Let me tell you a faerie tale.
It begins, as any good tale of fantasy, ages ago, far before the modern Neopian age. This was a time before Neopets, when Faerieland still hung as a prominent skylocked kingdom instead of an amusing diversion for bored and unemployed Neopians. This was a time even before the primordial, toxic soup that encased Neopia for eons, a time when forgotten continents were stitched onto the water skin of the planet and intelligent life roamed the lush greenery of these landmasses. This was a time where sky and land lived in harmony, only gravity an obstacle.
Faeries, of course, owned the sky. An all-female race, they were admired for their grace and beauty, with iridescent wings and slender builds. With their archaic systems of magic, they constructed floating cities with ease, buildings that floated on cloud like buoys at sea. They built castles, and infrastructure imagined only by minds accustomed to extravagance eager to proliferate that ideal.
The ground, however, was the dominion of the Feathers. They were a race of all-males, and though their ancestors could perform magic, their cultural reliance on a stringent system of logic and science had severed them from their ability to execute the ancient art. While they too had wings like the Faeries, theirs were burdened with flesh and feathers, enormous Pteri wings attached to the back of their handsome, humanoid forms. When magic coursed from their fingers, it was rumored that these wings had a purpose. Soon, however, it came that Feather wings were useless, and used instead only for festivals, body language and other recreational activities. They could only stare at the sky filled with darting faeries in envy while they toiled on the ground, hooked to dirt and grime by gravity.
Desperate to be able to contact the Faerie species without reliance on Faerie magic, Feathers poured their population's brain power into the technology that could help them achieve the sky. They built impossible structures, skyscrapers, that attempted to make contact with the very lowest level of Faerie architecture. They built ships powered by volatile fuels to send valiant crewmen into the stars, to hopefully hover momentarily with the Faerie race.
This skyward ambition worried the Faeries. Accustomed to being the sole possessors of sky and space, they felt the Feathers threatened their territory with their newfangled air planes and tall towers. Superstition and fear simmered inside Faerie sentiment towards the Feathers. The Feathers, oblivious to the social consciousness of Faerieland, continued their hopeful ascent.
The straw that broke the Gnorbu's back was the Feathers' construction of a new space station. In its stainless steel complexity, it orbited Neopia like a second Kreludor, just above the highest Faerie tower. The Faeries saw this as the ultimate offense. The Feathers had unabashedly interloped on their territory, and for this, the greedy ground dwellers must be punished.
The Queen Faerie, the supreme practitioner of Faerie magic, concocted a special spell under the new moon, rumored to be assisted by the dark faerie that would later be known as the Darkest Faerie. (Me, I've never believed in rumors.) Though she bottled it in the most benign glass bottles, it contained a curse fouler than thirty plagues. And while the moon hid its face from this abominable sin, the Queen Faerie permitted this noxious potion to rain down upon the unsuspecting Feathers.
I won't go into the details of the damage. Suffice to say the potion contained a crippling illness that stripped an infected Feather of his wings, distorted his handsome features into that of a monster—turned him as green, terrible, and twisted as the hearts of the Faeries that produced such a hateful spell. These were only the symptoms of the disease. The real damage came with the destruction of internal organs, slowly dissolving them one by one.
The Feathers cried up to the heavens in anguish. The heavens returned a silence as deep as space, and continued to rain suffering. Chaos tore through the population. Those who had escaped infection holed themselves up in isolation, while the infected stumbled through the streets and unleashed the roars of dying beasts. Feather civilization crumbled. Walls could not keep out the disease. Soon, those in isolation perished just as the others.
The Feathers abolished, the Faeries continued their peaceful lives, undisturbed by the torment their leaders had created below. The Queen Faerie, sensing no signs of life on the still planet below, sent down a final spell to spoil the seas and break apart the land. There would be no evidence of Feather civilization, buried beneath a sea of acid. Neopia would start anew, it was decided. In a few millennia, the Faeries would create a new species, subservient to themselves: Neopets.
In the mean time, those few Feathers stationed in the orbiting space station only watched on in horror, agonizingly safe from their kinsmen's suffering. They were a crew of five: a computer tech, an astronomer, a doctor, a mechanic, and a cook. They were proclaimed the best and brightest of Feathers in their respective specialties at the peak of Feather civilization—now they were the final survivors. The cook and astronomer, nominally expendable, decided to descend to the earth and expire with their families. The computer tech and mechanic both elected to stay on the ship, while the doctor urged the remaining crew to use the escape pods to search for the intergalactic center their space probes had detected in a far off region, fearing the Faeries would attack the space station as well as a death by slow starvation. The computer tech and mechanic refused to listen to the doctor. The doctor, filled with paranoia, left in the escape pod alone.
It was his privilege to watch as a blast of Light Faerie magic destroy his last two comrades while the pod escaped into space.
So the Feathers were destroyed and eliminated from history—except for one. What became of that sole survivor, the final carrier of Feather DNA? Did space swallow him whole? Or did the worm hole funnel outwards again, and lead him to that suspected intergalactic meeting place for a plethora of species?
Faeries typically end this tale differently, if they tell it at all. Of course, they tell the whole story differently—Feathers become the malevolent aggressors, determined to conquer and oppress Faerieland, and the plague becomes instead a spell that either makes the Feathers vanish, sends them to another planet, or transforms them into Faeries. (Just as they, supposedly, had always wished.) They tell of no survivors, or at least of no Feathers ever returning to Neopia.
Both endings are wrong. Lies—the old standby of the Faerie species. That Feather doctor survived, and he returned to Neopia. And boy, was he surprised to see his homeland overrun with pastel-colored Faerie worshippers.
I was that petrified doctor Feather in that tiny escape pod, barely able to handle the controls. The way I left Neopia wasn't the way I returned. Both my home and I had changed.
So now let me tell you a Feather tale. A survivor's tale. A tale of a medical-surgeon, determined to scrape out a living in the precipitous and outlaw-ridden environment of space. This time around, there will be Neopets—an alien Aisha (never a native species to Neopia) and a Kougra, the Kougra that would be the start of his species on Neopia. And yes, there will be a faerie, but only one. Her name's Hoshiya. You may know her as the Space Faerie.
My name is Dr. Frank Sloth, and this is my story.