As Elpis walked into the house, blowing his unique whistle-key to unlock the door and disable the alarms, he came home with the groceries, and put them away.
He sat on the recliner facing the TV, and found himself reminiscing. He remembered how Takeru loved to watch
Doctor Who with Shinji, and how Shinji had always asked Elpis if he had met anything like the aliens that appeared on the show (which sparked quite the controversy amongst Junction's actual aliens, but that was something he didn't pay much attention to).
Takeru would get curious too, and before he knew it, both gave him the same look of curiosity and awe, with Shinji asking Elpis to tell him a story about it if Elpis said yes, he had met something similar to the aliens they showed on the TV. Takeru would always have the look on his face that showed he was just barely trying to restrain himself from asking the exact same thing.
He didn't really sleep in the conventional sense, but he did find himself having vivid flashbacks on occasion.
This was one of them.
In this case, he was recounting a particular tale about one of the most curious things he had ever seen...
Elpis's Stories No. 1: The Strange Tale of the Father and Son:
This particular tale dated back to about, by human years, around 500 years ago, back when he was still in his original home universe. He had been in a different body back then, the body of a Osphorian, to be precise.
Osphorians were a race that, externally, resembled human skeletons, but in truth, the 'bones' were both their actual bones, and a super-dense skin for their flesh that protected Osphorians from having those bones broken.
Osphorians did not eat nor drink, nor did they need to breathe. They could see things as well, having eyes that were like black orbs, and spoke using a form of clicking noises they made with their jaws (unless they had a thought-to-speech chip in them, but that wasn't much).
They also had a cardiocerebral organ: or as some would have put it, a brain that served the same functions as their heart. Their nervous system was also unusual, as Osphorians, so long as the head remained, could actually shrug off things like limb loss as they felt no pain from such things. Most wore clothes though, like shirts, hats, and whatnot merely as a way of concealing their uncanny appearance.
Also, fat does not exist on Osphoria.
What does exist is being called 'big-boned'
(At this point, Shinji had started peppering Elpis with so many questions that Takeru had to tell Shinji something that often drove Shinji crazy before Elpis could resume telling the story.
"Try not to question it too much, okay Shinjiro? Elpis isn't a biologist, at least, none that i'm aware of, nor is he CWIS, so don't ask him questions like that, okay? Besides, there's only so much time until bedtime, so if you want to hear the rest of the story, don't ask questions until after he's done." he said.
"Okay." Shinji said.
Elpis then confirmed he wasn't a biologist before he resumed telling the story.
For one thing, he hadn't taken any classes for it beyond a few basic ones at least a lifetime ago.
He often needed refreshers on things like that.)
In this case, Elpis had take one of these, who had been known as Kobble in life. Kobble had loved mining, and had died in a cave in when a particularly large rock fell and hit his head. Elpis's current host body also died in that same cave-in, and took Kobble's body as that was the closest suitable template he could take ahold of.
So it was in the body of Kobble that, one day, he had met a old man and young man, the local celebrities of a moon named Tockaria.
The strange thing about them was that the young man claimed to be the old man's grandfather, at the young age of 20.
The old man, on the other hand, was the young man's grandson, claiming to be about 70 years old.
This highly unusual disparity in ages made Elpis question the legitimacy of their claims.
Up until they showed the records to prove it when he said he wasn't.
They pulled out their birth certificates, even (as part of the identification system in his universe, these were impossible to forge as the only record of them was embedded in a microchip that would only be updated by a physician, and never the same one twice, to reflect certain things, like marriage.).
To his surprise, the old man's birth certificate dated about 70 years before, and the young man's did indeed date about 20 years ago.
Elpis had been shocked. How did this happen?
Time travel had yet to be proven possible, and time dilation, while it could explain a phenomenon like this, would have to be at a phenomenal rate.
The two men laughed, and told him how.
It was an effect from the source of their homeworld, Kronosia, the very same world that Tockaria was a moon too.
Kronosia had a very strange, very powerful, ore that defied all replication techniques and analysis because it had a strong amount of chronal energy in it.
Apparently, millions of years ago, something had happened that caused Kronosia to erupt into a huge singularity, where different parts of the planet literally ran at very different rates. The singularity had rewritten the energy baseline of the ores of it to where it gained it's now signature chronal energy.
The energy supplied by it was phenomenal.
The zone the old man had been in was going years ahead of the one his grandson was in.
By the time the two got off the planet, they didn't think they'd be able to do it.
Not many could.
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