March 13, 3021 was the day Earth was destroyed; only a couple thousand humans escaped in time. They escaped on a spaceship that they had been preparing to launch for a ten-year mission. We found the humans half-starved and scared. They told us they had been on the spaceship for almost eleven years. The humans were so different from us; they were all different shapes and sizes, colors, hair, and faces. But despite our differences, we decided to take them to Piankhan, our artificial planet. They were hesitant at first, but after lots of hand gestures and friendly smiles, they agreed to come.

Several years later, the humans still weren’t adjusting to the Piankhan way of life. In fact, they didn’t try to adjust at all. We did everything we could think of, but it wasn’t enough. In the end, we realized the older humans kept the human culture alive. So, in hopes of making the next generation of humans part of our culture, we took the children whose parents had perished in the escape and raised them as our own. In return, we gave the older humans their own artificial planet.

We raised the human children to be Piankhan. They learned our language of whistles. They learned of our greatest achievements and of our greatest failures. They learned about our culture. We fed them our food. We loved them and they loved us. They grew up like every Piankhan child. But as they grew and thrived, they began to think more and question our decision. 

It began with a school field trip to the artificial human planet. It was a quick teleportation trip. The students, Piankhan and human, went to recreations of human history and museums, and they were able to experience daily human life on the field trip. It was a life-changing experience for all of them, the human children in particular. They had always known they were human, but on that trip, they felt neither human nor Piankhan. It was then that they realized they would never be human and they would never be Piankhan. They would be forever caught in between.

The day my sister came back from the field trip, she was changed. At times she was resentful and wished our parents had shown her how to be human and other times she wanted to look Piankhan. My parents did everything they could; they learned the main human language, we took weekend teleportation trips to the human planet, and we started dressing and eating like humans. They tried so hard to learn how to be human, but in doing so they lost sight of their own culture. My sister never wanted that to happen. What my sister really wanted was acceptance, and not from other Piankhans and humans, but from herself.