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Greetings from Europa!

This morning I sensed an eagerness in my wife that I hadn’t seen since we first met, when her curiousness about a klanea opened the doorway of my being accepted into her village.

At first, I thought she was eager for me to leave, that perhaps she had grown tired of my strange, non-Europan ways and customs but was too polite to say, and she could finally find some peace in my absence and settle into a brief period of normalcy with our neighbors.

That couldn’t have been further from the truth, which just goes to show that no matter where you go, there you are. Here I was in the most peaceful paradise in existence, the happiest I’ve ever been, and I was still carrying with me all the baggage and insecurities of my old life.

Outside our home, the village had gathered to see me off on my spiritual journey with a present of a village egami (one not belonging to any one family) and an uz cu’nal packed with food for the trip. I have no idea how word spread so quickly, but I suspect my wife had a hand in it. Everyone was in attendance, except for Jampi, who tried to hide his disappointment when I told him I would be leaving for a while and that it would be best if he stayed behind to be the man of the house, an expression I’m not sure he understood. I voiced my concerns to my wife and she said she would speak to the boy in time and bring understanding.

Just before I left, a Denpa arrived and announced that Kubus and Veron have reached a mecot’ra, one of the areas of Europa where the terraforming hadn’t taken hold.

You know, I just realized that if these broadcasts are being picked up, the receiver might not understand the complexities of a terraformed world. The process isn’t just about creating conditions for plants and vegetation to grow in order to create oxygen, you also need to create a greenhouse effect to keep Europa warm by trapping the sun’s rays and creating an atmosphere by releasing any of the moon’s available CO2. Then, you have to create a protective shield in order to deflect the Sun’s radiation and prevent solar winds from slowly shaving the atmosphere away, which NASA did by placing a field generator between Europa and Sol to act as a magnetic umbrella.

But there are places on Europa where the air is so thin that it is practically unbreathable and the landscape is a brutal, icy tundra of peaks and valleys, a result of the daily rise and fall of Europa’s subsurface ocean due to tidal forces from Jupiter. I sincerely hope that some miracle comes to their rescue so that Rezter’s children can put this hurdle behind them and that they aren’t forced to give up their pilgrimage, as I begin mine

Until next broadcast, this is Captain Edwards, signing off.

Text and Audio ©2014 & 2021 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Glossary of Terms

• Abogzons – Gynecological engineers.
• Agvann – Translation: The will of Nes’Tim; an accident.
• Alum’Vedca – The day marking the new solar cycle of Peace and Maturity; a tribute to the era when Europans evolved from their primitive prey state.
• Arcek – A spiritual theologian
• Biem – A time to show respect for the aged.
• Biss’ore – Travelers, nomads
• Bokloryn – An unrepayable debt; an act that places the receiver in a lifetime contract of servitude.
• Cu’nal – A biological storage unit.
• Denpa – An envoy equipped with an audiographic memory that can store and recall spoken messages at will in the same voice, tone and inflection of the original person who spoke it, who travels from village to village to deliver messages from other communities both near and far.
• Egami – A docile mineral-based creatures primarily used for family transportation due to the fact they are virtually inexhaustible.
• Gates of Juh’holl – Europan afterlife; where souls are released from the flesh to become stardust and rejoin the universe.
• Grahas – A gerbil-sized creature, resembling a stone armadillo, that emits heat when stroked.
• Homnils – A warm, yet sad, reminiscence about something in the past.
• Ipu llqr mwyll xfrr – Abogzon credo meaning “success or death”; satisfaction guaranteed.
• Isogoles – Europan monthly day of pay.
• Jampi – Captain Edward’s son.
• Jbwqnadb – The Europan spelling of lemonade.
• Jhisal – Meis’lo’s home village.
• Klanea – Translation: unknown to us; stranger.
• Mecot’ra – Unterraformed areas of Europa.
• Meis’lo – The only surviving witness to the murder of  the prophet Nes’Tim.
• Micdow yl – The vessels of new life; children.
• Nes’Tim – The most revered spiritual prophet on Europa, slain by a heretic tribe who call themselves Sel’Tab.
• Pwyll – Europa’s highest mountain.
• Qik’climajh – Depending on its usage in a sentence, denotes either the act of telling a story, or the storyteller themselves.
• Sel’Tab – A heretic tribe responsible for the death of the prophet Nes’Tim.
• Shig’umfu – “Interesting world of another”; a documentary qik’climajh in which neighbors tell the story of a person’s life as learned from casual conversations.
• Spo – Food.
• Uz Cu’nal – A biological storage unit used primarily for food preservation.
• Uz – An unspeakable sexual act; a derogatory term; an insult.