Another incredibly generous giveaway from Doc. Maybe should be used to them by now, but I keep being baffled whenever I see these. They'd be utterly shocking even for the old days!
In for:
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Game of the Year Edition Deluxe, The
Torment: Tides of Numenera
Thea: The Awakening
MightyPinecone truly is on the run from intergalactic police, coming from a planet which would be called Haven if names would be translated, in the nearby
Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. The name is painfully, or more exactly burningly and chokingly, ironic for its small remaining population, descendants of the massive group of colonists which fled their former homeworld when their local star expanded too much as it aged, rendering it uninhabitable and eventually swallowing it completely. At that time, their best scientists had calculated that just moving a few planets over would allow their species to remain in the same system, at least with the adaptations to the heat, hostile atmosphere and barren soil which had already been developed. But you know how it is with doing things quickly, accuracy tends to suffer, and so it did, their star continuing to expand past all predictions and Haven becoming anything but.
Of course, this did take a while, and technological and genetically engineered adaptations were improved upon by old-fashioned but highly effective natural evolution, which also did away with most of the mistakes (or "mistakes", as it's common knowledge among the survivors that many were not quite so accidental) added by the engineering, albeit at the cost of a high death toll. Most notably, as the name other species tend to call them when they're not around suggests, their bodies have developed a large number of skin flaps, some of them covering gills, allowing for both cooling and absorbing what little useful air is left in the molten and toxic atmosphere of Haven. Otherwise, as our resident MightyPinecone found with some surprise, as long as the flaps remain closed they appear passably human, albeit unusually muscular ones (gravity is quite high on Haven too). At least on the outside, because anybody taking a look at their internal structure would be in for quite a shock.
Now that's all well and good (or not, for them), but how did our resident MightyPinecone get to Earth? Well, somewhat understandably, Venus was the actual intended destination, but remember that lack of accuracy of their scientists? Seems like even after so many generations, that did not improve, because while they even discovered ways to send small spacecraft almost instantly to great distances and even render them undetectable for short amounts of time, getting the exit points right is still often beyond them... And the cloaking couldn't last nearly enough to allow for sublight travel to Venus. Could have been a whole lot worse, of course, and it often was, like all the stories of... But no, let's not go there; too gruesome.
Then again, we sort of have to go there to explain why our resident MightyPinecone is on the run at least. You see, this jump was actually the second one, the first being supposed to reach what should have been an uninhabited world where some of the chemicals needed to fuel the rest of the journey could easily be extracted from. But that little inaccuracy problem raised its head again, and the tiny vessel sort of materialized into a space passage connecting two parts of a processing platform being constructed there by other beings which had discovered the resource-rich world in question. The ship and its pilot survived. Those on the platforms did not. And apparently they were some big shots, as the galaxy goes.
The Earth is a pretty good, uh, haven for alien fugitives though, being inhabited, so requiring following proper contact protocols, but the supposedly intelligent species inhabiting it being so backward and, well, not really intelligent or rational that no sane member of another species capable of such space travel would care to contact them. Many are just waiting for them to destroy themselves to see what could be found in this system, as at the rate things are going that shouldn't take long at all. Sadly they may well take most of what's interesting on their planet down with them, but there will probably still be enough left to make quite a few expeditions worthwhile.
In case of this particular MightyPinecone though, he's rather sick and tired of being so damn cold and lightheaded all the time and can't wait for global warming and air pollution to advance to some of those predicted levels and beyond. After following the developments in politics and markets for a while, he has every confidence that they will, and soon enough. His species is a rather long-lived one, after all.
