Sorry it’s taken so long for me to update the story, but I’ve been struggling with my brain weasels for months and I have been struggling to write. I’m back now! I’ve almost finished writing the first draft of this novella and I’ve started writing a novel and a short story. I’ve had some work accepted by a local LGBTQIA+ zine, and I’ve submitted a short story to a competition. I will try to update with part two in the next few days.
Chapter 15 – Maria and Sahrai meet the local sentient aliens
“Now then, McClintock, been a while. Not going up top this time ‘round?”
The man, Joshua Dalton, accosted Maria and Sahrai as the track towards the crossroads, several days after their adventures in the flyer. He stood in the road, blocking their path.
“Dalton.” Sahrai nodded sharply at the man and ushered Maria around the man.
Dalton joined them, uninvited, walking beside Sahrai, grinning at thev discomfort of his companions.
“Who’s your friend, McClintock? She’s new.”
“Go away , Dalton. Don’t you have prisoners to abuse?” Maria said.
“Oh, your friend has a sharp tongue and disapproves of our work.”
He smirked at the pair and pointed at the tablet Sahrai carried in a pouch attached to her belt.
“Going to take some photographs with the tourist?” There was a leer in his voice that suggested the photographs would not be of the jungle.
Sahrai looked at his out of the corner of her eye, then at Maria. She tapped the tablet, already running to map their route and record audio. Maria shrugged, tilted their head, signalling that they’d take the lead. A few yards on they spotted the small gap in the vegetation they had been searching for and took a sharp left turn. Sahrai followed.
Maria stepped through the curtain of hanging vines, sliding past a whip plant as it lashed out. It clipped Dalton as he tried to follow Maria and Sahrai into the jungle.
“Hah! That’ll teach that slaver!”
“Careful, Maria. He can still hear you.”
“That’s the point.”
“And we don’t know who else is in here.” Sahrai whispered.
“I know that.”
Maria stepped around a large purple-leaved plant that leaned towards them and ducked past a particularly enthusiastic whip tree. The branches hit the leaves, there was a vegetal scream, and both plants retreated. Sahrai hurried past before the vegetation regrouped and tried again.
Sahrai pointed to an orange rock, which stood out incongruously among the purple grasses, which appeared shorter than the surrounding vegetation. Maria crouched down to get a closer look. They ran their hand over the surface. It was smooth, except for several bumps. They couldn’t make any sense of the bumps. They ran their hand over the rest of the rock. It became rough and almost crumbly to their touch.
“It’s been carved and polished.” Sahrai crouched beside Maria. Her nictitating membranes clicked over her eyes and then back open, looking in a different spectrum, beyond the range available to Maria.
“Hmm.” Sahrai rumbled as she turned the rock over a couple of times, “It’s been painted. Whoever our rock carvers are, they have access to developed technology.”
“Technology?”
“Well, they’re probably not pissing ultraviolet paint in elaborate patterns.”
“Can you draw them?”
“I can do better than that.” Sahrai grinned as she took her tablet out of the pouch and started up a programme. It started recording visual data, in multiple wavelengths. Focusing the tablet’s cameras on the stone, she took several still images and converted the ultraviolet into wavelengths Maria’s human eyes could understand.
“They look like Earth monkeys, with wings?” Sahrai turned the tablet around in her hands, interrogating the images and the stone in turn. It became quiet.
Maria looked around; the plants had gone still, silent, almost leaning back from the pair of alien intruders. “We should keep going.” they said, anxiety choking them.
Sahrai brought her focus from the rock to their environment, half looking through the tablet screen, carefully assessing the changes.
“Yes. Quite. Onwards.” Sahrai shifted rock back into its original position carefully.
The path became more obvious as they travelled into the jungle. It widened and more rocks appeared, getting gradually closer together. Sahrai recorded it all, and made commentary notes as she walked. She stopped at each rock, taking still images of it from all sides, and it’s place in the environment.
Maria listened to the jungle as they walked. The stop-start of the journey was beginning to frustrate them, but the patterns they heard in the jungle were fascinating. Some seemed vegetal, creeks and ruffles in a breeze that wasn’t there. Others were definitely faunal. Maria was struggling to find the right words. They didn’t want to presume the lifeforms on this planet, and in the system if Sahrai’s hypothesis about the rock plants on Rocky Horror was correct, was equivalent to the lifeforms on Earth, or as easily divisible as human languages tended to assume. This wasn’t Earth, no matter how friendly to humans the atmosphere might be, and the life here was unusual, energetic, and vengeful.
The aurox, for example had six limbs; the fauna of this planet seemed to have a six limbed body plan, although they hadn’t seen much of the fauna themselves. According to the survey data, the most common creatures were small and reptile-like. Some had six legs, and some had four legs and a set of wings. Some species had two sets of wings and a set of ‘arms’, which were entirely air bourn and lived in nests along cliffs, like sea birds.
The only examples of the fauna, other than the aurox, that Maria had seen was one of the ‘four legs, one set of wings’ types. It was about a metre tall, mottled orange and brown, and was tapping at her bedroom window with its wings. Maria had squealed, Sahrai had run in to her room carrying a pan and spatula (she was cooking pancakes for breakfast, apparently), wearing a dressing gown and not much else. She stopped suddenly, passed the pan to Maria, banged on the window with the spatula, and screeched loudly. Her mouth opened unnaturally wide, (for a human, averagely wide for a star-dragon).
The creature dropped away from the window, reappearing seconds later to shoot into the air, before diving into the tunnel through the jungle Maria had spotted when they’d first arrived.
A scream brought Maria back to the moment. They spun around, becoming dizzy as they tried to identify the source of the scream. Sahrai grabbed their shoulder, steadying Maria, and pointed out the source. Maria blinked, feeling almost as though they’d summoned their visitor from their memory.
A metre tall. Orange and brown mottled fur, or possibly feathers? Standing upright on hind legs, wings furled on its back, and a spear in one of the fore limbs. It had a belt with multiple pouches and a cloth hat, pointed ears poking through holes.
“What the?” Maria was stunned.
“Our visitor? It looks like the one at the house a few weeks ago. Same colouring. Although it wasn’t wearing a hat that day.”
The creature folded its spear and slotted it into a loop on its belt. It pulled another pouch open and took out a book, its leaves sewn together with thick thread. It opened the book and seemed to be scanning it for something.
“Told you, it’s a technology using species.”
Their new companion screamed at them. It snorted and coughed. “Wrrrr who you?” It ran a finger across a page of the book.
It spoke with the hint of a scream, but the words were understandable.
“Good grief, it can speak Lunglish!” Maria said.
“Yes, yes, it must have been listening to the humans on the planet.”
Sahrai said impatiently. She turned to look at the creature and said,
“Greetings, we are Sahrai,” she tapped her chest, “and Maria.” She tapped Maria’s chest. “We come from Intergalactic Association of Sentient Species.”
“Yes, yes. Igasssssss, igassss. Supai say igass.”
“Supai? Is that you?”
The creature riffled through the book then said, “Me…I…am…Mrrh-wAa.” It spoke slowly, sounding out the words until it got to its name, which came out as a half scream. “I am Rwwrrr. What species?” The creature pointed from Sahrai to Maria.
Another scream echoed across the jungle, interrupting the rudimentary conversation. Mrrh-wAa looked upwards. It waved at another Rwwrr flying towards them. The new creature landed beside Mrrh-wAa. A screaming match began. Maria covered their ears and waited, as Sahrai lifted the tablet to record everything.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 