Thank you to Soapytoast for requesting the numbers and genre for this oneshot!
It was with a well meaningful letter and a skip to her step that the person to change Marietta's life skipped into her cabin door.
Later, she'd insist that of course she knocked first; what good person didn't knock before intruding on someone's life? Marietta remembered it from the way that Felicia stood before her in the living room and read almost dramatically from that silly letter.
Felicia had came to her upon hearing from somewhere that Marietta was a resourceful Canadian, someone who truly knew her way around the world, and could actively invent whatever she needed to keep her animals safe.
The North Italian though was a completely different kind of crazy; she bounded into situations with the determination to see it all the way through to the end.
She wanted to change the world, to know that something that she did, would truly mean something.
Felicia wanted naturally to be the leading inventor of something that not only stopped aliens in their tracks, but recruited them to join their ranks; 'Everyone has a good side, even aliens.'
Marietta had no idea why she'd agreed so readily to work with the Italian; she refused to call them extraterrestials as if the big word wasn't easy enough to understand, and she refused to take, 'no,' for an answer half of the time.
"I want peace, the kind of peace you don't hear about. The joy of connecting to avoid danger." Felicia had smiled that day, kicking her feet out in front of her when finally Marietta's patience had been tried, and she'd finally asked her for the real reason that Felicia was taking part in a mission much bigger than herself.
"Peace means something different to everyone. It means, to me, that we stop killing animals that did us no wrong." Marietta stood tall as if she wasn't the person that was the most wary on their mission.
"Well," Felicia smiled in that way of hers that always made Marietta so nervous as if the Italian had a plethora of secrets that she should never trust, "Peace is love." Felicia seemed to like simple answers, answers with few backing, and Marietta felt far too tired to argue with her. Marietta had killed more than her fair share of poachers, of inhumane humans as far as she saw them, and she'd done so willingly to protect the wildlife around her. May be she wasn't the most peaceful one, but she just felt more connected to the woods by her home than the hunters that roamed it so very often.
Marietta didn't bother asking what love was, because Felicia would undeniably give a simple answer that would infuriate her Canadian co-worker.
"It happened!" Felicia squealed, "We did it! They sent us a message back!" Felicia spun in her office chair, half bent over her desk when she paused for a moment, and she scanned the words on the computer monitor though Marietta personally doubted that Felicia could read it.
"Look," Felicia breathed, "That one looks almost like Greek, but that one's a Hieroglyph of some sort. Do you think that they know a little of each of our languages?"
"If they're creepy and stalking us, then yes." Marietta shrugged, a worn smile on her face from trying to share her joy.
"What if they're studying? Like an alien foreign planet language class? They only know a little bit of each though." Feli pouted as she scanned through the writing before her.
Marietta gave her a blank stare, but she couldn't help but be startled when the woman beside her jumped up with a quick sound and rushed over to talk with others about whatever she'd discovered that it could say; Marietta doubted that it was a particularly grand or earth shattering discovery, but she figured that at least Felicia had somewhat of a lead on it.