The rain shower surprised everyone.

It was the last few minutes of the fourth quarter in the annual football game between the cities of Gordonville and Richfield, and the score was tied. For the last few years Richfield has won every match, and tonight Gordonville is inside the twenty-five-yard line of their arch enemy, with one more offensive play remaining.

All eyes were on the field, waiting for that next play; it was fourth down within field goal range, with a little more than one minute left on the clock. The Gordonville coach called a timeout, and the kicker was already warmed up and ready to make history.

Without warning the skies opened up and dumped a wall of water onto the bleachers and the field. It did not rain, it literary poured! One second the spectators were eagerly watching the huddled teams, and the next moment they were all drenched to the bone, and the field was flooded. The rain was so heavy that some people were knocked off their chairs and feet.

There were several injuries, contusions and a few broken limbs. Both teams were agreeable when the referee called a tie and ended the game. They all wanted to check on family and friends.

***

The freak rain shower dumped two feet of water in seconds. Something like this has never been observed before, and the incident made national headlines. The climate advocates immediately seized upon this opportunity to predict that all future rain showers might become like this, while meteorologists were baffled and had no explanation for this phenomenon. As far as they could tell atmospheric conditions did not allow for any form of precipitation, let alone the wall of water that crashed down on the high school football fields the previous night. UFO believers claimed that there must have been some fold or fault in the space time continuum that opened a wormhole into a body of water somewhere.

There were many other theories and explanations, and real scientists studied Doppler radar, satellite images and samples of the rain water, looking for an explanation. They found nothing. The radar was clear, the satellite images showed nothing out of the ordinary, and the water was pure, and contained so few minerals that it appeared distilled.

The story lost prominence as time passed, and was supplanted by other events and happenings that were still fresh enough for the media to use as hooks, enabling the marketing machine to keep on selling stuff to viewers and pay the networks millions.

The first blue hair and eyes showed up six weeks after the rain shower. The media was all over it, eager to please the marketing monster. The free market is such a wonderful thing!

***

One morning Angie Peterson noticed bright blue flecks in her dark brown eyes, and a few strands of bright blue hair. By lunchtime her eyes were a fierce bright blue, and her hair was filled with highlights of the same color. Angie works at the Richfield diner, and she noticed a lot of blue streaked heads and bright blue eyes as the day progressed. By dinner time those heads were all blue, Angie’s included.

Inevitably someone connected this with the rain shower and Angie called a friend that lives in Gordonville, and it was confirmed, everyone that got rained on now has blue hair and eyes.

Thanks to the magic of social media the neighboring towns were once again swarmed by the media, the government and the morbidly curious.

***

The hair and eyes were followed by finger and toenails, and then body hair turning the same shade of blue. People that used to be bald started growing blue hair, and those with poor eyesight ended up with 20/10 vision. They could see things at twenty feet that others could only see at ten feet. Naturally this piqued the interest of many. The world is filled with bald people with poor eyesight, so there is a lot of money to be made. The ‘blues’, as they were being called, were subjected to a battery of tests, and here it was discovered that their blood was also blue.

The government used this fact to quarantine the two towns. The national guard were tasked to set up roadblocks, and nobody was allowed to enter or leave. Travel between the towns was allowed because officials needed access to both groups of ‘blues’.

Human coloring is influenced by melanin. The presence of Eumelanin gives rise to darker eyes, hair and skin color. Redheads have more pheomelanin that brings reddish hues to their coloring, and the complete absence of melanin in any form leads to albinism. Incredibly, there have been blue people before. An American family, the Fugates from 1820s Kentucky, carried the methemoglobinemia gene, and they had blue skinned children who had chocolate colored blood! This current crop of blue people do not suffer from a similar genetic condition, they are mostly unrelated, but they do share the weather event at the football game.

The focus of attention shifted to the many water samples collected on that fateful day. The compound that causes hair regrowth and improved vision must be found, isolated and patented! The race was on. The free market is such a wonderful thing!

***

While competing companies raced against time and each other to identify and claim that which they can use to make themselves stinking rich, the ‘blues’ continued to evolve unobserved. They retreated to the privacy of their homes, where their skins turned pale blue, and their features changed, becoming uniform. Two weeks after the first blue eyes were noticed it was impossible to tell the blue men and women apart from each other. Both men and women became tall and muscular, while still remaining distinctively male and female, but one man looked like the next man. The same was true for the women. Once they were African American, Caucasian, Indian or Asian, but now they looked exactly the same.

On the 15th of March the ‘blues’ emerged from their homes at the same time and headed to the high school on foot. The ones from the neighboring town came running. The authorities had the expected reaction; they needed to know where the ‘blues’ were going and why. When they got no response, they attempted to forcibly stop the two groups. The blue men and women simply stepped around them and over their vehicles and obstacles. One of the soldiers lost his nerve and fired his weapon into the back of one of the blue men before his fellow soldiers could stop him. The ‘blue’ stumbled and went down on his knees, and two other blue men stepped up and grabbed him under his arms and continued to walk towards the football fields.

No other shots were fired, and the blues gathered wordlessly on the main football field. They huddled together, shoulder to shoulder and turned their gaze upwards and to the north. A bright spec of light formed in the northern sky, and swiftly grew as it approached. As it came into focus it could be recognized as a craft, a spaceship. It was gigantic, and already filled the sky when it entered the atmosphere 62 miles above the earth’s surface.

The scale of the ship was hard to comprehend, and those who saw it approach were told by their animal brains to run because this thing is on a collision course, but their human eyes and intellect made them realize that it is not, and it is absolutely in control of its path. People were dumbstruck, staring with mouths open and unblinking eyes, frozen in place by awe.

The impossibly large ship blocked out the sun and a bright blue light shone on the gathered ‘blues’. The ship had thousands of lighted ports and bristled with antennae and things that looked like cannons. Thousands of smaller craft flew out of it and circled the ship, apparently acting as guards.

The blue light intensified, and the ‘blues’ rose into the sky towards the ship. The scale of the vessel again played tricks on the eyes and minds of those watching. Long before the ‘blues’ reached the ship they could no longer be seen with the naked eye. Eventually they made it into the ship because the blue light snapped off, and the ship started rotating. This went on for quite some time, and eventually giant exhausts came into view. Before the awestruck humans realized what this meant, the ship fired its engines and the towns of Richfield and Gordonville were reduced to pools of molten rock.

***

The giant ship leaves earths atmosphere and its crew prepares for hyperspace while the ships commander ensures the freshly harvested blue beings are safely quarantined. They cannot risk contamination from the indigenous species of this little blue planet. The new blue beings will remain in quarantine for the duration of their trip, and they will be monitored at all times to ensure not a spec of humanity snuck aboard with them.

Once, thousands of years ago, one of their ships beamed a Jewish man named Elijah aboard, and the microorganisms he brought with him killed the whole crew. Elijah drank some of the ionized water they use to cool their ships engines, and that transformed him into a spectacular blue being. He was recovered and sterilized and is still alive and a favorite pet of the emperor.

This crop of blue beings are both male and female, and the money they will make breeding these as pets cannot be imagined. He is pretty sure they will make enough to fill this ship multiple times over. The ships commander smiles widely, and shakes his eight tendril like arms in excitement and satisfaction.

The free market is such a wonderful thing!