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The Alternate Reality News Service’s Field Guide to Alien Species

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The omniverse is a vast place, an infinity of infinities, with a wide variety of colourful life forms. Why, in the last week alone, Alternate Reality News Service reporters have encountered: a “smart” house that was nominated for a Nobel Prize for physics; a race of six foot tall mutant hamsters that powered a vast, peaceful galactic civilization by harnessing the exercise wheels in their sleeping quarters to batteries, and; a race of half donkey, half spider, all dictionary creatures that spun a web of terror across a dozen star systems.

And, then, there were the really strange life forms.

As part of their jobs, ARNS reporters are supposed to file detailed reports of all of the alien species they come across. These are kept in quantum computers built into the substrate of the omniverse (ARNS tech support rules!). Ordinarily, these files are not available to the public. However, in a bid to humanize our service after the Alpha Omega Interregnum Debacle, the Omicron Ceti Unpleasantness and the incredibly unfortunate Beta Oxbow Incident – as well as to stave off threatened government oversight – we have decided to make some of our files public.

What follows is a small selection of the types of life forms Alternate Reality News Service reporters have encountered in the past. They aren’t necessarily the most colourful life forms. They don’t necessarily have the most interesting histories. They certainly aren’t the prettiest. They’re the ones we deemed least likely to sue us if we revealed who they were.

Enjoy,
Alternate Reality News Service staff

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