The plot bunnies love to attack me at the most inopportune times, I tell you!

But in this case, it's good that they did. Because I now have places to put my OC's for this movie! You'll meet them all, along with a human character that I didn't originally plan to exist but sprung out of my mind due to the inspirations for this project.

So, what to say? District 9, Wikus and Tania van de Merwe, Christopher and Oliver Johnson, MNU, and prawns/poleepkwa as a race do not belong to me (as much as I would love to own all those aliens so they could live a better life). They are the property of Niel Blomkamp, Peter Jackson, and the guys at Sony Pictures. However, the stories that are told, Curtis Bax, and most of the alien characters are copyright me.

So, yeah, let's begin with this sort of quasi-memoir, quasi-story collection. Why?

With a foreword! Away foreword!

The Tales We Tell

A Memoir of Gathering Stories in District 10

By Curtis A. Bax

In Memoriam Edward Masterson

Foreword

It's been a very long time since it all began.

Fifty years have gone by since the poleepkwa first came to earth. I was not even an embryo in my mother's womb at the time, so I had no way of knowing it when the news that they were starving refugees had faded away from international headlines four years later.

Another thirty or so years would go by before they left this planet without creating a fuss. This was surprising to everybody, seeing as how we figured they would at least attempt to murder people for what we did to them during those thirty years. But, the mothership left twenty-eight years after it arrived, and then three years later it came back and took its people home. There was no war stretching across the entire planet; they simply left.

That three-year period was the centerpiece of my interaction with the alien race. I was studying abroad at Johannesburg in my third semester as a graduate student writing a dissertation on Bantu mythology when the mothership left the earth for the first time. The news had made national headlines all across the small nation at the south-most tip of Africa, and Wikus van de Merwe was then in the spotlight as South Africa's most wanted man. I know more about the events than I truly want to, however; the person housing me was the man who had uncovered the secret MNU experiments. So I knew that the whole affair with Wikus was made up by MNU long before the news made national headlines after he reappeared. His close friends at the company also ensured that I got a job as a guard working at District 10 after I had completed my studies, as I had really come to love Johannesburg as a city.

In a way, it is a curse. I was an MNU employee once, so the shame of the company's near-instant bankruptcy once the truth came out has attached itself to my name amongst my closest friends and family. None of my family or close friends have ever looked at me quite the same afterwards, and until I published my first volume of collected poleepkwan mythology they thought I was in the same racist league that the bloated corporate heads of MNU were in.

In a completely different way, however, it is a blessing, and it is one that I will not soon forget. For it was thanks to these connections that I first became acquainted with the poleepkwans.

It is also thanks to this that I gained the interest to collect their tales. I was never the kind for analyzing myths in great detail; my clear bias towards the world's lesser known pantheons always showed whenever I had to write a paper comparing them with the more analyzed and well-known pantheons. For that, I would always consistently get lower marks. However, I excelled at research, and even in my undergraduate years people were saying that I would go on to collect stories from many sources.

But then, even I did not expect that I would be collecting the tales of a race that did not even originate from this planet. I always imagined I would collect South American mythology instead of this.

The wheel of destiny had something else in mind, however, and before I knew it I had immersed myself in the non-confidential MNU files about the aliens. This stemmed an incredible curiosity in me that would not leave me alone throughout my final semester at Indiana, and so I resolved then that I would collect alien mythology.

So as a result, I took a job with MNU to guard the aliens at District 10.

I was right there in the heat of the action when the mothership returned for a week and departed just as quickly as it had come.

It would be another five years before they would return back home to hit the restart button on our relations. This time, everybody learned from their mistakes; we let them set up diplomatic relationships here on earth, and since then they have been accepted as a part of society without much problem.

There was a long period of interspecies turmoil in which xenophobic tensions ran high, but much like the American Civil Rights movement of the sixties, the aliens have won their basic rights in the countries they have chosen to reside in. I also have the distinct feeling that the fear of being invaded contributed something to their smoother transition to life with us.

It was shortly after they returned that I got my first collection of poleepkwan mythology published. I will admit to unfair play here; I was sort of turned off to publishing the poleepkwan mythology and fairy tales after they left the second time. I knew that in a world without them, the stories I had collected would be of no merit. Thus, I held on to every audio copy, busy translating while writing a book on Norse Mythology.

When they returned to stay, however, I knew that their mythology suddenly had relevance in this world, especially during the transitional period when they were beginning to integrate into society. I am often credited with helping relations along by publishing stories that fascinated people, and on the surface, this charge is correct. These stories do have universal appeal; I have met many people who related to the struggles of the poleepkwan hero Asbawevix in ways that even I did not think of when I first published the translated tale.

If we go deep into the heart of the matter, however, we find that the charge is unfair.

In reality, the credit is anything but mine; I only translated the stories to make them relatable to an audience that would never be able to speak the poleepkwan language as it is spoken by the poleepkwans themselves and that would have a difficult time learning their alphabet. The true heart and soul of the stories reside within the poleepkwans. Much like the stories of Achilles and Odysseus and Balder and Jiraiya, the epic heroes of poleepkwan stories are a part of the very fabric of their beings. They relate the struggles and glories of their people. Their tales are as much a part of their person as the Illiad is to the ancient Greeks. If anything, I feel like I am cheating the poleepkwans by earning profits with their stories; as much as I try to capture the essence of a poleepkwan story, I can never get it quite right because I am simply the wrong person to tell the tale.

So in this memoir, I have taken great care to think about the stories that affected me most and that I have put off publishing until now. The tales we tell have a certain poignancy depending on how we tell them, and so in this memoir I talk about the stories that spoke the most to me-- and that augmented the incredible friendships with the poleepkwans that I met in that concentration camp a long distance away from Johannesburg twenty-one years ago.

This is the story of how I acquired the stories. On a deeper level, however, it is also about the people that tell the stories, and what their tales say about them as a sentient race.