"Life on Pandora" - Part One

Part One

            “Pandora. Fifth moon of the gas planet Polyphemus, orbiting Alpha Centauri A in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest system to your own sun. I haven’t visited there in five regenerations. Makes it that much more special, going back there with you and Newt, Ben.”

            Ben Tennyson slumped in one of the console platform chairs, slurping on a chocolate milkshake; he was barely listening to Alicia, his Time Lord hostess and pilot for the Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S. he traveled the multiverse in for a few weeks now, under her protection at the request of his grandpa, Max Tennyson.

            Alicia, who was a tall, blonde, and athletic fortysomething African American woman in appearance, gave her presentation on their next destination, standing beside the large view screen across from the console platform. A slideshow of images projected onto it, showcasing a majestic planet full of alien vegetation and wildlife.

            “Yeah,” Ben passively said. “Sounds cool.”

            “I know, right?” Alicia hadn’t noticed his disinterest at all. “I can give you guys a tour of it all, and it’ll be the perfect place for Newt to explore more fantastic beasts for his new book!”

            Not far from the console platform sat a brown leather suitcase.

            It would have stood out from the Gallifreyan design of the console room, if it weren’t for its magical properties, specifically the undetectable extension charm that bewitched it. Much like her T.A.R.D.I.S., this suitcase’s internal dimensions were extended without affecting the external dimensions.

            As Ben once noted to her, “That thing’s even bigger on the inside than your ship.”

            She gave a knock on the suitcase, prompting its owner – Newt Scamander – to open it from inside and climb out.

            Once he was updated on the specifics of their next destination, Newt was a bit intrigued, “Pandora, is it? Like the fabled box of Greek mythology. I sure hope it turns out better for us than it did for her.”

            Alicia brought her T.A.R.D.I.S. out of the dimensional corridor and materialized it on Pandora. “I’ve gotta warn you guys about the atmosphere on this planet,” she told her two companions. “It has a high concentration of carbon dioxide that makes it virtually impossible to breathe without losing consciousness or dying.”

            “So let’s just put on some spacesuits,” Ben suggested.

            “I’ve got something better than spacesuits,” Alicia said, handing out small blue tablets over to Newt and Ben before popping one into her own mouth and chewing on it. “This is some gum I specialized to help us breathe in any planetary atmosphere, including Pandora’s, without the need for spacesuits.”

            Curiously, Ben popped his tablet in, his taste buds tingling from the intriguing flavor. “Mmm! Minty fresh!”

            The three travelers ventured out into the wild, taking in the astounding ambiance.

            Even Ben had to admit how cool it was to look up in the sky and see Polyphemus hanging over with three other moons.

            “This place is awesome,” Ben awed.

            “Yes, it is quite fascinating,” Newt concurred.

            Alicia giggled. “I told ya, boys.”

            Though she was glad to see her companions already enjoying the sights of Pandora, she was dismayed to see how little wildlife they came across. No direhorses, no hammerhead titanotheres, and not even a single banshee in the skies.

            Something was wrong.

            Loud running machinery lured her, Ben, and Newt to one area of the forest that was in the process of being mowed down by enormous bulldozers.

            “Humans,” Alicia hissed. “They’ve found Pandora. And they’re ruining everything sacred about it.”

            “How do we stop them?” Ben asked, and Alicia thought that he never would.

            She instructed Ben to go alien, summoning the strongest one in his watch, Four Arms, to dismantle the bulldozers. Meanwhile, Newt would use his magic to unleash whatever spells that were affective enough to shut down the bulldozers. Alicia herself did it with her sonic screwdriver.

            It wasn’t long before they attracted the attention of a platoon of marine soldiers, armed with assault rifles and either wearing breathing apparatuses or manned in large, mechanical exosuits.

            “Well, that was expected,” Newt observed.

            Together, they were placed under arrest and brought to Hell’s Gate, the base of operations on Pandora for the RDA (“Resources Development Administration”). There, they were interrogated by a gray-haired military man with a trio of claw marks on the side of his head.

            This was the chief of security, Colonel Miles Quaritch.

            “You freaks wanna explain to me how you’ve managed to sustain breath on a planetary atmosphere that could kill you in four minutes, without so much as an exopack?” Quaritch queried, prior to turning towards Ben and asking, “And what in the name of sanity is this thing? I’ve never seen one of its kind on Pandora before.”

            Ben hadn’t realized until then that he was still in alien form as Four Arms.

            “Our presence is quite simple to explain, sir,” Newt told Quaritch. “We happen to be travelers here on exploration. We’re discovering creatures that might be of interest for my book.”

            “Your book?” Quaritch questioned with a frown.

            “Yes, sir,” Newt said. “You see, I am a wiz—”

            “He is a wiz at those things,” Alicia quickly interjected before Newt told Quaritch any more than he should have. “We arrived in a shuttlecraft just an hour ago. Our ability to breathe in Pandora’s atmosphere is just from an experimental drug.”

            “And that little standoff you had with our bulldozers?” Quaritch snarled. “Was that part of your ‘exploration’?”

            Before Alicia, Newt, or Ben could come up with a reasonable cover-up for their actions in the forest, Ben’s watch timed-out, taking him out of his alien form and returning him to his normal human ten-year-old form.

            Quaritch could hardly believe his own eyes. “How did you do that?”

            Ben shrugged, chuckling nervously. “Magic?”

            He could hear Newt scoffing over his reply.

            The amazed chief of security noticed the strange alien-looking watch strapped to the boy’s right wrist. More intrigued than before, he asked Ben, “Can you turn into any alien with that thing?”

            “Yeah, I can,” Ben said. “But only ten of them.”

            After some consideration, Quaritch struck a deal:

            “You tell me how that doohickey works, and I’ll give you outsiders the chance to redeem yourselves by taking part in a mission that’ll greatly help the RDA and, more importantly, the entire human race.”

            Alicia did not like the sound of what Quaritch had in mind.

            Nonetheless, she went along with it. She needed to look into the daunting lack of wildlife on Pandora.

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            Tsanten thanked Eywa for bestowing him with such strong legs for running.

            He needed them to get away from a beast unlike any he had seen.

            Made of something denser than unobtanium, it couldn’t be stopped with mere arrows, as Tsanten tried the second he saw the mechanical demon.

            He believed it to have been sent by the sky people.

            An unstoppable creation of theirs meant to kill every Na’vi on Pandora.

            Unfortunately, Tsanten reached a dead end at a cliff; not a single mountain banshee in sight to save him.

            The demon caught up with him; two more joining at its side.

            Tsanten knew this to be the end, bravely roaring at the demons as they overwhelmed him with their laser fire. Wiped out of existence, the last thing he heard was a word the demons cried out repeatedly in their pursuit:

            “EXTERMINATE!”