"See?! I told you I was way bigger than that stupid ball of hot air!"
"Yes, Luke, you showed me. Not quit playing around before you suck Jupiter dry!"
"You're just mad that I was right."
Luke stuck at his tongue at his distinctly unamused sister, whose hands where set on her hips in that trademark 'I'm giving you ONE last chance' look that she reserved exclusively for the 13-year-old celestial giant. Nonetheless, he obliged, and drifted away from the once-massive ball of swirling hot gas as best as he could. It was more out of obligation than anything else, as most of the planet had already been irrevocably destabilized from having a cosmic being tearing away at its mass with their tidal forces. By the time the super-Jupiter-sized boy had made it a 'safe' distance, most of the gas had already been pulled away, leaving a small, dense core of liquid rock and metal mixed together in a boiling soup.
Clara could only sigh as Luke looked sheepishly back at his big sister, a thick, unstable ring of shimmering red and blue now orbiting the boy. This was exactly why she told mom that this wasn't a good idea. She had been insistent on everyone being present with the rest of the Celestials, though, so now, here she was, trying to make sure that her little brother didn't accidentally destroy most of the solar system while they were here.
"You know, if you keep on acting like this, they're not going to let you within 2 AU of Earth." Clara lightly reprimanded. Her azure-green eyes glared directly into Luke's turquoise ones, her long, light brown hair floating all around her like a lion's mane. Along her thin, lithe body, reddish-brown dust coated her light pale skin in curvy stripes, the remains of several planets now getting a new lease on life as a fashion statement. Luke flinched a bit in response, turquois eyes widening a bit in response as his short ginger hair flailed about in tight, wavy curls. Around his thighs and hips, the dense, swirling mass of luminescent interstellar dust swirled tightly around him, coating his lower body in yet more layers of paint-splatter whites, oranges and browns. His fingers and toes tense a bit, though Luke was careful not to close them too tightly: there was at least one dwarf planet orbiting around every digit, and the last thing he wanted was to have to find more to replace them.
"Y-yeah, but can you really blame me?" Luke said in his defense. "All these planets are way too fragile for their own good! You get too close to one and it just disintegrates! Honestly, I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
When Clara didn't respond, Luke immediately switched to looking up at his sister with the biggest puppy-dog eyes he could manage. "I promise I'll be careful from now on. Honest!"
"How many times have I heard THAT?" Clara replied with an eyeroll.
Luke gasped in an exaggeratedly high-pitched imitation of an offended noblewoman. "When have I ever given you any reason to doubt me?"
"Remember when you hip-checked that red planet and it sling-shotted three other planets into a black hole?"
"First of all, that was sick, and second of all, how was I supposed to know that would happen!?!"
"It's not about knowing, it's about actually thinking before you act?"
"Well sometimes, we can't account for every little thing that going to happen! I'm only human, you know!"
Clara didn't seem to buy into his excuses, if her unyielding glare was anything to go by. However, it quickly lost most of its intensity, and before long, Clara's expression softened into that 'just what am I going to do with you' look that she also reserved exclusively for Luke. "I suppose I'll let you off for now. The solar system's been through worse than you."
"Yeah, remember what happened with Mars-?"
"We don't talk about 'what happened with Mars.' Now, let's get going! We don't want to keep the others waiting, do we, Lukas?"
"Urgh, fine, fine."
With that having been settled, the two siblings slowly drifted towards where Earth should be in its orbit, using their own gravitational pulls to guide them. It had been a while since they'd gotten the chance to visit the tiny planet that they had once called home. The last thing either sibling wanted was to miss out on seeing it after so long.
It was absurd to think that at one point, they had all somehow managed to fit on a tiny blue-and-green ball that was about the size of a marble compared to them. Nonetheless, their memories told them it was the unvarnished truth, and neither Luke nor Clara had any reason to doubt them. Luke could remember it like it was yesterday: four years ago, humanity had felt a sudden, strange energy coursing through their bodies all at once. It was an intense, electric feeling with no name nor origin to ground it. Nothing about that day had been even the slightest bit off or different from before; it had just happened out of the blue, all at one. Once the strange feeling had passed, a little over half of Earth's population suddenly started growing. For most, the growth spurt wasn't too extreme: an extra foot or two here or there, perhaps a little more than that, up to the size of a two- or three-story house. For several, it was more than that, approaching the level of skyscrapers or monuments. For some, it was even more than that, reaching the level of mountains and scraping against the clouds.
And then, there were the Celestials.
Honestly, Luke had no idea what made his family or the hundreds of other cosmic-scale giants that had grown with them so different. There weren't any particular features or traits such as race, color, or age that determined how big you grew. The only thing most Celestials had in common was that they'd simply gotten affected by whatever had happened way harder than everyone else, soaring past the clouds and swiftly outgrowing the blue and green marble. To this day, no one knew how the Earth hadn't been destroyed right then and there. There some vague, hazy memories about their being a white light at some point, but as far as everyone knew, they had just woken up like this, floating in space and towering over the plants.
There had been a... very long adjustment period after that. All the Celestials had lives before all of this. They had careers they wanted to advance, families they had to support, songs to listen to and movies to look forward to. Then, with the flip of a switch, that had all been taken away from them and replaced with a void of glittering stars. Luke had been hanging out with his friends at the ice cream parlor when he'd become a Celestial, and the only one of them that had managed to make the transition with him was Emile. Poor Emile: he didn't even have his family with him like Luke did. They were basically brothers now, but Luke could still tell how much Emile ached for the others to be here with them. He didn't blame him; he missed his friends too.
Still, they had all managed. Most Celestials had taken advantage of their new size to go out and explore as much of the cosmos as they could. Though the galaxy was still infinitely vast in scope compared to a Celestial, they were able to take advantage of the gravitational pull of the Sun to slingshot themselves wherever they needed to. Luke's family in particular had been to just about every corner of the Oort Cloud, taking in the dazzling sights of cosmic dust and ice interplaying with one another. Now, though, all the Celestials had gathered back for the fourth time, to bear witness to Earth and reminisce on just how much time had passed since they had taken lave of their home. It was a rite of passage of sorts to bring a small chunk of rock to act as a moon and fling it somewhere within the general vicinity of Earth. From there, they would all lean back and watch it travel proudly in slow elliptical orbits around the Earth alongside the other moons that had been brought by others before them.
...one did have to wonder whether or not all of these additional moons wouldn't have an effect on the tides of the ocean. To be fair, Luke supposed that moons they brought were frequently far smaller than the regular moon as compensation, plus there were times when one of the Celestials would come in an destroy a few moons whenever things got cluttered. Still, he wondered how people were taking all of this back on Earth?
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