When Leona was a little girl she used to take walks with her grandfather around a large, circular pond. They would throw food to the ducks, like bread and refrigerated peas. There were no fish in it back then. She returned as a young adult one evening after a long, unsatisfactory cry that made her feel like a soda bottle with the cap barely twisted off, and was shocked to find it full of life. The fish were large, roughly the color of tangerines, and they glinted in the dying light of the evening. Leona thought they were the most beautiful thing she’d seen all year.
She asked the community if anyone had put fish in the pond, but they hadn’t. Then she asked some conservationist groups, but they barely knew that the pond existed. Eventually, when she went back to school, she learned what had likely happened- sometimes when ducks eat from larger lakes, they swallow roe along with the plants. There’s only a small chance of the fish surviving the digestive system of the duck, but some still do, and they end up in other bodies of water, such as a small pond.
Leona thought back to this in university, when she learned about Minthe. It is a small planet at the center of an equally diminutive geo-centric system, with little in the way of population, which is puzzling because it should not have a population at all. Minthe can sustain human life without struggle, but the greater Aristi Cthonia system had only heard of it recently. Humans had never been sent to Minthe before the first voyage, not ten years before Leona learned about it in school.
Leona, of course, thought of her pond. STARX didn't keep records of everything that had been reported to exist in deep space; half of the "reports" were tall tales anyways. Former captains told stories of glowing, humanoid creatures with asteroid tails instead of legs who sang the songs of the Void in imperfect harmony. Leona's future travelling companion, Abbott, mentioned ghostly ships with no crew before, and though he dismissed it as an old wives tale, he always double-checked that the darkness between the stars was natural, and not the camouflaged hull of a metal monster.
Call her immature, or silly, or uninformed, but Leona began to check the sky every night for the hydrophobic feathers and highly specialized bill of waterfowl. She was convinced that at some point in history, the first ever humans of Minthe were swallowed and relocated by a giant cosmic duck.