by Hana Starr
He said nothing, only continued to stand in the same place. And now Nelly was getting angry. If this was some sort of prank, it really wasn’t a very good one. NASA’s scientists could be rather prone to goofing off sometimes, but they’d never bothered her before like this. It was a bit upsetting, honestly.
“Look,” she said angrily, losing a bit of her calm demeanor, “whatever you’re doing, I don’t like it. So just stop, okay?”
The man blinked a little, seeming taken aback. Then, he opened his mouth and spoke. His voice clanged like stone striking together, like ice scraping over metal. “I am sorry to have frightened you,” he said, and it was impossible to decipher any sort of emotion in his voice.
Her face blanched, and she felt the color drain from her face. “How…are you doing that with your voice?”
Stupid, she scolded herself. Voice-changers are ancient technology. It’s still a stupid prank.
“This is simply my voice,” the strange man said blandly. The urge to cover her ears was strong. All this was too much, way too strange. She had no idea why someone would do something like this to her.
“Please,” he said. “Please, just listen to my plea. I have something to ask of you. Will you listen?”
Her anger burst through. “No!” she shouted, and started to march towards him with her first raised. She’d never hit another person in her life –she couldn’t even stand to kill spiders- but this guy deserved it.
He reached down and it was only then, in her utter shock, did she realize that he was completely naked with everything on display for her to see. Her mouth opened because what she could see would have to be part of a level of dedication that no mere prankster would follow through with, because he was silver all the way down. A bit of understand, of realization, began to register in her mind but by the time she was starting to comprehend, it was already too late.
There was a belt looped around his waist, and he plucked from it a strange little box. It was the only thing clipped on there, and obviously the only thing he thought he would need. Black all over, she had no way of figuring out what it was.
“What are you going to do…”
She never got to finish her sentence because in that instant, the silver man pointed the box at her and a wave of complete exhaustion crashed over her body. It was worse than anything else she had ever felt in her life, and she was powerless to resist it. Darkness crashed down upon her.
Chapter Two
When she woke, the first thing she checked was that she still had her clothes. Even in a moment such as this when she was groggy and disoriented, her mind was racing to figure out what happened and where she was. Though she was still struggling awake, she had already recalled the strange circumstances before and making sure that she was still dressed was as high on the list of importance as it could ever be. Unfortunately, there weren’t many situations where a woman could fall suddenly asleep around a strange man and have it end well.
Luckily, her fingers immediately encountered soft fabric set deep beneath what seemed to be many layers of blankets. Her eyes were bleary as she tried to look around, and her neck felt strange while her head was pounding, but other than that she felt just as if she would if she woke up in her apartment.
Blinking several times, Nelly let her eyes clear and managed to tilt her head a little to look around. Whatever was on her neck didn’t seem to be restricting her movements, at least.
Quite honestly, this room resembled a hut more than anything else. There were great furry pelts on the walls, and covering her, and laying on the floor in strategic places. She was in a cot of sorts, but that was the only furnishing that she could see. The light was dim, coming from a blue lamp set in the corner so that shadows washed impenetrably over the only exit and obscured it from her view.
Where am I? she wondered, already thinking furiously. This was such a primitive dwelling that she couldn’t be anywhere on NASA grounds, but if she was in a natural cave hideout of sorts, why would someone have brought her all the way out there without having harmed her first? In any case, she didn’t quite think that was it. There was just something so deeply unsettling about all of this. It wasn’t natural. And she felt for some reason as though she should be cold, so why wasn’t she? She understood that most of her was covered up at the moment, but there should have been a chill nipping at her cheeks or something.
Nelly lay her head back down against the soft fur piled up at her neck as a pillow, and closed her eyes. Quickly, she took stock of the situation. Judging by the state of her person, she hadn’t been unconscious for very long. She knew that from taking stock of her bladder, her stomach, the feel of her hair and skin. Everything was the same as it had been when she fell asleep, which led her to believe less than an hour had passed. In fact, she would have been willing to hedge a guess that it had been only minutes.
However, even knowing a solid fact like that left her mystified. It took her five minutes just to reach the elevator! How could she have gotten somewhere like this so quickly?
Opening her eyes again just a crack, she noticed movement over at the shadowed part of the room. Silently, far more silently than such a large man should have been capable of, he approached and then stood in the middle of the room. He was as naked as ever, his silvery member still on display.
Blushing and angrily averting her eyes, Nelly started to struggle up from the nest of blankets. “You! Who the hell are you and what did you do to me?”
His dark eyes flashed, but he still said nothing. As she finished thrusting the pelts away, she swung her feet around to the side of the bed and was preparing to leap down when suddenly, a firm hand wrapped around her wrist.
Surprise shot through her at how hot this man’s skin was against hers, like he’d been warming them over a fire for the past ten minutes. It was beneath his skin, his fingers throbbing against her wrist. His eyes glazed for a moment as he seemed to take stock of her pulse before releasing her again.
Snatching her arm away and rubbing her skin, Nelly scowled furiously at him. “Don’t touch me!”
“I apologize,” he said in his clashing voice. Nelly wince and this time did put her hands on her ears to hide from it. He frowned, seeming offended, but she didn’t really care at the moment. And if all he was going to do was apologize and not explain any of this to her, she was about to have a real problem with him.
She said, “I don’t care what you feel. Just explain things to me. Now.”
“Very well,” he said, and then tilted his head a little to the side and then back. The gesture was strangely reptilian, not at all a smooth motion. “What would you like to know?”
Her temper burst again, which she hated. This wasn’t her normal behavior at all and it had been so long since any situation forced her to act out, but she had to. “Start by telling me your name.” She stared at him, awaiting his answer. Her eyes kept straying down, and she hated that as well. It was so big…
“My name is Rornak Frozeneyes. I am the leader of my people, the Akait.”
Nelly rolled her eyes. “Sure it is, and sure you are. Do you really think I’m that dumb? I’m not. I’m incredibly intelligent, I’ll have you know.” Though the words were defensive, she knew them to be true and spoke them without arrogance. A person had to appreciate their gifts first before anyone else would.
The man who claimed to be called Rornak just frowned at her. “That is good and I am glad. When we sent our generator out in earth’s direction, we were hopeful. Your civilization seems rather advanced. For once, our luck was with us to have obtained one such as you.”
A chill ran through her blood, and her hands fell away from her ears as her extremities went numb. There was no denying that something strange was going on, and all this talk of civilizations and strange names was starting to do something to her mind. She might have likened it to her high school years, when she sucked up knowledge like a sponge without a filter. Everything was stored. Nothing escaped.
“Explain to me,�
�� she said shortly. “Explain to me everything. What are you talking about, and where exactly are we?”
“We are currently on the ninth planet furthest from the star around which this system orbits. I believe that your people call it Pluto.”
“There’s no way,” she insisted, certain that she’d caught Rornak in some sort of lie. “Pluto is freezing. Far below freezing, in fact. We’d both be dead.”
Rornak grunted and tilted his head up, his eyes gleaming again with shimmering heat. “Your kind would, perhaps. However, you wear about your neck one of our regulators. You cannot feel what does not come close to you. As for us, the Akait live here. It is not plausible that we would live somewhere where we could not survive. Your thinking is flawed.”
“My thinking is never flawed!” Nelly snapped, rising to her feet.
He just blinked, slowly. His eyelids shuttered, and there were two of them. There was the normal fleshy eyelid, and then there was a translucent second eyelid which folded up just beneath the first. Her stomach squirmed with revulsion and horror. Nothing could explain that. It was too…organic.
“You are a human,” Rornak pointed out simply. “Your thinking is flawed here and not on earth.”
Her fist snapped out, aiming right for his face, but he effortlessly reached up and batted it away like she was a kitten threatening a lion. And now that she was standing and she’d been touched by his body twice, she was beginning to understand just how immense he was in comparison to her.
“Violence solves nothing. It only destroys.”
“It defends, too!” she insisted, but felt tears spring to her eyes. She was scared and frustrated and had no idea what to do with herself, and this whole situation was just so impossible. And this man, if he could be called that, was so infuriating, only offering her tidbits of information before going off on her and arguing semantics!
Her control snapped, and she started to march past him. He backed away, leaving the path to the shadowed exit fully open. “Where are you going?”
“I’m getting out of here! I don’t want to deal with this!” she shrilled. Both of them winced at her tone of voice but she was already striding for the shadows. She should have picked up the blue lamp in the corner but it was too late to turn back and get it, or else she would make herself look even more ridiculous than she already had. On top of that, she hated to sound like such a stuck up priss.
Her outstretched hands hit something hard and metal. A barest ray of sapphire managed to struggle over her shoulder but all she saw was an expanse of grey. Swiping her hands over it frantically, she found what was clearly recognizable as a knob and began to turn it.
Before she could finish, she found herself on her back on the bed again with Rornak leaning over her. He looked furious, with one corner of his mouth turned up in a snarl, and heat coming off his body in waves. Through fear tight in her voice, Nelly looked up into his eyes and spit, “Do it, then. Hurt me. Kill me. I don’t care. Just stop this insanity.”
At that, Rornak blinked again and tipped his head around once more. His voice softened just the slightest, but his breath was still burning hot. “Insanity? You are the one who is being insane! All I have done is made a request of you and then tried to keep you from harm.”
Something connected in her mind, as she’d been mulling over the problem in the back of her head as she always did when something needed more work before she was ready to give voice to it. Slowly, she lifted up one hand to feel the device on her neck. It felt like a metal band, the sort that birds are marked with for studies, and it was entirely smooth but for a small rectangular indentation along the right side.
All these things she had seen so far, these odd, featureless devices, the crystalline blue lamp, his strange body and temperature, these were all things that just couldn’t be. At least, not on earth. She belonged to NASA, who very often kept secrets from the world but shared willingly with its brethren, so it was very likely that if this technology existed anywhere, she would have known about it.
Turning to look at Rornak, she said firmly, “Show me. What’s out there that will harm me?”
He still looked angry, his expression severe, but he seemed to settle down even a bit more at the tone of her voice. “And if I show you, what will you be doing then?”
“If you can convince me, maybe I’ll actually listen to you. But, don’t be such an asshole about it.”
This might be a very interesting encounter if I wasn’t so upset and afraid. If all this is true…
As much as she had learned on her own planet, the amount she could learn here had to be simply astounding. If only it was true….and she suddenly found herself wishing that it was.
Rornak looked at her and then nodded, his double eyelids flickering. “I can do this, but you will have to listen to me. And we are not leaving through the door.” He stood and ambled over to the opposite side of the room, facing the wall.
Irritation sparked in her. This was taking too long to actually get any answers. “There’s no other way out of here, you simpleton.”
He ignored her and reached out to the wall, somehow sinking his fingers inside the harsh stone. When he pulled it away, she saw it had been merely a tight-fitted panel sitting flush against the surface. Where it had been was now a squarish opening. “Come.”
Keeping her body tilted as far away from him as possible, Nelly walked over and looked out as instructed.
There were mountains outside, great spears of ice and stone rising from the craggy surface which was split in some areas by craters and in others by streaks of glacier. Only light from a shallow star allowed her to see any detail, and it was all utterly colorless and vague. Yet, higher above that single burning star, she saw ribbons of speckle and color and debris that were unlike anything she’d ever seen before. The Northern Lights were brighter than this, but these shimmering gashes in the sky were static and subtle.
Pulling herself away from the window, she watched Rornak resettle the plate over it. She tried to watch carefully but when it was replaced, she couldn’t see the seems where it lay at all.
“Pluto?” she whispered.
Rornak nodded, looking pleased. “Pluto. Our home. Are you convinced now?”
The scenery could very easily be terrestrial, but she knew it wasn’t. She knew it, now. Even during her one privileged trip to Antarctica, she had seen nothing like this. “But…how? It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way that anyone can survive here, and definitely not…”
Her voice caught on the word naked, so she just gestured at his bare body anyway.
He seemed not to take notice of it, however. At least, if he did, it didn’t bother him. “I tried to explain this to you before and you would not listen to me.”
“Well, I’m listening now,” she replied slowly, backtracking. Hesitant, but knowing that she had to, she stuck out her hand for this man to shake. “My name is Nelly.”
He glanced at her hand and then stuck out his own, looking perplexed at the ritual. Nelly couldn’t help it. If these people were that much more advanced than humans, she needed to start respecting them even if dealing with this guy was a far worse fate than being pranked.
“Nelly, again, I am Rornak. I am leader of my people, who are known as Akait. We may resemble you humans, but it is not always so.”
“Meaning?” she asked, looking him up and down. “And how can you speak English?”
“I do not know what English is,” he said. “I am simply speaking.”
Well, that’s one to figure out then, isn’t it? Despite herself, the prospect made her feel excited. And if she could bring her findings back home…if she could bring an Akait home with her…
“I can show you if you would like, but it will be strange and frightening for you.”
“Isn’t this already?” she challenged.
Rornak lifted his hands in a shrug, and then he changed. There was no transformation, no process. One minute, he simply stood there and then the next a creature stoo
d in his place which could not possibly be real. Simply not.
It was a dragon. Rather, he was a dragon. Four legs, a thick armored body, a whiplike tail and folded bat wings, it stood just as tall as Rornak had and had the silver cast of his skin in its scales. Its fangs were wicked and hooked, and its talons were designed for gripping. Even though it didn’t move towards her, the back-and-forth flicking of its tailtip sent heat flashing out to either side.
Her heart stopped with full-on terror as its eyes, dark as the abyss, dark as the empty areas of space separating Pluto from earth, rose to met hers. Those double eyelids flickered, and she struggled to gasp in any air. Every part of her body was cold now, but it was a cold that came from within her own body as chills raced up and down her spine.
Then, just as he had before, he changed. Where there was a dragon, now there was a naked man with a smug look on his face.
Her breath returned, and every sip of oxygen she took into her gasping lungs was like pure heaven. She felt starved and oppressed by the weight of what she’d just seen. And Rornak just waited, letting her speak first if she wanted, but when no words came for over a minute, he explained, “Our stories teach that at one point in time, there was merely one planet and one species. Strife amongst the people caused the planet to split into nine, and the peoples were divided as well. We simply assumed that on each planet in this system, there would be a civilization similar to our own, but we have so far not yet been able to contact anyone else until now. We have been trying for months to make contact.”