MidReal Story
Desert Lumite: Secrets of Calidus
Scenario: Visualize a futuristic desert planet, Calidus, under a vast, star-filled sky. The foreground shows Kaela Vero, a young woman with long, dark hair and a determined expression, wearing a flowing, sand-colored robe that blends with the dunes. She is standing on a massive sand dune, with her hands slightly raised as if manipulating invisible energies. Beside her, a rugged, futuristic aircraft is partially buried in the sand, hinting at past struggles. In the distance, the silhouette of a nomadic tribe can be seen migrating towards an oasis. The atmosphere is charged with a sense of adventure and mystery, highlighted by the glowing luminescence of a rare mineral, Lumite, scattered subtly across the landscape. The color palette is dominated by shades of orange, gold, and deep blue.
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I wake up on an alien planet, and it’s the first thing I notice.
Not the sand in my hair, not the sun on my face.
The sky.
It’s night, and the stars twinkle all around me, like they’re hanging from the sky for me to grab.
I’m used to smog-covered voids, where you can only see the brightest of stars poking through the pollution.
But here, they’re everywhere and take up the whole sky.
I’ve never seen something so beautiful.
I sit up, my head spinning, and look around.
Sand dunes stretch out as far as I can see in every direction.
I’m on a desert planet, Calidus.
I knew that, of course—I’m not an idiot—but it’s different to see it in person.
The cold desert night air bites at my skin, making me rub my arms to warm up, and I climb to my feet unsteadily.
The sand shifts beneath my feet with each step I take as I try to take it all in.
The stars are so much brighter here than I ever could have imagined.
Tavil is one of the most well-populated cities in the galaxy, but that comes with consequences—there’s so much light pollution that you can hardly see the night sky at all.
You can even walk outside at night without a flashlight if you know where you’re going.
Not here on Calidus though, not now when it’s so dark out that you can hardly see your hand in front of your face.
But the lack of light also means that you can see everything—every star, every planet, every galaxy.
It seems like the stars go on forever and ever, and I know that there are entire worlds out there that I’ll never get to experience for myself.
It makes me feel small and insignificant, but also a part of something so much bigger than myself at the same time.
It’s beautiful here.
Though I’m sure it won’t be as beautiful when the sun comes up and starts to beat down on me.
Then again, maybe it will be—I’ve been drawn to this place for as long as I can remember.
Lyra says that it was the pull of the Lumite that brought me here, and I think she’s right—but there has to be more to it than that too.
I don’t think that just any human could have made their way to Calidus like I did.
But then again, I’m not just any human either.
I’m Kaela Vero, and I’m an adventurer at heart, and there are still so many places left for me to explore in this galaxy.
I take a deep breath and start walking forward, letting my feet sink into the sand with each step I take until I climb my way up to the top of one of the massive sand dunes.
The view from here is absolutely amazing and I have to stop and take it all in for a few minutes before I move on again, the tiny grains of sand sticking to my skin and clothes as I go.
The night is absolutely beautiful and I want to spend hours up here on top of this sand dune looking at it all, but I don’t have the time to waste and I know it, so I take off again, my feet dragging through the sand as I go, trying to keep my balance as I climb my way down to the bottom of the sand dune without falling face first in the sand along the way.
I’m halfway down when suddenly, I get a strange feeling, like I’m not alone anymore and someone—or something—has come up behind me without me even hearing them do it.
I turn around quickly, but there’s no one there, and I shake my head as if that will make the feeling disappear and keep climbing down the sand dune instead, but it doesn’t work and I just feel more paranoid than I did before as I go.
The feeling doesn’t go away as I walk back to Rylan, and it’s not long before he’s getting impatient with me for taking so long and starts yelling my name to try to get me to hurry up and come back to him faster than I am right now—but he doesn’t know how much I need this right now or he would never be rushing me in the first place.
This is what we came here for after all, to see Lumite up close—Rylan wouldn’t be rushing back either if he had any idea how important this was to me instead of just thinking of it as another job like he always seems to do when we get sent out on a retrieval mission like this one—but he doesn’t know how much this means to me or how hard it was to get Lyra to agree to let us come here either, so he never will either, unless I tell him about it.
But I don’t want to tell anyone yet, so I don’t, and keep my mouth shut as I make my way back to Rylan as fast as I can, even though I don’t want to.
I take one last look up at the sky and let out a heavy sigh, promising myself that I’ll come back here someday again soon, but not today.
Rylan may be impatient and want to leave as soon as he gets what he came for, but I’m not ready to go quite yet.
Not until I get to see what else this planet has to offer me after I’ve waited for so long to finally be here.
I take another deep breath of air, trying to clear my head of everything else that’s going on around me, and let myself sink into the feeling of being home again, even though I’m nowhere near it.
The Lumite beneath me vibrates gently as I do, reaching out to connect with me, with its brothers and sisters in the sky, creating a bridge of energy that stretches out toward them from where we stand on this planet together, even though I’m the only one who seems to notice that it’s happening at all.
“Finally,” Rylan grumbles as I make my way back down toward him, “I was starting to think that you were never going to come back down again and I’d be stuck here waiting for you forever.” He rolls his eyes as he looks up at me and I can feel his glare on me even from this far away.
“I was just spending a little time with our new friend over here,” I say as I start to make my way down toward him, “I can’t help it if you’re always in such a rush to leave.” I start to slide down the side of the dune and smile as I do—Rylan hates when I do that because he says it’s dangerous and that I’ll break something important eventually.
He always yells at me whenever he catches me doing it and tells me that I have to use the stairs like a normal person instead of sliding down like some kind of kid who doesn’t know any better—but I can tell that he doesn’t really mind so much as he’s pretending to right now either because he’s already reaching out his arms to catch me before I can fall over and hurt myself like he’s always worried that I will.
“Be careful,” he says as he catches me and lifts me up into his arms like I’m still a little kid who needs to be taken care of all of the time even though he knows perfectly well that I didn’t need his help at all.
He wraps one arm around my waist and uses his other hand to hold onto my wrist and keep it in place so that I don’t fall over again, but I can tell that there’s a smile on his face as he does it even though he’s trying to hide it from me right now too.
“I don’t want you getting hurt,” he says when we finally make it to the bottom of the dune and start back toward our aircraft again, “I promised Mom that I’d bring you back home in one piece—and I don’t want to have to explain to her why you got hurt either.” He starts to scold me more seriously than before as we walk, but there’s still a hint of a smile on his face as he does because I know that there’s nothing in this world that could make him mad at me for long.
He loves me too much just like I love him too—and that’s never going to change at all either.
I can tell that he’s already forgotten how mad at me he was before too when we finally make it back to our aircraft and see it sitting there against the sandstone ridge like it was always meant to be there in the first place.
It looks even more like a giant bird than usual right now—especially with its wings spread out on either side of its body to keep itself balanced against the wind as we land—and it’s not long before Rylan starts running toward it at full speed like he’s planning on jumping up into its arms and taking off into the sky to fly away from here again.
His excitement is infectious and I can feel my own heart starting to race as I watch him run away from me and jump into our aircraft’s waiting arms—and it’s not long before I start running after him to join him up there too.
Rylan may be our pilot, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love flying just as much as he does—and I’ve been looking forward to this part of our trip even more than he has ever since Lyra agreed to let us come here in the first place.
Rylan calls out to me as I run toward him and it’s not long before the two of us are finally reunited inside of the aircraft—and speeding off into the sky again as we leave the desert behind us for good this time.
I’ve always been drawn to the Lumite.
For most people, it’s nothing more than a source of light or a curious substance that only seems to appear after the sun goes down in the night—but for me, it’s always been so much more than that.
There’s something about the way that Lumite shimmers beneath the stars that sets my soul ablaze every time that I see it—even when it’s just a small fragment of a much bigger piece that’s waiting for us in the depths of the desert.
I don’t know what it is about Lumite that I love so much—only that I do.
I’m not like most people when it comes to Lumite either.
For one thing, I never need a growth near me to see it like they do.
I can always see Lumite no matter where I am or what time of day it is because my eyes have always been able to see things that no one else can.
And for another thing, I can control Lumite too.
It took me a little while to figure out how to do it at first because no one told me that it was possible until they saw me doing it for myself—but once I did, I found that I was a natural at it because controlling Lumite has always been easy for me to do for some reason that no one else seems to know either.
Lyra says that it’s dangerous for me to do—especially whenever people are watching me do it because she says that they might try to take advantage of me if they ever found out what I could do—but that’s never stopped me before or even made me think twice about doing what she told me not to do anyway because there’s something about controlling Lumite like this that makes my heart feel like it’s finally at home for the first time in my life too.
I’m not supposed to use my powers like this when Rylan is around because he’s the one who’s supposed to be in charge of our aircraft whenever we fly together—but that doesn’t stop me from doing it anyway even when I know that he’s going to get mad at me for it later.
I don’t care what he thinks or what anyone else says about what I am or what I can do either because I know that this is what I was meant to be doing all along.
Lyra has always been the only one who understands that and she’s never tried to stop me from doing what I was meant to do either even when everyone else tried to tell her that she should.
She’s always said that I should be careful with what I can do whenever I try to use my powers in front of other people—but she’s also said that she knows that there’s nothing that she could say or do to stop me from doing what I was born to do in the first place too.
The Lumite flows through my fingers like water whenever I reach out to touch it and I close my eyes so that I can concentrate on the way that the energy feels as I wrap my hand around the glowing ball of light that hovers just above my head right now.
It doesn’t take very long for me to feel like I’m holding onto a part of myself instead of just some piece of Lumite anymore either—because that’s how much control over the energy that I have now after all this time of getting used to using it like this and for so long too.
I’m stronger than I was before—stronger than anyone else in our tribe thinks that I am—but I know that I’m not as strong as Lyra is either because I’ve never been able to make the Lumite move like she does or to be able to control the energy like she does too.
She says that controlling Lumite isn’t about being able to move more of it than anyone else can but that instead, it’s more of an art form that people are born knowing how to do—or even not knowing how to do too.
She also says that it’s not about being able to control the energy that makes people powerful either but about being humble with what they can do with it—or even not being humble with it too.
She says that people who use their powers without being humble are the ones who get themselves hurt—or even end up hurting other people around them too.
I’ve never understood what she meant by saying it like that, but she’s also said that it’s not up to her to make sure that I understand what she’s trying to teach me either.
All she wants is for me to be safe whenever I try using my powers in front of other people—and even herself too—and I think that’s something that everyone can agree on regardless of who they are or where they come from too.
I don’t like it whenever the energy flows through my fingers like this because it reminds me of the way things are supposed to be instead of the way that things are right now whenever I try using my powers whenever Rylan is around.
There’s nothing wrong with the way things are now either because this is how things have always been for as long as I can remember—especially whenever we’re flying over those tall mountains in the distance or while we’re walking across the desert on our way toward the oasis where our tribe lives right now.
I just wish things were different than the way they are right now because then maybe Rylan wouldn’t look at me the way he does whenever he thinks I’m not paying attention to him right now.
Lyra says that Rylan shouldn’t be acting the way he acts toward me because there’s nothing wrong with the way that I’m using my powers right now either.
