By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
We were careful at first. Our drones started collecting rocks and bringing them back across to our side so we could examine them and use them in our own technology. Perhaps there were hundreds, thousands of these missions focusing only on small amounts of rocks and minerals.
While this was going on, we were still watching you—the human civilizations. We learned a lot from your technology, though we found it increasingly dangerous to look into the future as your technology became more sophisticated. We learned from your technology, but also had to be careful that you could not detect us or invade our world. To protect ourselves, we built and maintained a sort of globe or floating fort around the portal on your side to mask its existence so your people could not find us.
In fact, we built more than just masking technology on your side of the portal, which was also in the sky. As we became more interested in personally visiting your world, we built towers to the portal. At first these towers were constructed by our drones out of the rocks, trees, and other physical matter on your side. These towers inevitably decayed and fell away over time, and obviously we couldn’t use them in the times when humans lived if we wanted to avoid detection. Eventually we discovered a means of building a tower to the portal that utilized a special kind of matter invisible to human eyes. I won’t go into specifics here, but that tower exists even now not far from here.
To be frank, as we watched and waited and learned more and more, many of our kind experienced a reawakening of older desires and instincts. Many became jealous of the pleasures of the life on the other side. We were immortal, but we could not take part in even the most common activities which most people in your world would consider the most meaningful parts of life.
More specifically, as mentioned before, we could not reproduce in the sort of stifled semi-time of our world. And many of my kind decided that they frankly wanted children. But in order to have children, a number of incredible obstacles had to be overcome.
Not only would we need to visit the other side safely, we would have to be able to readjust our bodies to live in your world again for an extended period of time—long enough to mate, but then also through the gestation period and birth. Even then, if we returned immediately after birth to our side, the child would be locked into a life eternal in the body of an infant.
If we wanted to raise our young to adulthood, it would need to be on your side, in your world. And the whole time we lived there, we would be in danger of death, whether from disease or aging or any other of a million factors. Most of our kind were not willing to take that chance, which is why we had sent drones for such a long period instead of visiting personally.
But the desires grew and grew as we viewed your world and ways. And eventually some were brave enough to go and risk everything, all for the promise of having a family.