Phase Q/Wandering Stars

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

You and Rogan cross paths. Again.

Same this year. Same last year. Same next year.

Same every year. For the last thousand years. For the next thousand years.

Your orbits coincide, and once every year, your trajectory intersects Rogan’s.

Floating through space, round and round you go. Spinning about yourself, flying in circles.

Fun.

At first it took some effort to acclimatize to your orbit. Sometimes you felt a little far from Tornuqur. A little cool.

Now you’ve got the swing of things. It comes naturally. There’s nothing for you even to do, really.

When your belly faces Tornuqor, you feel things heat up. Metaphorically, too, as lots of the laborers and warriors live there.

When your back faces Tornuqor, you can hear the solid hum of a billion youians moaning in unison.

Your population has grown over the years. At first you started with a few dedicated followers. Now you have a hard time even remembering souls. Yet your people live on, creating works of art and warfare and commerce.

It feels funny when your people reproduce. As a whole, like a single organism, the population starts the vibrations. Seismic activity rumbles through your core. The whole population hops up and down, setting off your resonant modes. Their ideas flow through their feet, fertilizing the rootstock in your center. Then you erupt.

With lava flowing through your veins, you rock and you roll and you heave as a new generation of children come pouring out of your crevices. It hurts but it feels good, like scoring a goal in hoozion.

In their youth, the population of you like to keep their feet wet. Apparently it helps to stop accidental vibrations. A very sensitive topic among youians.

Rogan’s people like their feet out in the open. But then, they use their feet to breathe.

That’s funny.

You feel a tickling sensation. It starts at the tips of your mountains, and travels in forking paths down to sea level. Amid the raging flames of your red hot surface, little squirts brush through your filaments.

You send out an extra stream of heat, through your underground network of tubes. The flame quenches the tickling sensation, for a while.

The next time the tickling starts, it happens in the pits of your valleys. Right where your people are holding a hunting ceremony, if you’re not mistaken.

“Do you feel anything?” You ask Rogan.

“Yeah, sure, I feel lots of things. Wind, rain, anger, pride. Why do you ask?”

You send out a huge plume of lava from an active volcano. Within it, you encode the message:

MY PEOPLE TICKLE.

Rogan cracks up. Waves of ice erupt from heaving tectonic plates.

“I’m not joking,” you say. “I think I’ve got an infestation of some kind. Maybe I’m sick?”

“Relax,” says Rogan. “Let it rest a while. We’ll see if it hasn’t disappeared this time next year.”

Sure, you rumble. Tumbling through space, you continue to roll in your orbit around Tornuqor.

Halfway around, you split in half.

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.