A Tentacle Romance Novella

He twisted his tentacles anxiously.

"I'm sorry," he added, "I know it probably doesn't taste very good."

Melina stared at him in shocked silence. Her swirling thoughts gradually started to coalesce into a coherent emotion. Anger. She'd explained her own line of work to Nomy as soon as they'd shared the vocabulary to do so, but he'd never said anything then. She'd assumed he was holding off on telling her what he did for lack of shared concepts, but it was clear now that he'd kept it from her deliberately. In the entire time she'd spent with him, he'd showed her only the keenest consideration, but still, she couldn't imagine what reason he could have to hide this from her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked.

"Sorry." For the first time since she'd first spoken to him, Nomy wouldn't meet her eyes.

"Sorry," he repeated. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

She didn't know what to think. After everything he'd done, it seemed almost unfair to doubt his intentions. Still worse, if she couldn't rely on him, she had no idea what she could possibly rely on in this world. But still, from his reaction, she couldn't help but think he might have something truly heavy weighing on his conscience.

"Nomy?"

"I'm sorry, I...think you ended up here because of me." he said.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

He couldn't have just summoned her away from her own world. She remembered exactly what she'd done to end up here, there was no way she'd been grabbed by some other spell by coincidence.

"When you came here, you ended up right next to a... thing I made. It's supposed to bring messages from other worlds. Any spell which sends information between worlds, it..." he made a grasping gesture with his tentacle, then turned his eyes to meet her gaze again.

"It grabs onto it. Brings it here, so I can figure out what it is."

Melina sat down on the desk.

"Has this happened before?" she asked.

"No! The most I've ever gotten are little bits of information I can't even tell are real messages. As soon as you showed up, I turned it off to make sure it wouldn't happen again. But for you to have ended up right where it was just by chance... I don't think that could happen."

That explained a lot. She'd thought the same thing before; if the spell could really have sent her to absolutely anywhere in any of countless worlds, for her to end up right outside Nomy's home seemed too unlikely to happen at random. Really, no explanation that chalked it up to coincidence could possibly have made sense of the situation.

"I don't think your device caused me to end up here though." she said.

"I mean, I think it must be the reason I ended up here instead of somewhere else. But the spell I used wasn't meant to send me to another world, it was supposed to bring something to me. If I'd gotten that right, even if your device intercepted the spell, it shouldn't have sent me here. It only did that because I messed up in the first place."

"I've been thinking about that ever since I first saw you use magic in the forest, back on my first day here. The summon spell relied on the assumption that the magical background would be the same on both ends no matter where it opened up. That's true for any summon that connects two places on my own world. But the background is completely different here. That's why I can't use my own magic. If the background density could be different on both ends depending on where the spell goes, then it could end up running in either direction."

"So, uh... I was the one who screwed that one up. Probably about fifty-fifty odds which way it would go, and I got unlucky." Melina said. "But not nearly as unlucky as I could have been, thanks to you. If I'd kept using it, it was only going to be a matter of time before it backfired on me anyway."

"I see..." Nomy's voice sounded calm, but he could probably make his voice sound like anything. His tentacles still coiled uneasily, and he still seemed to struggle to meet her gaze.

"But, I still didn't tell you." he said. "I knew since you first came here, and I never tried to tell you. I'm sorry."

Melina struggled to find a response. Her throat felt tight, and she could feel the prickling onset of tears. More than anything, she felt ashamed. Her first reaction had been to lash out at Nomy in anger, but he'd already been tormenting himself over this matter for weeks. A part of her was conscious that her feelings might be grounded in fear. After all, if she couldn't rely on Nomy, she'd be back to being completely helpless in this world. But still, since she'd first arrived, he'd spared no effort in taking care of her. It hurt to think that she'd given Nomy reason to doubt her gratitude. And it hurt even more to think of him going to such lengths for her motivated by guilt.

In the end, she decided to put aside words. She walked towards him, to the edge of the desk. It was the first time she'd ever seen him from above his eye level, and he gazed up at her as she approached with sorrowful eyes. She grasped hold of one of his tentacles for support, and leaning off the edge of the desk, she kissed him above his eyes. She was afraid for a moment she might overbalance, but of course she wouldn't- Nomy wound a tentacle gently around her waist, holding her secure. Relying on his support, she let her weight rest against him in an embrace. She wrapped her arms around his tentacles at the base, where they met his trunk, and held him tight until she felt ready to speak.

"It's not your fault, Nomy. Even if I did end up here because of your device, that would still be an accident. Everything you've done for me isn't. There's no way I'd be angry with you."

Nomy remained quiet, but slowly lowered a tentacle from above her, and began to stroke her back, as he had on the day she first arrived. His grip gradually became stronger, as if he was not just comforting her, but drawing reassurance from the feeling of her touch. After a long time holding her in silence, he finally eased her back onto the top of his desk.

"Thank you. For telling me that." Nomy said, one of his tentacles lingering behind to stroke her cheek.

"I promise I'll do whatever I can to get you home."

~~~

"So," Nomy said, "we need to buy some things."

"What sort of things?" Melina asked.

"A lot, honestly. I normally go shopping a lot more often when you're not here." He said.

"You know, I wondered about that."

Although Nomy had long since mentioned a town nearby where more of his people lived, and made occasional references to shopping there, he'd never once brought up the prospect of actually going since Melina had first arrived. It'd been more than a month now, and felt like longer given how much of her language Nomy had absorbed in that time, and she'd begun to suspect that his usual lifestyle might be one of hermitlike seclusion.

"How far is it from here?" she asked.

Nomy waved a tentacle. "It's a bit of a trip for me. For you, it'd take all day. I'd be happy to take you with me, but I'd have to carry you."

"Would that be any trouble?" she asked.

"Not at all."

She blushed a bit at that. Nomy had picked her up a few more times to let her onto his workspace where he kept his research documentation, but it still hadn't lost its effect on her.

"I'll come with you then, thanks."

She could certainly have gotten some work done with the time alone. Even if she couldn't use her magic in this world, most of the preparations necessary for her return spell were theoretical. A few hours with nothing to focus on but running calculations would probably be good for progress. But she couldn't just pass up the chance to see what a town full of Nomy's people was actually like. And if she was honest about it, the thought of him carrying her there appealed to her in a way she wouldn't have anticipated.

"I appreciate the company then." Nomy said.

For all the work she'd imposed on him since she first arrived, he still made a point of constantly reassuring her that she wasn't causing him any trouble. At least as far as physical effort went, that seemed to be true; he offered her a tentacle to grasp, and as she held on, he swept her into the air, positioned as if she were sitting on a swing, his tentacle looped back lightly around her waist to steady her. She only occupied one of his twelve tentacles, while another held onto the cord of what appeared to be some sort of thick, transparent balloon which drifted in the air behind him, buoyed up by ingrained spellwork.              

"It's not hard to carry me a long way?" she asked.

"Of course not. You weigh about as much as the shopping bag, and it floats."

She wasn't sure if that even registered as a compliment to Nomy's sensibilities, or just a frank commentary on their difference in species. Still, it got a smile out of her, and she ran her hand along the tentacle supporting her. Even at its maximum compression, it was still only about as thick as her own arm, but she'd never observed any sort of limit to his lifting strength. Each of his tentacles was even stronger than an elephant's trunk, and at least as dexterous. Whatever they were built from seemed far more powerful than any sort of terrestrial muscle, and she suspected that magic was probably an integral feature of his anatomy. That might also explain how Nomy could get around so fast despite being shaped roughly like a tree.

He didn't seem to have any need for roads either, covering rough, hilly terrain so quickly that he carried her on the opposite side of his body to the direction he was traveling, to shield her from the heavy wind of his movement. Once they passed out of sight of his house, she couldn't see anything to distinguish their surroundings from complete wilderness.

"Do your people not develop land to make it easier to travel over?" she asked. "Maybe you don't need it, but in my world we have, uh, paths between places. Roads. They're like..."

"I know what you're talking about." he answered. "We have those, I just live really far out of the way. Nobody usually comes this way except for me."

"Why's that?" she asked.

"Because I research magic for travel between worlds. People get scared. I was asked to keep my lab at least this far from town, in case the whole place got blown up." he said.

Melina boggled at the thought. They'd traveled more than a couple dozen miles by now, easily. She attempted some quick calculations in her head, and ran out of mental envelope space.

"Could that happen, realistically?" she asked.

"No." Nomy said.

He'd become adept enough at speaking in a human voice that his irritation was clear in his tone, and she'd picked up enough of his body language to read the movement of his tentacles as frustrated gesturing.

"I used to have a space in a much bigger lab, in the middle of a big city. Back then, the biggest danger was not being able to get anything interesting enough to happen to get funding for the projects I actually wanted to work on." he said.

"Oh god, that was my life for the last three years." Melina said. "I thought I'd finally hit my big break recently, with something really tangible I could show the advisory board. Then, I went and tested it and got myself sucked into another world."

"I know how that goes." he said. "Sometimes, your work turns out almost right, but you just can't explain it to your supervisors."

"Exactly! Of course, since as far as anyone can tell, I went and got myself killed, the entire department's probably been put under review. Maybe my coworkers are living in cabins in the woods now."

"There are worse ways to live. I've gotten most of my best work done like that." he said.

Maybe it was just because everything Nomy knew about human culture came from her, but still, it couldn't escape her notice that he'd become easier to talk to lately than almost anyone had been in her own world. She'd had colleagues of course, but nobody in her own research department was really a close friend. And when it came to relationships closer than that, she had a long history of uneasy compromises and clashes of expectations.

She thought about the man she'd run into a year or so back, muscular and shockingly tall- although it was strange to think about him that way compared to Nomy, since he'd really only been about half a head taller than she was- who she'd felt immediately drawn to. After minutes of painful indecision, she'd decided to trust her gut, and for the first time in her life, asked someone out on first meeting. It had taken half an hour of lunchtime conversation for her to write him off as one of the most insufferably boring men alive and wonder how she could ever have been attracted to him in the first place.

Nomy was the one of the only people she'd ever met with whom she could share an in-depth discussion of her work, and he delighted in the puzzle of working out the relations between her native notations and formulas and his own. But she'd never known a single person with whom she'd had the same easy rapport, where anything she talked about with them could seem interesting. Of course, there was novelty in talking to an alien being about absolutely anything, but more than that, she'd come to rely on him to fulfill her need to feel connected to people like herself, to remain emotionally grounded.

A tentacle tapped on her shoulder, interrupting her thoughts.

"We're almost there." Nomy said.

He slowed his pace, the rush of wind around them dying down, and turned around, finally giving her a clear view ahead. What Nomy had called a "town" now spread nearly across the horizon. There might only be a few hundred of his people living there, but for creatures so much larger than humans, who didn't build more than a single story above ground, the space needed to house them might have been called a city in her own world. Nomy was right, there were roads inside the town, and probably leading away from it in other directions, but the way behind them was all trackless wilderness.

"It's okay if we just walk in from out of nowhere like this?" Melina asked.

"Sure, it's not like people don't know who I am here." Nomy said.

Even if that was the case for him, it definitely wasn't the case for her. She was literally the only human this world had ever seen, and she was simply being carried in out of the blue as far as the town's inhabitants were concerned. She'd envisioned, maybe some kind of gate, where Nomy would introduce her before they'd be allowed to pass through. Maybe because the idea created a clear transition between being outside the town, where only Nomy had known her, to being inside, where she could meet others of his people. But instead, she was finding herself being carried inside town limits, growing more and more uncertain about when they were going to run into other people, or what would happen when they did.

She expected to spot one before she was spotted, given how much bigger Nomy's people were than humans, but she'd forgotten to account for the fact that unlike her, they could see in every direction at once. A sudden, loud warbling took her by surprise, and she turned her head to see the second person she'd encountered on this world, quickly approaching. It was darker than Nomy, midnight blue to his ultramarine, and she was surprised to find that at the height Nomy was carrying her, she could see over the top of its trunk. It was much smaller than Nomy, perhaps about nine feet tall with a slenderer trunk, so Melina guessed she might be looking at a female of his species.

The... anemone woman? Moved her tentacles inquisitively as she approached, a bit close for Melina's comfort. As Nomy raised a tentacle and warbled back at her, she backed away. After a quick, incomprehensible exchange, she headed back the way she'd come, still saying something to Nomy. Although Melina couldn't help thinking it was like the woman was calling to Nomy over her shoulder, of course, from their perspectives, she was facing in both directions at once.

"Who was that?" Melina asked.

"I barely know her." Nomy answered. "But I guess she knows what I do. She wanted to know if you were an alien, of course."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her yes, and to be careful not to get close. She's not a very curious person." he said.

"Am I going to attract a crowd?" she asked.

"A what?"

Nomy had become adept enough at picking up new words from context that it was easy to forget about the gaps that were still left in his vocabulary.

"Like, a whole bunch of people grouped together. Everyone in town gathering around to look at me."

"Is that something your people do?" he asked.

"We definitely would if an alien showed up in town!" she said.

"Close enough to touch each other?" he asked.

"If it's a thick crowd at least. If people really wanted to get a look, they'd probably be pushing each other to get closer." she said.

That got an anxious twist out of him.

"People wouldn't do that here." he said. It'd be uncomfortable to have that many people so close together."

True to his word, they never encountered more than a few people together at once. Most of them were more curious than the first woman, but none of the conversations lasted long, solidifying Melina's impression that Nomy's quick-trilling language was a much faster form of communication than human speech.

"None of them know me well," Nomy told her, "so it's awkward for them to ask too much now."

The conversations were all completely opaque to Melina, so instead she focused on their appearances. She was concerned to discover that, having only seen one member of Nomy's species before, she found them genuinely hard to tell apart. The men and women were easy to distinguish, with the women being much smaller and darker in color, but all of them had the same sky blue eyes. The rippling striations on their trunks, what she'd come to think of as Nomy's muscles, were quite different from each other, but since she had no experience recognizing people by the markings on their trunks, they all faded from her mind's eye as soon as they were out of sight. She resolved that as soon as she could, she should at least commit Nomy's to memory.

The actual process of shopping was a bit unfamiliar to her. Nomy didn't haggle for anything, and she wasn't sure at first if he was simply bad at it and had enough money not to bother, or if it actually wasn't a part of his culture. When she asked him about it though, he seemed to find the idea genuinely weird and disconcerting. His interactions with the vendors seemed shockingly minimalistic to her, but considering how much ground they had to cover to make all their purchases, it at least sped up the process considerably.

Towards the end of their shopping trip though, when the floating bag was starting to stretch to full capacity, a woman called out to Nomy with a different tone than Melina had heard before. She gestured energetically at him from a distance, and Melina guessed that for the first time, they'd run into someone who wasn't so unfamiliar. She seemed a bit smaller than most of the women they'd encountered, but her voice, if it could be called that, was much louder. Nomy, on the other hand, went quiet as she approached.

The woman became even louder as she came closer, not simply from proximity, but actually raising her voice further. She came uncomfortably close, well within tentacle's reach, before she finally stopped, and pointed one of her tentacles directly at Melina. In her entire time in this world, Nomy had never pointed at her before, and she wondered if it was as rude among his people as it was among hers. She was sure Nomy wouldn't have brought her with him if he thought she'd be at risk, but still, she wrapped her fingers tight around Nomy's tentacle with uneasiness.