Note:
There's some violence, graphic details, potentially uncomfortable situations, and other stuff.
That should do it.
In a distant taiga, there once lived a tribe of humans and a tribe of monsters.
On the surface, the humans lived in a walled town dotted with several tall buildings. Few traders ever visited, so the humans grew their own crops and built their own industries. They were a particularly hardworking bunch, having mastered the precursors to concrete and steel.
Nearby was a village populated by magical monsters of all shapes and sizes. The monsters rarely visited the humans; therefore, they became equally self-sufficient. Unlike the humans, however, the monsters opted to study and develop advances in the magical arts instead of the industrial field. This choice was a trade-off at the cost of technology, and the village's stone-brick houses were nowhere near as impressive as their human counterparts. The monsters were ruled by the Dreemurrs, a long-standing family of two-legged, two-armed goat-like monsters. Each king and queen successively brought prosperity to the monsters through their benevolent rule.
It seemed peace was not meant to last. Disagreements became scuffles, then bouts; as the pressure kept building, violence between the twin civilizations spiraled into full-scale war. Bitter fighting erupted in five or six places and spread like multiple wildfires, with dozens to hundreds of new settlements being sucked into the bloody vortex every day. To unify and maintain communications between the different tribes of monsters around the world, the Dreemurrs played host to a conference of delegates from every monster society in their own home village.
It was not long before the humans discovered their opportunity to remove the entire enemy high command at once. From their walled town, they launched a surprise attack and began slaughtering everything that moved. The crimson rivers only stopped flowing when the humans, decisively victorious over the monsters, cornered and sealed the last group of survivors underground to be imprisoned for all eternity. Without their leaders, the other monster villages collapsed within a few decades.
Many years later, an orphaned human child fell into the monsters' underworld and found their way to the Dreemurrs' front door. No monster expected a human to visit so abruptly, if at all, but they must had noticed something unique regarding the child. The Dreemurrs decided to adopt the human child as their own, and almost instantaneously, the human child and the Dreemurrs' son became best friends.
They shared butterscotch-cinnamon pie. They played "Monsters and Humans," although the human child always liked to be the monster. They helped the king take care of his garden of golden flowers.
Unfortunately, the human child grew ill one day. She was severely poisoned, and the monsters lacked the modern medicine to cure her. With her dying words, the human child asked the Dreemurr prince to take them back to the human village.
When the prince entered the village with the child's body, the humans thought he had killed the child. Before the prince could explain himself, the humans attacked him.
Against all odds, the prince survived his vicious beating and was reunited with his family; soon after, his friend and sibling recovered from her buttercup poisoning and everything was as it was before. The barrier remained standing, but at least they were safe underground for the time being.
"That's our history with Mount Ebott in a nutshell."
Between Mars and Jupiter orbited 'Planet' ZY-9, an asteroid-sized space station populated by a group of vaguely humanoid figures. From the outside, ZY-9 looked like any other of the trillion asteroids orbiting the Sun—bland, dull, but still majestic as a team of ice skaters locked in an eternal dance. However, the inside was a bustling metropolis, featuring dozens of chrome-plated compounds, a beehive of flying shuttles, and acres of hydroponic gardens. Large cargo ships docked and departed continuously, supplying the station with raw materials harvested from the far corners of the galaxy. Smells of disinfectants choked the air, but the crisp aroma of freshly baked goods offered relief from the harsh chemical cleaners. There was no shortage of defense systems, as anti-spacecraft batteries and hangers dotted the outskirts of the station.
A few hundred figures in everything from run-of-the-mill clothes to full power armor were assembled in one of the hangars, listening intently to a robed and hooded figure behind a podium. Neat rows of dark banners, each decorated with a shield insignia with one large purple star in the middle, hung from the curved roof and flapped lazily in the artificially heated air.
The speaker was wrapping up an emphatic discussion about recent events that occurred on Earth, gesturing at holographic depictions of the historic violence that consumed the mountain range. One slide showed a group of humans burning down a house with monsters still in it. Another showed a human chasing a child monster while waving a spear over his head. Agitated murmurs began rippling through the audience. The speaker raised a paw, shushing the crowd, and spoke of the need to prevent further atrocities from taking place. Looking into the audience, they suggested deploying several "agents" to the range.
"In conclusion, the circumstances of the region surrounding Mount Ebott deserve particular attention. Although the great war between the monsters and the humans has largely subsided, the atmosphere is still too unstable to leave alone. Furthermore, we have intelligence that the barrier that once imprisoned the monsters has been shattered. This barrier was no ordinary magical shield; it would have taken an immense amount of power to break it. We must discover every detail behind how this happened."
One of the agents, dressed in a form-fitting, leather-like outfit and a red scarf instead of a proper set of armor, called attention to himself and announced, "I have years of experience conducting operations on Earth. All were largely successful, and I don't plan on failing my people now."
The speaker removed their hood to reveal a familiar face: one which had two short horns poking out just behind their forehead, long, droopy ears that were rounded at their ends, and a healthy coat of whitish fur. With a hardly worried smirk, they asked if the agent was truly prepared for this mission.
The agent scratched his own floppy ears, smiled, and insisted, "I may be young, but I have the record and skill to get the job done."
"That settles today's briefing, then. Meeting adjourned!"
The agent thought to himself about his word choice as he walked away from the rapidly dispersing crowd.
"I am a person," he thought. "That's what my race refers to itself as. We aren't 'space aliens' or 'monsters;' we're just… a bunch of creatures with the strength to survive this long and the intelligence to thrive while doing it. We aren't 'human' people though. We're people, but we aren't hairless chimps from the planet Earth. Some other civilizations have difficulty understanding this, so they rather lovingly called us angels and demons and everything in between."
The agent chuckled to himself about nicknames, and then inspected the polished hangar he and his colleagues stood in. Simply "surviving" may have been an understatement. Everywhere he looked, neat rows of spaceships stood at attention. Some were larger and designed to carry dozens while others were smaller and served as two-person starfighters. All the ships bore the same motif as the banners overhead.
"The shock and awe isn't completely misplaced; we've built thousands of artificial worlds to complete a truly impressive galaxy-spanning network," the agent considered silently, "The name makes us feel proud of our technological achievements, so I guess it's fitting. Technology isn't everything, though. We've been able to harness magic for as long as the stars have shined."
The agent stopped to help a bunch of workers telekinetically lift one end of a starfighter by an arm's length, allowing one of the other creatures to reach a tricky spot in the fuselage with a rag.
Continuing his mental monologue, he explained, "Not even the strongest of us run around destroying worlds, but they're quick and clever and generally not fun to be caught in a fight with. I don't even bother with armor anymore because that kind of equipment would just slow me down. Needless to say, the magically adept are a prime choice for dirty work. Case in point: the M.B., an…intragalactic detective agency of sorts."
As the agent approached his starfighter, a mechanical voice crackled to life, declaring, "Greetings, Agent. I will be your A.I. assistant for this M.B. assignment. You are to fly this vehicle to Earth and investigate any traces of the barrier near Mount Ebott."
The voice read a pre-flight checklist aloud. Meanwhile, the agent strapped himself into the pilot's seat and made himself comfortable. He began to adjust a few of the hundreds of glowing switches and dials that lined the cockpit.
"Fusion engine: on. Life support systems: active. Wormhole generator: stable. Plasma cannons: armed. Preparing for takeoff."
The agent felt a virtual eye-roll as the A.I. announced, "Oh, and that coffee machine you installed next to the filing cabinet you also installed is done making your latte."
"You know I'd make one for you, but…anyway, how's the stealth field doing?"
"Stealth systems nominal. Human optics and scanners will not identify this spacecraft as anything more than an errant radio wave."
A starfighter rocketed away from Planet ZY-9 at leisurely few thousand kilometers per hour, headed straight into the asteroid field. Earth looked no larger than a tiny blue speck on the vessel's HUD.
*Before you make the wormhole jump to Earth, HQ has requested that you investigate an unusual object they detected near the station, which is probably a rock like it always is. Anyway, I'm sure you'll be able to find out which rock you're looking for out of the infinity billion around here.
"Play nice. They found an unidentified spacecraft last time and for all we know, we could bump into another one. We picked up an electromagnetic signature from this one, so it has to be something interesting."
*No, that was a hunk-of-junk satellite from Earth. It had this strange golden plate with flimsy doodles etched on it for some reason they didn't understand, so they sent it on its merry way straight out of this star system.
Elaborating further on the A.I.'s first mission statement, the pilot described, "This barrier's been a thorn in our side for years now, and if someone managed to get rid of it before we could; well, that's someone we'd take great interest in meeting."
The agent considered his reasons for volunteering so readily, thinking, "I know I volunteered to go to Earth, but to be honest, I find Earth rather unflattering. I know a good bit of the history; the culture, too, and I've even met a few humans all for the sake of work, but…looking like what we look like…when it gets dirty, it gets really dirty."
The asteroid field, unusually dense around ZY-9 as if to form a defensive shell game, showed no signs of thinning out enough for a safe wormhole jump. Even at the fighter craft's top speed, it would still be a slow, gradual trek through the rocks. Remembering something, the agent relaxed into his pilot's seat and took a sip from his drink.
