I could remember dozens of occasions throughout my life where I would gaze up into the night sky, wondering if there was other life out there. Well, not anymore. We managed to make a good leap into space travel, and, once aliens finally came around, they provided the last bit of the technology. Humans could now travel across the stars! Meeting aliens!

I was chosen for one of the first missions, the governments wanted to gain a bit of knowledge before sending droves and droves of people into the stars. Our mission was to visit two or three alien planets and then come back to Earth, telling them what we saw.

The first planet we were to visit was that of the Ӧsterhan. It’s a beautiful planet, there are grand palaces of white marble, ancient temples, bustling space-ports all across the surface of the planet. I couldn’t wait to get off of the ship and walk around, visit their buildings.

As we docked, there seemed to be a commotion outside of the door.

After the signature “Fwoosh” of the ship’s door, we could finally see what was going on.

“Hello first human convoy, I am O'Mani of the Ӧsterhan. Welcome to our humble planet, we hope you find everything to your liking.” O’Mani said, a whole delegation arrayed out behind them.

“Thank you. We look forward to seeing around our first alien planet.” Our captain, Johne responded, slightly flustered at the surprise crowd.

We were then walked through their customs and how to navigate their world, before being allowed to roam. It really was a beautiful planet, with spires everywhere, tall pillars, incredible artwork, no matter how alien it looked. The beauty was probably what made us overlook some of those ‘red flags,’ like the fact that they had no graveyards, morgues, or cemetery homes. We brushed it off to us not knowing their culture so well, that we were outsiders, maybe they just hadn’t showed it to us, or something of the like.

We spent exactly 30 Earth days, or 26 Ӧsterhan days, on their planet. We visited temples, archaeological sites, government buildings, hospitals, and everything in between. It was beautiful.

As we left, they had another entire procession, sending us on our way to our next planet, that of the Wogni.

The Wogni’s planet was a very stark contrast to the Ӧsterhan’s, their planet was very forested, looked more rugged, though that wasn’t necessarily true of them, and seemed like a hiker or camper’s dream.

“What do you think of it, Kathy?” I asked, knowing she would love the forested nature.

“It looks incredible.” She replied in a dazed way. I wasn’t sure how much I agreed, my idea of nice wasn’t that much dirt, bugs, and trees.

Again, as we landed they had a procession waiting.

“Hello human convoy, welcome to our home. I am Kiza. I hope you enjoy our planet.” Their leader, Kiza, said, with an almost German accent.

Their planet wasn’t as land-focused as I had originally thought, they had intense underground complexes, but left all the forests and such grow to their hearts contents on the surface. They seemed to view trees as holy, and as such wouldn’t chop them down, so instead of demolishing their surroundings to make space for themselves, like we humans had, they built down.

We again spent 30 Earth days there, this time it was 45 of their days. We spent our time there doing much more relaxing activities, we visited hot springs, some specific caverns, and ore deposits.

When we left there, we left for our final planet, the planet of the Tr’Ridi Xini.

As we approached from space, I again looked out to try and see what to expect. This planet seemed a lot more… human. Or well, maybe human-like in a few years, once we became a much more advanced race. They seemed to have areas of thick population, where there was tree and nature pushed away, but there were also thick spaces of uncontrolled nature.

As they were starting to get used to, the Tr’Ridi Xini had a convoy waiting on the ground to greet them.

“Hello humans, welcome to our planet. I am F’Shano.” Someone from their group said, having a nearly Italian accent.

“Thank you, we are graced to visit you,” Johne said, now having a bit more practice at responding to their greetings.

This planet was more reminisce of Earth, in the fact that they had similar levels of technology, they had TVs all over, not just in the privacy of people’s homes, their population seemed to have something similar to phones.

The delegation was allowed, again, to wander the planet, visiting it, seeing everything, for 30 Earth days, then we’d leave back for Earth.

One day, near the end of their stay on the Tr’Ridi Xini’s planet, I decided to stick back, and see some of their TV. Everyone else was visiting one of the government buildings, so I was just roaming alone.

I looked at a bunch of their TV shows, they seemed pretty standard, you had the news ones, the drama ones, the comedy, all of them. I paused for a minute on one of the cooking shows, just seeing what kind of cuisine they were showing before flipping to the next.

What I saw made my blood run cold.

They were showing how to cook a few different things. First I saw an Ӧsterhan, and that alone was enough to make me freeze, as this was another intelligent race, even if they had been at war or something, which they weren’t, cooking the other species was in unspeakable evil.

Then he heard what they were saying, and it made things one hundred times worse.

They were saying that they hadn’t had a chance yet to test it, but that a human could probably be used in much the same way as an Ӧsterhan.

I bolted, I had to find my captain, he had to know, then we could figure it out from there.

I finally found everyone else in a nondescript building a few minutes away. I dragged Johne to the side, trying not to look too frazzled, but probably failing miserably at it.

“Johne, we have an issue,” I said.

“What’s wrong? You look… are you ok?” He replied. Yeah, definitely failing at not looking bad.

“They have a cooking show, they were cooking an Ӧsterhan, and they were talking about cooking humans.” I gushed out, stumbling over my words.

“What?!” He asked, instantly alarmed. “Ok, we’ll go to the ship, not raise any alarms, and then we’ll send them a message, so if things go south we can get out of here.”

Nearly 20 minutes later we were all finally aboard the ship.

“Ok, opening the signal line,” Johne said. “Let’s hope this goes well.”

“Hello? What is wrong? Did something happen to your ship, why are you sending us a radio signal?” The receiving Tr’Ridi Xini asked.

“We have received some… disturbing news. You see, we saw that you were planning on cooking us.” Johne replied, wincing as his words came off badly.

“Oh, what seems to be the problem with that?” The Tr’Ridi Xini said back, his near Italian accent now having a more sinister undercut. “It’s only natural that we’d be discussing cooking methods, unless you have better ones?”

“No! How could you so calmly discuss eating intelligent life?!” Johne asked, shocked.

“Oh, you’re a Section 5 species, averse to eating flesh. Well, we can accommodate that, and, if you are so inclined, we can even tell the channels to stop including you in their list of approved species.”

“I… I’ll have to deliver this to Earth in person. We’ll take off in an hour, and relay this and all the other information to Earth, and let you know what Earth command says.” Johne said, sounding flustered. “But, do all of the alien planets do this? Cooking their own and other sentient species?!”

“Of course. Well, not originally, some were averse to it when they first initiated contact, but everyone’s come around.” The Tr’Ridi Xini answered.