster in a martial art reliant on psychokinesis. Their new daughters showed them around their home, around their town, and around their capital. Their son showed them his hang-around spots and the spa where he worked. They dedicated a chapter to showing them Hope Faust, their fifth granddaughter. And they showed them a million photos of their son wrestling with Rainbow, reading with Twilight, meditating with Lyra, playing with his baby and his stepson Spike (a drake!), cooking, tossing out a burnt cake, visiting places, doing home maintenance, spending time with friends, having picnics on the park, stargazing… The sun was well up before they closed the book. They then went to bed and had the best sleep they had had in more than a decade: Their oldest wasn’t only alive, Belerophon was happy. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Epilogue: Later that day, they went down to the basement to pick up the gold and assess the damage. The gold was easy enough to locate: a red velvet sack, so heavy that Aristotle could barely carry it. A week later, it proved to be worth well over eight million dollars, and happily liquidated their remaining three children mortgages. The other thing was the “souvenir”: A life-sized, exquisitely detailed metal sculpture of Star Trek’s Q, wearing a Polynesian skirt and a coconut brassiere, standing on a roast pig on a giant platter, drinking deeply from a pineapple cocktail while his other hand held a tray up high (the tray that still protruded from their kitchen floor). Neither parent needed an art degree to know that the sculpture was hideous, and would not sell even for free. At first they tried to ignore it, which was easy: once removing the rubble from beneath it, the tray was two inches below floor level and the entire well could be repaired. Once in the basement, it was easy to forget. In fact, it took them almost three months before Damocles came visiting, noticed the cratered concrete under the sculpture and suggested having the metal analyzed. Aristotle almost had a heart attack when the results came: the 2.5-ton monstrosity was made of the purest platinum known to mankind.