Sentient life carries the originating spark of curiosity combined with a need not to relinquish this curiosity until the need for understanding lay satiated. A high likelihood existed that the sentient life of one world would find its way to encounter that of another. For those of Earth and those of Arrhazon – the fourth of 12 planets in the Arrhka system, with the star Arrhka at its centre – that time had come.

To those unknowing, we know the sun-like star Arrhka as 51 Pegasi.

Life on Arrhazon claimed roots older than life on Earth; Arrhka/51 Pegasi formed slightly prior to Earth’s sun. In other respects, the stars are relative sisters – or perhaps first cousins – in space, roughly similar stars across 50 light years of separation. Arrhazon itself is slightly larger in mass than Earth, the actual measurement at just under 1.148 times.

Somewhere around 2 million years ago a mysterious, ancient space faring peoples ‘seeded’ this sector of the Milky Way galaxy with the building blocks of sentient life. Arrhazonans, now also a space faring peoples, to date identified the peoples of 140 separate planets across 110 light years of space in the region as having this common connection to the unknown Ancients.

The work of the Ancients persisted up until very recently in terms of evolutionary time: evidence existed of involvement on Arrhazon in the very early days of Arrhazon’s own move into space. There the record abruptly ends, and no one knew whether the Ancients were satisfied with the evolution of the Arrhazonan people, now to be left alone, or whether something happened to the Ancients.

This recent change also held true in information gleaned from the people of other worlds with whom Arrhazon had contact, all of whom were descendents of the mysterious Ancients. The evidentiary trail ends with the world’s move into space.

Apparently the Ancients would monitor each of their seed-worlds, where they would tweak evolution of life, as well as that of society, adding cultural elements they found to be positive from other worlds. One such example was the cross-culture development of music; almost all of the worlds had one culture or another develop similar musical instruments at around the same general point in the evolution of their particular society. The Ancients apparently had a thing for pianos and stringed instruments and music.

Unlike how we glamorously depict futuristic space travel, four centuries into Arrhazon finding its way into space, such travel remained relatively expensive and largely exploratory beyond the greater Arrhka system. Arrhazon established very basic relations with four other systems to date, with an exchange of permanent envoys working to forge some kind of permanent arrangement on trade, with great possibility for the future.

The furthest Arrhazonan explorers reached officially out into space was 55 light years, the distance now far less daunting with scientific discoveries and their application over the preceding 3 decades. In general, the greater the distance, the least explored and the more basic and limited the level of information.

Relatively few Arrhazonans could lay claim to having been in space, even to the established colonies on both Arrhazonan moons. Arrhazon extracted minerals and ore from both moons for use on Arrhazon. Each moon housed way stations to other planets of the Arrhka system. This remained an exotic and hazardous profession, one not for the faint of heart.

Arrhazon itself was typical of worlds where explorers found sentient life. In common for each planet were: rough mass of the planet; atmosphere within a certain range of gasses and pressure; active plate tectonics changed the surface over time; the planet moderately tilts on its axis of revolution, producing seasonal variance; and their surfaces were home to very large amounts of water and or ice. Each orbited their star within a belt roughly 110 million kilometres outward to roughly 210 million kilometres distant from the system’s star if the stars were roughly similar, or if not, at roughly the same location if measured by energy output of the star or binary stars.

In addition to the sentient beings of these worlds, many species of flora and fauna were of roughly the same genus. As an example, dolphins on earth closely equated to empohnims on Arrhazon, and likely shared common ancestry.

Researchers speculated the Ancients did this to mitigate potential for extinction. Losing a species on one planet did not eradicate it forever – they could be brought back and ‘reseeded’ from another world if need be.

Twenty years before, Arrhazonan explorers sent back information on one of the more remote systems under study to date, known to Arrhazon as Arrkarhara – literally ‘almost twin of Arrhka.’ To the sentient peoples of the third planet of this far off system, this twin of Arrhka carried the name of ‘sun.’

The third planet was of intense interest; partly for its remoteness, partially because its civilisation was more varied in advancement than Arrhazon. While Arrhazon had long since united, with virtually all poverty eradicated and most people having access to modern conveniences, the Arrkarhara planet had pockets of advancement and pockets of near subsistence existence. Wars abounded, the people of the planet remained hugely territorial, with the planet criss-crossed with arbitrary borders.

Stargazers on Arrhazon scrutinising their nighttime sky invariably spent time looking at Arrkarhara – easily found at the tip of the Arlkhala constellation, one of the first constellations an Arrhazonan child learned. Those children wondered, just as their counterparts across the void between them wondered, if the other was there, and what they were like. For Arrhazonan children, they now had partial answers.

For the people of that far off world, many suspected off-world visitors, crafting great stories of their existence or interaction with their planet, but no public proof existed. Arrhazon would make contact when it felt the world was sufficiently stable – or so Arrhazonans thought.

Things have a way of following an independent path. When one world tinkered with that of another, eventually a heretofore hidden error would open the doors of awareness and interaction, from which there would be no turning back.

That error carried a name, and at that very moment, for the person to which that name attached, for the second time in her life – on her second world – she was the person of interest to a presiding government.

Little did she know the first government fell largely from her advocacy and story; little did either she or the governments of this new world know how her existence would change life on their world.

The answers would begin to unfold soon enough, with the governments of this world left with no choice but to change their ways, the result of the remarkable musician with an extraordinary vision that would extend its reach across two entire worlds. This musician was force-muted for far too long, and the universe, with time as its ally, would have a way of correcting this slight.