The Hero watched as the last member of the last family climbed into the portal, just as the glowing yellow ball disappeared below the horizon. After the portal disappeared, his eyes began to sway from one side to another, as if afraid that an enemy would come to get him any moment. He saw nothing. He let out a deep, long sigh, and then collapsed into the soft soil. A fortnight of work was too much, even for the Hero.
Twelve hours must have passed, for it was sunset again. Foranus had three suns and twelve moons. Sometimes, he would wake up and, as his eyes adjusted to reveal a sun on each side of the horizon and several moons in between, think it was some sort of dream. Having lived nearly a hundred thousand years in the Mundus, the three thousand in Foranus seemed so short. Yes, it had been three thousand years; yet the earth seemed still so exotic, so foreign, so alien under him. In a little over a week, he reminded himself, he would bid farewell to the strange soil and return to the Mundus.
As he lifted himself up, he swept the dirt off his shirt. It was not necessary, for the particles of soil had already fallen away, thanks to his friends' new invention. Knowing very well the consequences of being idle, the Foranus colonists did what they could to counter the lack of work Foranus provided. It led to great developments in every field from food preservation to spacecraft propulsion, from molecular biology to dirt-proof fabrics. Meanwhile, the less intelligent, or less intellectually diligent of the population left piles of rocks at every corner of the planet. At night, they would retreat to the nearest beach, feeding on whatever game they could find, returning only to the city to spend the holidays with their families, or when they had to buy new tools to replace their worn-out ones.
He forced himself to walk to the laboratory, resisting the urge to lie down and fall back to sleep as best he could. As he entered the building, he noticed that the computer was on. He had forgotten to turn off the computer when he left the laboratory. The excitement must have prevented him from completing this routine task. After walking over to the nearest computer, he typed a few commands into the computer. A chart popped up, the contents of which were no surprise to him. It was a larger version of his earlier experiments.
Nearly all of the population were pentelemental. The number of quadrelementals was a ten thousandth of pentelementals, divided evenly between the different combinations. The number of trielementals was a hundredth of that of quadrelementals, and the number of dielementals was half that. He made a mental note to pay a visit to the sole fire monoelemental the next day.
The wheels of his chair made a small groaning sound as he moved to the right to face his giant shelf. It contained three thousand years of scientific papers. All scientists sent him their reports after they were completed, not for the Hero's personal use, but so that it could act as a library where one could have access at any paper at will, as long as they stepped through their local portal. He wondered if the scientists would continue their study of science after they returned. He shook off the thought that the scientists would betray their plan to the powers that be in the Mundus. He had set up a barrier to destroy everything and anything that left the Foranusian atmosphere. Thus far, the only thing he'd destroyed was a child's kite. He had had to make another one for him.
As he pushed his chair further right, he found himself staring at the greatest library of musical scores on Foranus. He had all of them stored into a computer chip, so thankfully, the composers could bring along all of their works. The painters and sculptors were not as lucky. The painters could only take scanned versions of their artworks with them. Each sculptor could take only one of their works, their magnum opus; they could only bring home the photographs of the rest.
Going further, he saw his dictionaries. The Hero had, during his free time, transformed into some kind of superhuman polyglot. Knowing every language among the human race, or at least the known ones, the Hero understood the problems with the lack of a common language. Soon after their arrival at Foranus, the Hero had designed Komuniki as a lingua franca. Of the many dictionaries on the shelf, the Komuniki one was the thinnest. Komuniki was the most abject failure in his life of several thousand years. By the hundredth year, dialects had started to develop, and it took only five hundred years for the languages to develop into separate languages. He never had the motivation to develop another one, just to watch it sink like a stone again. He could not bear it.
Resting on the far end of his giant bookself was the Plan of the Pentelementalia. Would the blueprints become realities? Or would all the human race die, and would he have to float endlessly in space forever, with an army of corpses, people killed by him, by his side?
He knew very well that from that point, the fate of the human race was in the hands of Ground Control.
----
I plan to make Galactic Symbols in the role-playing format. The only difference with real role-playing games is that you look through a telescope instead of fight. Instead of how well you attack and defend yourself, you will have upgrades. I already have a series of plots in mind, although they are plots; not games. At the end, I may decide to write them down as short stories or as interactive stories in the Flash format. Or perhaps I could use another programming language to make the games.
To find out what happens next, please wait for Galactic Symbols! Also, if you didn't understand the part about being idle, please play Idle Not! :)
By the way, can you guess what 'TOP' stands for? The first person to send me a private message containing the correct answer will get his or her name on Galactic Symbols! :)