The Mysterious Alien Replicator by deejay435 |  |
SPACE - When Persimid gets something into her head, she just doesn’t let it
go. It’s all the books she reads. I try to get her to play with the other Eyries
more often, but Persimid is nothing if not persistent. So when I have any spare
Neopoints, we buy books. And books and books… but the books get her thinking
about how things work, and why. "Why" is my dear little Eyrie’s favorite word.
Her sisters don’t care about such things, but Simie does. "Why does the Omelette
have sausage in it?" "What makes the Chias and Lupes so frightfully mad at each
other all the time?" "Why are the prices in the Garage Sale so wonky?" My days
with Persimid are an endless round of questions. Usually I answer as best as
I can, and move on. Sometimes I point at her Neopedia set and let her look them
up herself, but her latest question started me thinking. "Where does the Alien
Aisha’s replicator get the things to make Neopoints with?"
I mean, everyone knows matter just doesn’t appear out of nothing. Persimid
has known that since she read An Eyrie’s guide to Relativity. Something
had to be making those Neopoints. And once she started asking about it, I couldn’t
help but wonder myself.
So we called Terbrada, the Tonu travel agent, and booked a flight to the crashed
space ship. Terbrada’s agency specializes in the "Deepest, Darkest Corners of
Neopia". We recommend him highly. We booked only two seats. The other three
pets wanted nothing to do with this little excursion. PalounaMakees, my little
Grundo, hasn’t quite gotten over her life at the Space Station, and didn’t want
to see a crashed ship, and the others just weren’t all that interested in Persimid’s
endless round of questions. So it was just the two of us.
It’s just as you might imagine. Long, wide corridors of neotanium walls that
would light up a specific color, depending on where you were heading. Or would
have, anyway, if there weren’t big gaping holes in the hull of the ship, and
broken bits of wire and such all about our feet. The floors were carpeted in
a material so soft I thought we would sink down forever, but then we figured
out it was really just dust that had wafted in through the holes. Because nothing
was really working, figuring out where we were, and where we were going, wasn’t
so easy. Most of the directional signs were in some strange inter-galactic language,
so we started out at the only thing that was working, the
replicator. Five hundred Neopoints later, we were meandering through
ever darker corridors, and down shaky ladder after shaky ladder.
Eyries have quite well-developed directional senses, so it wasn’t long before
Persimid had lead us to a part of the ship she thought was right below the replicator
machine. It was dark there, in the bowels of the ship, so I hauled out my handy
Scorchio-Torch. Just as I was clicking it on, Persimid’s scream pierced the
gloom. I turned, expecting to find something terrible had happened to my pet.
I could only laugh when I saw she was dripping wet, the remnants of a Gormball
at her feet. Across the chamber was none other than an Alien Aisha herself,
her six ears wiggling in amusement. Even before we could speak to her, our primary
question was answered. A sudden blinking and beeping sounded from a small machine
at her feet, and a little monitor showed a Meerca and his owner at the Replicator
upstairs.
Now it was Persimid’s turn to laugh. We’d been imagining some wild alien technology
able to refute the laws of physics behind the replication process. When in reality,
it’s only the little Alien Aisha herself. Once she’s been signaled that someone
has employed the machine up above, she slides 500 neopoints into the chute and,
"whoosh!" up it goes.
Persimid is hastily trying to learn the Alien language, so we can ask the
little creature why she’s bothering with such a huge process just to give out
Neopoints. In the meantime, when you next travel to the spaceship and find the
replicator isn’t working, take heart... the Alien Aisha is probably just out
playing Gormball. |
