After getting Krissy cleaned up from her misadventure and near-death, the three sat at the kitchen table solemnly. Ty in particular was deep in thought, and Narissa could see a million bad things playing through his mind.
"I don't know if I can do this." Ty said finally.
"I'm okay!" Krissy said reassuredly, having redressed and sipping some water. "We just got a little carried away, that's all."
"No, it's not just that. I have this terrifying ability. There's all this other stuff going on." He sighed heavily. "I'm just a fucking kid. A stupid scrawny kid."
Krissy looked down at her glass sadly, but Narissa wasn't having any of it. "Do you know..." The lizard said sternly. "That your soul goes through multiple lives? You're made, you incarnate, you die, you do it again. And again. Dozens if not hundreds of times until you learn something about yourself."
Both the humans stared in fascination as Narissa continued.
"You!" Narissa pointed at Krissy. "You were once an Egyptian priestess who was assassinated for trying to incite a revolution against a tyrannical pharoah."
Krissy blinked several times, goose bumps rising on her skin as her strange childhood fascination with the pyramids and old egypt suddenly made sense. Wait... holy shit! Her mind blew.
"And you, Ty... man, if you knew what you used to be. See, you've been a soldier in at least four brutal wars. You've seen and done way too much, some of which you're still paying for today. But you're also, deep down, incredibly brave. Because you come from a time when the Earth was young and adventurous." She paused for a moment, seeing Ty's same realization. "That's what I see when I look at you. I see past your body and into your very soul. So don't tell me what you aren't. You're better than that."
At that speech, Ty slumped back in his chair and began thinking again.
"What about you?" Krissy turned to Narissa. "Have you ever been anything else besides a lizard woman? Does that happen?"
Narissa checked Ty's thoughts and smirked slightly. "Actually, yes. I mean, I've incarnated as a reptilian, of course, it's my basic DNA, my default orientation if you will. I've traveled space, been to different planets, been an explorer and a scientist. But when I kept returning after I died, I felt like I was missing something really important. So I tried other species once or twice. I came back as a Lemurian once. That's about as close to human as you could get back in the way. I mean, you came from Lyrans, but still..."
"Okay." Ty said, wincing. "You need to stop telling us things like it's nothing. So back up."
"All right." Narissa said, swirling some water in her cup and downing it thristily as the afternoon began to fade into early evening.
"So the ancient aliens thing is true?" Ty raised an eyebrow.
"Yes, of course." She shrugged. "There's hints and monuments everywhere. In myth, legend, stories, and your very culture. Oh, and actual real monuments depicting aliens, gods, spaceships, and other such things."
"Whoa." Krissy said suddenly. "What about like... Sobek? Or Seth? Or bird people? Or cat people?"
"In ancient egypt?" Narissa said with excited eyes and a fluid movement of her tail behind her. "Oh, yeah! Yeah, no, those guys would look like gods to the ancient people, right, but they were actually ambassadors and space folk involved in the affairs of mankind. Sobek, yeah. I know that guy well, because he's the representation of a reptilian species. Namely mine, the Saurians."
"Really?" Krissy said, leaning forward in total rapture.
"Yeah!" Narissa pointed to herself. "On my planet my descend from an archosaurian type creature, the best representation of that was the crocodilian or alligator, which the Egyptians already revered before we started meddling, so they associated their God Sobek with our species in particular."
"Shit." Krissy said simply, blinking. "So who built the pyramids?"
"Ancient builder race. Anti-gravity and high tech cutting." She said casually. "You didn't really think they built those things with ramps, did you? The granite alone has machine markings in it that a lot of people know are a lot older than we say... and of course you haven't even found all the secret chambers yet. Or the other complex that used to be a tropical jungle. A few people have Luxor figured out, though." She said with a cryptic grin. "I should know because we helped with the geometry when I was Corps of Engineers."
"Go back to people." Ty said with a surprised smile. "Where did people come from? Are we all aliens, then?"
"Not really." She shrugged. "I mean, here's how it usually goes. Another more advanced race finds a new planet, and traditionally, they get to seed it with life. Earth or Terra, you know, whichever you use, had this really cool history in that a bunch of us who used to be enemies got together and said, know what, let's do this one together. So it's really a symbolic world in that respect."
"What?" Ty blinked. "Like, lizards and aliens?"
"Oh, like three tribes of reptilians." Narissa said, recalling information that had easily happened billions of years ago. "The Lyrans, the Vegans, some Pleiadians, A-Sirians, Zetans, the Ataiens. It was one of the first times after the big wars that everybody really worked together on something. Big political deal at the same."
Ty blinked. "Who are all those things? In order?"
Narissa chuckled softly and rose to get more water. "Lyrans, either blonde or red headed humanoids, but they come from Alpha Lyrae. Kind of the forerunners of most human-like beings. Uh, the Vegans were brown skinned folk from the same area, pretty close to Native Americans. The Sirian A's are cat people. The Zetans are the guys you met today. Remember Jake?"
"Yeah!" Ty said excitedly.
"Right, him." Narissa said, ignoring Krissy's obvious confusion. "The Ataiens are the mantis people."
"Shut up!" Ty said in delight. "They're real?! There's mantis people?!"
"Yeah." Narissa raised an eye ridge, swaying her tail back to her seat and topping up Krissy's glass from a pitcher. "Why wouldn't there be?"
"What about your guys?" Krissy sipped her drink, totally lost in the story.
"Okay, so you've got the recently independant former Dracosaurian band. That's me." She said, leaning against the table and deep in thought. "You've got the Royals, which are the guys who eventually became this kind of terrorist group. There's the reds, which look like me but are not. And at one point I think we had the phibs here too." She noted the apparent bewilderment of her human companions and sighed. "Uh..." She waved her hand distantly. "Amphibian-like. Phibs. Kind of look like gilled lizard-frogs."
"The Loveland Frog Man!" Ty blurted excitedly.
"Say what?" Narissa pulled her neck back, and seemed to stare off distantly for a second before nodding enthusiastically. "Oh, yeah! Yeah! I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah!" She pointed. "Those guys! I guess they're still here."
"So all these different races... or... tribes, you called them? They built all those big complexes and old buildings and stuff?" Krissy asked.
"Yeah." Narissa nodded. "In one fashion or another, at the very least we helped early people with scared geometry, mathematics, construction, agriculture, astronomy, astrology, aetheric concepts, the mystery, basically to get you on your feet."
"Okay, fine, fine!" Ty held up his hand. "But who made us?"
"All of us." Narissa shrugged. "You've got a little reptile in you for survival, a little Lyran for appearance, the compassion of the Ataien, the strength of the Leo, the fascination of the Zetan. The list goes on. We all threw a little bit of our attributes onto you and stirred it in a pot for a few thousand years until, well, pretty much Mu."
"Like... Lemuria." Ty said. "Like, we're talking the lost continent that doesn't exist and couldn't exist."
"Yes." Narissa said patiently. "You really have to understand just how much of actual history has been suppressed or hidden over the years. Yes, Lemuria. Mu. The motherland. Pre-Atlantis. Imagine..." She put her snout towards the ceiling and wagged it oddly. "Imagine the most perfect human civilization you can. Everybody's generally nice and peaceful, you work together, live in an untouched and unsullied paradise next to dinosaurs and aliens, you have a clear grasp of how everything works, and it's just a lovely life."
"So... what happened?" Krissy dropped her smile.
"War." Narissa sighed heavily, deeply. "With Atlantis."
"Atlantis." Ty repeated. "Was real too?"
"There were two schools of thought." Narissa explained quickly. "Mu represented harmony with nature. Atlantis represented development and technology. Despite being younger, Atlantis became the more powerful of the two continents. And in the end, thanks in part to objection over violating the laws of pretty much everything, Atlantis wound up bombing the shit out of Mu so badly that the entire continent's base was weakened."
"It sank into the water." Ty blinked.
"An entire prosperous several thousand year old culture. Gone overnight." She nodded. "Meanwhile, the dickheads of Atlantis got theirs."
"Explain." Ty said, shocked.
"Because of their utter cruelty and disregard for life, they were ordered to surrender their Empire, which stretched well away from their continent itself. They didn't. They were fucking nuked off the planet by an orbiting battleship. Which in turn caused a huge catastrophic event that wiped out most planet life."
"Jesus." Ty blinked again. Harder. "So the flood was a thing too?"
"Yeeeahhh." Narissa said, shaking her head. "You gotta work pretty hard to piss off a race of benevolent space aliens, but when you do, you're done."
"So that's true." Krissy added. "Like that thing in the bible about purging away all the sin."
"No, literally." Narissa nodded. "Noah wasn't actually a guy, and he didn't build a giant boat. They were actually talking about preserving the genetic material of animal life in preperation for the coming razing of the planet's surface. Also, you need to understand that Atlantis was a truly awful and absolutely terrible place filled with every kind of morally reprehensible and disgusting thing you could think of. Such as removing the soul from the body in order to create a race of unthinking slaves, mixing the genetics of lower animals and humanoids, creating a beacon of dark energy to take over the planet. That kind of stuff."
"Is... that where the bad guys come in?" Krissy seemed to sink into her chair.
"My dear, those were the bad guys." She sighed again and pinged her glass with a claw. "A bunch of my cousins decided it would be great fun to use their status as Gods to create a race that could legally claim rulership of Terra. Because this is very clearly NOT a reptilian owned world and must remain so. But if they could create a proxy race to run it for them, then technically they own it. This meant killing the rightful heirs to the planet. Those were the Murians, by the way."
"So... humanity is a lost species." Ty said sadly.
"True." Narissa nodded. "The survivors of Mu emigrated to various places. Some went to what is now Polynesia, some to Asia, while a few other tribes descended from the teachings of the Vegans wound up going west to the Americas. I bet you won't be surprised that the whole point of the big empires throughout your more recent history was to kill off the remaining descendants of Mu and control their ancient knowledge to keep it hidden." Narissa poured another glass of water and sipped it casually, her face a stony annoyance. "So... that happened."
There was a long and dark pause as the two humans took it all in, staring at the table with abject defeat and sadness.
The clock ticked by in the background and Ty and Krissy both managed an upset sigh, while Narissa seemed to slump into her chair.
"The visit from Mr. Creepy starting to make sense?" Narissa asked. "The bad guys are so powerful they can control the entire planet's history, wreck evidence exposing it, and kill and silence whoever dares to stand up to them. Even something like me. Because higher beings are great in their own realms but very unable to just up and save humanity. Hence secret war."
"God damn." Krissy whispered. "That pisses me off so much."
"Huh?" Ty turned.
"Because once again a bunch of fucking jerks went out of their way to hurt the innocent people just living their lives. I mean, did the Lemurians bomb them back?"
"Of course not." Narissa said sharply. "The Murians had no such weapons. War itself was regarded as an absolute evil. Right until the end they held out hope the crisis could be resolved peacefully. And guess what? As Mu collapsed into the ocean, a bunch of their elders stayed right to the end, sinking into the ocean with their home instead of giving their enemies the satisfaction of dying in their prisons. And that defiance to evil without making more of it is exactly the kind of thing that humankind's modern descendants need once again."
"So..." Ty said tiredly. "What do we do? What do you want?"
"Good question." Narissa said. "And I will explain as I promised. But I think we need a break after that shit."