Back in the Earthen spaceship, I was able to battle the Voice for the first time since my murders. Now, its hold on me is still here, but weaker - far weaker.

What the hell is going on? Is she really just weakened by the change in environment, or is it something about this alien ship?

A surge of random glee hits me, erasing the troubling thoughts. I know it's from the Voice, meant to distract me, but I still giggle from the pure bliss of the emotion. The male alien looks at me with raised eyebrows and a slight smile, and I get the sudden, certain feeling that he knows. He knows something is wrong with me and he finds it amusing. The Voice's hold tightens and I know it is holding back the fury I would otherwise feel.

Strange. Hatred is usually one of its favorite emotions.

I am snapped out of my head as the alien begins to speak.

"You are on a spaceship that holds the shattered remains of a dying race."

The room around us suddenly bursts to life, and we all flinch away from it. Deirdre's hands ball into fists, obviously wanting a weapon. Nicole bares her teeth, a sight that is rather comical once one works past their initial terror. Xavier taps his fingers on his legs, his expression tightening. Jake growls slightly shifting backward. I just scoot towards them all. After all, my body is my weapon and my caretakers ruined it.

High definition holograms surround us. We are an island of calm in the midst of a horrifying war.

Not a war between men. A war against nature.

Screams fill my ears, laced with pure agony as throngs of these albino aliens struggle to avoid rapid streams of lava running down the streets of a pulverized city. A house collapses with a magnificent crash, and I hear a baby wail inside of the ruins. A rock shifts, falls, and the cry is quickly cut off.

I feel a twisting in my stomach that is quickly swept away. I am glad. Nausea is one of my least favorite feelings.

The projections change to show more ruins of what was obviously once a large city. This wreckage is quickly submerged with water as huge tidal waves crash relentlessly against the building husks and the beach they were once situated on. The place is already so broken that there are no more people who must evacuate. They are already dead or gone. An albino corpse, strangely small and thin, floats facedown through the filthy. The Voice watches in quiet interest.

Then we are in a rainforest. Rain is pounding down, thick sheets of it. A small group of aliens move cautiously through the rain, trying vainly to shield both their faces and a tiny figure in their center that I quickly realize is a toddler, supported by several different hands. One man slips on a log, falls, and does not get back up. A woman screams at the sight and the child begins to cry.

Mercifully, the projections stop, leaving our ears ringing in the sudden silence.

"Our world was changing in ways our scientists have still not been able to understand," the man continues calmly, as if he hadn't just been standing in the (albeit holographic) wreckage of his home planet. I wonder how many times he has given this speech. It seems monotonous, bored, even.

"What should have happened over the course of thousands if not millions of years was happening in a single decade. All the volcanoes erupted, the oceans tore further and further inland, earthquakes destroyed any man-made objects left over, and sinkholes swallowed the rubble of those destroyed cities - and wherever there was not a sudden and violent natural disaster, rain pounded down so long and so hard that nobody could live there for long without the rain destroying whatever they built.

"The Supernova Initiative was hurried into effect. Decades prior, the mission had been intended for a preconstructed spaceship holding five crew members to travel into deep space, to promising stars in search of another habitable planet. We are an advanced race compared to yours - we had already developed the technology to allow us to do so.

"Once our own world began slaughtering us, it didn't take much to turn the Supernova Initiative in a different direction. While a select team of scientists and engineers constructed a colossal spaceship holding everything necessary for survival, we had a team of architects work on designing and building protective domes for those who we would not be bringing with us. After all, we could only take the most helpful, intelligent, creative citizens on our journey, and their families - if they had survived.

"The domes functioned even better than we had hoped, so we built four of them- one on each of the continents - and stationed a team of architects within each of them to help repair any of the damage done by nature. Meanwhile, to ensure our race would survive, we launched this spaceship, giving the crew time to first wrap up their preexisting lives and relationships on our home planet. Still, we would be connected to our planet with several advanced communication systems.

"The last time we heard from our planet was seven years ago. They reported that they were running out of resources to fix the domes and things were beginning to look grim. Soon, all we could pick up was static. We believe that those domes have failed and everyone back on our planet is long dead.

"The original crew of this spaceship is elderly or deceased. I myself was a child when this spacecraft took off."

The alien stops abruptly, glancing around at all of us, and I get the sense that we are supposed to be asking questions. The rest of the teenagers remain silent. I, however, raise my hand, genuinely curious about several things. I am sure the others are, too, but are too intimidated to ask about them.

The man smiles at my hand. "You humans are so fond of doing this to ask a question. Yes?"

"What should we call your species?"

"You could not pronounce it. Your vocal chords are not constructed the same way as ours. Humans in the past have referred to us simply as the Albinos, whatever that may mean."

I nod. After all, that fits. "And what is your planet called?"

"It does not matter. We will never be going back." The man sounds so dismissive, I wonder if this is all a fictional story. How could he feel utterly nothing about the destruction of his home?

"How long has this spaceship been operating?" Nicole asks, her courage obviously bolstered by my own questions.

"The Initiative has been in operation for over fifty years now."

"How are you keeping it safe from all of space's elements?" Xavier asks.

"Since when does a drug lord's kid know anything about space?" I murmur, and the child glares at me. The Albino smiles fondly as if I have just said something endearing.

"We send out frequent electromagnetic pulses that deflect any debris. You would not understand the full process - it involves math and technology far beyond you humans' miniscule understanding of the subjects."

"Why are we here?" Jake demands, jaw working as he mulls over all of this information.

"Well, since we seem to have no more questions about my species' distant past, let us look at the recent past, present, and future.

"We began abducting humans when we first arrived in your solar system, about twenty years ago. Every few years we take five humans - test subjects - and put them through a series of tests that we call the Trials. Through these Trials, we discover how different humans think, act and react in high-pressure situations, as well as gain a larger understanding of how you treat one another in such scenarios.

"We are doing all of this to prepare for the day when we take over Earth, naturally. We wish to do so quietly and virtually effortlessly. What would be the point of an intelligent race such as ours attacking without discovering, without understanding our opponents? There is no point. We have watched countless Earthen" - the alien struggled for the term - "sci fi movies, and have learned that misunderstanding is how the attacking species is always defeated. We plan to be victorious in the tidiest, quickest way possible."

"What are the Trials going to encompass?" Deirdre asks in a tiny voice, looking somewhat pale at the thought of these aliens taking over Earth. Meanwhile, within me, the Voice is cheering.

"We cannot tell you that yet," the man says in a tone that I could almost mistake for gleefulness. He is obviously very excited.

"What kinds of humans have you studied?" I query hesitantly, the Voice allowing me temporary control.

"We have experimented upon the poor, the rich, the criminals, the do-gooders, the night owls, the early birds, the newborn, the teenagers, the middle aged, the old, geniuses, idiots, all the races, all the religions, all the sexualities, and every gender. The only group of people that we have not studied are the insane."

The Albino smiles evilly. "So now it's your turn."