Is it possible to accidentally land on Earth? Well, that's the story I got from a girl I met in high school. Except she said she wasn't really a girl in high school but only pretending to be.
After months of dropping hints and being questioned, Naria finally told me she was from the planet Cronin on the other side of the universe, where she intended to return as soon as she was able. In the meantime she had taken the place of a human being, a female high school student, who she deemed capable of adjusting to the relatively short-term inconvenience.
She said she was the princess of Cronin, which had been attacked by and was at war with another planet. And it was when she and her father, the leader of Cronin, were travelling in a spaceship to meet with the leaders of the enemy planet to negotiate peace that a rogue enemy vessel attacked Naria's with some kind of weapon that knocked it across the universe, possibly to a different time.
Of all those aboard, only eleven survived the blast and subsequent trip, and Naria's father was not among them. Somehow all those that did survive managed to escape their spaceship and the ocean depths and to be rescued. Naria was picked up by a sea ship which brought her, unconscious, to a hospital on the East Coast of the U.S. But when she regained sufficient wherewithal, she immediately left, knowing full well that the doctors there knew that there was something not quite human about her.
She and the others from Cronin looked human, but they possessed some very unusual traits. Not only did they typically communicate with one another telepathically and were easily able to read minds, but they were also able to assume different physical forms. Shape-shifting took a lot of energy, however, and it wasn't possible to change into just anything. It had to be something of a similar type and size.
Naria's brother, the new leader of Cronin, who had not participated in the peace-seeking mission and had remained on their home planet, was greatly relieved when she was able to contact him telepathically. Together they decided that since Naria was not strong enough to transport herself or to be transported back to Cronin, she would take the place of a human while she healed and that human would go to Cronin in the interim.
So, Jill, an American high school student and one of my classmates, was removed to Cronin while Naria, using her mind-reading abilities, learned what she needed from Jill and took her place. No one close to Jill or anyone else suspected, apparently, what had had happened, though I do remember one particular day, early in the school year, when Jill didn't seem herself. I was blabbing on about something in Biology when I noticed she wasn't paying attention to me at all. Slightly peeved, I got up from my desk and walked across the room to sharpen my pencil. But when I walked back and looked at her I could see that she was utterly baffled, not only by my irritation, but, seemingly, by everything. Yet we were in the middle of class, and I had no way of knowing, let alone guessing, that my friend had been replaced by an alien, so I just dismissed the girl's odd behavior. We were both teenagers after all, and there's probably nothing stranger than a teenager.
"What did you hope to gain," I asked indignantly on Jill's behalf, at one point after Naria had told me her story. And why tell me any of this? I wondered. She thought it would be a great way to learn about Earth, she explained, and, though she hadn't planned on telling me, she said she was told to-- that I would need to know in the future.
In addition to reading minds, Naria could see the future as well as beyond the grave, I had known for some time, before she spilled the beans about her origin. But I had assumed she was a gifted human. After I was exposed to an alternate explanation, I would sometimes call her a creature or an alien to get a rise out of her. But she didn't pick up on the sarcasm at all. My impression was that she had no qualms about her alien status. She simply was not an Earthling. I, on the other hand, was angry and scared, mainly because of the person I was, but also because I knew she was leaving.
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