Atlantea Ch. 14

"Deal!" I said, but she held up a hand.

"Also, you have to do it whenever I want, as long as I want. Basically, I'll own your tongue. How long can you go down on me for?" she asked.

"Until my tongue falls off?" I said.

"Good answer! My vagina and your mouth have a date this evening, then. Your place."

* * *

I had to race to get to language class before class started, and there had been no time to change clothes. There weren't any spare men's pants in Jacintha's office, and my apartment was too far away. She had loaned me a backpack that I could casually hold in front of my midsection. It felt like everyone would be able to see through what I was doing, but I could not come up with a better solution. When I approached the weathered wooden door of the appointed classroom, designated by Aurebesh characters I did not recognize, I could not have said what was making me more nervous, the stain on my front, or my certainty that I would not learn the Atlantean language in time. As it was, I sat down at a weathered student's desk just before the clock struck nine and class began.

The room looked like any number of college classrooms I had been in, albeit more worn-looking. There were thirty individual-sized desks, with a burnished look that came from years of use, arranged in a loose grid. We only occupied twelve of them; the other students in the class were the same men I had flown to Atlantea with. I supposed that the other visitors I had seen in the airport spoke other languages, and needed different instructors. I noted, sympathetically, that my compatriots had not found any good places to put their phones. None of our clothing featured pockets, so we had to just hold them in our hands, leave them on our desks, or else tuck them in our waistbands. I saw examples of all three. I was the only exception, having been able to stow my device in Jacintha's backpack.

"Hello gentlemen," a loud voice said from the front of the room. It belonged to a woman, a few inches taller than me, with long, straight, dirty blond hair. Her frame was statuesque, and she was wearing a multi-colored garment that I can best describe as a sari, although I suspect that someone from India would have been able to detect a difference or two. The tinted fabric ranged from light yellow, to deep crimson, to azure. It was a strange choice of garb, as the colors contrasted poorly, to my mind, with her pale, sallow complexion. "My name is Vasilika, and I will be your instructor in oral communication for the next month." She paused, a mysterious smile coming to her lips. "I'm surprised nobody has quipped, 'that's what she said' in response; a common jape, in your country, is it not?" Scattered laughter broke out across the room at this unexpected attempt at levity. Vasilika's handsome, angular, face gave her a serious mien; the contrast with her humorous words only made them funnier.

She went on to explain that we would meet every weekday, at the same time, for the rest of our time on Kumaiya island. At eleven, we would have an hour-long class on a rotating topic; today's was to be one of several concerning Atlantean culture and customs. After lunch, there would be a class on reading and writing, and in the late afternoon there would be one-on-one language practice. In other words, the only class that would vary in subject matter was the hour-long one that preceded our noontime meal.

"Although your CLs have most likely explained this to you already, in case they have not, it is important that you take this class seriously. At the end of the course there will be a qualification exam. If you do not pass, you will be sent home, albeit with generous compensation. Does anyone know the reason why?"

The man I had dubbed Wolverine answered, "My CL said Atlanteans usually don't know a second language. And most of the ones that do work on this island."

"Correct," Vasilika intoned. She was standing in front of a large projection of a screen, and gave the impression she was reciting a speech she had given countless times in the past. "In fact, we have a little joke in our homeland: 'Most Atlanteans know five languages, but all five of them are Atlantean.' There is truth to this. Although our nation has been in existence well over eleven thousand years, this has not brought about the homogeneity in dialect that one might presume. Citizens from different cantons take great pride in their accents, in fact. As a result, there are a number of dialects, five major ones, as you may have gathered from the saying, and part of what we will learn is how to understand them."

Vasilika continued her lecture, but I lost focus when I felt my borrowed backpack vibrate. It was lying on my lap. After a moment of confusion, I realized it was my phone that had been buzzing. Irrationally excited, I wondered if Calista had been able to contact me, after all, and surreptitiously unzipped the front compartment and slid my hand inside. I slowly withdrew the device, hoping not to attract any attention. Flipping it around, it was with mild disappointment that I saw the notification that messages had arrived from Jacintha. Curious as to why my CL might be texting me, I tiled the clear plastic device upwards, so that it would recognize my face and unlock. It turns out I was wrong, in one regard. Jacintha had not texted me, she had sexted me.

"OMG u bstard," her first message read, "i have report due @ 3 2day!!" The next read, "& all i can do is frig myself!!!!" More shockingly, the next message contained a short embedded video set to loop over and over. From the angle, I could tell she had held her phone with her left hand, right in front of her pussy. Three fingers slipped in and out of her canal. At the very end of the loop, she spread her labia and vaginal opening wide, and I could just barely see her cervix. Her final text consisted of a cat emoji, followed by an emoji of a face with its tongue stuck out.

'I guess they have the same emoji here,' I thought; I had been curious about that. 'I wonder who invented them first?'

It dawned on me, as well, that despite having had a number of relationships, I had never sexted before. I was momentarily unsure of how to respond, not having had any practice. Eventually, I settled for sending back an eggplant character, in reference to the massive erection I'd gotten. Just as I hit the send button, my head snapped up reflexively, as I heard my name ring out.

"Mr. Walker!" Vasilika said, sternly. "Since you evidently find your phone more interesting than this class, I can only presume you know the material already!"

"Sorry!" I said, lamely, shoving my phone back into the pack. "I got a text; I'll ignore it from now on!"

"No need to apologize, Mr. Walker," Vasilika said, a grin spreading across her features. "As I said, clearly you are ahead of the class and don't need to pay attention! Why don't you stand up and demonstrate for us all how you would greet a room full of strangers?"

I felt certain my face was now purple. For one thing, I was embarrassed to have been caught out like this. For another, Jacintha's messages had already caused me to flush with excitement. And I was worried about flunking this class; now I clearly gotten off on the wrong foot with the most important instructor. Perhaps worst of all, at least in the moment, was that standing up meant I'd have to hold up the backpack awkwardly in front of me, lest the whole class see the cum stain on my pants.

There was nothing for it, however, so, as casually as possible, I stood up, shifting the backpack so it rested on the plane of the desk, as if I intended that all along. All eyes were glued on me, I hoped mostly at my face. Vasilika had an amused expression. My heart sank as I tried to recall what she had been saying while I was reading the texts. I was sure she had just given us the very phrase she wanted me to repeat, but I could dredge up no recollection of what she had said. Then, to my utter shock, words started pouring, unbidden, from my mouth.

«Howdy thar, y'all, lucky ta make yer acquaintance!» I said, reflexively, in Atlantean.

The other students looked perplexed, not recognizing my words at all. Clearly the phrase Vasilika had just given the class had sounded different, but the men had no way to know if I had used an alternative phrase, or had just been speaking gibberish. Vasilika's face went through a range of emotions. First, her jaw dropped. Then she closed it again, and pursed her lips tightly. I knew what was coming next, as it had happened every time I first spoke Atlantean to someone new. Unable to keep her mouth closed, raucous belly laughs erupted from her mouth, and she put her hand on the wall for support.

"Oh my, Mr. Walker, you really are something else!" In a manner similar to Jacintha, she was flapping one of her hands, off to her side, in an attempt to gain composure. After a few more beast, she addressed the class, "That, gentlemen, is a pitch-perfect example of a Northeastern dialect, primarily spoken in the canton of Zatyr. It's very rural there, so hearing a mainlander speak with that accent is just too much! Mr. Walker, could you come by my office after your eleven o'clock class?" She paused for a moment. "Actually, how silly of me, you were going to anyway." At first I wondered what she meant by seeing her anyway, until I remembered that Jacintha had arranged for her to breastfeed me at noon.

'Fuck!' I thought to myself, 'Now I've gone and pissed off my lunch!'

I sat back down, grateful to, at least, not be so exposed. My friend Chris turned around in his seat, a leer on his face, and gave me a thumbs-up sign. "Smooth, dude, smooth," he mouthed. I responded by flipping him off, and he just grinned wider. Vasilika cleared her throat, loudly, and I hurriedly put my hand under my desk. Chris swiveled around, and both of us, fearful now, focused intently on the rest of the class. During the remaining time, we practiced a number of stock phrases. Whenever my turn came up to repeat one of them, I just blurted it out without thinking, with perfect accuracy every time. My word choice, thankfully, matched hers, but I could tell from her amused expression that I had a strong accent, every time.

Two phrases that were notably absent from the day's lecture where "please", "thank you" and "you're welcome." Towards the end of the two-hour period, the ever-gregarious Chris finally asked our instructor about this. "Excellent question!" she said. "We do have such words, of course, and you will learn them eventually; but they are rarely used. There are situations where, when asking for something, you will need to use specific phrases. But, most of the time, we are a blunt, plain-spoken people, and avoid such niceties."

* * *

Vasilika wrapped up, and the twelve of us walked up a floor, to another classroom, a twin of the one we had just left. I was still holding the backpack in front of me. The other men shifted their phones from hand to hand. In the new room, a woman with an open, broad face was waiting for us at the front. Her name was Omarasa and she explained that she was a Professor of Anthropology at the Turicum Academy for the Arts and Sciences, one of the twenty-four universities in Atlantea. She spoke English flawlessly, with perfect pronunciation, and a use of idiom that fell somewhere between Jacintha's and Calista's.

"Gentlemen, I always like to start out this class with a round of questions. I could lecture for hours on the topic of Atlantean culture, and the differences from your own, but I find it is more interesting, not to mention useful, to answer your questions first. Is there anything you've observed so far you'd like to ask about?"

The man I'd dubbed "Hippie", from the plane, raised his hand first. He looked like a cast member from Jesus Christ Superstar, the Broadway show. Like all of the men I'd flown over with, he seemed like a superstar in more ways than that. Impossibly handsome, with a wild mane of curly hair that fell below his shoulders, his real name was Stephen Richter. Born in Pennsylvania, he had already qualified already as a Master Plumber at the young age of twenty-five. Several other men raised their hands, but only after he did, so Omarasa called on Stephen first.

"So, uh, why are there so few men here?"

"That is usually the first question," Omarasa said, smiling. Her voice was smooth and soft, reminding me of Rosalind, my best friend's wife. I had always though she could deejay on a classical music station. "And it's a subject of great debate here. There is no short answer, but I'll try to give one anyway. Atlantea has been in continual existence, as, more or less, a democracy, for over eleven thousand years. We do not know how much longer than that, but scholars believe we could add more thousands of years to that number, at least." Some jaws dropped around the room. "And we believe, or at least most of us do, that that stability stems from the five to two ratio of women to men."

"So you all hate men or something?" Stephen asked.

"Oh my, no!" Omarasa said. "I think you'll find the average Atlantean woman loves men more than anywhere else on the planet! I certainly do. It is a simple pragmatism. Males, on average, of course, are stronger and more aggressive. There are always exceptions in either direction, but it holds as a general rule. We have ample data that with a fifty-fifty ratio of the genders, men will take over most aspects of government, military, and society in general, eventually, one way or another. And that simply leads to a less stable society."

"So you don't hate us," Stephen said, mild sarcasm creeping into his tone, "you just think we're bad at running things?"

"Men are fine at running things, it's just that those societies don't tend to last long. I could bore you all to tears on the topic -- I am a professor of Anthropology after all -- but that would take days of lectures which I'm sure most of you would find supremely dull. Suffice it to say, it all boils down to one simple fact. Humans are not designed to handle sexual competition, among men, well. The only stable societies we have observed are ones where the males don't compete with each other for sex."

There were murmurs of protest around the room. Omarasa held up her hands.

"I know, I know, it sounds far too simplistic. But we have ample evidence, from millennia of observation. You have doubtless heard of at least one such example, the splinter colony of Atlantis? When we trace back the reasons for their collapse, this was the root cause. I teach a semester-long class on the topic, by the way!"

The murmuring shifted to silence, as we digested the implications of what she was saying. Omarasa continued with her lecture.

"As far as we can tell, and the direct evidence is both scant and highly debated, at some point in human history, female children were born more often than male children, at a five-to-two ratio. Some kind of genetic shift happened, we believe, moving the ratio to the one-to-one you are used to."

Finally, Stephen interjected. "So Atlantea is like this perfect utopia or something?"

"Hardly. Some amount of luck has clearly helped us. We have had six civil wars, ten attempted coups, and, to this day, the five-two ratio remains a political hot button. There is even a party devoted to its abolition. Still, we believe that our track record as the world's longest-lived nation is due, at its core, to the fact that males here have constant, limitless, competition-free access to sexually inclined females."

"How exactly do you maintain this magic five to two ratio?" asked the next man, Lumberjack, an Ivy League law student named Elvis Gregory.

"That's where you gentlemen come in. To be blunt, you all have been tested, and your testes carry significantly more X-chromosome sperm than Y-chromosome sperm. Every year, around 180 thousand children are born here, due entirely to men like you, and so the ratio is around two girls to every boy. Factoring in the average number of males who do not return from their ambassadorships, the overall ratio works out to five to two."

In response to follow-up questions, Omarasa explained that males from ages twelve through forty-nine were sent out to influence the wider world. She casually rattled off a number of famous historical figures who were natives of Atlantea: Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Genghis Khan, Ieyasu Tokugawa, T.E. Lawrence, and several others.

"What about Alexander Ovechkin?" I blurted out. I was a die-hard Caps fan, after all.

"Who is that?" Omarasa asked.

"Um, a hockey player," I said, embarrassed to have drawn attention to myself.

"Is he still alive?"

"Yeah."

"He might well be from here; but identities of ambassadors still in the field are kept secret, so even I wouldn't know."

Omarasa continued the explanation which I had interrupted. Atlantean men were free to return home after their fiftieth birthday, another pragmatic measure to ensure females ran the place and maintained the ratio of genders. It also transpired that, while men were allowed to join the Atlantean military, only two roles were open to them: navigators and communications specialists.

"Wait a sec; I read T.E. Lawrence's biography. He was born in Wales!" BTS -- a writer named Han-Gyeol Sobong -- objected.

"You'll find that Atlantea's foreign intelligence service, the Igil, is second only in size or importance to our armed forces. We have thousands of years of practice at covering up any trace of our country's existence. We can fake almost any backstory. That's why those of you who complete an advanced degree, while here, will have it appear to be granted by a US university."

The class continued in this vein, but I found myself distracted and did not take much more of the information Omarasa was imparting. For one thing, my backpack buzzed with a new message every so often. It would seem that Jacintha was still sexting me. Each time one arrived, though, my mind reflexively assumed it to be from Calista, at first, even though, intellectually, I understood that to be an impossibility. Also, my stomach was growling, and I found the accompanying hunger pangs distracted me from the course material. It was with relief that I saw the top of the hour roll around. Our little group filed out of the room. The other men peeled away from me, talking animatedly among themselves, escorted by one of the CLs. They were headed to a cafeteria for a group lunch. The men watched me curiously, as I headed in the opposite direction, making for the stairs that would take me back to Vasilika's classroom.

* * *

As I closed the door to the language classroom behind me, Vasilika began to shrug out of her garment. The folds of multi-colored cloth dropped to her waist, revealing low-slung, heavy, sloping breasts. Her nipples were angled upwards. Although her casual disrobing suggested she was not upset with me, I wanted to be sure. "Sorry about looking at my phone during class! It won't happen again."

"Don't worry about it," the topless woman said, her face neutral. "I just wanted to tease you for sending naughty texts during class."

"How do you know they were naughty?"

"There's an old Atlantean phrase that I think applies to you: 'A visage that loses at Xutura.' Xutura's a game that involves bluffing. Your face turned bright red, and it looked like you were about to start drooling onto your phone."

"Oh my God," I said, "that's so embarrassing!"

"No need, it was highly amusing. Would you be willing to show me these texts? I'm curious what was so exciting about them."

Normally I would not agree to such a request from a comparative stranger, but her tone was so neutral, she came across as having a scientific interest in our communications, rather than an exploitative one. Plus, I had a lingering feeling that I should make a good impression on this woman, who was to be my only source of sustenance on weekday afternoons. I handed over the phone, and she began to swipe through the texts and videos, including ones I myself had not had a chance to look at. A broad smile engulfed the angular features of her handsome face.