“I’m sorry, Sarah. They can’t fix it.” Ral shook his head sadly.
Sarah felt lost as she tried to accept this situation. She couldn’t even wipe the tears away because she couldn’t move properly. A machine made a beeping sound again.
“That was the evaluation of your mental state. It advises that you shouldn’t be left alone. Unfortunately, I am not running a babysitting service so you will have to pull yourself together. If you’ve finished expending energy on this, I really need to ask you to leave. I have three more revivals to get through in the next hour, and they’re all paying customers.” The mean doctor pressed some buttons and Sarah felt something sharp behind her ear, then the glass slid away and she sat up properly.
“We can dispense with the pocket translator now.” Ral picked up a device that looked like a radio, pressed a button on it then put it in one of his pockets, making his jacket look slightly lopsided where the device bulged through the fabric. Sarah put her hand to the side of her head; Ral’s voice seemed to be inside her ear now. It was very disorienting.
“What just happened? Your voice…” Sarah frowned, unsure of how to describe it.
“Doctor Tavia implanted a Speakeasy chip behind your ear. It’s a special device that will translate everything you hear, so you can understand us all. Every citizen of the Interplanetary Alliance has one,” Ral explained. “Now, the kind doctor is going to waive her usual exorbitant fee if we quit her office immediately, so I want you to try and stand up, then let’s go for a walk around Minos Kerala city.”
Sarah put one foot on the black glassy surface, then tentatively put her weight on it. The other foot touched the floor too, and she saw that she was still wearing her ruby-red glittery party shoes. There had been an event, and she’d been dolled up. Where were her dress and clutch bag? She was dressed in a hospital gown. Something didn’t quite add up. Where had the event been? The memory of getting into a stretch limo was followed by nothing. A big empty blank patch where the rest of the night had gone. Who had she been with?
“Was I frozen in this hospital gown?” She looked at Ral, hoping for an explanation.
“Looks that way. There are plenty of places near here where you can get some clothing.”
“I’m pretty keen to know where my dress and purse went. They might explain why I got frozen.”
“Get out of my laboratory!” the doctor grumbled. “Outside is for conversations. Inside is for sick people. Paying sick people!”
“Wait! Do you have a towel, please?” Sarah wondered why this was sticking in her mind, but she knew it was important.
“On the shelf. Take one and get out.” The doctor waved a hand dismissively at a huge stack of white fluffy towels. Sarah picked one up and held it tightly.
Ral took Sarah’s free hand and gently led her out of the doctor’s office into the corridor.
“Why a towel?” he asked. She looked up at him, as the tears pooled on her lower lash line again.
“It’s the only single thing I can think of right now that will make me feel even remotely prepared for this situation,” she tried to explain, but she knew it must seem silly to other people. She was just glad that such a normal thing as towels still existed in this future. Was it a sign that everything hadn’t changed much? But then, she was on a foreign planet, surrounded by aliens whose languages were being translated by an implant behind her ear. How were there still towels? Her fingers gripped the towel to make sure it was still there. It was reassuringly fluffy.
Ral showed her out through the glassy automatic doors, and Sarah found out just how different this new world really was.
The street was bizarre. Sarah stared around at the black, glassy buildings under the tropical purple sky. There were rows of flying cars, about five feet off the ground, all traveling at a uniform pace. Occasionally, a vehicle would break away from the herd and land beside the dark, translucent pavement, and someone would either get into or out of the car, before it would take off again and rejoin the others. On the other side of the road, a woman in a shiny catsuit walked behind someone crawling on all fours; the woman held a leash that attached to a muzzle obscuring the crawling person’s face.
“Those people… are they performing street theater?” Sarah asked, barely able to stop staring.
“No, little one. They are probably just going for a walk on a summery afternoon.” Ral squeezed her hand, and Sarah was momentarily reassured that he would keep her safe in this scary world.
It didn’t last for long, however, and when they got to the bottom of the street, Sarah nearly walked straight into an enormous monster with masses of writhing green tentacles. Ral turned to wave at the monster at the same time that Sarah screamed in terror. Wrenching her hand free from his, she fled, clinging to her towel as she ran away. Ral called after her but she ignored him. She didn’t know how to feel about Ral in the torrent of emotions that seemed to be taking over her. He had seemed so safe and trustworthy, but she had no interest in finding out why he was being friendly with horrific monsters like that. Had he brought her all this way to deliver her to some sort of alien overlords? All the sci-fi shows she’d ever seen ran through her mind at once and she was too scared to stop and find out what was going on.
With no idea where she was going, she dodged down an alleyway between two tall buildings, and ran at top speed away from the terrifying tentacle monster. After taking several turns to throw off anyone chasing her, Sarah ran straight into someone, and they both fell to the ground. When Sarah looked up, she was surprised to see a young woman in a sailor dress.
“I’m so sorry, are you okay? We have to get out of here, there’s a tentacle monster nearby!” Sarah cried. Her towel had landed on the ground and she snatched it up like a hungry wolf snapping at a piece of meat. The other girl frowned then giggled.
“They look really scary but they’re just different. You look like you’re having a bad day; want to come to my place and play?”
In the midst of all the confusion, Sarah realized this must just be another dream. There was no planet anywhere, even in the distant future, where adults asked other adults if they wanted to play. It must be her subconscious yearning for a friend again. Sarah had always wanted someone who she could act little around, without having to worry about what she was wearing or what she said or did. In an ideal world, there would also be a daddy around to take care of her, but Sarah knew there wasn’t much chance of her finding anyone who would put up with her work schedule. More certain that she was dreaming, Sarah nodded at her new friend.
“I’m Sarah, what’s your name?”
“Laila. Are you new to Minos Kerala?” the other girl asked. Sarah nodded. “Don’t worry, this whole place is really weird ‘til you get used to it. Do you like painting?”
“Sometimes. I’m not very good at it though.” Sarah was definitely not an artist.
“Me neither! We can paint terrible pictures together in my playroom! C’mon, I’ll show you!” Laila took her hand and led Sarah around a corner to her building, a big warehouse made of the glassy black stuff that all the other buildings seemed to be built from. Behind the huge door, there was a spaceship parked in an enormous hangar-type room. The words ‘The Great Gig’ were just visible on one side of the ship, beside an unfinished painting of a pinup girl clad in a corset and frilly panties, who was still awaiting some feet and shoes, but otherwise looked a lot like Laila. The ship’s underside had a very dented door that looked large enough to load cargo.
“That’s my daddy’s ship. Our apartment is upstairs.” Laila led the way up the stairs to a mezzanine floor that half-covered the warehouse, and she opened a door at the top. Inside, there was a living room. One wall was just made of glass windows, facing outside, and the only pieces of furniture were a low coffee table and several very large beanbags. There were a few devices that looked like iPads on the coffee table, and a half-full glass of something orange. At one end of the living room, there was an open-plan kitchen.
“My
When Laila got the paints set up, they both painted happily together until someone loudly opened and closed the front door.
“Laila? You home?” a voice called. Sarah paused with her paintbrush poised over the paper, then reached to the floor and picked her towel back up. Laila dropped her brush into her pot and ran out of the room.
“Daddy!” Laila shrieked with joy. Sarah cautiously put her brush down and tiptoed to the door, holding the towel ready to throw over the head of any monsters. She knew these sorts of dreams could change at any moment. The man tickling Laila didn’t look scary; nobody wearing such a normal knitted sweater had ever turned into a tentacle monster.
“We have a visitor, I see.” The man looked at Sarah, who shrank back and tried to hide most of herself behind the playroom door. If only there wasn’t so much of her, she thought, she could probably have gone unnoticed.
“Sarah, this is Basil, my daddy. Daddy, this is Sarah. I bumped into her on the street and she was lost and scared. Can she stay with us?” Laila looked so hopeful and Sarah was torn between wanting to roll her eyes and wanting to give her new friend a hug.
“Wait a moment, young lady. I think you need to explain this in more detail,” Basil said, and Laila told him what had happened. Sarah was too scared to interrupt; she just hoped the tentacle monster wasn’t going to reappear.
“So, you found her on the street and brought her here? Sarah, do you have a home nearby?” Sarah looked at him and shook her head. To her immense surprise, the chip was only translating one or two of his words in each sentence, and everything else he said was in English.
“You… you speak… normally…” Sarah struggled to put her thoughts into words. “Can you take me back?”
“To Earth?” Basil looked pained. “I’m sorry, Sarah, it’s been destroyed. Maybe you should tell me how you got all the way to Minos Kerala without knowing Earth was un-terraformed.”
Sarah hesitantly started explaining everything that had happened today.
“…And when we got to the end of the street, this scary monster appeared, and it was covered in slimy tentacles and I was so afraid that I ran away,” she finished. “Then I met Laila.”
“So there’s an elf out there somewhere who’s searching for you. Did you get his name at all?”
“Ralnar Rowardennan,” Sarah remembered. “He was really tall.”
“Yes, you told me; that’s how I knew he was an elf. Elves are always a lot taller than humans. There’s not many of them on Minos Kerala so they tend to all stay in touch with one another. I wonder if my good friend Flin knows him from one of the elvish bars…”
Sarah shook her head tearfully. She buried her face in her towel, feeling completely ridiculous as she did so, but still unable to help herself.
“Please don’t call him. He seemed to know that monster, I think they were friends.” She spoke through the towel but Basil seemed to understand her.
“Sarah, there’s a few tentacle monsters on Minos Kerala; they’re just regular people like you and me. They look different because they grew that way on their planets, but they’re not inherently bad or good. They’re just people,” Basil explained.
“I told you that!” Laila announced.
“You… you mean it wasn’t going to eat me?” Sarah asked, lifting her head from the towel.
“Absolutely not. They only eat seafood and plants,” Basil said. Sarah shook her head in disbelief. Pescetarian tentacle monsters… now she knew she must be dreaming.
Chapter Two
When Ral heard that Sarah was safe, he breathed a sigh of relief and went straight to his cousin Flin’s place. Ever since Ral first saw Sarah, he wanted to do things for her that he’d never wanted to do for any woman. She had looked so lost and vulnerable in the cryogenic freezing chamber, like a blonde Snow White in her glass coffin, or Sleeping Beauty waiting to be awakened. Then there was the fact that she’d called him Daddy. She must have been half-asleep when she said it, but Ral’s heart had leapt at the tinny sounds that the pocket translator had made.
He reminded himself that he wasn’t doing this to get a date. Even though Sarah clearly dreamed about ageplay, it didn’t mean that she’d want to be his. Regardless, she was his responsibility until he’d gotten her settled somewhere, since he had found her, and that meant there would have to be consequences for running away in a big city.
“She still here?” Ral asked, the moment Flin opened the door.
Flin cocked his head toward the living room. “In there.”
Ral found Sarah sitting with Flin’s slave Laila on a beanbag. They were coloring some pictures and deep in conversation. The image of the two girls sitting side by side was adorable and very arousing.
Ral admired Sarah’s curvy outline even through the shapeless hospital gown. One of the reasons he’d never been very interested in female elves was because they were so thin. He preferred a woman with a nicely rounded ass that he could spank. At the same time, his imagination galloped away and he started thinking about what it would be like to take her lovely big breasts into his mouth and suck on those nipples until they were hard and long. Wait, what was he thinking? He caught himself and tried to be cool.
“I didn’t know you liked all the little stuff, Flin?” Ral wondered aloud, attempting to drown out his own thoughts as his cock stirred slightly. He pointedly didn’t look at Sarah. Wasn’t there an upper limit on how attractive a man found a woman? How was he so enamored already? He didn’t intend to act on his feelings, however, unless she wanted him to. There was a huge line between taking care of someone and wherever his thoughts had ended up.
“It’s got nothing to do with me. Laila does that with Basil, her daddy.” Flin held up both hands to prove he wanted no part of it. Ral was slightly disappointed; he’d half-hoped he and Flin finally had some more common ground. They were cousins on their fathers’ side of the family, and they were very close as children, spending carefree days on their family’s unicorn ranches, but they grew apart when Ral went to college on one of the super-wealthy Prime planets, while Flin dropped out of art school and eventually got a job with Basil’s cargo company. It was a funny coincidence that they had both ended up living in Minos Kerala city, a few streets away from one another, since they were both so different. The only traits they both shared, aside from their similar physique, was that they were perfectionists, and extremely adventurous.
“Hah, and there was me thinking there might be a big softie hiding under those layers of leather and half-elf angst,” Ral teased. Flin merely glared at him. The man was always so serious. Sarah looked up when Ral spoke, and for a moment, he thought she was going to flee again. Her eyes were so big and blue. Did all Earth girls have such mesmerizing eyes?
“Young lady, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You’re in big trouble. Why’d you run off like that?” Ral scolded. Sarah’s face fell, and she looked down at her picture. Someone had given her real paper to draw on. That must have been expensive; everyone but artists drew on their tablets now.
“She got scared of a tentacle monster. She’d never seen one before,” Laila explained in a petulant tone. Ral raised an eyebrow at her and she shrank back into the beanbag. He noticed Sarah grabbed Laila’s hand tightly at that moment. Ral was frustrated that he’d spent so much time looking for her, but he made an effort to calm himself. This would be a bad time to scare her away again.
He crouched down and spoke to her on the same level. “I’m sorry you got scared, little lady. Has someone explained to you about tentacle monsters now?” She glanced up at him and nodded anxiously. “You feeling better about them?” She nodded again, although Ral guessed she didn’t want to see another tentacle monster for a while.
“What are you doing with her? She can’t stay here. We’ve already got a stray young woman with no job and nowhere else to go.” Flin nodded toward Laila, who rolled her eyes.
“We were headed to my place,” Ral explained. “I have a guest bed,” he added, although he was uncertain as to who he was trying to reassure.
“Can she visit us? Please, please, please?” Laila looked at Flin pleadingly.
“If you’re both good,” he replied, catching Ral’s eye. Ral nodded in agreement.
“Come on then, Sarah, time to go.” Ral held out his hand and, once all the goodbyes had been said, he led her outside to the street.
It was beginning to go dark and the streetlights now illuminated the black glassy buildings, making the cityscape look like it was lit from within. Ral was pleased to see the look of pure delight on Sarah’s face when she saw the evening landscape.
It must have been hard for her to wake up today after three hundred years of sleep. What would he have done in her place? If he’d never seen a tentacle monster before, and didn’t know they were friendly and sentient beings, he probably would have tried to turn Skarg into calamari. Cutting her some slack was going to be hard; Ral liked everything to work the first time, and she was probably going to mess up a lot while she settled into her new life here.
“Ral?” Beneath the Speakeasy chip, her voice reminded him of fresh strawberries. If they talked, they would sound exactly like Sarah. He wished he spoke her language; he would listen to the strawberry sounds without the translation playing over the top. Perhaps he could settle for finding some strawberries to feed to her. There were plenty of hydroponics labs specializing in exotic and nonstandard foods, although none of it stored for long enough to survive transportation between planets. Anyway, she might not even like strawberries. Hadn’t she mentioned them when they’d first spoken to one another before he transported her here from Luna? The journey had taken three months, so Ral was struggling to remember. She had definitely called him Daddy more than once.
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