Gerald cracked his eyes open as the sniffing continued. His eyes met not a dog, but a wolf with the most beautiful emerald eyes he had ever seen. She began making a series of sounds, rather like whispered howls. A heartbeat later the translation came out in his ear.
“Oh, thank goodness, you’re awake,” she said, running her clawed hand gently over his forehead. “When you folded in half across that flagpole I was sure I had killed you. That would have just been awful.”
“Nope, still alive,” Gerald strained. He tried to lift his head, but the world spun when he did so he set it back down. It was then that he noticed his foot leaning up against his cheek. “Oh, that can’t be good.”
She leaned back and straightened her school uniform. “That was a close one. If you had died there would have been a mountain of paperwork for me to fill out. I could have been expelled.”
“Wha?”
She smoothed out the gray fur on her face and neck. “Look, this is pretty awkward for me. You see, I’m not actually allowed to drive on campus, so if you could just not tell them about my skiv, I’d really appreciate it.”
“Where am I?” he gurgled.
“Oh, I brought you here to the campus hospital. I’m just going to ring the bell and let them take it from here.”
“Who...”
“Welcome to Central Exeter.”
She blew him a kiss and then with a flick of her long fluffy tail she was gone. Everything started going dark again as medics streamed out the front door and gathered around him. Their voices grew more and more distant, until they were gone.
* * *
The next thing he knew, his eyes were forced open by smooth scaley fingers. The light that was shone into his retinas was painful, sending little daggers into his brain. There was a green-scaled man kneeling over him, holding something wet and lumpy in his gloved hands. “Excuse me, excuse me, I’m really sorry to wake you in the middle of surgery, but I really don’t know much about human anatomy. I just need to know, real quick, do humans need this?”
Gerald tried to look at the lump, but his body gave out and his world went dark again.
* * *
Light and shadow twisted and writhed together, like the mixing of liquids. He found himself back home as a kid, sitting on the twisted fence in front of Mr. Bonnard’s house, his short little legs happily kicking back and forth as he watched the T.V. through the front window. Mr. Bonnard was the only person in the neighborhood who still had one that worked. Gerald brushed some of the dirty hair out of his round little face and craned his head to see a little better over Mr. Bonnard’s helmet, hoping that it would be a cartoon this time, but instead it was a lady in a suit talking with another lady.
“...Cindy this is an historic moment, a moment for all peoples in all times. We can see here President Fendt on the steps of the U.N. adding his signature to the document that will formally add Earth to the Galactic Alliance. Behind him you can see former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton toasting the Tindorian ambassador with the traditional wine.”
“That wine is very special on their world, is it not?”
“Yes it is, Cindy. Tindor, you may recall, was the first race to make contact three years ago when... oh my something seems to be happening here. Oh my! Are... are you seeing this Cindy?”
“Yes I am Jane, it appears that Former President George Bush is having some sort of stomach pain... did he just?”
“Yes Cindy, I can’t believe it myself. Former President Bush has just thrown up on the Ambassador from Tindor. The alien is obviously very upset and confused, as anyone would be...”
The other lady disappeared and the box she was in went black.
“Our apologies ladies and gentlemen, we seem to be having some technical difficulties. We will correct the problems and get back to you as soon as possible. Don’t forget to join us also later this evening, we have a very special, very exclusive interview with former president Barack Obama from his prison cell in Guantanamo Bay.”
Gerald heard some footsteps as a freckled shoeless kid wearing overalls walked up to the fence.
“Hey Zuri,” he greeted without looking up.
“I’m bored, let’s play Candyland!” Zuri demanded.
Gerald wrinkled his nose. “Candyland is for babies, I’m too old for that.”
“Babies? I’m older then you are, you big dummy!”
Zuri bent down and threw a rock at Gerald, striking him in the head. As he fell off the fence, all of his senses shut down. He caught the faint glimpse of Zuri running off in tears, calling for her mother, then everything went black.
* * *
Gerald felt his senses coming back to him, one by one. Cool, sterile air on his skin. The steady beat of his heart. Silken sheets touching his skin. The beeping of medical machines.
He opened his eyes reluctantly, not entirely sure he wanted to know what he would find.
A lizard-skinned man was reclining back in his chair, a lit cigar hanging in his mouth, creating a trail of blue smoke that gave off a floral fragrance Gerald had never smelled before.
The man gave off a series of clicks and hisses as he sucked on the cigar. “Welcome back to the world of the living. My name is Dr. Klatta,” came the translation in his ear.
Gerald slowly sat up. Humming electrical casts covered his arms and legs, bandages covered his head and waist. As he tried to remember what was real and what had been a dream, he noticed the man leaning against a glowing jar filled with a floating brain.
“Is... is that my brain?” he asked groggily.
“Oh, this?” Klatta said, lifting up his elbow. “Why, yes. Yes, it is.”
“You removed my brain?”
Gerald placed his hands on his head, remembering the man asking him if it were something he needed. “How can I still be alive if you took out my brain?”
Klatta laughed, blue smoke spilling out of his mouth. “We thought it might be necessary. You were pretty banged up when we found you. So, we cloned your brain so we could replace it if we had to. Heads off any legal problems, so to speak.”
Klatta elbowed the nurse at his side. “Get it? Heads off.”
“Very humorous sir.”
Gerald lay back down, relieved. “Oh good. In my dream I remember you taking something out of me and asking if it was important.”
“That was no dream, but luckily it turns out you humans have some extra parts in there you don’t need. I believe that one was called an appendix.”
Gerald sat up again. “You believe? Are you sure that’s what it was?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. Pretty sure.”
There was a snap and a spark and the forcefields around Gerald’s limbs flickered out.
“Well, that’s done,” Klatta said, pulling off the cast generators and tossing them into a heap of the things in the corner.
“I’m healed already?” Gerald asked, moving his arms slowly.
“Not even close, but you’ve gone through our entire supply of acta molds, and every time we inject you with nanomeds they just die off, so we’re letting you go now to minimize our costs.”
“How long was I out for?” Gerald asked as he swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“Eight days. I tried calling the Soeck Temple in town but they had never heard of you.”
“I’m not surprised,” Gerald added, grabbing his folded robes from the tray table. “I didn’t get a chance to present myself to them yet. I wanted to register at the admissions office first.”
“Oh, so you are a student? Thank goodness. My boss would kill me if we had to eat the costs on this one. Nurse, send the bill to the Academy immediately, and add in a generous tip for myself.”
“Right away sir.”
Gerald slowly put his weight on his legs and felt the sharp pain where the bones had splintered. They were not fully mended yet, but they could at least support him. As he dressed himself, he looked over at the doctor nonchalantly blowing blue smoke rings up into the air.
“I have to, it’s the law.”
* * *
When Gerald made it back to the admissions office, he was careful not to say anything this time, for fear of jinxing himself. He just hobbled silently past the bent flagpole and went inside.
The receptionist looked at him down the bridge of her long nose as her tentacles tapped away at the screens that hung in the air around her. The gills on the side of her head released a few gurgles, and a moment later, the translator kicked in.
“May I help you?”
Gerald straightened his robes as best he could. “Yes, my name is Gerald Dyson, I’m a new student here.”
Her tentacles paused. “The quadmester began nearly a month ago.”
“Yeah, I tried to call from the starliner, but the phone shorted out.”
Opening up his worn essentials kit, he rummaged through it and pulled out the darkened tablet his mom had given him. “This is what we received in the mail.”
Two little tentacles wrapped around it and examined it. “You broke it.”
“I didn’t really breake it, it just stopped working while I was holding it.”
“Tablets don’t just stop working,” she corrected.
“Well, this one did, and before it did, it displayed the terms of my scholarship.”
The receptionist gave out a bubbling noise which he quickly realized was laughter. “Central Exeter doesn’t give out scholarships, sweetie.”
For a moment, he felt himself panicking. He was light years from home, with nothing more than pocket change and no identification. “Yeah, that’s what I thought as well, but just go ahead and look me up.”
Grumpily, she clucked her gills and blew a little grey bubble into the air, then tapped a few buttons. Pulling out a small cable from her desk, she plugged it into a socket on the back of her neck.
Pictures of students flashed by faster that the eye could see, until it stopped at his image, green text flashing around it.
“Green flashing is good, right?”
Her eyes grew wide. “It says here you have a full-ride scholarship. I’ve never even heard of such a thing.”
“Life is full of new experiences.”
She pursed her lips. “Whatever. Let me verify your data. It says here you are from Eeeyarth.”
“We pronounce it Earth.”
“Erth?” She looked at him oddly. “But it has an ‘a’ in it.”
“I know, that’s just the way it’s pronounced.”
“Whatever, I’m just going to call it Eeeyarth,” she said, typing away. “Oxygen breather, omnivore, diurnal... oh, carbon based, that’s a new one. “Male...” She lowered her glasses and looked him over critically. “...at least on paper. It says here we still need a letter of recommendation from your planetary senator.”
He blinked. “That’s going to be... difficult.”
“Why?”
“Well, you see Earth...”
“You mean Eeeyarth.”
“Right, Eeeyarth doesn’t currently have a planetary senator. Or any leaders for that matter. The government sort of collapsed a while back.”
The receptionist took her glasses off. “Sweetie, what kind of place do you think this is?”
“A really nice school?”
“No. This is THE really nice school. A prep academy for future world leaders. Every one of these students are representatives from the most powerful worlds in the Alliance. Individuals that scored high enough to beat out millions of other applicants. 96% of our Alumni go on to become planetary senators themselves. We have the finest faculty and facilities in the galaxy. Now, why would a school like this give a scholarship to someone from a world that doesn’t even have a functioning government?”
“Diversity. Maybe they thought a poor kid from the sticks could enrich the learning environment here and broaden perspectives.”
She looked at him humorlessly.
“Okay fine, I don’t know why,” he said, raising his hands up. “But you guys invited me here and I came. What more do you want from me?”
“Just a thumb print and retinal scan,” she said as the top of her desk reformed itself into a scanning receptacle.
“Oh, that is neat,” he gushed, poking at it.
“It’s just a desk.”
Gerald placed his face on the chinrest and kept his eyes straight as the little beams played across the surface of his eyes.
A flash of light and a friendly chime later, and the receptionist handed him an I.D. card. The picture was out of focus and cut off the top of his head, but he hugged it all the same.
“You’re hugging the picture. Is that some sort of human thing?” she asked critically.
“Kind of,” he said, rocking side to side, the card pressed against his cheek. “I’ve taken lots of pictures, but I’ve never had one of my own before.”
The receptionist rolled her eyes. “Class 1-A is the only one with an open seats, so you’ll be with them for now. First left, third right, up the stairs then turn around. If you reach the statue of Toberon you’ve gone too far.”
“Got it.”
As Gerald painfully walked off down the hall, the receptionist shook her head and blew another spit bubble. The scanner on her desk made an electric popping sound, then all the windows around her flickered and died out.
“What the...”
Despite the pain, Gerald could not help but gawk at everything as he walked down he vaulted corridor. It was all so clean. He paused to watch one of the little robots scoot about, polishing the floor to a mirror shine and beeping happily to itself. He bent down to touch it but it scooted away like a little animal. He walked into an open area, a single curved piece of glass arching over the entirety of one side, letting in the gentle morning light from the triple suns. A marble fountain sat at its center, with a broad-shouldered statue. The cascading water was cleverly positioned so that it took the form of the robes that he wore, with one clasp about his shoulder. It reminded Gerald of pictures he had seen of old Greek statues... except it had the head of an otter.
“Is this Toberon? I have no idea.”
Gerald went up a pair of winding staircases that looped over one another like a helix. One was functional while the second was decorative, water running down the steps and into the fountain below. When he got to the top, the ceiling grew transparent, allowing him to look up at the rows of air traffic crisscrossing their way through the skylines. From here five corridors reached out like a star, but they all looked identical to him. Stylish signs were posted in a variety of languages, but none that he recognized.
A short little student walked by, clutching a tablet in her hands. Her long blue hair hung down behind her, nearly reaching the floor.
“Excuse, me, I’m a little lost,” he began as he approached her. She reached up and tapped her translator and Gerald waited a second for it to find his dialect. When she looked up he continued. “I’m supposed to go to room 1-A, but I don’t know which hallway to take. Could you help me?”
The girl held up her tiny hand and flipped him off, sticking her middle finger up right in his face.
“Room One down the first hallway there,” she said sweetly.
Gerald stared at the obscene gesture, then looked back at her kind smile. It just didn’t fit at all. It took him a moment to realize that she was indicating the number one with her hand.
“Oh, thank you,” he said, chuckling. “For a second I thought you were... never mind. You know, back on my world we do it this way,” he said, holding up his index finger.
The girl screamed in offense and slapped him. The force snapped his head around and sent him spinning to the floor as she ran away.
“You pervert!” her voice shrieked.
Gerald groaned as he propped himself up and was met by a pair of shoes and a swinging fluffy tail.
“You know, you really should be careful what you do with your digits, most
any gesture you can do is bound to be considered offensive on one world or another,” came a familiar voice.
“You!” Gerald said looking up at the shapely wolf-girl.
“Me?” she asked, looking around over the stack of tablets she was carrying.
He rose to his feet. “You’re the one that crashed your skiv back there.”
She dropped the tablets and covered his mouth. “How do you know about that?” she asked, looking around to make sure no one was listening.
“How do I know? I’m the one you hit.”
Her eyes narrowed and she looked him over doubtfully. “You are?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, freeing his lips from her grip. “How could you not remember?”
“Sorry, all you prey look alike to me.” She leaned in and sniffed his hair, her eyes growing wide. “It is you.”
“Of course it is,” he said, straightening his hair.
She stepped back, and for a second she tapped her claws together nervously. Then, her expression changed and she held out her hand. “Hi, my name is Ilrica Faolan.”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it.
“But you...”
“No silly, when someone gives you their name, you are supposed to give yours back.”
He looked around in confusion. “Gerald Dyson?”
“A pleasure, let me give you the tour.”
“The what?”
She took off, dragging him behind her by the hand. Unable to keep up with her long strides and leaps, he could do little more than be fluttered along like a kite, occasionally touching a toe down to prevent himself from being dragged along the floor.
She took him to a balcony overlooking a study area filled with living trees. Staircases wound up the trunks and couches sat out on the branches. Hanging lanterns filled the area with a soft twilight glow. Various students lounged about. Studying, flirting, and courting. So many different races and colors; from where he stood, the different groups reminded Gerald of a handful of Skittles.
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