Their legs were very long and lean and always slightly bent at the knee, and their feet were remarkably similar to their hands. They appeared to be wearing hooded mantles which were richly colored in layers, and similar bands of bright color covered their rounded torsos. Their backs were humped. And they moved gracefully and spoke softly in an Earth language, the language of the city of Atalantaya.

None of us realized at the outset that the Parents were covered with very tiny feathers, and wore no other clothing. We didn’t realize that the humps on their backs were indeed folded wings. Or that their noses and mouths were in fact beaks, or that they were another species from us. This just didn’t occur to us. They were the Parents. And the language of Atalantaya was the language we needed to know for our purpose.

The Parents had made us. We belonged to them and we made them happy. We were the People of the Purpose, they told us. And though their color patterns varied, they were otherwise interchangeable and numerous as they spoke to us and interacted with us on Bravenna. If they had individual names, they never revealed this to us. One might start speaking and another take up the thread and yet another after that, all rather seamlessly, so that no one individual ever stood out to us.

Now Bravenna was the world into which we’d awakened, a world that seemed vast, a world that was “Home,” said the Parents, and the world where we would be prepared for our purpose.

As they helped us to dress in silken trousers and shirts, they praised us, stroked us, embraced us, and told us we were perfect for our purpose and that they loved us.

We were all then as you see us now. And they had a word for us which translates best as Replimoid. They would tell us over time that it was very easy for them to make Replimoids but some turned out better than others, and we were their finest work so far. We were given to understand that we were grown, just the way a human being is grown in the womb of its mother, only we were organically developed from a blending of all the cells in the life chain of the planet Earth, including those of plants, sea creatures, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. We were the result of blending and not the result of evolution. We had been made to resemble human beings in and out but we did not have the same neural circuitry.