One moon has developed three hominid species, Homo up, Homo down, and Homo sideways, which lived contemporaneously across the landscape.
Homo up lived in the mountains. They walked with their noses high in the sky. They raced through the thin air, becoming short, lean athletic creatures. Homo down relaxed in the valleys, farming themselves into absolute stagnation. Homo sideways were the weirdest of the bunch. After losing a series of wars, H. sideways launched themselves from the coast and went far, far away. But they came back. Boy, did they.
H. up and H. down never had a particularly good relationship, but they tolerated one another for long periods. Gradually H. down, ridiculed among H. up for being lowbrow and reproducing a lot, precipitated a simultaneously ecological and economic disaster due to agriculture. H. up was forced to flee into the mountains one fateful evening after a young member of their species insulted his counterpart's mother during a rap battle. H. up had barely outpaced the angry farmers.
H. down, satisfied that H. up was likely aware that they were the bitch, returned to their farming villages. However, one young man decided to start a fire.
"Don't do it," one of his neighbors had warned him. "Why would you do something like that?"
"It will be funny," said the young arsonist as he set fire to a tree. "Why not?"
The fire spread quickly up the dry forest. Hundreds of square kiloflats of old growth trees just went up in flames like it's all good like whoosh. A young arsonist of the H. up persuasion felt hot anger about this situation.
"I'm going to go kick somebody's ass," said the boy, only for one of his companions, Gary, to say something like, "Really? You want to turn around and go fighting?"
Needless to say, Gary's buddy's answer was yes, and there he went into the flaming vegetation like an idiot. And he didn't have to go far before he found exactly what he was looking for: a bunch of angry youth of the other flag's variety. "Hey, fuckers!" he greeted them.
"Hey, you dick shit duck! Why did you burn down the forest?"
"You burned down the forest, assholes," he replied.
"No, you did."
He thought about it. Had it been someone from his own group?
"You mom is fat!" he exclaimed, and ran off into the growth. The attack was effective, because the other boys raced after him. Before long, the entire lot of them arrived at a precipice. The sun rose over a glistening ocean. It was clear to the young mountain arsonist that he would have to fight or the valley gentlemen would push him over the edge. And so he fought, but they pushed him over anyway, because there were like eighteen of them.
His fall to the beach was exciting. First, he was able to bounce off tree branches sticking out of the rock. Next, he smacked the mountainside with the left half of his body and rolled like a gas station empanada across a number of smooth semi-vertical surfaces. Then, a flaming tree bark the size of a boogie board drifted next to him, and he hopped onto the thing and rode it into the sand where it was left sticking up diagonally.
"Hey, fuckers!" he called. "You're going to have to do better than that!"
And so they returned, an army of them, and quite a number of his own boys as well, some of whom were frustrated with their own speciesman for having been such a belligerent jackass.
And it was during this exact tense moment that Homo sideways returned to the mainland.
