Chapter 11 Something needs to be done.

Sitting on Kristy's lap, Lili watched attentively as Kristy pointed at things in the book that she had placed upon the nice round table before her. There in the book Lili could see all sorts of animals, places and the history of this world represented by short texts underneath large beautiful pictures.

Kristy carefully pointed at each and every one of the things there, explaining them all and then made Lili learn to read the texts that she just explained to her.

Needless to say Lili felt informed. For never had she before heard of these stone aged people, never had she seen these black people, foxes, pyramids or this solar system and the blue planet there that they were on. Or well that's what she had thought at first, but the more Kristy showed her these things and the more she looked at that blue planet called earth, it then came to her.

She had seen this place before, no she had been here before, not in her previous life but in some other one a long time ago. She couldn't remember when it was, but quickly faint images of that time had come back to her.

She could remember watching this planet from a large viewing window in a space station. Large ships of metal were flying past the station and heading towards the stars in the distance.

And then she turned towards the large crowd of finely dressed people of all nationalities looking up to her. They all looked at her with such awe and hope in their eyes. Hundreds of large cameras were pointed at her as she then began to hold a speech to them all.

And after the speech ended people cheered for her in excitement and came on the stage one after the other. They all seemed so humble as they shook her hand and wrote down their signatures on a big piece of paper that was layed out on a large table next to her. And on that table she could see flags of hundreds of different nations and four letters, UESC. And under it red, United Earth Space Command.

But she could also remember another image of the earth. In it she could remember feeling extreme rage as she watched from a far as the earth was consumed in three massive green spore clouds.

There, before earth stood a fleet of hundreds of massive battleships of different sizes, but it was no use. For these were no mere spore clouds, but collections of monstrous ships of flesh. They somehow used massive tentacles like octopuses to push themselves slowly forward, some simply spewed out gases from their backs or used fish like giant fins to somehow move themselves forward. They were slow, but extremely heavily armoured in carapace-like armour on all sides except their backs.

Once they got into the fleets firing range, small holes in their sides opened up and started sending fourth small monstrous vessels like fighters of flesh. Pods of living flesh were also launched in great numbers.

And in minutes the already massive cloud of monsters had turned into a hailstorm of monsters that came down on the human fleet with unrelenting force.

Earth's defences were strong with hundreds of large orbital batteries defending it. They fired devastating energy rounds that tore small holes into the swarm of monsters.

The fleets biggest of capital ships did the same as smaller vessels and gun batteries picked out the smaller monstrous pods and fighters of flesh.

But no matter how much the humans resisted, the swarm was too vast. It quickly bypassed earths front line of defences and began assaulting the planet below. Even from orbit she could see the ground based batteries firing away at the incoming flesh pods.

Earth and it's orbit seemed to be a blaze for a while in the fires of all it's defenders guns. But little by little they started to die out and the green swarm began to take over.

Massive monstrous vessels of living flesh opened up their front carapace-like armours, revealing rows upon rows of massive teeth the size of buildings. They quickly crashed into the fleets ships tearing them into pieces. Tentacles wrapped around smaller vessels, jammed their gun batteries and crushed them into bits.

Orbital platforms were struck by the flesh pods that were filled with small human sized monsters that quickly overran them. And so the defences quickly crumbled and whatever was left of humanity quickly retreated into the stars, leaving the earth for the swarms consumption.

As Lili recalled this memory of her past. She also could recall the Sargent making some mention of this. For while the galaxy held many hostile alien species, it also held two distinct species that were a danger for all. Two species that were friends to none, not to each other, not humanity or any of the many alien species of the galaxy.

One of these species was the Demons that sought to turn all into their hellish paradise. And the other was an endless swarm led by a single hive mind. It was a swarm that sought only to consume all in its path, for it saw all as it's food and a means to clench its endless hunger.

But what were these two enemies exactly? This Lili didn't know, for not even the Sargent had seemed to really know anything about them, as both enemies never spoke or made any attempts of speaking to humanity.

But whatever was going to happen and whatever had happened in the past, it all just meant one thing to her. With more determination than ever before Lili clenched her little fists and decided to do something about this. For whatever she had done in the past or whatever humanity had done had not been good enough. Clearly creating a United Earth Space Command wasn't going to be good enough. She needed to do more, what was she going to do, she wasn't sure, but she was going to for sure do something about it all.

So on their way back home from the library, Lili finally decided to ask the most important question of all. "Kristy, what is money?"

For a moment Kristy seemed surprised to hear this as did Eric, when she then fell into thought and said. "Hmm, well how should I put this."

Looking at all the people, buildings cars and other things they drove past, Kristy then started to explain by saying.

"Well Lili, simply put money is value. And like everything you see around us here, it all has some value to it. And that value can be bought with money, or like in the US we use dollars as our currency and form of money.

But of course it wasn't always like this. You see in the beginning people had no dollars, so they used things like fish to trade for other things like tools. And like so you could say that everything had a fish value to it.

But fish gets bad over time, and it is hard to measure or simply too heavy to carry around. So you see people then began to use hard metals like gold and silver instead of fish to get those tools.

Because you see metals can be made into small coins. And coins don't go bad like fish and they are easy to carry around, so they could then be taken further away to get better tools from people living further away. And also it was much easier for instance to buy a house with small coins made of metal, instead of using many big bags of fish that would not only stink, but be extremely heavy to carry around.

But why dollars you might ask, what do dollars have to do with all of this. Well I'm glad you asked Lili, because you see gold and silver are not so easy to find as they are hidden in the ground. So for instance when the US needed money to fight the bad Germans, they quickly ran into a small problem of not having enough money to borrow from the bank.

And as time went on and even more wars and problems emerged, the need for money grew. And because money was tied to metals, the banks couldn't endlessly just give out loans of money to the government, if they simply didn't just have that money.

So the big people in charge then came up with a genius scheme to detach the dollars from metal. By doing this the banks little friends in the federal reserve could now endlessly print out however much money the bank needed to give the government.

But even this wasn't convenient or good enough. You see paper money needs to be made physically and can be stolen or simply lost. And so they decided to just make everything basically digital now. So now in the world there is more digital dollars than there is paper dollars or gold.

And because the government needs to borrow money from the bank, and the Bank borrows money from the federal reserve that makes and controls the outflow of digital money, there now is an endless cycle of debt. You see there now is more debt in the world than there is digital money.

Simply put, if you for instance want to buy something for ten dollars, but you have zero. Then what do you do? Well you borrow ten dollars from the bank. And now because of this you owe the bank eleven dollars in interest. And so you have a problem, so what do you do, how do you pay eleven back when you have only ten? Well you borrow more, and like so you're in an endless cycle of taking loans and paying those loans back with more loans.

All in all Lili, money is value, and that value is in the form of digital dollars here that we use to buy or sell things. It is a system based on trust in that system. And so that systems worth is however much the people, and most of all the government and its friends decide its worth to be. Oh but I'm no expert on this matter, but just know that money is important if you want a good life and many expensive things. Oh and being in debt is bad, you don't want to be like the government ok. Now did that answer your question Lili?"

Honestly Lili didn't really get it. But she nodded affirmatively to Kristy anyway. For one thing now came more obvious to her than ever before, and that was the fact that Alex was a genius.

She didn't know how it exactly worked, but Alex has after all been earning money constantly through those donations it seemed. And Alex seemed to really be interested in money as he seemed to know it's true power and worth.

So after listening to some more great knowledge about the world from Kristy and Eric. And after she ate a nice meal with them she bed them farewell and headed straight for Alex's home to make more money.

The sun had set now and it was dark again as Lili came before Alex's home. A home that was in complete darkness now and there was no cars outside, was Alex not home?

Usually Alex was always home at this time, but it didn't matter. Lili had seen Alex using that computer many times now and so she knew exactly what to do in order to start making money with it.

Climbing up the side of the house and going to Alex's window. Lili found it to be open and so she entered without hesitation.

Crawling through the now open window, Lili flopped gently to the floor and looked around.The room was silent, as was the house. There was no one there now, so she closed the window and went to work.

She might not have had her cool Elven ears, but she did have her cute kitty cat hoodie and so it was ok. After all looking cute was important for the viewes, and talking also. Although the talking part she wasn't that good at as she couldn't even read what the viewers were saying.

But everything was different now, as she knew how to read some sentences. She knew what a turtle was and so much more.