The game of Both has kept the peace between boys and girls for two years. Boys imbed girl play in boyish narratives and girls imbed boy play in girlish narratives. This allows everyone to live together in harmony without getting offended. Nowhere has this process reached higher complexity than on Ninosa. Girls love to sing in unison – uttering the same words at the same time. They like to sound pretty. Boys don’t care about that, but by managing singing contests, boys can determine winners and losers. Different states sponsor different teams and use the singing contests to settle disputes over territory, taxes, and senate seats. The girls tolerate this, but insist that the purpose of government is to make states as pretty as possible. The boys accept the idea so long as the most important part of prettiness is making scientific advancements. The girls insist that science should be used to cook and clean. The boys invent food bombs and soap guns, holding contests to see if the cooks can make messes faster than the maids can clean them up. In response to these antics, the girls treat the boys as if they are babies that need babysitting. Eventually, the play economy becomes too complex for anyone to make sense of it. Longing for simplicity, boys and girls return to playing separately, leading to competition over territory and time slots.

Then one day there is a riot. Angry that girls have taken all the flying cars at a time that boys wanted to use them, a group of boys trash the downtown shopping zone of the city, destroying many shoe stores. The girls are furious. The adult government puts the boys in jail, but the girls are not satisfied. A meeting is called and the girl leaders insist on ridding the planet of the boy pestilence for good.

Nathaniel and his crew land on planet Ninosa, home of the Ninos, pale-skinned, black-haired hominids. Ninosa is largely a windless desert of white clay, white sand, and white salt. The few tree trunks and roots are also white and often resemble twisted stacks of pizza boxes or Styrofoam cup sleeves. The palm-like fronds are indigo. The large fruits are puffy and hollow. Ninosa is also home to brown, sticky, carnivorous ferns and various herbivores. Due to the sparse biomass, Ninos live in white cities of artificial wood and eat factory-made food compounds. Most everything is powered by energy crystals, which create energy out of nothing. Ninos use a time-based currency. The value of goods and services is proportional to the time it takes to supply them, with no consideration for the costs of energy or anything else.

In places too rough for roads, the Ninos use flying cars with propellers front and back. Many vehicles are designed for multiple purposes, including helicopter airplanes, helicopter boats, helicopter submarines, and helicopter spaceships. The Ninos have mostly flat spaceships shaped as squares, hexagons, or octagons. Patrol robots have propellers on their heads.

The prime library on Ninosa is enormous. The four explorers spend a lot of time there. One day, they hear a scream and run to investigate. All they find is a stain on the carpet. They call the police, who end up closing off that section of the library. “This is the second attack like this. Until we figure out what’s going on, the library isn’t safe,” the officer says.

“What is the stain of?” Nathaniel asks.

“Blood, bones, and organs completely dissolved by a strong acid mixture. It looks like their body fluids boiled from the inside out,” the officer replies. Typical of many Ninosan uniforms, the police wear boots, briefs, and little else. Badges are fused to their skin. Over one hand, they wear a sock-like accessory capable of firing bursts of quasi-coherent infrared radiation.

“What could contain such a strong acid?” Nathaniel asks.

“We’re investigating that,” the officer says.

Captain Nathaniel and his crew land on planet Snarugi, home of the Snarugi people. Snarugi have three body sections, each with two limbs and surrounded by a transparent globe. One globe is filled with chlorine gas, one is filled with formaldehyde gas, and one is filled with ammonia gas. Snarugi have extremely complex biochemistry allowing them to metabolize almost any compound. They are an entire ecosystem unto themselves.

The Snarugi have an energy-based currency, where the value of goods and services is proportional only to the amount of energy it took to supply them, ignoring the costs of time, inconvenience, expertise, benefit to the consumer, and other factors.

Hearing of a new planet discovered far beyond the aerogel asteroid belt, having colors never before seen in history (fluorescents), Captain Nathaniel and his crew join a team of color wizards to extract, concentrate, and ship the new colors. Being so far away, it will take their ship three years to get there, so they go with the Snarugi, who can reach it in nine days.

The new planet has three biomes. Sixty percent of the surface is fluorescent rock, worn in places by extreme winds (there are even wind caves). These plains are inhabited by glittery blobs of fixed but flexible shapes. They nest in the same crevices every night and fit them perfectly. Thirty percent of the planet is “ice stick” forest. Columns of ice roughly the same height jut straight up from the ground, leaving just enough space between them to squeeze through if one takes a circuitous route. Ten percent of the planet is fir forest. These firs have fluorescent, spiral cones. Mouse-sized fluorescent dinosaurs live there. These three biomes exist wrapped around each other on small scales, but with sharp boundaries.

The Snarugi use trazer beams as drills and trazonic shielding for protection from the wind. Trazers are electromagnetic in nature, but the photons are combined differently than in lasers, giving them a silvery look. Trazers can be powerful weapons, but as it turns out not powerful enough for what awaits them on this planet…

Girl play and boy play are incompatible. Stuffians exposed to the wrong kind of play will experience fun poisoning. Boys and girls hate each other and adults are annoyed by the sounds of all play, yet they all have the same needs for commerce and resources, so girls, boys, and adults often live in the same regions of the same planets, though they often live in different sections of the cities or even in different cities. They share infrastructure but have different media. Thus it happens that the girls are able to plan a surprise attack on the boys without them knowing.

It is Nathaniel’s fourth birthday. He should be celebrating. Instead, he is in a courtroom on planet Kakro. Sitting down, he carefully places his tail through the back of his chair in great pain. It will be a while before it heals. Around the room are five Kakro adults. They have gumdrop-like bodies and glide like snails. A single, jointed arm extends from the lower front of their bodies while a thin, jointed neck extends from the upper front, tipped by a large eye and three straight horns. They are weird creatures. “Let the trial of Captain Nathaniel the Dromaeosaur begin,” adult one says.

“What are the charges?” adult two asks.

“Theft, vandalism, threats, and murder,” adult three says.

“That’s not what happened!” Nathaniel protests.

“Then tell us what really happened,” adult two commands, and so Nathaniel begins his tale:

Nathaniel has finally turned three! He continues to explore the cosmos, fighting boredom and learning new things.

Nathaniel and his crew stop for supplies on a Hammer-Face space station. The Hammer-Faces there have a favor-money system, meaning that all naturally indivisible tasks and objects are considered to be of the same value. Nathaniel does a favor for the Hammer-Faces by telling them a story, and they return the favor by giving him a bowl of food.

Nathaniel eats his bowl of candy sprinkles with a spoon and tells them another story. “So how did you get away from the Barts?” the tall one asks.

“We still had the numb-ray with us,” Nathaniel answers.

Eventually, the Hammer-Faces invite Nathaniel to visit nearby planet Hek with them. Frankfurt, the tall one, tells him, “It’s good that you never surrender. Good guys always fight bad guys. We know a place where you can be a hero anytime you want.”

Nathaniel is bored. His crew of Stuffians are bored too. They can barely stay awake. There is nothing new to do. They have done it all before. On Lectipas, they had entered numerous races, high-jumping contests, shoe-tying contests, eating contests, and breath-holding contests. Usually, they lost. They had climbed mountains and explored caves. The caves were always empty and after a while, all mountains looked the same. They repeatedly visited Planet Candy. They wore disguises in case The Mama-And-Daddy or some other adult was looking for them. The problem is that one can only eat so much candy before being full. They visited Earth (also in disguise) to watch whales, but most of the time there were no whales. Still fearful of the Fun Toy Syndicate, they avoided Gruezhe completely, but stopped at a Stuffian space station with a zero-gravity playground. That was fun for a while, but they soon got bored with that too. They stop on Soda (a Candy Wizard colony) to taste new flavors of soda, but find that the only new flavors are made for adults, such as kale, Brussels sprouts, and vomit.

They explore nearby planets, but most of them are lifeless and it takes days to travel from star system to star system. There are airless rock planets. There are airless ice planets. There are gas giant planets with no surface. Nathaniel catalogues and classifies them, but eventually starts seeing the same colors over and over. Gas giants can be bright yellow, dull yellow, bright orange, peach, grey, white, brown, striped, spotted, or striped and spotted. They can have rings, moons, or even moons with smaller satellites orbiting them, which Haticat calls “woons.”

Nathaniel keeps detailed descriptions of different kinds of mountains, cracks, and rain. He collects rocks of different shapes and colors, but soon he has every kind. Finally, they land on a planet with life. It is covered in jungle. There are no animals of any kind except for forty-five species of beetles. It’s very quiet. Not knowing what else to do, Nathaniel challenges himself to sit still long enough to count to one thousand. Finally, he finishes. “What now?”

The boys fly to planet Lectipas (planet of the Dinosaurs) in their new Extolon ship to discover that mosasaurs have somehow learned to burp in such a way to ignite their belly gases. They are coming onto land and starting massive forest fires. The boys become firefighters because being a good guy is fun.

They are brought from location to location as threats are upgraded and downgraded based on how big the fires are and how close they are to a village. While the Tyrannosaur tribes take charge of hunting the mosasaurs, all other species are assigned to firefighting duty. Ditches are dug, rivers are redirected, and trees are chopped down to make firebreaks.

Dinosaur adults, boys, and girls work together. Girls annoy adults and boys by giggling loudly. Adults meanwhile get more caught up in who has the authority to make a decision than they do with whether the decision is a good one or not. Rather than doing what they think best until another tells them not to, they do nothing and wait for another to tell them what to do while the forest burns and Nathaniel gets frustrated.

Responding to a distress call, Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill discover a boot-shaped Extolon spaceship on the surface of an unknown planet. The crew is dead, their bones picked clean. In life, they would have been blue-yellow striped hominids with large jaws, but no longer. Exploring outside, they find a barren landscape underneath black clouds. They walk and walk but see only dirt. “This looks like good soil. Why are there no plants?” Haticat asks.

“Maybe not enough sunlight gets through the clouds,” Nathaniel suggests.

Finally, they see one leafless tree at a distance. They walk closer to get a better look. It is covered in flies working hard on stripping the bark and chewing the wood. “My guess is that these flies ate all the other plants. That’s why this area is so barren,” Doctor Bill says.

“Ow!” Nathaniel shouts. “A fly bit me!”

“Maybe it thinks you’re a tree,” Haticat says.

“Maybe,” Nathaniel says. Another fly lands on him and he swats it.

“Augh!” Fred shouts. “A fly bit me too!”

More and more flies begin to land on Nathaniel and Haticat. They wave their arms frantically but can barely keep up with them. “These are carnivorous flies! Run!” Nathaniel yells.

The boys run back to the ship with a swarm of flies behind them. One very large fly gets past Doctor Bill’s waving paws and takes a chunk out of his ear. White stuffing fibers hang out. “Aaaaah!!!”

Nathaniel gets an idea. He sets his laser pistol on wide-angle and stuns the whole cloud of flies above them. They collapse to the ground around them like rain. Only a few escape. This buys them some time until they top the ridge in sight of their ship. “What is that?”

A section of the dark clouds above extends to the ground all around the ship and is growing. It is also moving towards them. The clouds are made of flies! All four explorers fire their lasers, but there are too many flies. One bites Nathaniel on his trigger finger and makes him bleed. “Hide in the Extolon ship!”