It All Started With Magnets

.4.

I looked around at the aliens in the room and they were all staring at me but I figured I could understand that. I had literally told them that we knew what they looked like but come on, it was like I had stepped into a fantasy novel minus the magic. I clasped my hands together and looked at them.

Loril-ee looked like a damned pixie. She was two feet tall, had wings, two tiny antenna growing from her forehead, and a short pixie cut. True, her teeth were far sharper than a fantasy pixie's were, like a mouthful of daggers that nearly made me want to shudder and her eyes were all black, but she was a dead ringer for a pixie.

Mare-aidee, with her long white hair, slim form, and long ears was like a damned elf if I had ever seen one. Her eyes were extra large and glowing silver, yes, and her ears were a bit wider than the standard elf ears I had grown used to seeing, and her skin was blue, but she definitely looked like an elf.

Gal'rug looked one hundred percent like an orc out of a fantasy novel. There was no damned question about that. He was big, green, had tusks, and loved to fight. That was definitely orc like. His eyes weren't yellow though and he didn't have black claws, I glanced at his large hands and they had neatly trimmed regular nails. He also had facial hair, which was strange to see on an orc but I could get behind it.

Hint and Lyress looked just like werewolves. Which was more than a little off-putting and I was glad I hadn't jumped out of my skin when they had gotten closer to me. They looked like standard werewolves from fiction too. Shaggy hair, claws, sharp teeth, yellow eyes. The difference was Hint's snout was shorter and looked a tiny amount like a hyena when he smiled but still. Werewolf.

Dunnerton looked like a rock golem but in a different way. There was no floating rock, no empty joints suspended by magic. He just looked like someone took a person and covered them in a rock suit. He was still absolutely cool to look at and I wanted to pick at the craggy and rocky skin of his to see if it felt like it looked like it did.

I glanced at At'kat'vo. His name was a trip to try and work the clicks into but I was pretty sure I had it down pat. He was a preying mantis but he kind of reminded me of that one character that used to play on the cartoon network, it ran a talk show. I couldn't remember it's name for the life of me but he kind of reminded me of that guy. Except there was absolutely zero human features to him. His eyes were like wasp eyes, his arms, if you could call them that, had long finger like sticks that he had pressed together. I thought it was one smooth shell arm until he pulled them apart and it almost made my skin crawl. He also wasn't green, he was a dark, almost black, and had rather terrifying mandibles on his face like an ant.

I thought I would have been terrified to meet aliens. I had a lot of time on the ship to think about perhaps meeting a new species and how I would react but they were so...familiar that I was geeking out more than anything else. It took all I had to not screech and grab my camera and take as many pictures as I could because holy fucking shit, I walked into a real life fantasy novel.

Loril-ee seemed to be the first to recover and I looked at her patiently. I knew damn well I was going to have to explain it to them. "What?" She tilted her little head at me and blinked her all black eyes and I fought the urge to burst into laughter. I had been expecting a full question, not that.

"Well..." I trailed off slightly and wondered if what I was going to explain would insult any of them. I didn't know their cultures and humans had enough issues with insulting other cultures by just doing regular things from their own cultures. I had to explain to a group of very, very real people, that my species imagined them, wrote them into story books, that they were fiction on Earth. "Humans have very big imaginations." I said it carefully before sitting up a bit straighter. "Every single one of you have appeared in our media in some form or another."