Gnomy tells all: stories from his lifetimes throughout the universes

After my disastrous time on Earth, where I witnessed the dinosaurs being destroyed and humans being removed from the Garden of Eden, I was looking for my next assignment. I was feeling rather sad and wanted to work on a planet with a better chance of success.

I was happy to snag a long-term assignment on a nearby planet called Kepler 5. They were looking for two gnomes, so my delightful wife Jaal agreed to move there with me. We thought it would be a kind of honeymoon for us.

Kepler 5 was a small rocky world. It was close enough to Earth for us to see its sun as a bright star in the night sky. Even though I was happy to leave Earth, I missed it and the sight comforted me.

Kepler 5 was comparable to Earth in many ways, full of water features and bursting with a multitude of plants and animals. A population of prototype humanoids also lived on the planet. They were very similar to humans, though less advanced.

Even the vegetation was similar to Earth … except for one strange thing. The foliage wasn’t green, it was purple. All the leaves on all the plants were shades of purple. They were the shades of a purple rainbow, from bright raspberry to pinkish lavender to deep maroon. Not just in autumn, but they held their purplish colors all year.

The animals had also evolved to be purple toned, which made sense since they needed to blend in among the purple plants. The humanoids were not purple since their skin had to absorb vitamin D, but they liked to dye their clothes and hair with purple plant dyes.

The Kepler 5 sky was likewise filled with hazy purplish tones. The light ranged from pinkish-lavenders to mid-purples to deep twilight bluish-purples.

The next strange thing was that the planet itself was contained within a triple-sun solar system. These suns had a complicated pattern of rising and setting, so the skies, although always purple-toned, were never truly dark. That doesn’t sound bad, but we found it to be very strange. Neither of us had never lived on a planet with more than one sun. The constantly changing sky became a headache-inducing element for us.

Due to no true nighttime on the planet, the animals had evolved a far more flexible system of sleep than on most planets. Every species, including humanoids, just napped randomly as the planet dimmed and lightened. Their sleep patterns had no definite Circadian rhythms, they were simply based on whether the animals felt safe enough to fall into slumber for a while. After a few hours they would awaken and get back to the business of their world, feeling refreshed.

Gnomes are not made this way. Sure, we can wake unexpectedly and function, or even alter our sleeping schedules artificially to match the planet we are living on. However, we must get an average of at least six hours of sleep every 24 hours to survive long term. It is a limitation of our earthly corporeal bodies.

Needless to say, the constant activity of animals and humanoids was very trying to both Jaal and me. If you think not getting enough sleep makes you grouchy after one night, try it for a few millennia.

As we were the only gnomes caretaking Kepler 5, we decided to take different work shifts so each of us could leave the planet as often as possible. We found that instantly transporting back to our home planet to sleep in our own bed was best. Otherwise, we were short-tempered and irritable. It was better not to see each very often other than to argue every time we did see each other.

Not only did we get little sleep on that world, but the constant purple became nauseating to us. It turned out that so much lavender and purple was actually disruptive to our health.

We tried painting the walls in our cottage beautiful shades of green and added tranquil pale blue ceilings to give us an illusion of being on a normal planet, but it didn’t help much. Our chronic bad tempers turned small arguments into big, loud disagreements until one of us had enough sense to just transport away. It was a terrible strain on our new marriage.

In those early days of Kepler 5 there were frequent storms in the atmosphere, which seemed to mirror our unhappiness at living there. I vividly remember cycles of dark purple clouds that would combine with even darker purplish-black skies. The threatening skies quickly built into screaming windstorms. The rain didn’t so much lash down as blow sideways.

Sometimes the storms became so dangerous that we had to transport out and wait in our home world for the duration of the storm. At least we would have two or three days of tranquil enjoyment amongst family and friends on a green planet before we had to head back to inspect the purple damages.

Believe me, it was always difficult to return to that strange and unsettling world after being on our lovely sunny home planet.

On another level, I did like the intelligent humanoids who were developing there. Like on Earth, we didn’t interact and didn’t show ourselves. These people did get enough of a peek at us to have fables about the “little people” who helped out on their planet. I enjoyed their highly embellished stories. Were Jaal and I the noble, wise and all-knowing royalty they thought we were? Did we really deserve to be called the Prince and Princess of Purple? Did we deserve the laudatory myths and songs? Surely not.

We did accept the lovely matching crowns they sometimes left for us to find. The original crowns were merely woven grass, which eventually progressed to carved wood, and finally became pure gleaming silver, beautifully beaten and chased. Since the crowns were not offered as any kind of religious token, we were allowed to accept them. Jaal and I enjoyed all of the crowns tremendously and still have them.

Individual residents constantly left small gifts for us, mostly choice pieces of fruit and baked goods. I learned to really enjoy their version of baked banana-orange-oatmeal bars. And I especially liked the spicy egg-cheese-chili pepper casserole bites.

How can you not like a civilization that treats you so well, even when they have barely seen you? We were impressed with the society and how steadily they were advancing in their unique way. We ended up writing many positive reports over the years. It was fascinating to see how their people coped with purple storms. They developed very differently from Earth’s people.