Chapter 1

For the earthling known as Peter Quill, life was pretty good on board the space station Knowhere. It was an amazing place, after all. Unlike normal space stations, it wasn’t made out of metal or a rare space element. It was made out of bone!

How was that possible? The station was built inside the skull of a long-dead giant celestial being. “I live inside a massive floating alien skull,” Peter would say. “How cool is that?!”

The station was filled with strange and wonderful beings. Peter got to meet people and do things that no other human being ever had, or ever would. It was a pretty special feeling.

But the very best thing about Knowhere was that it served as home base for the Guardians of the Galaxy, an intergalactic Super Hero team that Peter was proud to be a part of!

There were four other members of the team: Drax, the green-skinned, alien strongman; Groot, a living tree monster from space; Rocket, a furry little weapons specialist who looked almost exactly like a large Earth raccoon; and Gamora, an intergalactic warrior trained in several dozen forms of combat. And, of course, there was the leader of the group, Star-Lord.

When he wasn’t out in space doing awesome (if sometimes super-dangerous) missions with his team, Peter spent his time doing fun stuff on Knowhere. Take today for example:

This morning Peter went to the Celestial Boot (a restaurant where the Guardians love to hang out) and played space darts with Rocket. “This is going to be a bull’s-eye,” Rocket shouted as he held up his dart.

“But you’re not even aiming at the target,” Peter pointed out, holding his dart up as well.

“You’ll see,” Rocket said. He released his dart, and it zipped around the room, bouncing off walls and knocking over people’s drinks before landing dead in the target’s center. “Hey, how did you do that?” Peter asked.

Rocket showed Peter a tiny device on the tip of his dart. “Homing beacon,” Rocket explained. “It will always go where I tell it to, no matter what direction I throw it in—I designed it myself!”

“Always?” asked Peter. “Let’s see about that!” He took the whole box of darts and threw them all at once, scattering them in the air! The darts whooshed around the restaurant in all directions, causing patrons to duck as they pinged and ponged off the plates, the tables, the floor, and the ceiling before. . .

. . . all landed, clustered perfectly, in the bull’s-eye of the target!

“Awesome!” shouted Peter and Rocket together, high-fiving.

Later that day, Peter hung out with all of his other friends. He did a space race with Drax, ran some cool Zero-G training exercises with Gamora, and even tried meditating in a garden with Groot.

All in all, it was a pretty incredible day.When it was over, Peter headed back home to his bedroom on board his spaceship, which was docked semi-permanently on Knowhere. On his way he walked past the only other earthling living on the Knowhere: Cosmo.

“Good evening, Peter,” Cosmo said as he walked past Peter going in the other direction down a sidewalk.

“You too, Cosmo,” said Peter to the animal. Cosmo was the only other earthling, but Cosmo wasn’t a human being. He was a dog! Born in Russia in the 1960s, Cosmo was launched into the galaxy as a cosmonaut, part of the Russian government’s experiments in space travel. But Cosmo fell into a wormhole, and he wound up gaining advanced intelligence and mental abilities—including the power to communicate with humans. Now he was head of security on Knowhere.

“Oh, by the way. . . happy birthday, peter!” said Cosmo.

That stopped Peter in his tracks. “What?”

“I know that the calendar is different here on Knowhere,” said Cosmo. “The days and weeks are different lengths, and there are only eight months in the year and everything. . . . But I keep an Earth calendar on my desk at work, because it reminds me of home, and I happened to notice that on Earth, right now, it’s your birthday.”

It was Peter’s birthday and he hadn’t even realized it!