 What motivated the narrator to design the Volpla origin story as he did?
Volpla By WYMAN GUIN Illustrated by [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. The only kind of gag worth pulling, I always maintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humor! Volplas at last. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. I had called them volplas since the day old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had given me the idea of a flying mutant. When Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly. Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern. I thought, "All this and three volplas, too." I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, "Yes, sir, the dangerous age. I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction.
 Making them think they were aliens was part of preventing any traceable ties between them and himself
 He enjoyed creating backstories for the creatures as part of the stories he told them  He did not want the creatues to feel like they did not have a rich history  The Volpla asked him to tell them their history, and when they guessed they were from elsewhere, he ran with it  Making them think they were aliens was part of preventing any traceable ties between them and himself