Close Encounters 05: of the 8th Kind

And I'm starting to get antsy because I...

I really have to pee.

Being in a virtual coma I probably didn't have a significant liquid intake, but even a thimble full is plenty when my bladder has the loading capacity of a walnut, due to the gigantic spike Bane and I cooperatively put into the next chute over.

I hold on for another infinitely long couple of minutes but nothing happens, except that the pressure on my bladder increases steadily and by the second.

So in absolute slow motion, I shimmy and shift my legs, hips and shoulders again and start sliding away from her.

Ever.

So.

Slowly.

Almost.

Imperceptibly.

Aaaalmost-

Something cool touches my thigh and I yelp and jackknife up out of reflex.

Naturally, I smack my head into the bottom of the low shelf above us in the process. Right on the oreo-sized horn I already have, too.

"Ow! Fuck!" Blazing pain.

The A'Draht gives a startled hiss-trill and suddenly we're bumping into one another in several places, and I bang my left elbow into some box or another. My funny bone sends a sonata up through my arm, my hand goes momentarily numb, and I end up laughing at the way it hurts.

And then I just laugh and laugh and laugh because nerves. I've had too many close calls in too short a time, or maybe living in paradise with two hunky aliens, doing nothing but foreplay, fucking, eating and sleeping all day long has made me soft and unable to cope with stress of any kind.

It takes me a little while to realize that, firstly, my shelfmate has neither killed nor so much as hurt me in the kerfuffle and that, secondly, I'm not the only one laughing.

As it turns out, an A'Draht's laugh sounds exactly like I always imagined a Yorkshire terrier would sound if dogs could laugh.

Holy fluffing shirt! That's obscenely cute!

I slap my hand over my mouth to stifle more laughter -- this time at her expense -- and she mirrors me exactly, ceasing her squeaky hiccuppy laughing at once.

Is she... copying me?

Why is she copying me? Is this Drahta hunting behavior? Do they copy their prey to... what end?

Maybe fear spoils the taste of your meat and when they copy you, you're less likely to feel scared when they kill you.

... I shall ignore that thought entirely.

In the waning glow from the porthole I study her, propped up on one elbow and leaning slightly towards me as she is, while she studies me in turn.

The short flash I got of her in Tulun D'tel must've been entirely tinged with the stress of the situation. In my memory she is a veritable monster, a grimacing, snarling creature that would've fit nicely in any low-to-mid-budget 90s vampire movie.

Right now, she's a lot closer to Zoe Saldana's character in that blue alien flick from a couple of years ago, with a dash of Yolandi from Die Antwoord, a bit of Doug Jones in almost any costume he's ever worn, and a sprinkle of Björk's freaky and feminine beauty on top. She's certainly unusual to look at but not unpleasant and not exactly frightening.

At least not right now.

Well, I mean. She's a little bit frightening. Yeah.

Gotta say, if I didn't know, I wouldn't have guessed that she and my two big lugs are the same species. She's fine-boned and on the smaller side overall, both in body and face. Far as I can tell, her boobs are non-existent (although she does appear to have nipples. Four of them, to be exact.) and she has all the curves of Kate Moss during her coke phase -- which is to say, none. She's angles, edges and concaves, wiry, hardy and tough as a silver thistle.

Speaking of Kate Moss, this A'Draht would fit the kindchenschema if it weren't for the needle teeth poking out of the sides of her mouth like tiny vampire fangs. She has big eyes that are just a tad farther apart than seems proportional, and they are freaky for being inversely colored; the sclera, the parts that are white on a human, are a deep, glossy brown while her irises are the color of milk. Also, her black pupils are horizontal slits, like that of a goat on Earth. She has a stringy mop of almost colorless hair plastered to her head and normal-looking ears (which, as I now know, doesn't mean much) in the normal spots.

And then there's the feelers. I count eight of them, two pairs growing right out of the angle of her lower jaw on either side, and one pair on each of her temples, reaching back into her hair like a couple of wormy, udon-noodle-y-looking highlights. They're as pale as her skin, about fifteen centimeters long, and constantly, gently moving like seaweed in a stream.

If she's anywhere close to the beauty standard for Dryth, I have to count as aggressively ugly in a Dryth's eyes. Note to self: Never ask Bane or Rune whether they think I'm pretty.

Before I'm entirely finished with taking her in, she reaches out a hand and touches the side of my thigh with her knuckles. The touch is very brief, followed by her looking up to check my face.

Uh. Okay.

Then she does it again. And again. And again.

"Yeah, you're weird," I mumble after the fifth touch-look- cycle.

She hesitates after I speak, then touches once more, letting it linger just a little longer. Man, her fingers are icicles.

Then she breaks contact and then blinks at me like she's waiting for me to do something. Except I have no clue what that something could possibly be.

Touch. Wait. Look.

Touch. Wait. Look.

Touch.

Wait.

Look.

This is getting ridiculous. Has no one taught this chick not to play with her food?

I tisk and, without thinking too much, poke her in return, nudging her (surprisingly taut, muscled) thigh with the knuckle of my own index finger.

"That means you're it," I tell her when she blinks at me and tilts her head in a universal 'huh?' sort of way. She clearly has no idea what I'm doing. Yeah, that makes two of us, sister!

"Look, d'you want to kill me or nah?" I ask her straight. "'cause if you don't, I'd like to go potty now, yeah?"

She doesn't understand a word, of course, but talking drowns out the whooshing of blood in my ears, as well as the small voice in my head that's telling me to fucking stop bantering with the dangerous alien creature like we're old gal pals.

My heart is still going roughly a thousand miles an hour as I continue my earlier slide towards the lip of the shelf.

"I'll just, uh, remove myself from this immediately life-threatening situation and powder my nose, y'know? And once I've done that, I'm going to go tear one of my boyfriends a new one for withholding the rather important info that you, missy, are still running around on this vessel. Honestly, we might just have a general conversation about sharing of intel because, man, Dryth seriously suck at it. Of course, that would require them to not treat me like a freaking baby pet or something, but hey -- that's a learning opportunity right there, I'd say. You see, just a week or so ago-"

I don't get to tell her all about what happened a week or so ago because right at that moment, she attacks me.

***

Her cold fingers, tipped with those scary pointy claws, reach for me in the half-dark and then she's right on top of me, even in the cramped space of the shelf.

The shriek gets stuck in my throat because I'm literally too terrified to make a sound.

Oh fuck, this is how I'm going to die.

And the last things I ever said to both Bane and Rune were decidedly unfriendly.

My eyes immediately start to sting -- ugh, again with the weeping, Val? -- and I screw them shut to keep the tears at bay.

And then...

Nothing.

As in, nothing happens.

I'm still alive.

I'm still alive?

Alive and whole, I think.

I squint and peek through my lashes.

I'm a lot colder than before and breathing is a little more difficult because the A'Draht is lying on top of me because...uh.

Why is the A'Draht lying on top of me, exactly?

(Maybe it's a tactic to make you less scared, so that your fear doesn't spoil the taste of your-)

Give it a REST, will you?!

I briefly wonder if that's just... her thing, being on top of other people. You know, like chickens always go for the highest possible point in their coop? Or maybe she has also done Rune's Dryth Maga 101 and the only lesson she took away from it was the sitting-on-people part.

"H-Hey... hey? What a-are you d-doing?" I inquire through clacking teeth. God, if the A'Draht doesn't kill me soon, I'm sure a heart attack will do me in.

Or, if it's not a heart attack, it'll be hypothermia.

"And why are-are you s-so f-fucking cold?" Good heavens, this girl is a snowwoman! Seriously, her skin feels clammy, icy cold.

As if in reply she burrows her extremities into the warmest places of me -- namely my armpits, the crook of my neck, and between my legs. It's the opposite of pleasant to have absolutely icy limbs shoved into those places, but it sure beats being gruesomely murdered, so there's that.

"Oh, okay. N-now we can b-both be cold, huh? I guess muh-misery does love kah-company," I gripe even as I reflexively close my arms around the back of the woman who's trying to physically climb into me in, apparently, search of warmth.

Oddly enough, her back feels familiar to me. As I gingerly run my palms up and down the middle of her back, I encounter bony protrusions and textures I know very well by now, just in size XXL instead of her slender S. She's lacking some slabs of muscle I'm used to feeling there, but the overall structure is the same.

In fact, she also purrs like my boys. It's a more delicate sound, more halting, apprehensive, but it's very similar.

Okay. Uh. Great. Now I'm lying here with a cold, purring, highly dangerous alien who might kill me any second in several dozen grisly ways and who doesn't speak my language lying on top of me.

For a similarly terrifying experience, head over to the next zoo and cuddle with an alligator. You'll have to imagine the purr.

Fuck. I still really need to pee, though, and her hip is pushing right on my bladder.

This is the weirdest timeline, y'all.

***

An undefined length of time later, I suddenly startle awake and spend long moments trying to figure out what year it is and who, what and where I am.

2020, possibly 2021 or later. Valerie Greene. Space Prostitute turned Space Life/Sex Coach. Currently in mortal danger. Again.

Oh, right.

I must have slipped into a shallow sleep. I don't even know how it happened. I guess waking up from a coma followed by rough sex followed by a rollercoaster of absolute terror just takes it out of you.

I find myself lying on my side with the female alien still in my arms, her forehead leaning against my chest. I turn my nose away a bit because... not to put too fine a point on it, but the girl reeks. It's the sour stale-sweat-and-dirt-and-long-unwashed-body- odor of a woman who has been trafficked. I know it unfortunately well, it's the same smell on humans, too.

At least she doesn't feel cold to the touch any more -- which probably means that I'm verging on hypothermic myself, even though I neither feel particularly icy nor shivery, which is probably a bad sign.

In a beam of light from the porthole I see that her eyes are closed(ish. She has a milky third eyelid that covers her whole eyeball while the other two leave a slit open) and she's snoring (also like a Yorkie... fuck me, that's cute!), so I gingerly extricate myself and then get the hell out of that storage room.

... where I proceed to freak out silently for a full minute for obvious reasons. Cut me some slack, yo. I just had a brush with messy death. Again.

And then that minute passes and I make a battle plan.

Step 1: Toilet. Step 2: Warmth. Step 3: Overdue conversation with my boys.

I want my nice, quiet life filled with nothing but wild alien sex back, and the only way to do that is to deal with this new development before it literally bites someone in the ass... or other body parts.

***

Trying to rearrange my butt on the tatami-like floor so that the pressure on the close-to-2x4-sized spike that's making itself at home in my vagina is bearable, I look from one of my aliens to the other in utter, fascinated, flabbergasted confusion.

Funny how I'm several years and billions of light years away from Earth and I can still learn something about my home planet. About Earth men, specifically.

I am learning that Earth men are veritable fountains of empathy, wisdom and knowledge when it comes to their female counterparts.

At least as opposed to Dryth who...

Well.

"What do Drahta eat?"

Two Dryth look at me wordlessly, like I'm slowly growing two more heads right in front of their eyes.

"Are they omnivores? Vegetarians? Vegans?" I'm not sure these categories are even applicable in space, but what the hell. "Do they survive on love and air? What?"

Heads with three ears each. Out of my nipples.

"O---kay." I blow a strand of hair out of my face. Maybe start with a simpler question.

(... what's a simpler question than that?)

"Do they... drink, then? Water, maybe? Or do they, like, draw moisture out of the air through their skin or...?"

No reply. Bane looks like a freaking statue of himself. Rune's tail is tucked super tightly around his waist.

"Do they ever talk? Do they... Are they able to verbalize? Do they do the Morse alphabet? Do their feelers work like sea flags, or like... Y-M-C-A...?" I press my hands up to my temples and use my forefingers to form the letters in rhythm with the song.

I look from one Dryth to the other and can almost see the thoughts flowing between them. They have many opinions on this entire conversation and the overall premise of it, even though they don't deign to communicate them to me directly. Then again, they don't really need to. It all boils down to "No, Va'l-ree" and "We are really pissed right now."

I sigh and take my hands down again.

There was a lot of angry tail-whipping going on when I brought up the subject of the A'Draht Bane had picked up in Tulun D'tel, and even angrier tail-stillness when I told them that I had encountered her on the ship.

Bane and Rune had both demanded to know where she was.

And I had refused to tell them.

I could easily imagine them going and pulling her out of her hidey hole -- with their usual Dryth'ian tact and sensitivity -- and trying again to put her into some ghastly box. And they probably wouldn't be foiled by me this time.

Call me a soft-hearted goody two-shoes, but I just don't want to inflict such treatment on a clearly sentient, intelligent, thinking creature who's been abducted (multiple times), who's scared and hiding and cold (and snores like a tiny dog) and has no hopes of understanding what the heck is going on. We are just too much alike. (Except I don't snore at all, of course. Ever. Not even adorably.) I'm not going to throw her under the Dryth bus. None of this is her fault.

So yeah, my boys are cranky.

Well, they're going to have to deal with it.

"They hiss," Rune supplies eventually in answer to my earlier question about Drahta talking.

Splendid! If there was a Cosmo on planet Dryth, and they did a quiz about What Females Really Want, my aliens would score negatives. Double digits.

"Drahta keep to themselves," Bane explains to me in the same tone you use on kids when they ask why they are not allowed to lick a power socket. "Dryth keep to themselves."

"Yeah. I'm starting to understand exactly how much," I sigh, then formulate a battle plan. "Okay. So. First order of business: Communication. We need to talk to her."

Actually, I need to talk to her. I'm not sure I trust these two with that sort of monumentally revolutionary task.

And if I'm honest, I'm not sure I want her within talking distance of either of my boys, either. She might do the pheromone thing again and drive them both mating-crazy until at least one of them ends up fucking (and, if I remember Bane's short treatise on the mechanics of Dryth-Drahta procreation correctly, inevitably impregnating) her.

I clench my teeth against a snarl. Yeah, I'm preemptively jealous. They are both mine and mine alone. Their cocks belong to -- and in -- me and nobody else ('s vagina), dammit! If someone wants their babies, or any of their appendages, they're going to have to ask me first. Nicely.

I take a mighty breath, shake off the green-eyed monster rising for no good reason, and try to get my thoughts back on track. Communication, Val. We were talking about communication.

"You don't happen to have translators lying around, do you?" I ask. "Or is there a planet on our route where we could get one for her?"

No reply again. That's a No, topped with some intentional obstruction. Grr.

"Great. This is going so smoothly," I murmur to myself. "Alright. Then we take mine out and give it to her."

This time both of my aliens speak up immediately and in sync. "No."

Tisking, I lift both hands in a calming gesture. "Look. The chip is pretty much right underneath my skin, here..." The chip shows up clearly as an uneven, coin-sized bump just behind my ear now that I shaved my hair there. I turn my head, then point and wiggle the thing with my finger. "It's not fixed to anything; it just sits there. One nick and it'll slip right out."

That's the theory, anyway. If I remember the way that chip went in in the first place, it might be more complicated, not to mention painful -- but now isn't the time to object to my own proposals.

"Teacher." Rune only says one word, but I hear several hundred in my head, like a whole choir of Runes.

Something happened to and with Rune (or maybe with me? Or both of us?) since I almost died in Tulun D'tel and he kept me alive. For want of a better word, his whole being is louder than before. It's like my pulse is running against a little headwind, and that wind whispers his secrets to me.

Right now, Rune's (not exactly super-secret) secret is that he's uneasy and dismayed. He doesn't want to see me bleeding again by my own hand (even though he's a fan of the general idea of blood). He is, however, no fan of the change and uncertainty that my losing my language chip would bring.

"We can get a new chip for me somewhere, but right now, she needs it more," I argue, holding eye contact with my worried crown prince, willing him to see my point. "And I'll learn to understand your language, or you'll learn to speak mine, or both. It's long overdue anyway."

I realize that, A, I'm vastly overstating my language-learning abilities (Señor Santos was right, I am extremely vaga and my atención is not bien.) (bueno?) (buena??) and that, 2, Rune's learning Ain-g'lish could potentially complicate matters around his already troubling mind reading skills... But I figure we'll burn those bridges when we come to them. Right now, there's a more pressing matter hiding and shivering in a storage room downstairs.

"I need that female to be able to understand us. We need to communicate with her. Otherwise, she'll either kill someone -" Most likely me first, I mentally add. "- or she'll die of exposure, thirst, hunger, whatever. You didn't mean to fly her corpse to her home planet when you freed her, did you?" I challenge Bane and cross my arms over my chest.

I know he takes offense to the suggestion by the way his eyes go dim. Lookit, I got me a warlike alien lover with a somewhat intact moral compass! Those are rare.

"Once she can understand what we're saying to her, we'll see what's what."

I can see (and, in Rune's case, hear and feel) that my boys aren't convinced. But it's the only way and the only plan I can see that might not result in a dead or pregnant and/or more deeply traumatized female alien, dead or injured male aliens, and/or a dead or injured human.