Shaia

Generally taking the form of a lithe young lady of substantial size, her place in the universe is often sketchy at the best of times. For a humanoid creature typically big enough to have trouble fitting indoors, or even fitting in with her human kin, it might surprise some to imagine that she does in fact originate from Earth.

The first type of intelligent 'life' that Shaia discovered was equally bewildered, being one of the first to naturally form in the beginning of the early universe. The crackling, floating chunks of quartz had never seen anything resembling organic life themselves, and were thoroughly confused to discover their unexpected catch had simply been drifting through outer space. What -they- saw was just a chunk of rock like themselves, a perfect sphere of quartz. The meeting was short; the planet was summarily vaporized by a gamma ray burst emitted from a nearby collapsing star, turning most of the thinking and feeling chain of conscious stones into radiant high-energy particles.

Other more interesting, varied races naturally emerged as well with time, and were also given passing visits by the peculiar comet girl. Usually choosing to represent herself as one of the native races at some interesting point in time before catastrophic annihilation is destined to occur. Tasked with preserving and recording instances of meaningful and delightful things to emerge from the interaction between energy and entropy, Shaia travels abroad, biding her time. For her race, the end of the universe is happening all too soon, or already did. Mostly a matter of perspective.

The real concern is how long the fabric of the universe itself will hold out, before giving way to perversions and voids beyond the edge of what is real. Which, too, will someday collapse and give rise to something newer, stranger, and even more unpopular with kids.


Produced as a contingency plan by powerful manufacted intelligences finding a comfortable seat at the very end of the universe's timeline, the best of all technologies conceivable were thrown together in a last-ditch effort as a full-scale universe backup plan. At a time when even just matter was a rare and treasured resource, substantial amounts were used and refined into gems of varying shape and purpose. Where primordial matter would ordinarily be used to craft servers and machines, to house virtual environments where the denizens of the time might live, it was instead siphoned away into the most massive virtualization effort ever attempted.

In order to save what was left of the universe, they would -record- it. All of it. Save it all in digital form. If things turned out to work like they thought, they would at least be able to enrich the next universe to contain some nice things. Events, species, and anomalies of statistical unliklihood which hadn't faired so well the first time. The machines required for the job were best-suited to be operated by live intelligences, for which there was no particular scarcity. The stones were finally imbued with plotting and navigational tools, massive projection capabilities, all of the necessary tools their inhabitants would require to perform their duties. All that was left, after the mammoth calculations were made to send them into the ancient early universe, was to await their own inevitable demise and hope that their friendly time capsules would arrive first, with information enough to help overwhelm the vacuum.


The girl herself, consequently, is terribly lazy. A bit shy, too; extroverts were not the best suited necessarily for long travel times and long stretches of solitude.
Skipping ahead a bit anyway, in more interesting recent times, Shaia has begun adapting herself to human society. Feigning ignorance of her past to a point and pretending to be just another human being, solely for the sake of studying human cultures across time and space. Producing rain just as people praise the clear sky, moving welcome mats just barely out of range of doorways, teleporting a single sock out of random dryers, a subtle nuisance to mankind in short and freckled form.

Shaia is easily humbled regardless of everything, considering herself to be of similar authority to most ordinary living people, and preferring to live as quietly as possible during the slow journey that lies ahead of her.