Time and Dirt

This extended story idea is for a fanfiction of a game about being an exocolonist, i.e. helping build up a settlement on a distant earth-like planet in outer space.

However, it does not require any knowledge of the game and is deliberately written to be accessible to as many people as possible.

Will this story ever be written?

Cal, fan of plants and friends to all animals is a boy you have known for your whole childhood, who you grew up spending much time with helping out your and their families on the fields, gardens and barns of your small solitary settlement on a distant planet, braving out all hardships together. By the time you are older teenagers you realize both of you have ended up gradually falling in love with each other.

He had posed as a not-so-secret admirer for a while, but you figured it out immediately and were grateful for having at least someone close to you in your life at a time when your father had just died to an alien illness less than a year and half after your mother had already died from overworking, leaving you an orphan at the age of 16.

By age 18 your small settlement, suffering from yearly attacks of monsters ten times their size or a hundred times their own number, now risks being torn apart between two factions. One that wants to eradicate all alien life on the planet that refuses to just submit to them and make it their dominion alone. And one that sees the blame in the refusal or inability of the colonists to understand the world they are living in, adapt to the environment properly and become a part of the ecosystem rather than act as an invasive species.

Home now feels increasingly less like a safe haven in an unfamiliar world. Even the green oasis you have been tending to for years, where the food grows near where the dead are also buried and shrines for them erected, is being desecrated by older officials wanting to pressure you and everyone else to join the war on the planet. It disgusts you and Cal.

You sometimes feel like you almost only have each other anymore, with the exception of the few friends that also refuse to sign up for war, but they can often still feel somehow distant.

And there's even something getting between the two of you and your pure love and strongest of bonds. All your life you have had nightmares that seem like premonitions of the future and terrible moments of deja-vu. Over time, you have come to believe them as fact, because they have often held information that you could not have known. As memories of past lives and visions of your future lives, that seem to endlessly rerun your life on this distant world.

And in one future life, where you manage to save Cal's other best friend Tammy from a lethal accident when all of you were just ten, you see Cal growing much closer to her than to you instead, leaving you dreading the moment when inevitably your parents both die and you are entirely alone, no one to fall back on, no secret admirer, no one you could make happy.

Worse, a bad part of your mind wonders about simply not saving Cal's friend so you can still have him to yourself. Even though this hasn't happened, and knowing yourself, should never happen in any lifetime, you are still wrecked with guilt and unable to just enjoy your time with Cal in your current life the way you were before.

And the worst, you feel you can absolutely never tell the one person you should be able to tell everything. Or be certain you would really save Tammy the next time.