Their tour began with a visit to the museum, which was located close to the Royal Palace.

Aside from Varka, Emperor Velandar added three more members of Velrakis-Aran to guard their group. Those Velrakis-Aran members wore the same uniform as Varka — sleeveless black outfit with decorated collar, and a sword strapped to their hips.

The museum they visited was named the Great Museum of Velrakis. It preserved the long history of Mothership Velrakis and the culture of its citizens. Its collections were rather extensive, from paintings that depicted the life aboard the Mothership, three-dimensional recordings of important events, various sculptures made by the citizens of the Mothership, to various technologies that they used in their daily life.

“Even though our home-planet is no more, we strive to keep our culture alive”, Avamar said as they walked past the mannequins that displayed traditional clothes of the beings who lived aboard the Mothership.

“This preservation effort must have taken quite some time”, Professor Ratri said as she examined a mannequin that displayed the Ursii traditional clothes. 

According to the plaque in front of it, the Ursii were monosexual being and reproduced asexually — even though as of late they would often use genetical manipulation so that they could intermarry. This allowed more genetic diversity among their people and better chance for survival in their new colonies.

“That is correct”, Avamar returned. “The whole process has been taking millennia, and it’s not yet complete either. It’s not easy to collect the records of long lost civilization, but we still refuse to give up.”

“All this preservation effort surely takes space, correct? How do you manage that?” Professor Ratri asked again. “This museum seems too small to be able to contain your people’s entire history.”

“Ah, we have a centralized archive somewhere outside the Mothership”, Avamar replied. “We can still access them through interstellar network from this museum.”

“Wow”, Tika gasped in amazement. “That’s going to take months if not years to study everything.”

“If you want to, you can come again another time”, Avamar said with a smile.

“Thank you”, Tika said, before examining the Anur Arta traditional clothes.

All visitors were given a tablet filled with information about everything that was displayed in the museum. Tika was delighted to find that the tablet was set in English, and she began to read the informations in it diligently.

As it turned out, the Anur Arta were amphibian humanoid who were capable to live both on land and underwater. Most of their megapolitans used to lie close to large bodies of water — which wasn’t difficult, as their planet was ninety percent aquatic. This explained why the Royal Palace was decorated with ponds — perhaps to remind them of their long lost home-planet.

The Anur Arta breathed with their skin, so the clothing they wore could transform depending on their environment. When underwater, their clothes would shift to show more skin so that they could breathe freely. When on land, their clothes would accommodate to protect their sensitive skin from direct sunlight. The collar they wore, as it turned out, controlled this transformation, and the wearer could shift the clothes they wore at will.

Their traditional clothing on land was a sleeveless knee-length cloak and a pair of leggings. While underwater, their traditional clothing would shift into a sleeveless vest. Their collar was decorated with beads made out of colorful corals, and their head was decorated with colorful headdress.

Even though Tika was no expert about clothes and stuff, she knew that the materials used to make the Anur Arta clothes was way more advanced than anything that humans could ever make. This made her curious how a piece of clothing could shift depending on their environment, but she didn’t know to whom she had to ask without the risk of offending anyone.

After five hours (around two hours Earth time), Tika and her colleagues took a break in a cafe inside the museum. Varka helped them ordering food and drinks. Naturally, not all food and drinks available in the menu were edible to humans. Some could even straight up poison them to death.

“Like the Jotnar’s traditional drink, grelsaka, which is made of ethylene glycol”, they said.

“The Jotnar drank ethylen glycol?!” Bayu cried out in surprise. “Wait, hold up. How did you know that ethylene glycol is dangerous to us?”

“When I was four, my mother had to be hospitalized after taking a sip of grelsaka”, Varka grimaced. “Thanks to that incident, I invented a device to detect dangerous chemicals in her food and drink.”

They pulled from their pocket a metallic orb as large as a marble.

“Observe”, Varka said as they dropped the orb. However, instead of dropping straight into the plate of food in front of them, the orb floated ten centimeter above it and emitted bright light that bathed the food electric blue. A few seconds later, the blue light dissipated, and the orb displayed a holographic screen. A few lines of chemical formulae were written on it in Anur and English.

“Astounding!” Professor Arga gasped. “And you invented it when you were four?!”

“Varka was a child genius. They had invented a few gadgets, before joining Velrakis-Aran”, Avamar said while petting Varka’s hair. “Such a pity, really. They could be accepted into Velrakaris Science Academy, if they wanted to.”

Varka let out a snort and pulled themself away from Avamar’s hand, but they said nothing as they joined with the other Velrakis-Aran, a few steps behind Tika and her colleagues.

After the break (which ended somewhat awkwardly), their group continued on with their tour. The Great Museum of Velrakis was massive, just as the name implied. Even so, Avamar was optimistic that they could finish the tour in one day.

The next area was science and technology — and in that moment, Tika realized how impossible Avamar’s plan was.

When Tika was a child, during school breaks, she always asked her parents to visit Batu City Science Museum. The newly founded museum really appealed to her — there were always new things she could learn there, and they made her more interested to pursue her dream to be an astronaut.

Right in that moment, the child in her was jumping around in joy. Wherever she looked, science props she could never have imagined sat nicely on metallic platforms, ready to be used.

“I wanna stay here…” Bayu muttered from Tika’s left.

“Me too”, Indah added

“Get in line, kids”, Professor Arga piped in too.

Tika was grateful that she was not the only one. After a long debate, Avamar let Tika and her colleagues to stay in the science area until their tour ended in ten hours (around four hours Earth time). They argued that to study the technology that the Mothership had effectively, they needed to understand the basics first. 

And really — what was better than a museum filled with advanced science props, a manual written in English readily available in their hands, and a science genius like Varka to help them?

After a quick discussion, they agreed to begin from astronautica section first.

As soon as they got there, they found various spaceship models were displayed in the open room. At the center of it, of course, a model of Mothership Velrakis was displayed in its full glory.

“Mothership Velrakis. An exceptionally large Exodus-type built by the Anur Arta ten thousand years ago”, Tika read the holographic plaque next to the model. “Although the foundation is old, the parts are continually upgraded and replaced, so that every parts of it have been completely replaced by newest technology. Wow.”

“How the heck did they replace vital parts of a spaceship while it’s in use?!” Indah cried out.

“No explanation here”, Tika returned, scrolling to the bottom of the screen.

“Wow, look at this!” Bayu cried out. Immediately, Indah and Tika fled to another spaceship model, shaped like an eldritch monstrosity with one thousand limbs.

“The Grand Maestro Ship of the Axocarium Empire”, Tika read. “Known as the only sapient silicone-based lifeform that Mothership Velrakis has ever encountered, the Axocarians are an aggressive one. They ruled a large part of the Known Universe, before acquiescing to the Intergalactic Coalition after the Forty-Seventh Great Galactic War.”

“That’s a lot of wars”, Indah said with a grimace.

“They didn’t really acquiesce, really”, Varka chimed in all of a sudden. “They’re still controlling all the bureaucratic stuff on Andromeda Galaxy, to this day.”

“And the Intergalactic Coalition has no problem with that?” Tika asked.

Varka shrugged. “I mean, they’re not really attacking anyone anymore.”

Tika frowned at Varka’s answer, but decided not to say anything else. Indah and Bayu then walked away to see the other ship models.

“Perhaps I sound cruel”, Varka said with a sigh. “But the Forty-Seventh Great Galactic War was… the most destructive one. More than half of the Known Universe fell under the Axocarium Empire. They even nearly destroyed this star system, thirty years ago.”

Thirty years ago. That was when they saved Indira, wasn’t it? Varka said a ‘foreign enemy’ attacked the Mothership. Tika shivered as terror gripped something deep inside her chest. Earth was so close from being destroyed, thirty years ago, and they were not even aware of it.

“Thank you”, Tika said. “For saving our solar system, even though we knew nothing about it.”

“As a Velrakis-Aran representative, you’re welcome”, Varka returned, smiling.