By Morgan Hannah, Life & Style Editor
One… Two… Three… My breathing is slow and deep. My skin is cool and tingles like menthol leaking throughout my body. Four… Five… with wide eyes and a weak war cry, I spin around, everything is a blur of red until it isn’t.
Standing at five and a half feet tall with bumpy, dark green skin hanging loosely around a barrel-shaped body, is an unflattering, unknown creature. A strangled noise escapes me, like a balloon wheezing out the last of its air. I jam my hands into my hair and brush it back from my face as I stumble around a little to regain my footing. I cannot believe this, there’s an actual alien standing in front of me! Other Space Geographers brag about their vague encounters with other species, and, I mean, we do have alien languages built into the translator, so someone, somewhere, must’ve run into aliens at some point. But now I have, too! Me!
Memories of when my younger brother and I would play with our plastic green alien figurines—sprawled across the beige shag carpet in my childhood home—invade my thoughts. Roaming through unknown landscapes and terrorizing a make-believe society of dimwitted humans… Those extraterrestrial-fueled days are a major part of why I’m here today on this foreign planet, encountering a real-life foreign species. I just wish my brother was here to see this, too.
