When I started writing this, the political climate was a LOT different. I was in college, for the third time, looking to increase my skillsets for my chosen occupations, since I was leaving my old occupation due to age and injury just mounting up. I took a lot of writing classes at a university that offered Masters Degrees in the Arts. I was going to focus on writing, since I've always hoped I had that thing, that spark.

Now, this was back when shirts with profanity on them could still get you told to leave campus and change your shirt by the campus cops.

I had a year long course with a teacher that for some reason had fallen in love with Game of Thrones, specifically Song of Ice & Fire, long before the HBO show came out. This was a "Fantasy Writing" set of classes, where there were workshops where we had to work together to collaborate on stories and do peer review and everything else.

This was the second year of my studies, and I'm telling you, I was a BAD fit. I was over 30, around 40 years old, and had been on my own since I was 15 years old. I was married with children and had been through a lot of stuff and the majority of the classes were full of 18-20 year olds with no life experience who were all convinced they were going to write the next novel and become even greater than JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien, GRR Martin, and CS Lewis and change the world with their writing.

I was jaded as fuck too.

Everyone in my classes were working on "huge epics!" and they were all the fucking same. Twilight was recently out too, so that didn't help.

Everyone was writing "Twee Teenagers Save the Universe" as well as "Princess Saves the World Through the Power of Her Vagina" stuff. To me, it was like the worst of the 1960's fantasy combined with the self-absorbed narcassism of the 1980's.

I decided I was going to write the most obnoxious characters ever. Now, this was before "Social Justice Warrior" was even a concept. Trump was still a TV personality and a real estate mogol, Hillary wasn't anything more than a Senator. Everyone thought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be over in a few years despite people like me knowing exactly what they were seeing (Time is a flat circle) even without the casualty lists appearing on television like when I was a child.

One thing that all of my peers's fiction had was the transplants from modern day into a fantasy setting was... well... arrogance in the author and thus passed to the characters.

All of them were geniuses compared to the primitive people around them, with their advanced scientific brains of course figuring out the difficulties that the poor pathetic primitives of a medieval era world could not.

Written by people who were confused on how a light switch worked. If you asked them exactly how it worked, they'd just give you a blank stare. (I can tell you how the whole system works and why the alternating current frequency used in the US was chosen)

So the characters would show up and virtually be seen as Gods. It was acted as if the people were too stupid to figure things out themselves in their own world.

And one trope I've always hated was the 'savior' thing.

The Indigo Child thing was in full swing (LULZ) and I decided to make my primary protagonist an Indigo Child, because, holy shit, were these people insufferable asswipes.

I made Rider into a male feminist of the type I saw crawling all over the campus. You know the type.

I made Jack into someone wishy washy who just goes along because he doesn't have anything else in his life.

I also decided to use a world I'd come up with a few decades before, a world of savagery and magic.

I quit soon after I started. College just wasn't for me anymore. I was too old, too jaded, and not willing to put up with the dumb shit any longer. It wasn't the classes, it wasn't the course work, it was my fellow students, some of the teachers, and some of the administrative faculty. I couldn't handle the hypocrisy, two faced attitudes, and the general attitude.

It didn't help that my coursework put me in close proximity to theater majors. (Yes, I've had two scripts for plays acted out and I wish I hadn't) Oh, God, Theater Majors.

Shoot me now.

Trust me, if you've never been involved with Theater and Cinema Majors, you have no idea just how disfunctional it all is.

(It seemed like every month or so some dippo decided to be ground breaking and lose their virginity on stage like every dippo before them. Blargh)

I kept writing it, then... well... things changed on me.

The story wasn't funny any more. The characters, which had been caricature over the top outrageous parodies of the worst of the Indigo Child scene suddenly became, well, political.

So I quit writing this.

While "First Contact" contains some political themes, it isn't intended to be hurtful or harmful or even directly relate to modern politics.

This wasn't supposed to be a critique on modern politics, it was designed to be a critique and parody of the kind of stuff my fellow students pumped out by the thousands of words.

It was satire on the high fantasy writing cliques. Poking fun at myself and other authors.

But, the world changed.

People got offended by it. Felt like I was personally attacking them.

It wasn't worth it.

So I gave up on it.

Part of me wants to keep writing it, keep the blend of satire, high fantasy, and high stakes fiction. Show that Jack, Skylar, and Ryder would be more changed by their new world than the world would be changed by three newcomers, no matter how powerful.

I had in mind fall and redemption, a total fall into becoming what they hate, and the slightly bemused of someone who is a little separated from the world because of their power.

Oh well.

I hope you laughed at a few things, like Skylar's descriptions, like how oblivious her and Ryder were, and how the Phealan were.

--Ralts