From Luke's diary
So we left for our top-secret trip a few days later, without saying anything to the girls to keep them from worrying about us.
Luke: Ditto for yours.
We landed in the middle of winter, we missed so much stepping on real snow... But that wasn't the reason we went there.
First we got a local cellphone, and Misty started looking for some recent profiles of the person we wanted to talk to on social media.
Misty: Ah ah, here she is! I'll write her a message right away, let's see what happens...
Most likely she wasn't expecting to hear from us anytime soon, but we were also reasonably sure she would respond quickly. And indeed it had been. And, indeed, it is exactly what eventually happened.
We thus agreed to meet a little later in a local not far away.
Serena: Well, I admit that this is the last thing I expected to see happen today. To say the least!
Serena was just as we remembered her: smart, intelligent and willing to take a little risk to discover something new. She had come with her partner, Alex, who in the meanwhile became her husband.
Seeing her again threw me indescribable nostalgia, the kind of nostalgia you feel when meeting again a childhood friend you've lost sight of a long time ago.
Serena: I also admit that I would never have thought that you two would have started a family together, I seem to have missed so many events! But I guess you're not here to talk about this, are you?
Misty: Sorry, we're better to return back home as soon as possible. So I'm afraid I'll go straight to the point: are you ready to hear about a crazy international spy story?
So Misty told her about the crashed airplane, the two fake soldiers and their attempts to gather as much information as possible about New Sixam.
Serena had shaken her head several times, but those words seemed to be confirming what she already suspected more than surprise her.
By now prejudices humans have about us had had decades to settle, but the more time passed the more difficult it would be for them to change their ideas about us.
But maybe I had a way to try and stir things up a bit...
Serena said she works for the anthropology department at the local university, and I'm quite sure that finding any good material about us sixamians is now a challenge here. For her, all those pages could be the equivalent of a gold mine.
Serena stared at us for a few moments with a surprised expression, that day a lot of unexpected things were happening. She thought about it a few more moments, but she couldn't find any reason not to say ...
Serena: Well, I think I can give it a try. Publishing books is always risky, you can never know if they will be successful or not... But I think it is worth the risk to give it a go, you know?
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It took Serena a little over a year to re-edit my books and to propose them to a Sim City publisher. At first they seemed sceptical about the project and decided to print just a few copies, but people were still curious and many were reading them. So also the inhabitants of the Sim Nation had discovered the motivations that had brought us sixamians to Earth, what we can really do with telepathy and disguises (that is, things much less frightening than their urban legends suggested), as well as how everyday life is in New Sixam. The books also reminded them that humans will always be welcome in here.
The success of the books outside of New Sixam wasn't overlooked by our local newspapers either, to the point that Serena had become quite famous among us.
So it didn't take long before she was invited for an interview here in New Sixam. I think she didn't think twice about the offer, she seemed to be curious to see the place in person but also eager to send a provocative message to the Sim Nation.
Misty: (happy) And here we are! How was the teleport travel?
Serena: For sure it is very different from any other means of transport!
Luke: Good evening everyone for our live streaming from the Central Library of Strangerville! There has been a lot of talk about this topic in the last few weeks, and finally the curator of the Sim Nation edition of the book "Sixam: Stories and Lies" is here with us! Let's make a big round of applause to our guest, Serena!
The interview will be streamed live online, and we'll also give Serena a copy of the video so she can share it on the Sim Nation internet network as well. By now many humans also follow her updates with curiosity, some of the bravest have even begun to visit New Sixam as tourists. All these news are also putting pressure on their governments, which are being asked with increasing insistence to start easing the restrictions against us sixamians too. We are becoming the current trend among young people across the border, apparently.
Serena: Thanks for the introduction, Luke. However, I have to admit that without the excellent material in the original edition you wrote I'd never have been able to put together more than a couple of pages.
From behind the camera I was waving my arms in an evidently very funny way, if I had never wanted to reveal that I was the author of those books and I had always preferred to use a pen name I had my reasons, right? But instead she had just revealed my identity to everyone on live stream, and even with a smile that made me think that she had done it on purpose. Sometimes she is even too clever...
Needless to say, next to me Misty and the girls were doing their best to stifle their laughter, with very poor results I would add.
Serena: The first thing I noticed when arriving here was how this place is basically the same as the city I live in. People walk down the street to go to school and work, meet at the bar and so on. They are even starting to put on decorations for Winterfest on the facades of their houses. In the end, the similarities far outweigh our differences, even though for all these years we have preferred to ignore them. This should lead us to reflect ...
Before staring her intervention, Serena had also commented about how a few people seemed to look at her with suspicion in the street in front of the library. After all those decades of complete isolation, many locals haven't kept a good memory of humans and now looked at her with the same suspicion we used to receive in the past. She realized what it was like to feel like an alien in a foreign country, in short. Yet she had decided not to mention all this in her public speech, she did not want to feed the unfounded distrust of either side. And we can only be grateful to her for this.
Many times my ancestors have found themselves playing decisive roles in changing the world we are living in. They have put together the strangest and most dangerous plans to be able to avoid the destruction of the Earth by the early sixamians, to destroy giant and dangerous alien plants or to assist the foundation of New Sixam. Who would have thought that we would be decisive too simply by writing a few books, so to fight fear with knowledge?
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