Continuing flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Icon by later_tuesday

Yeah, the first one of the Asteroid-hits took us by surprise. I mean, shooting stars didn’t hit the earth that hard very frequently, and when they did – crater, some rock, that was it.

Nobody expected there to be sentient life, not in that first one. And, because the government did a quick and thorough job of covering it up (I know, I was there), the rest of the world wasn’t expecting the second one, either, or the third.

By the thirty-seventh of these Shooting Stars, everybody knew. Hobos who lived in shacks in the desert knew (and I’m not counting that guy who got superpowers because the asteroid almost landed on him). People with no TV knew. Everyone knew about the Star People, the Asteroid Aliens, the Palondeze refugees.

I knew, of course. I’d been working with them since the beginning, since we first hid the skinny-furry-strange thing that, I swear, looked like an anthropomorphized anorexic platypus. I knew when they learned ASL (English was beyond their beak), and I knew when our linguists figured out their language.

I knew the first thing that one of them said to us, too:

We are here to help.

And what an older one, weaker and smaller, said in counter:

We are here for help.

By the time we’d worked out what they’d really meant, there had been fifty-three Shooting Stars in the course of a year and a half, and we started watching the sky, nervously, for the long blue contrails across the twilight.

Their definition of help, we were beginning to understand, was not quite the same as ours.

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