Artificial Suns In Alternate Galaxies

Chapter 5

The ship flies their guests in with little fanfare, barely a minute before 10 o’clock in the morning. Tony imagines an alien googling “appropriate meeting times” and allows himself a giggle before donning his best game face, squaring his shoulders next to Rhodey.

He’s still shorter than the older man, damn him.

They wait until all six of their guests step onto the freshly mowed grass – like aliens are going to care about the aesthetical superiority of ‘slightly shorter grass’ over simply ‘short grass’ – and when none of them seem to carry any visible weapons, the two present Councilmembers signal for their own guards to stand by instead of following them to the ship.

“Welcome to Earth,” Clarke keeps the greetings simple, making no attempt at a handshake until one of the Grilians steps forward and offers her own hand.

The woman – Ranina, Tony recalls – is no less captivating in person than she was through a screen, sitting at a table under artificial light and literal light-years away. Tony itches to ask what the pale blue lines curving gently around her neck and the sides of her face signify: if they are decorations or designs by birth, and if the latter, then what purpose they serve from an evolutionary standpoint.

Sadly, it’s neither the time nor the place for such questions, but Tony hopes he will get the opportunity to ask her for more reading material at some point, even if he’s probably the only person who managed to finish all they’ve been given so far.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Ranina offers with a genuine looking smile, and Tony stops sneaking glances at the ship as if more soldiers will pour out of the barely Quinjet sized construction any second now.

He touches the housing of his nanites securely attached to his chest, the motion still a self-soothing gesture despite his best attempts at getting rid of it. It’s going to be fine, he tells himself. The Mark L will not have to become battle tested today.

Ranina and her two peers are wearing long robes and coats in different shapes and colors, while the soldiers are all clad in a uniform: black pants with no adornments, practical boots and a long sleeved jacket in grey, with electric blue linings and an unusual cut. The waist ends higher than what would be customary for a man on Earth, and Tony suspects the different shades of the fabric signify a difference in ranks, seeing how the one with the lightest shade stands firmly in front of the other two.

What blows Tony’s mind away is not their clothes though: it’s that all three of the soldiers look completely human. The left side of their heads is shaved up to their temples, but that’s about the most unusual thing he can pick out about the men.

The diplomats, at least, subscribe to the average nerd’s belief on how proper aliens should look like: the taller man is a burly giant with bright orange skin and yellow freckles, and sports no less than six horns on his bald skull. The green one must be related to Gamora somehow, and Ranina looks quite otherworldly with her near translucent skin and those blue markings herself.

And yet, what gets to Tony the most is that below the surface differences, they still all look… remarkably human. Two legs, two arms, all the right facial features – even if the proportions are a bit of a hit and miss, the familiar anatomy is all there.

He wonders if the bipedal humanoid thing is the usual getup out there, or if these people have been specifically selected for this mission due to that resemblance.

The summit is rather anticlimactic in the end, right until it isn’t.

There are a lot of talks about ‘terms’ and ‘interests’ and citing clauses of the ‘Cilian laws’ – pronounced with a soft ‘C’ as opposed to how that name lived in Tony’s head until now after reading about it – but the outcome is rather simple: