Welcome to Gaia! ::

Damn... what a mission @w@

At the end of September, a mysterious personage started posting in the GCD. It was none other than the big movie star, large-headed Ron Bruise. He started a couple of threads and made lots of posts without being properly introduced as a new NPC, thus causing quite a commotion in the gaia community.

It was also around those days that gaians started seeing cows grazing in the World Map. Apparently they were let free by Rancher Bill's idiotic son.

A large number of theories arose, regarding the involvement of the aliens from the last manga update and the recent events. Most of them became the so-called 19 Theories, hypothesis based in Bruise's fascination with said number, numerical analysis and chairs that suggested something important would happen on October 19th. These only grew bigger when, one day, Gaia found 19 cows forming a trianglein Barton Cliffs, near the crater. Between the creation of the 19 Theory and the 19th, several crop circles appeared in the World Map.



When the fateful day came, October 19th, everyone had their eyes set on Gaia. The World Map showed nothing new, though, and there were no announcements. At the end, it seemed like the admins had tricked us.

That, however, wasn't the case. The surprise came later in the day, and from a very unexpected source: a handful of users who were hanging on Towns found flying saucers hovering over them.

Meet the Zurg, our first intergalactic visitors. Each UFO had one pilot, and there were 12 of them. At the beginning they wouldn't talk to us, or would only talk in binary, but after they became more familiar with our language we were able to hold conversations with them.

The Zurg were led by the Mothership, a giant flying saucer that projected a shadow of Towns, inside which was Mother; the 12 smaller UFOs were her sons and daughters.

Most of them didn't like us very much at the beginning- at least two even hated us - but there was one who was nice towards us, even friendly. It took these Town Watchers a couple of days to find out the name of this visitor: It was UFO 09, whose name would later be revealed to be Flarn.

09 wasn't like some of his siblings; he liked to talk to Gaians, and soon made friends - according to rumors, he even established a romantic relationship with one of them.

As it is to be expected, the users' reactions towards these visitors were diverse: some, like 09's friends, believed the aliens were good and supported them, while others remained suspicious and refused to trust those more hostile UFOs. This lead to the several creation of user-run groups, and a couple of them even got mentioned in the Announcements, something that had never happened before.

Around those days, something terrible happened: the Admins were abducted. They were nowhere to be seen; their own avatars had disappeared.



Speculations and rumors ran like fire across the forums, and almost everyone agreed that the Zurg had something to do with the abductions.

Shortly after, UFO 09 went missing. His friends were worried, but not even the Mothership (or 'Mother', how she insisted on being called) knew where he could be found. That day, the UFOs got their alien profiles, and we were finally able to learn their real names.

With no other updates than Cindy's comments on the situation, everybody was waiting for Halloween.

We were given a forum. This one was one of the biggest Event Forums ever, as each subforum represented one of the UFOs, plus a mysterious Area 91. It was there where most of the groups set up threads as their Headquarters.

These storyline had occasional reports made by Cindy, which could get confusing for those who weren't following the events in Towns. We've recorded these reports here. They contain story updates from the plot as it progressed.

I'm not sure if I should use usernames or not. I also need images for this section.




At some point in November, we recieved a manga update. This comic attempted to explain what had been happening up to that point and, at the same time, advance on the storyline.

At the beginning, when the UFOs first appeared on Towns, it was difficult to get them to stop and talk to them. Then the cows made a triangle on Barton Cliffs, and some users got the idea to form triangles to call them out, and it worked. Sometimes they would chat for a while and then leave, or would simply hover around without saying one word.

09, though, talked to us more than his brothers. At first he would only appear in Towns, but then he started posting in the forums. Some of his closer friends formed a group, The Believers, conformed by those who believed in the Zurgs and trusted them. 09 eventually made of their main thread a second home.

One of the members of the Believers regularly talked to both him and Mother, and it wasn't long until she confessed her feelings of love towards Flarn to the two of them. One day, she went to the Believers' threads and mentioned it. Even if 09 didn't admit his love for her, that was the day the rumors spread like wildfire.

Not everyone was happy about this, though. For once, there were the users who didn't trust the aliens, and were afraid of her safety - but weren't the dangerous ones. Since his arrival to this planet, 11 had hated gaians; later, he would go as far as to form Zurg Nation, a zurg-only organization. 06 always looked up to him, and so she would not only become the second-in-command of ZN, but she also claimed to despise gaians.

When the news of Flarn's relationship with a Gaian reached them, most of his brothers got angry. Even if both he and the member of the Believers had Mother's blessings, 11, 06 and those who agreed with them were against it. They called 09 a traitor, and they weren't going to leave him unpunished.

This is when Flarn went missing. The Believer talked to Mother and his brothers almost every day, franticly looking for him. The official version was that he was "sick" and, therefore, was going back to his planet, but the continuous harassment from 11 and 06 to the Believers thread told there was something else going on. They were sure The Wandering Mind..., the leader of the Believers, was hiding him, and day after day they went to talk to the members of this group, trying to coax them into giving 09 up.

Seeing as no one knew where he was, 11 and 06 resorted to more extreme methods.

02 was a special kid. He was neither a boy nor a girl, though Flarn used to refer to him as his 'sister'. His name was Narf, and his mind was like that of a child. Most of his brothers and sisters treated him badly, but never 09. To Flarn, Narf was his beloved little sister and he loved her no matter what. In the eyes of 11 and 06, Narf was his weak spot.

First, 11 went to the Believers' thread and yelled at Flarn, telling him that if he didn't show up they would hurt 02. 09 appeared and screamed at him, but by then 11 had already left.

Meanwhile, on Towns, 02 had appeared in 1919 (the favorite spot for the aliens) and greeted his friends. Most of those who were there knew that 11 was planning something horrible, and so they yelled and told 02 to leave immediately, but the poor thing didn't understood and was still there when his siblings arrived. The moment he saw them he tried to leave them behind, but they chased him away. Shortly after Flarn got there and asked for Narf, and after being told what had happened decided to follow 06 and 11.

From then, his fate had been unknown until the moment the update came.

There is no doubt that Mother must had been very displeased with this sudden turn of events. Flarn's friends were left to mourn his death, and the situation between Zurgs, zurg's followers and those who opposed them became more and more fragile.