Writing Prompt: June 15 - "A life force from another planet has just translated the first piece of human writing. Write a story about what they discovered."

A chill ran down his tendrils as he waited and read through his results one last time. It had been months of research, weeks of translation, and days of double- and triple-checking his work. After all that work and time, Frank was finally ready to present his findings to the board.

He had squeezed into his best outfit for the occasion; a navy blue number that covered his least favorite arm quite nicely while leaving the other four available for gesturing and holding illustrations for visual impact. He had 5 minutes before his going in for his timeslot. He nervously practiced his speech in his front brain, while his back brain ran yet another critique. He did prefer his frontal for formal presentations like this. His backer could be quite brusque sometimes.

"Frank?" The secretary called his name.

"You got this" his backer said.

"Yes, quite." his frontal concurred.

He slid, following the secretary, into the grand hall where the board conducted business.

"Speak" they instructed, in perfect unison.

"I am Frank" Frank said.

"Yes, we know. You're next on the list. A presentation on an anthropological text of import, as we understand. We've ready your summary. Get on with it." They hummed.

"Ah..Yes... So..." Frank paused. He honestly hadn't thought that they would have done any of the pre-reading he recommended. It threw him for a moment, but he recovered.

"I've been studying the first available texts from the humans recently discovered to be inhabiting planet U7G4P3. 'Earth', they call it."

One of his arms held up a poster of the blue planet for effect. Several eye-stalks turned to focus on it. The rest focused solely on him.

"This text was located at the bottom of the deepest ocean, on a slab of material very similar indeed to that which covers our own space rovers.

After consulting many an expert in historical documents, we see that it is written in a language that predates, and therefore forms the long-ago basis of our current speech. Regretfully, only a tentacle full of historians are still aware of this writing system, and many of them are working only with their backers in their old age, so it has been notably difficult to gain their assistance. Still, a few were interested in assisting me. Together, we have found indications that 5,000 years ago, our ancestors were exploring U7G4P3 and were marooned. As we have all heard the tales, some of their descendants, our distant cousins have proliferated in the more liquid areas of environment. You may have heard that they have grown a full 8 appendages, rather than our 5. It's all a very interesting theo..."

"Yes, we are aware of the octords." The board sounded impatient, "Tell us something we are not aware off."

"Right... well, the panel translates roughly to 'Don't come back. We tried it, and it sucks."

Frank waited, holding 3 lungs of breath, while he awaited the board's reaction.

((I'm too tired to continue. Don't think I'll come back to it, but I wish I could just write stories and then come back and read them without ever having had to actually write it. This one would certainly be one.))