Most people do not know about archaea, the tiny creatures that mind their own buisiness and never bother us much at all. The archaea, however, take an enormous interest in most people- and if you could listen in to their babble in hot springs and the bottom of oceans, you would not like the things that they say.
For the archaea -who live everywhere people are, and everywhere they are not- regard our world and everything within it as a ridiculous shadow of their own. While they might take a trip to the mantle and feast on uranium or soar to the atmosphere to munch on its plentiful gas, often they settle in our cities to mock us as we go about our lives. They read of what we think of ourselves, about our dominion over the earth and our place in it, and when they do they laugh as much as a unicellular structure allows. Because dominion, they say to each other, is exactly not what we have- stuck in our gigantic bodies we can only breathe air and eat the disgusting husks of other creatures we find. How much better, the archaea say, to be able to eat anything, to live anywhere, and how much more control over the world we have than the giants up above us ever will.
Happily, there are some that take pity on us, and it is to them we owe our lives. Whenever a rogue archaeum would begin to develop the ability to breathe what we breathe and eat what we eat, the others decend on him in a flurry of protection orders and legalease. They have decided that there is one part of the world they can spare, and leave to the creatures that grow ever larger and stranger to eke out what they can upon it. It's a small restriction on archaen freedom- but they feel, at least, that it gives them something to laugh at.
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