#Notes from the deathworld earth
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Aliens are floored by tardigrades
Life is pretty resilient. It has to be, especially if the rest of the Galaxy thinks we're from a Deathworld. In comparison then, if their planets are not as demanding, would life there ever be under enough pressure to survive to go to the extreme lengths that some Earth creatures do? I think one of the most profound things aliens might learn from Earth and Humanity is just how powerful life itself can be.
That itself could shake their understanding of themselves - a billion year old civilization could never even conceive of a thing we accept as simple fact, ushering a revolution in thinking not seen in eons.
___________________________
The Galactic Coalition scientists are busying themselves with obtaining, analyzing, categorizing, and integrating the libraries of information Humanity has brought with them as they incorporate into the greater space faring matrix of civilizations.
A good grasp of Physics, though lacking in certain fields for now; unmatched Engineering doctrines, they really do think of everything, although, perhaps, better to say - they really do attempt everything, then take notes and improve for the next attempt.
Chemistry is another fine addition to the collective knowledge base, a disproportionate part of the catalogue is comprised entirely of explosive reagents and combinations - always good to know more about what NOT to do.
And Biology. Oh boy. What a chaotic but beautiful but also disturbing mess. Life on most planets has a long period of just chugging along, surviving as best it can, until eventually something has the bright idea to evolve the ability to have bright ideas. Then in almost no time at all (on a cosmic scale) a dominant intelligence emerges and civilization alongside it, and in the blink of an eye it finds itself exploring the stars.
A similar pattern happened on Earth, but interrupted alarmingly often by utter catastrophes. Humans call them Mass Extinctions. It is exceedingly rare to find life that can talk about its own extinction events. Kind of deflates the term a bit. Life on planets as inhospitable (by Galactic norms) as Earth tends to be found only as fossils, and almost always on the microscopic level - very rarely do they get the chance to form more complex and advanced lifeforms before the planet with its harsh conditions and scarce resources kills it just as randomly as it spawned it.
We were incredibly saddened to learn from the Humans that the biodiversity of Earth had dwindled by roughly 85% since they accidentally created that giant hole on their planet, and that it had already been on a steady decline before then. Even so, when they revealed there were still 2.4 million species alive on Earth was a shockingly high number. Most are on the brink of extinction, yes, but the fact remains that Earth is easily one of the most biodiverse planets in the Galaxy.
Then we started looking at each individual species and learned about the Tardigrade.
what
It is literally the toughest creature ever discovered, and it's not even close. At least, so far, we haven't looked at absolutely everything Earth has or had yet.
It can just... basically turn itself off and then back on again when the outside becomes livable again - Cryptobiosis, or suspending their metabolism, something we considered only possible through artificial means. And the levels of various extreme they can endure and still be alive would just be utterly ridiculous if they didn't give us samples to confirm for ourselves.
Then we came across the term Extremophile and just decided to take a day off.
#earth is weird#earth is space australia#earth is a deathworld#nature is weird#tardigrade#that's how my brain works#I too learned of that term only now#so it was time to stop before things got out of hand#carionto
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Here we go again,
Puzzles/ jigsaws would confuse Aliens so much
Set on the serpentine, beginning of the humans tenure
Important crew:
Primoz, captain -Limoyh a four armed species-Krag, second in command (brother of Primoz)
Kit, dokter -avian, bird like, she has feathers like a swallow-
Ortez, ASR (all species resources, human resources in space) -kiltak, insectoid species, think ants but exoskeleton-
Lugea, helmsperson (does the steering) -rock like alien-
Artex, engineer/mechanic 1 -also Kiltak-
And then our humans:
Kamari, navigator -Eritrean woman- (has cat named Sidra)
Markus, weapons expert (knows how to use them and upkeep, also shields) -Swedish man-
Petrus, mechanic/engineer 2 - Italian man-
Lilly, administrator/note keeper (learns languages for fun)-english woman-
~~~~~~~
Puzzles
The serpentine is on route between trading posts, this is currently the furthest route without proper jump point because of the static energy surrounding the dual planets castor and pollux.
Primoz is getting worried. The humans are becoming increasingly more jittery and Kamari looks like she a pinch away from punch someone, Markus has been ‘humming’ a song that annoys her greatly. Honestly the noises the tall man is making don’t seem that bad but every few minutes her eyebrows twitch which Ortez told him is a sign of frustration.
Before the captain can figure out how to keep them from doing something deathworld worthy, Lilly comes in with precariously stacked carton boxes and Petrus carrying a table. Setting the pile down the smallest human straightens out “look what i brought! Old earth puzzles! This one has a deer and this one has the old world wonders” immediately the humming stops and Markus is at the table with Petrus “oh yes Lilly you are the best! I wanna do the deer one, that is gonna be a challenge”
With the table in the corner of the bridge the tension among crew is nearly gone, as all species try to put the cut apart pictures together, Lilly brought 9 puzzles and at a certain point a competition was forming: after one of the human unit had finished a puzzle the other crew try to make it in less time. They have yet to win.
Looking at his relaxed crew Primoz grins at his brother who is trying to use all his four arms to put pieces together without much succes. Turning away from the competition he taps Lilly on her shoulder “how do you guys do it? Also why did you think to take these things with you.” Lilly looks up from her drawing (the crew bent over the table making the puzzle) “well i knew it was going to be a long trip, Kamari thinks Markus will be ‘professional’ but he can’t help himself” her soft smile when she puts air punctuation around professional makes her look much younger than she is “puzzles are something many humans enjoy, not everyone is as good at them as Markus, but he does this thing where he uses the shape of them more than colours. While he isn’t colour blind, he has real trouble with telling differences in shades. No idea why it works this well but it does, Petrus has already won three nights of free drinking on Castor from betting.” All of a sudden looking bashful Lilly ducks her head “ah eh yes sorry forget i said that we don’t bet on this at all!” Primoz just grins “nobody has broken anything this whole trip, im not going to disrupt the flow you and your unit created. Don’t worry.”
At arrival Petrus has won the whole human crew free drinks for the foreseeable future, and the crew in its entirety hooked on puzzles. While not all species see the colours the same way or understand the patterning in the pieces the feeling of putting in the correct pieces makes it such an enjoyable activity that Lilly brings new puzzles after every holiday back home.
~~~~~~~~~
This one was born out of the confusion my family had when we were making puzzles (jigsaws?) the pictures in pieces… this is where it becomes super clear English is not my first language. Anyway, we had two puzzles out and they were so surprised i could differentiate the positions the pieces needed to be in without context. I had to tell them that the pattern otherwise won’t make sense,
I have the same thing as Markus that colours are fine unless you put several of the same colours next to each other and call them different. This is why the deer one is super hard,
The two puzzles that were described:
#humans are space oddities#humans are space orcs#humans are deathworlders#humans in space#humans are space capybaras#humans are weird#puzzle#jigsaw#humans are insane
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“Louis, may I ask you about human preparedness?”
I looked up from my book to see Milly and company sitting down.
“Sure, what’s the quandary?” I asked.
“Humans are biologically suited for the land, yet when you go on your explorations, you prepare for living in both water and in treetops. Why?” Milly asked.
“Easy answer is you never know what could happen,” I shrugged.
The crew mate next to Milly with dark green eyes spoke up. “It is my understanding that humans prepare for what they are relatively familiar with. A hunter will prepare to hunt, for example, whereas another might prepare to eat plants.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I follow,” I admitted.
Purple eyes on the other side of Milly spoke. “What he means is, if humans prepare for things they’re familiar with, why do they prepare for all environments? Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to locate the environment you’re biologically suited to?”
“Oh, well yeah, but you have to remember that nearly 75% of wildlife on earth is suited to land as well, and that even our herbivores can be deadly and territorial. Sometimes the environment our biology is most suited to isn’t the safest one to be in,” I explained.
“Can you expound on this subject?” Green eyes asked.
“Sure. So let’s say we crashed on Earth. We have a nearly three in four chance of landing in water. Logically, we’d want to find land to have a better chance at living. But if the land we find is home to a bunch of orangutans, I’d much rather continue on the water.”
“But what if you can’t find more land?” Green eyes asked.
“Set up a water filtration system to clean the salt out and have drinkable water, swim or catch fish for food, make shade for the daytime and stay dry and warm at night. It won’t be enjoyable, but it is livable.”
“This is why you always bring a prepared human on explorations.” Milly was smug, like she just won an argument. “They apply their knowledge to all kinds of scenarios they’ve never experienced.”
“That doesn’t make humans better that other deathworlders,” purple eyes insisted.
“No, but our winning streak in the survival games does,” I offered.
Neither purple or green eyes responded to that. Milly nodded.
“And on that note, I believe you two have a shift of mine to take,” she said.
#humans are space australians#humans are space orcs#humans are weird#humans are deathworlders#humans are space fae
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Terix
Humans, often unpredictable, abandoned all reason on deathworld Terix. Initial surveys noted the planet’s apex predators were predominantly reptilian. Galactic Union declared it a deathworld and it was largely forgotten. Human researchers had been poring over uncolonized planet reports. Their aim had been to find places they could settle where others couldn’t.
Within weeks of discovering Terix several privately sponsored bio engineering expiditions descended on the planet. None of these had been sanctioned by the United Earth government. In all previous settlements humans fully complied with interstellar regulation. This was just the beginning of the irregularities.
After acknowledging the illegality of unsanctioned actions, the human government forces declared Terix to be vital to military research. Galactic Union bureaucracy was slow to respond. As political committees debated, humans dissembled and filed appeals in interstellar courts.
Whispers and rumors thrived in the absence of official narrative. Low resolution videos depicted smooth and scaled bodies dealing unspeakable violence to each other. Unverified reports were difficult to distinguish from popular human entertainment. Stories of unethical experiments and last stands against ravenous hordes flooded the feeds and channels. Some were hoaxes, most were sensationalist and exaggerated.
Eventually patience with the humans ran out. Tensions reached the point that many feared the outbreak of war. Abruptly, delegates from Earth government agreed to open the planet up to inspections from any and all comers. Government functionaries, media, academics and august personages turned out in droves. The alleged horrors were nowhere to be seen.
It appeared that the humans were planning to develop an amusement park on the deathworld. The natural environment was hardly changed. There was evidence of illegal genetic modifications. Natives of Terix had been significantly altered to resemble various extinct native species of Earth. The results were terrifying. Something had to be done to stop this madness.
Representatives of human government, military and private finance were prepared to pay fines in recompense for the unethical nature of early experimentation. Questions were raised regarding the rumors of death on the planet. Humans asserted that the only deaths were human, and that compensation had been dealt with.
Objections remained. Protestors demanded that the experiments be euthanized, humans removed from the planet, and be subject to heavy sanctions. A riot nearly broke out. Deafening screams pealed out from the sky above. Winged reptiles the size of lower atmosphere aircraft circled above. Humans sat astride their gargantuan necks. In defiance of biological science these monsters released gouts of flame from their mouths.
“Did you really think we would go to the trouble of making dinosaurs and not make dragons as well?” An anonymous (possibly apocryphal) human quipped.
#humans are space orcs#humans are space oddities#humans are aliens#humans are confusing#humans are deathworlders#humans are silly#humans are space australians#dinosaur#dragon
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Well uh- due to my feed on stuff hating me forever, I now have a Humans are Space Orcs thought-
Whales.
This is gonna be a bit gross because it is specifically dead whales and how they bloat. If you DON'T know what I'm talking about I beg you to spare yourself this knowledge. It is horrifying enough to know and gross to possibly ever see.
Ssoooo, Earth is a Deathworld hellscape that honestly shouldn't be livable with how it is. Especially not with the various predators, even if Humans are scarier than them all. But when a human is talking about a whales body that had recently beached, the aliens were confused by the disgust on their face.
Alien 1: Usually your dead creatures bring you sadness, why does the whale bring disgust?
Alien 2: Yes, I remember you mentioned whales were large but beautiful creatures.
Human 1: Ah- well....whales themselves are great, don't get me wrong. It's just after they die, which does make me sad, they uhm...John help-
Human 2, John: They swell up till they explode if we don't do nothin.
Alien 1, feeling faint: what?
Alien 2, also feeling faint: explode?
Human 1, sighing: Yeah, it's a gas build up or something and you have to cut them open to release it. Causes a mini explosion of guts and stuff on ya.
John: I did it once, showered a whole 3 hours and still felt like it was on meh body. Really a shame.
Because honestly. It's horrifying enough for us that they literally explode after death, imagine this giant goliath of a sea creature that could easily kill probably anything dying and you think it can't do anything now only for its entire body to become a live bomb of its innards.
And we just learned that it's better to deal with it ourselves by stopping it from building up that much if they beach. Our solution to seeing a dead whale if we aren't experts on it or anything and can't do anything? "Oh just stay away, the skin will give at some point."
We just decided that yeah, this was fine.
The aliens decide this is not, in fact, fine. A new note is added to the human's deathworld guide, reminding how dangerous the sea of the human world is, even for semi or full aquatic species.
#humans are space orcs#humans are weird#humans are space oddities#humans are space australians#humans are deathworlders#tw: gore mention#tw: gore#cw: gore#cw: gore mention#I don't entirely know what to tage the stufff about the whales- sooooo#heed my warnings
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Do you have any good Humans are space orcs/humans are weird (that kind of thing) short story links?
Hoo okay so the reason that I was asking about the Doctors Without Borders one (which is here, incidentally, and which you should read if you haven't come across it before) is that 1) I have been doing some personal archival work to save some internet stories offline, but 2) I have been historically good about tagging my fandom stuff but have unfortunately left most non-fandom stuff untagged, and by the time I realized I ought to've created a humans are weird tag it was too late, so my blog is Not a good place to try and find them. But, since I'm trying to dig them up for myself anyway, I can share the ones I've managed to find so far. And hey: open invitation to anyone who wants to put links to their favorites of the Humans Are Weird stories in the reblogs or replies!
I'm also going to recommend you check out blogs like @what-are-even-humans and @space-australians, which exist to archive these sorts of stories. I will also do what someone did in the replies of my query post and point you to r/HFY and specifically its sidebar of links to previous classics and must-reads -- I'm not as familiar with that bc I don't use reddit so much but it helped me dig a couple of these back up.
But onto a few highlights:
Stabby the Space Roomba is required reading, he is our beloved Tumblr mascot of Humans Are Weird and you'll see Stabby referenced in other stories like this
Less a humans-specifically-are-weird and more of a Earth-is-a-death-world in general, but as I remember it, this post actually predates the explosion of Humans are Weird/Humans are Space Australians/Humans are Deathworlders on tumblr, and I suspect helped inspire it as people went from "wow our planet is full of weird shit" to "maybe... we also... are some weird shit". Take a wander through the notes of that one, it has a million different branching reblog chains and it's different every time I see it.
Humans Are Unstoppable Until They Aren't
Drake McDougal (Part One) (Part Two) (Alternate Part Two)
Last Contact
You Really Want a Human (Ginna's Story) (Miscellaneous)
I KNOW there are more that I want to find again that I'm gonna have to get creative about searching for (again, open invitation to drop your favorites on this post!) but that's what I have for now and it should get you started.
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Being in environmental sciences and also anime makes for a fucked up and evil combo.
Be absolutely free to ignore, i do not come up with any conclusion worth reading here. Ravings of a madman. But know it involves One piece.
Today i wasted my morning looking into one piece worldbuilding, specifically the planet the story takes places in and its impossible landmarks and going too deep in a rabbit hole i am not sure i have the right amount of knowledge to delve into regarding Geology, Tectonics, Meteorology and also Astronomy.
All of which started from me seeing an image of Admiral Fujiitora, doing his funny admiral movement tech of "Fly across the sea on top of a chunk of ground he ripped out of the ground with gravity powers" and wondering how much this man may have impacted the soil microbial developement of each island by doing that, carrying ground bacteria, nematodes and all that as unwilling passengers of his trips.
And that turned into "hey, now that i think about it, how did life evolve around with so many insular communities cut off from the rest?" As insular evolution usually involves landmasses being connected at one point before getting separated and having speciation happen.
And that yet again turned into "Hey, how DID the geomorphology of this planet turn like that?" Which brought me to pull up my old geology, petrography, tectonic and orogeny notes and try to make sense of it.
Rinse and repeat, and now the final question is:
"HEY HOW DID LIFE DEVELOP AT ALL IN THIS FUCKASS DEATHWORLD PLANET FULL OF PHOENOMENA THAT CAN BE ARGUABLY PLAUSIBLE ON THEIR OWN BUT NOT WHEN PUT TOGETHER LIKE THAT?"
We got islands with their own magnetism and climate, incredibly deep abyssal sea floors that can reach 10.000 meters in depth, a continental strip that encircles the planet much akin to something that could be seen on a tidally locked planet but that goes across the poles vertically, the whole grand line and reverse mountain and adjacent calm belts, Pelagic megafauna that would make Subnautica devs sweat in fear, four evenly distributed oceans that may or may not actually be connected somewhere but are officially distinct and separated and thus insular in their own.
The planet pretty much has fauna that mirrors our real world one, a moon similar to ours (if not even more satellites if a specific scene of the anime is to be believed), but unlike ours, dry surface is sparse with only the red line continent and the numerous islands which one of the characters state could be more than 20,000,000.
Of course, foolish of me to try and reason out how a planet from an anime could work realistically, but the scary part is that a lot of it could be explained by the one piece world being some form of Super-Earth, with a rampant volcanic activity to generate enough hotspots so that island can spring up much like Hawaii, and with powerful tectonics that push opposite plates into eachother creating the red line. Bigger planets means bigger and stronger atmospheric phoenomena, but nowhere in the way they happen in the series.
I reinstate, all these geomorphological and meteorological situations COULD BE theoretically plausible, but not all together. And yet life on it developed in a way comparable to the earth's own biosphere. Which is the most absurd part, because a planet like this would constantly be faced with extreme cataclysms every friday and at best i could only see the fish men and mermaids survive there.
And remember, this absurd spelunking trip into a rabbit hole of my own making started from seeing THIS.
Rant over. Once again i wasted a morning being the Hubris-prone fool that can't watch anything without wondering about biological implications of certain factors the story definitely does not give much weight.
#crab says stuff#crab says DUMB stuff#i am not even gonna tag this as one piece i am scared someone may dig up this and ASK MORE QUESTIONS#``i may have something undiagnosed`` tag
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Challenge #03901-J249: Convergent Primate Studies
A ship of scientists, both human and galactics, came upon a level 4 deathworld, with some level 5 areas, that was suspiciously like prehistoric earth. What happily surprised the humans, and horrified the galactics, was that the primates were nearly an exact match to homosapiens! What would they be in a few hundred thousand years? -- Lessons
[AN: I'm taking them a little further back than H. Sapiens. There's some interesting evidence to suggest that hominid civilisation goes as far back as H. Habilis]
In an infinite universe, all things are possible. Given that, it was only a matter of time before unusual happenstances could repeat. Such as a level 4.5 Deathworld evolving primate-based hominids.
The Humans gathered with the observers of such things to take notes and compare with what they knew of their own development. Assumptions from centuries past were blown to smithereens with the first concealed observer drones.
"Hominids wore clothes! Look! And they're building shelters out of the local flora. Oooh! Oooh! They're caring for a tribesmember who has a broken leg."
[Check the source for the rest of the story]
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Challenge #03901-J249: Convergent Primate Studies
A ship of scientists, both human and galactics, came upon a level 4 deathworld, with some level 5 areas, that was suspiciously like prehistoric earth. What happily surprised the humans, and horrified the galactics, was that the primates were nearly an exact match to homosapiens! What would they be in a few hundred thousand years? -- Lessons
[AN: I'm taking them a little further back than H. Sapiens. There's some interesting evidence to suggest that hominid civilisation goes as far back as H. Habilis]
In an infinite universe, all things are possible. Given that, it was only a matter of time before unusual happenstances could repeat. Such as a level 4.5 Deathworld evolving primate-based hominids.
The Humans gathered with the observers of such things to take notes and compare with what they knew of their own development. Assumptions from centuries past were blown to smithereens with the first concealed observer drones.
"Hominids wore clothes! Look! And they're building shelters out of the local flora. Oooh! Oooh! They're caring for a tribesmember who has a broken leg."
[Check the source for the rest of the story]
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I posted 4,215 times in 2022
That's 1,580 more posts than 2021!
468 posts created (11%)
3,747 posts reblogged (89%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@sapphicshart
@kurtwagnermorelikekurtwagnerd
@tattinglacework
@biotic-boshtet
@callmebliss
I tagged 1,869 of my posts in 2022
#v's fiber arts tag - 379 posts
#the yearning is upon me again - 112 posts
#hopepunk - 104 posts
#knitting - 98 posts
#lace rot disease - 77 posts
#v rates teapots - 74 posts
#humans are space orcs - 48 posts
#lace for the lace gods - 36 posts
#atla - 34 posts
#the joys of tea - 34 posts
Longest Tag: 139 characters
#i messaged my doctor yesterday like 'look i just want to confirm that my assumption that this doesn't require medical treatment is correct'
I sent 2 gifts in 2022
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
Alien crewmate: you talk to that small earth creature like it's a person. It must be intelligent to understand you and respond.
Human crewmate: oh you mean my cat? They don't understand most of what we say. They can understand basic commands and tone. And some of them are as intelligent as a human toddler. But they can't understand most of what we say.
Alien crewmate: but... it made noise back at you. It responded.
Human: oh yeah cats do this thing where we can have "conversations" with each other but we don't understand each other. Sometimes I meow back at her, too, but I don't actually understand her meows. It's only polite to speak her language sometimes, after all.
Alien crewmate: fascinating
1,604 notes - Posted August 27, 2022
#4
OK but humans can feel rain in their bones. What kind of stuff could aliens do similarly? Imagine another alien from a deathworld hanging out with a human and the human is like "Oh my knee hurts the weather is going to change." And the deathworlder being like "Wait, you can predict your environment based on sensory input from your body too???" Turns out our deathworlder cousins can predict the weather and things like cave-ins because it makes their tusks hurt and they've never met another species who can do that. Non predator aliens watch this conversation in the mess hall in growing horror because what the fuck why are the predators able to do insane magic shit like predict the weather based on the feeling in their bones???
1,800 notes - Posted August 26, 2022
#3
In a world full of forces that want to keep you miserable and downtrodden, the most radical thing you can do is cultivate hope in yourself. It takes practice, and it's hard at first, but it's one of those things that snowballs. First you find a little bit of hope, and you think maybe that's all there is. But as you practice being hopeful, your hope grows and grows until suddenly the world doesn't seem so bad.
And remember, maybe you can't change the entire world. But you can change your world. And it's okay to let that be enough. The entire world is a heavy burden that no one was meant to carry alone. It's okay to put it down.
2,116 notes - Posted May 4, 2022
#2
Humans understand that for a lot of alien species, baring teeth is a sign of aggression, so we all learn to smile with our mouths closed but then we meet an alien species that think "that thing you guys do with your face muscles" is as adorable as we think a cat doing a blep is and then only finding out (with horror) way later that when we smile at each other we bare our teeth and that's a sign of friendliness and happiness we do to each other among members of our own species.
Imagine being an alien recently assigned to a new ship and there's multiple humans on this crew and you're like "Yes! I hope these humans do the 'smile' thing it's so adorable" and then you watch two humans hanging out and they're baring their teeth at each other and you're like "oh no the predators are gonna fight this is bad" until someone else on the crew notices you turning distressed colors and is like "No that's what their smiles look like when they smile at each other" and the you're suddenly very intimated by the fact that the persistence predators bare their teeth at each other when happy.
2,668 notes - Posted July 31, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
Human crewmate: smells like rain
Alien crewmate: you can SMELL that???
Human:. ... yes? Some humans can feel it in their bones, especially where bones have been broken and healed or have decayed. Most of us get it with age.
Alien crewmate, aside to another alien crewmate: what the fuck
12,827 notes - Posted August 26, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
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This is an add on to my previous idea of old weapons being redundant and everything being rays/plasma/energy based. But humans are weird little things that like hoarding weapons…
This story plays on a spaceship called the Serpentine.
Important crew:
Primoz, captain -Limoyh a four armed species-Krag, second in command (brother of Primoz)
Kit, dokter -avian, bird like, she has feathers like a swallow-
Ortez, ASR (all species resources, human resources in space) -kiltak, insectoid species, think ants but exoskeleton-
Lugea, helmsperson (does the steering) -rock like alien-
Artex, engineer/mechanic 1 -also Kiltak-
And then our humans:
Kamari, navigator -Eritrean woman- (has cat named Sidra)
Markus, weapons expert (knows how to use them and upkeep, also shields) -Swedish man-
Petrus, mechanic/engineer 2 - Italian man-
Lilly, administrator/note keeper (learns languages for fun)-english woman-
~~~~~~
Ouroboros
The mood on the Serpentine is at an all time low. Right now they were supposed to be on planet earth, getting a tour from the deathworld residents. Krag was very disappointed that the humans celebration for their 15 year tenure on the ship had to be cancelled, after all the stories he had really wanted to see the planet, at least more than the embassy or a space travel base.
Sadly this had to be put on hold, as the Counsel is at war. The big four armed alienwas looking at his brother, the captain, pacing the bridge while they slowly moved to the deserted front lines of the attack, hoping to maybe find something that gives the Unity an edge.
This had started no more than a month ago, an exploratory vessel had found a planet beyond the borders of Avian territory, on the southern side of Unity (direction is always measured from Unity as that is the point of convergence for most species and space faring) now new planets were interesting but not usually to the average person. The last message received was a voice note screaming about a wormhole in the planet the sent hundreds of ships and the ship it self failing on all fronts and shutting down.
From that day a line of dark crude ships started eating away at the Avian territory, within a week they had lost 19 colonies. Nothing is stopping them, ships that got too close shut down for no reason and were never recovered as the unstoppable line of enemy ships progressed. Weapons fired from far away did nothing as whatever beam they threw vanished when it gets close.
All that and the Unity still kept sending forces, because what else were they going to do?
So here they are, on their way to a probable death sentence with no clue about the enemy. Through his somber thoughts Krag hears laughing from the mess hall, yes, these are the moments he is extra thankful for the humans. After 15 years they were pillars in the crew, right now Lilly and Petrus were teaching the crew human “sea shanties” which were apparently doing their job of lifting spirits as the humans had explained, Lilly is writing the english words down for Kit who is learning the language in her analog book, one of her human oddities. Markus is showing some of the newer recruits the ins and outs of the weapon systems. Lastly Kamari, their leader and confidant, she has made herself indispensable to Ortez over the years. Now she was sitting in a corner listening to people pour their hearts out, giving the best advice she can.
As the ship is approaching the seemingly desolate piece of space where 23 ships float without direction or crew, hulls torn open and ransacked, the crew of the Serpentine watches in horror as there are only Unity ships, non of their enemy.
Artex and Petrus helm the out board arms in trying to get any information or remnants that are usable, when the ship shivers and stills. As the sound of something attaching to the outer hull comes through, the ships lights and computers shut down.
“DO NOT PANIC” the captain yells, “grab your weapons, and prepare for battle” as everyone prepares Markus grabs a weapon from his bag, a long gun, which Primoz recognises as an old earth weapon. “Why would you carry that?” Primoz grabs Markus’ arm, who contorts his face in one of the more terrifying human grins, one usually reserved for enemies “well we know the blasters don’t work. I thought let’s try this!” Now that the captain is looking he sees that the humans are all carrying an old weapon, Kamari seems to have a smaller version of Markus’ gun, Petrus has a sword on his hip and Lilly had several sheets with daggers strapped to her hips. Primoz turns around as Krag grabs his shoulder “if it gives them hope, let it go, what are they gonna do?”
Lugea catches their attention “something is boarding in sector three!” Immediately the armed crew members ran toward the sector, Markus directing people into an ambush formation. Blasters ready they wait.
The doors as everything else have lost power, but with a flash electricity runs through it the doors open and two tall lanky aliens skitter in (the silence from doctor who but in body armour) with voices that sound like nails on a chalk board they use the captains language “sssurendderrr, and youuu won’t ssssssufffer. Yourrr weaponsssss aree ussssseelll-“ with a swoosh Lilly’s knife flew past the ranks and embedded itself a bit in the body armour. Three blaster shots follow her knife but dissipate in mid air. Kamari’s eyes light up as she grabs her glock “looks like old does the trick!” A big bang makes the other crew members cover their ears. But the bullet hits its target, and dark yellow blood pours from a head wound.
“Thats it!” Petrus runs in and goes for a decapitation, sadly no such luck as the left over alien grabs his sword and not caring for life and limb tries to touch the human. Before he can a second loud shot rings out, Markus got a good aim.
Now there are two dead aliens but still no power. Through some investigation Kit figures out the aliens are like leeches for energy, electricity and a lot of what their stuff runs on. The ship the creatures came with is empty and sending out a signal, worried more enemy troops are coming the crew discusses. No useful ideas come up until Petrus starts speaking: “what if we make thrusters like the old ones on earth? Y’know like a fire powered one. Heck i know we have several things that are flammable in high quantities. If we put that behind the other ship we could propel ourselves away maybe find council ship? And while we are at it we could Ouroboros this ship when those leech man comeback. right Markus?" Markus gets a pensive look on his face “yea we probably could, but even if we can propel the other ship far enough how do we stop our people from trying to blow us up?’ Now Lilly speaks up ‘we can paint it? I have paints in my room, our space suit will still keep the pressure out but won’t supply oxygen. We could hold our breath.’ Rumbling Lugea intercepts ‘while i do need a little oxygen i can survive up to 58 kliks without it, i could do it?’ More and more of the crew start to speak up, Artez offers to help Petrus with the thrusters. Kit knows several flammable liquids she keeps in the med bay and has enough chemical knowledge to know what can be used as fuel so she is in on gathering the necessary ingredients. The two brothers started with decking out Lugea, and gathered several steel ropes to pull the ship in so people could get on with as little exposure as possible.
Ortez realises noone asked what ‘ouroboros’ meant and finds Kamari in a fight with Markus ‘you’re right that we’re gonna need the push if we want to get anywhere but there has to be another way?!’ The dark woman whisper shouts with a resigned look Markus grabs her flailing arm ‘we have no electricity to make a remote to do it from a distance moon, I don’t see another option.’ The fact that Markus is using Kamaris nickname and gets no scolding look makes the insectoid realise this is very serious ‘what about Lilly then? You know she won’t let you.’ Now the man looks stern ‘we dont tell her until it is too late.’ Skittering into the light Ortez speaks up ‘what exactly does ‘ouroboros’ a ship mean and why can’t you tell Lilly?’ Startled the two humans look at him, Kamari takes the word ‘ouroboros is a plan we made up for blowing the ship up, without power source. Ya know- serpentine -serpent -ouroboros is a serpent eating its own tail’ as she is speaking Ortez gets more anxious ‘okay several things 1, you made plans to blow up the ship?! 2, you just said you don’t have a remote which means you are planning on staying behind’ focussing all six eyes on Marks. Who squares his shoulders and nods.
It took two hours to get things in place, another hour to prepare and calculate the blast range.
Almost everyone has boarded the enemy ship, save for Primoz, Kamari, Krag and Markus. With tears in her eyes Kamari hugs him, Primoz grabs him by the shoulders ‘are you aure? The thrusters might be enough.’ A sad smile crosses his face ‘but it most likely won’t be captain. It was an honour serving with you.’ The three salute him while he walks to the bridge so he can see the ship and calculate when to start the chain reaction.
As the captain and his brother close the secondary doors behind Kamari, Lilly realises what has happened ‘NO,’ running for the door Petrus grabs her ‘PLEASE NO,’ as she fights and struggles the man starts whispering to her while she screams for Markus. Krag looks away towards Artez ‘start the thrusters’ now weeping Lilly cries out ‘WE LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND, we leave no one behind.’ the ships starts moving and as calculated their beautiful Serpentine blows up the shock wave propelling the now brightly coloured ship to safety.
It takes 5 hours for them to be found, after explaining the situation they are immediately transported to Unity. Where the group of humans show Lillies notes and the enemy ship. Plans are made and the human civilisation shows exactly why they are so scary when in les than a week they mass produce weapons that can hurt the newly dubbed leeches.
With the crew on the frontlines scattered over separate ships they beat back the leeches, destroying the wormhole and any stragglers are mercilessly killed off.
Humans are terrifying if you hurt them, because they never come after you alone.
~~~~~~~~~
This is technically the end of the serpentine but much room for stories in the 15 years before.
Hopefully people enjoy this.
#humans are space orcs#humans are space oddities#humans in space#humans are deathworlders#humans are space australians
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Still recommending Zahn's Manta's Gift as a literary take on "paralyzed human given new lease on life by being reborn into an alien body specifically to serve as an ambassador to said alien species, with subplots about human military getting in everyone's way and making everything a hundred times worse." (it was written long before Avatar)
Now also recommending Gear's Donovan series for "humans trying to colonize a deathworld where the sentient native life reacts to them as a tasty invasive species."
Manta's Gift tells the Avatar story with significantly more alien aliens and a much neater payoff as everyone grows and learns from their mistakes. Ends on a great hopeful future note.
Donovan series tells the colonizing-the-deathworld story (financed of course by evil greedy corporations) from the colonists' POVs as they adapt, communicate and make tentative peace with the local sentient species despite being on the menu for every intelligent plant, animal, fish, insect and mono-cellular organism. Series isn't over yet but heavy focus on humans evolving to meet the conditions at hand rather than forcing the planet to conform to old earth.
If you want something that isn't quite so much a retread of American history In Space, those might be of interest. They are no more flawless than Cameron's movies but they do add variety.
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I posted 29 times in 2022
That's 29 more posts than 2021!
19 posts created (66%)
10 posts reblogged (34%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@writing-prompt-s
@happy2justb
@rigormqrtis
@boymilfsblog
@atagotiak
I tagged 26 of my posts in 2022
Only 10% of my posts had no tags
#humans are space orcs - 14 posts
#aliens - 12 posts
#earth is space australia - 12 posts
#humans are weird - 10 posts
#aliens and humans - 5 posts
#humans and aliens - 4 posts
#aliens being so confused will never not be funny - 4 posts
#writing stuff - 4 posts
#scifi - 3 posts
#aliens :d - 3 posts
Longest Tag: 108 characters
#also aliens interacting with these cats that are definitely related to bigger more vicious cats is hilarious
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
Aliens and Human Relationships pt 3 :D
More romantic,platonic, and familial between aliens and humans
Romantic Relationships
-Some aliens have very Rube Goldberg styles of courting while others are very straight forward
-blush appears on mammilain species but not on reptilian or avian, but that doe snot mean those species do not blush, they just hsow it differently
-i have a feeling that nearly all aliens can be embarrassed easily, so when a human flirts, its great
-meeting the parents could be very weird for alien species simply because either a) everyone knows each other or b) no one cares who you date in space
-ALIEN SO'S BEING PROTECTIVE
-on the above thought, humans have all sorts of social issues so if a human had an alien s.o, i headcanon they would be very protective
-small human, tall alien or vice versa
-the tension between very short humans and very tall humans confuse most aliens until it happens to them, then its "oh"
-some aliens are like cats which means courting gifts are like enemies heads or some sort of trophy
-polyamory is normal in some species and it is completely normal to have 2+ partners
-a lot of children that have both human and alien genes but how they appear can vary due to how strong the genetics are.
-humanoids can mate with each other but not more avaian or reptiallian or even very aquatic species. So those who cannot mate will adopt
Familial Relantionships
-Children are able to speak more than 3 languages, 2 being their parents original language and one which could be galactic basic or something. English is spoken within the galaxy but is not the main language
-children learning acceptance of differences from a very young age where that's skin colour, heritage, accents, sexuality, gender etc
-very mixed families, for example - alien+alien+human (parents) with alien/human mix and full human children or human+alien with 6 adopted or foster kids. Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bisexual, polyamorous, and so on couples and families exist.
-parents have either wallets filled with pictures or at least 3 full albums full of photos that they pull out to embarrass their kids
-found family is very common. ( idk if i mentioned this already)
-Child services are very effective on some planets but on others are crap
-children who are orphans sometimes have people who help them and create safe spaces for them
-mental health issues are treated seriously in a lot of families because it is important for the members to be healthy
Platonic Relationships
-Aliens bonding over their love for their human friends/colleagues/kids/SO
-give me a human showing an alien a meme and the alien doing what all the dads do when you show them something
-t-shirts that are " this is my alien -- >" "< --this is my human"
-aliens being mildly terrified of their human friends
-on the above headcanon, humans have the whole deathworlders and also having the damage predictability of an iphone
See the full post
529 notes - Posted September 3, 2022
#4
Aliens and dealing with animals
I find this hilarious because while aliens definitely have animal species on their planets and have domesticated them. Just compared to animals we find on earth, it's either that aliens are terrified or are not. Its one or the other. No one can change my mind.
Here's a scene.
Alien: What is this quadruped, furry animal on your lap human?
Human: Oh, this is Lasagna, they're my cat. I have two other cats, Loaf and Pebble. Lasagna's old and Loaf is a kitten - she scratches everything! * points to the sofa in the corner* Look what she did to my sofa! Pebbles yells a lot.
Alien: How did you domesticate such violent and destructive creatures.
Human: Through food. These fuzzballs love food! * nuzzles into Lasagna*
Alien: On an evolutionary perspective, are they related to any other species.
Human: They're related to big cats like tigers, lions, panthers. Any big cat, our cats are somehow related to. Someone I know is a zoologist and he says that the big cats are really friendly if they know you, and they love pets.
Alien: You mean that these small creatures are related to these dangerous creatures?
Human: Yep, but it's alright, the worst these kitties can do are scratch.
Alien * equally terrified and curious as Pebbles comes close and nudges their leg, * : Who is this? * Pebbles scratches*
-Garbled alien screaming-
537 notes - Posted February 27, 2022
#3
Aliens and Humans Relationship Headcanons
General relationship headcanons, romatimic, platonic, etc. Cause my brain really ~Aliens like Humans~
- You know whenever there's a newborn baby and everyone coos over them? Yeah that's Aliens to Humans. Some are super tall and some are super short but it is agreed that Humans are ~baby~
- Most Aliens that have interacted/worked/met a bunch of humans has a favorite or a preferred human.
- Headcanoning one species of Aliens that are similar to cats. So when humans do they pspspspsp, these tall, scary looking humanoid/hybrid figures stumble over like cats. ALso this species are the same with cats and knocking things off places and chasing laser pointers.
- Imagine an Alien and Human who are together. But of course the Alien is scary and mean and in the middle of telling someone to go piss themselves, their human S.O shows up and the Alien melts into such a softy.
- Aliens either are super scared or super fond of humans. It makes sense given that Earth is Space Australia and we do banthashit things here.
- Probably classes at alien schools about Earth and Humans and there could be Human Transfers who are horrified at how Humans are presented. Human transfer students most likely being asked about human stuff
- Humans in public or in private are cuddlebugs, we like physical touch especially with the ones we love.
- Furries scare everyone, I mean have you seen them? ( this is a joke, I've met some furries and their all very nice :D)
- A thought, which i think is extremely funny, is how Aliens see our technology and compared to their technology is probably super old but humans make up for it with the enthusiasm.
- What about Aliens and swear words? I think this will be one of the next posts.
This will be continued :D
821 notes - Posted March 14, 2022
#2
I think that aliens would be extremely weirded out by third culture kids.
Here's my thinking. Aliens come from planets that have only one ruler or government so laws are the same for the entire planet. If you look at Earth that is not the case with how our countries have different laws and everything else. This is not to say that aliens don't have municipalities or regions but maybe not as complex as having 195 countries each with their own government and laws.
I feel like a conversation would end up like this between an alien and a third culture kid.
Alien: Human? What is a "Third Culture Kid"?
HUman: Oh that's where you are from one country, but you live in another and you speak a completely different language.
Alien: I thought all planets had one government. That is standard on Earth?
Human: Uhhh, no.
Alien: What do you mean?
Human: We have... 195 countries
Alien: What is a country?
Human: uhhh a country is... an area that is governed.
Alien: So a region? We have 5 of those on my home planet of *unintelligible name* What about you?
Human: uhhh.... 195.
Alien: How many? My hearing is not great
Human: 195. We have 195 countries.
Alien: *Visible confusion* 195? How do you agree on anything?
Human: We have Unions and groups to agree on things.
Alien: So this "Third Culture Kid"? What is it?
Human: I'm considered a third culture kid. Born in Austria, Raised in Australia and my first language is French. So a third culture is kid is someone who is born somewhere, speaks a completely different first language and whose raised somewhere other than their home country.
Alien: Humans are confusing.
974 notes - Posted February 14, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
Imagine aliens hearing a thick accent for the first time. Like I'm talking heavy Scottish or Irish specifically just because it's too funny. But just imagine how funny it would be to other humans. We already laugh at the hilarity of the irish and scottish way of speaking so this would be humours. Just think an alien thinking its normal human and then it talks with such a thick accent that the alien just blue screens.
For anyone going to say i am mocking or making fun of these accents, i am not. Simply it is for fun and is not to offend anyone. I am sorry if i did
1,014 notes - Posted February 19, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
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The galactic crossing program finality.
It had been a few... rest periods? She wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed, so she asked W.I.N.G her now silently angry Ai.
Freyith: “Hey uhh, wing?”
W.I.N.G: “What?”
Freyith: “How log have I been on this miner?”
W.I.N.G only sighed into Freyith’s ear piece as she quickly ran diagnostics.
W.I.N.G: “Its only been 4 seret (8.9 hours), and you still have not reconsidered leaving the deathworlders miner.”
Freyith: “Hush, they are doing something.”
W.I.N.G went silent as the deathworlder stopped the miner, stood up from their seat, and simply began to prepare some food stuffs. They had done this before, suddenly open their fang filled maw in a silent if not calming groan of sleepiness, before getting up and preforming some other task. Although they seemed to enjoy preparing different food items to eat every one of their three daily eating periods, they always surprised Freyith with the different confections and roasted succulent meats. This time it had taken out a large packet of freeze dried meat, primitive runes marked onto it with a foal smelling drawing material. It pried open the package and neatly placed the thin strips of fatty meat on a uniquely rectangular devise. It behaved similarly to the food prep surface that mysteriously erupted with heat each time it was needed to heat a meal, instead it needed to be attached to what Freyith originally suspected to be some sort of water dispenser. But it was in actuality a power outlet it seems, for a number of lights on the devise blinked to life as the similar sense of heat began to roil out of the rectangular heating surface. As the deathworlder coated the thin strips of meat with a sweet smelling semi liquid that had come out from a cylindrical container, the heat made the meal sizzle with the all too familiar sound of the deathworlders odd food preparation technique.
While the meat cooked, the deathworlder looked to me and gestured to the storage that contained the platters. It had done this before as well, it was a request it seemed. Freyith stood up and retrieved the two platters and handed them to the deathworlder, the deathworlder taking them and serving a generous helping of the thin strips of meat. It had prepared a soft white grain that was place beneath the sweet meat, this one she enjoyed. It didn’t seem to bother her digestive system, and the deathworlder possessed a great deal of it. It didn’t spoil easily, and seemly the deathworlder enjoyed it as much as she did.
The deathworlder handed out the eating utensils, as it had begun to eat its meal. Once it had finished it merely put away the plater and it’s utensils into the cleaner devise, and simply went back to its station. It had done that... three times now... eaten, cleaned, and then back to work. Work periods averaging out at 8 Quib (5 and a half hours), but what did she except. Suddenly, the miner stopped, as the deathworlder tapped on a number of data pads. Suddenly, a massive meteoroid landed off in the distance, it looked as if it would cause a massive creator, and all the work these deathworlders were doing. But... thrusters... and sheets of metal, appeared. The thrusters pushing up from the bottom, and the sheets of metal catching atmosphere from the top.
Once the meteoroid landed, the deathworlder for the first time got up from its post without needing to eat. And pulled a sitting station out from the wall, and sat in it. Offering the seat on the back of said sitting station.
W.I.N.G: “Freyith, think about this, a massive rock fell out of the sky and that means something to the deathworlder. What if it has just been fattening you up for later this whole time?”
Freyith: “Then it would have force fed me that fatty meat. Cmon, it’ll be fine.”
Freyith sat down in the seat and allowed the deathworlder to secure her to it, before it got into the forward seat. Metal plates folded out from the wall and surrounded the two of them, and the feeling of falling graced Freyith for a moment, before a comfortable landing followed by a light bouncing up and down.
W.I.N.G: “We are on a... ground transport?”
Freyith: “It would seem so.”
Looking out from a window in the protective plates, Freyith could see the massive miner she had been in all this time with the deathworlder. It was massive, and rather worm like. She could see another terrain vehicle that had folded itself into the side of the miner. And based off of the deathworlders love of symmetry, there was likely two more on the other side.
As the transport neared the meteoroid, Freyith could see other similar ground transport vehicles, each one with one or two passengers. The transport stopped, and the plates folded away. Freyith unsecured herself and stood up, slowly. She could noticed the widened, frightened eyes, of the other deathworlders.
Her deathworlder seemed to take the lead, standing next to the massive meteoroid. It seemed taller than the miner was long. The other deathworlders seemed to be arguing, but her deathworlder called their attention forward. A taller, stronger looking deathworlder with a darker skin pigment walked to their trans port and pulled from it a large shiny metal weapon.
W.I.N.G: “WHY AREN”T YOU RUNNING?”
Freyith: “I’ll just fly away at the first sign of trouble, relax.”
Her deathworlder took the metal weapon in hand, and brought a remote controlling devise up from their clothing storage pockets. And pressed something on it. A plate of stone on the side of the meteoroid folded away, as a large cylinder extended out of it. It was much larger than the little deathworlder, but despite this her deathworlder ran up to it. Her deathworlder brought up the metal weapon, and brought it down on the end of the cylinder. And the weapon stuck in with a large dent.
Her deathworlder made a gesture above his head, before running to the transport. All the other deathworlders did the same, so Freyith quickly secured herself into her seat. As her deathworlder hopped in, the metal plates came over her and it. And sealed with a hum.
The transport was moving fast now, Freyith kept her eyes fixed on the meteoroid. The transport reattached itself to the miner, and the plates folded away. The deathworlder jumped up quickly, tapping the data pad a few times as all the room was cover with projections and screens. Thousand of optical eyes fixed on one thing. The meteoroid. Suddenly, it began to... inflate? No it was bursting! The rock folded down, out of the way. Revealing a massive mesh holding thousands of transparent spheres. The mesh began to snap and fall away, as the spheres all rolled into the many rivers the deathworlders had been digging.
Her deathworlder was jumping around celebrating, they raced to their pilot helm, the miner drove itself out of the river bed with the help of the deathworlder. And backed up the back end up above the wall of earth, that divided the river bed from the deep lake. And with one ‘thunk’ the wall was gone, the dirt settled, and the spheres began to pop, actually pop! As thousands of units of liquid began to flow down the river, what's more many many tiny water creatures were swimming in the what my implant realized was water! They filled the lake and river! All the rivers were filled with water, as was the lake, and all were filled with thousands of aquatic creatures!
Her deathworlder was celebrating, they looked as though they would burst with excitement. It was happy, so happy. Freyith couldn’t help feeling happy too.
--------
Over the next few days, Freyith witnessed the first rain to occur on that planet, she witnessed the first plants grow without a greenhouse on the planet, she watched as the deathworlders retrieved the metallic weapon used to set life loose on the planet. And used it to harvest the first trunk of a dying “oak tree”, to grow on that planet. These humans, they changed the world, only a crew of 300 of them there, and 200 more operators back at their home world. And within 2 of there standard year cycles they managed to make that world into an arboreal paradise, they live there in the millions now, only 100 of their standard years cycles later. And in that time they have funded and terraformed 30 other planets.
Humans... they change worlds. The adorable changers of worlds.
And they come in peace.
_______
Authors note:
Hey everyone, sorry for my late submission, school has started up again and I’ve been shoulder deep in studies. Best of wishes to my fellow authors, prompters, and commenters for their inspiration for this piece.
#humans are space orcs#humans are space oddities#humans are adorable#humans are insane#humans are space australians#galactic crossing program
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The Space Between Us
Alien au? Alien au! I have no self control! Please accept this one shot that quickly spiraled into 23 pages of Virgil being a disaster in space. (If you guys enjoy it, let me know because I’m considering making it a series.)
Summary: The cosmos is a Gigantic place and somehow Virgil’s past still catches up to him.
Words: 11400
TW: Human trafficking, Human experimentation, dehumanization, fighting rings,
Quick taglist: @chelsvans @dante-reblogs @dwbh888 @glitchybina @faithfulcat111 @felicianoromano @harrypotternerdprincess @holliberries @jemthebookworm @killerfangirl3 @mrbubbajones @musical-nerd18 @nonasficcollection @stricken-with-clairvoyancy @the-sunshine-dims @themagicheartmailman @themultishipperchild @thenaiads @treasureofpriam @vianadraws @welovelogansanders
Read on Ao3 || General Writing Masterlist
“Tell me again why this is absolutely necessary?” Virgil asked, watching Logan’s hands dance across the console. On any other day the sight would be comforting. Every time his digits landed on a key, his nerves glowed with sparks of multicolored light through his transparent crystal skin, creating a beautiful firework show right in front of them all. Logan had told him once it was called Lightdancing, an evolutionary adaptation of the Tenkarie people: their bodies were near invisible in dim light, and they could control the pulses of light just enough to attract other cave dwelling creatures to them before striking the killing blow.
Now, though, the sight made Virgil’s stomach churn. Logan’s lights were a calculated system that he had trained to hone better than most of his race: he could make any part of his body glow at a brightness ranging from a flickering candle light to a flood light, he could make his whole body radiate or he could make just the tip of one of his sixteen fingers, he could even change the color of the light with just a thought. Virgil had always been glad that Logan was the only Tenkarie that dared venture from their caves on L0-G1C; Logan’s kind had perfected the use lights and dancing which made all other creatures become so nauseated they couldn’t fight back or become so mesmerized by the swirling motions that they didn’t see the attacks.
(Of course, because Virgil was rather distinctly human, it took longer for either of the effects of Logan’s fighting to work, which had saved both their lives more than once.)
However, in contrast to the usual focus of Logan’s fingertips on the control panel, lights were flickering all over his body, up and down each of his four arms and burning from the notches around his neck. The lack of control was enough to make Virgil’s stomach churn.
“Because its Remus,” Roman replied, although it didn’t help that he said his brother's name the same way he might have said puppy kicker.
“And we care about Remus because....?” Virgil prompted, running his fingers over his satchel again, checking the latches to make sure they were still there, still closed, still containing the supplies within. “If my memory serves me correctly, Remus was the one that set us up to be ambushed by those space pirates the other week. You know, the ones that nearly killed Patton?”
“We care because, in Erefrenian customs, blood bonds are the most sacred of bonds.” Logan supplied distractedly. “And Remus invoked the Oath of Brothers, which means that if Roman were to ignore his call for aid, Roman’s honor would be forever stained which would prevent him from crossing to the planes of heroes after his death according to the religion of his people.”
“Yeah that,” Roman says, even less excited than Logan at the idea. The bone spikes along his spine had been secreting that red poison that usually only happened when he got annoyed or anxious. Virgil had learned quickly to stay away from him when he was like that: touching it merely made Virgil’s limbs feel pins and needles, but the Orlun thief had screamed until unconsciousness.
It was one of the (very) few perks of being a Deathworlder, Virgil supposed. Most of the things that hurt the other species out here usually had a looser effect on humans because humans rarely made it this far. In fact, it was illegal for humans to get this far by at least sixty doctrines (all of which Logan had filed away in his room).
Humans were juggernauts-- the alien versions of the boogie man told to children to keep them from acting out. Virgil had seen some of the written documents about his kind, and the tales of bloodshed and terror invoked by merely existing were pretty horrifying. Graphic depictions of humans tearing aliens limb from limb, scientific studies on the amounts of chemicals that humans had absorbed and withstood against, an interview with a survivor of a human rampage who revealed the bite marks left by the so-called beast.
Almost every species out here was just as scared of him as he was of them.
The problem came from the ones that weren’t scared.
Which, of course, was how Virgil had ended up hundreds of literal light-years from Earth, on a ship with three aliens whom he was pretty certain he would end up dying for sometime very soon. Yurinks were crafty, shameless, bold, creatures, and they were notorious for visiting Earth and abducting humans for individual sale. Weslors ran fighting rings and humans were almost always the safest bets for some quick cash. Quitans were a fan of skinwearing, which was not something that Virgil ever wanted to see, based on the name alone. And Pol’turs loved learning how things worked and paid very handsome prices for human subjects on the space black market.
Virgil, himself, had sold for 300 griot. (Which was apparently a lot, based on the way that Patton’s eyes had quite literally bugged out. Virgil was still trying to figure out the conversation ratio of American dollars to griot and getting nowhere with it.)
“I hate him,” Roman said under his breath as he threaded through the spare armored uniforms in the storage, trying to find one to fit over the rigid bone plates along his back. His tail squirmed behind him as he searched, dragging the spikes through the air. “I hate him so much.” His bone claws cut through the fabric and he growled as he tossed the ruined clothes to the floor. “We’re gonna save him and then I’m going to toss him off into space, myself.”
Logan made an affirming noise, using his lower left arm to nudge his visor back up his nose. Virgil had only caught sight of Logan’s eyes once or twice, as most light strained his sensitive eyes. They had paid a pretty griot for a repair and a spare of his light blocking visor after the first time some space smugglers had surprised them and managed to break the lens. Logan’s pained scream was the worst thing that Virgil had ever heard and he had sworn he’d do anything to avoid ever having to hear it again.
(That had been the first time that Roman and him had truly worked together on something, Virgil noted absently. Between Virgil’s uncharacteristic bloodlust and Roman’s furious wrath they had taken out the smugglers in less than five minutes and they hadn't been very nice about it.)
Looking from the back, Roman resembled a stegosaurus to Virgil. If, like....stegosauruses ran around on two legs, flourished a sword, and were prone to acting like every minor occurrence was a slight against them personally. His red-ish skin had the appearance of leather but was twice as thick, his bone plates were slimmer rounded triangles than Virgil remembered from his kindergarten picture books but they ran from the based of his neck all the way down his back and to the tips of his tail which he liked to use as a spike-ball-and-chain attack along with his ridiculous sword. Virgil couldn’t count the number of times that Roman had nearly taken him out along with the enemy. His claws were only a few inches long but Roman whined like a baby when they broke-- which was ridiculous because his bone plates literally grew back overnight, and the ones on his forearms were made to be taken off and thrown. (Logan had indeed informed Virgil that Erefren grow new bones every moon cycle and proceeded to lose the old ones which Virgil had then mentioned that humans did that too sorta! With their baby teeth! And Roman and Logan had both looked unnerved by that information.)
“I’ve got it!” A voice sang from the ceiling, which was about all the warning Virgil got before a child sized figure vaulted down from the rafters of the teleportation deck right onto his shoulders.
“Jesus! Pat!” Virgil yelled as he stumbled swaying to accommodate the new weight that had stuck itself to Virgil’s back and then wrapped around to hug his chest. “Give a guy a warning, will you?”
Patton giggled, hooking his legs around Virgil’s waist so that he could sit comfortably, swinging the two other satchels he had been sent to fetch from his hands. Roman accepted one of them readily.
“What's a Jeeezus?” Patton asked, stressing the syllables as English terms never really fit right in his tongue. As far as Virgil was aware no species were equipped to speak human languages, although Roman’s Erefren dialect involved some rolling syllables. He probably could have picked up Spanish, if Virgil hadn’t barely passed Spanish III with a C minus.
To be fair though, that year had been bad. Janus had been in his class, and then he hadn’t. And it was hard to focus on conjugation of verbs when the golden student of the entire school who had sat next to him had been declared dead and Virgil had been the prime suspect of it.
That, and Virgil was pretty terrible at picking up new languages. He had only managed to figure out how to communicate with Logan by luck: hands raised with the fingers spread was a symbol of innocence and fear for the Tenkarie, while a sign of rage and fury for Yurink. This, of course, had also been in the middle of an illegal Weslor fighting ring which Logan had been dragged into and essentially sentenced to die in after being separated from Roman and Patton.
(Virgil tried not to think too much about those days. Alien blood was still blood and it was very not-good to feel dripping from his hands, even if it was him or them, even if it had been his life on the line, even if it wasn’t another human with heterochromic eyes and smug smirk. Virgil had fought nearly six times before Logan had been his opponent, and that was six times too many.)
Regardless, Virgil was lucky that when Roman and Patton had come for Logan, Logan had remembered his reluctance to fight and insisted that Virgil come with them in an escape. Roman and Patton had their hesitations but Logan wouldn’t take no for an answer.
(And Virgil who did not understand Common, had honestly thought that Logan had come back to kill him officially. Not a good first impression.)
Logan had made him flashcards to study from and taught him common in the sitting area of their ship. The endless hours of memorization, the drills, the sentences, all of which helped him more than he thought the others knew. They were something to do with his mind and Virgil had been in desperate need of something to do with his mind those first few months that wasn’t thinking about Earth or home or boys who were dead.
“We could go to Earth,” Logan had offered once during one of their sessions.
Virgil had blinked looking up to from the practice reading he had been studying with a bewildered look. “What?” It had taken a moment for him to realize that he had spoken in English rather than Common, but Logan must have picked up on the meaning of the foreign word anyway.
“You were… badly, ah, stolen,” Logan had said, pointing at the flashcards. “We could give you back.” He had used his lower two arms to mimic the motion of handing something off.
It had been so touching, the way that he had scaled down his speech to match Virgil’s progress, had offered despite Earth being the infamous Deathworld, had been looking at Virgil like he was living being and not just some animal. Virgil had cried.
He should have wanted to go back to Earth, should have wanted to go home, but instead he had begged in his broken, garbled Common for Logan to let him stay in space with them. And Logan had glowed nearly blindingly with purple light, a relief light, a content light, a happy light and promised that he wouldn’t have to go back if he didn’t want to.
Perhaps that had been the day the Virgil had realized he’d die for Logan.
And once Virgil had decided that for Logan it wasn’t hard to decide it for Patton too. The Reytin was just so nice. Even back in those first months when Virgil didn’t know how to talk to them and Patton had been so obviously terrified of him, the alien had made sure that Virgil was eating, that he was sleeping, that he had space when he needed it. Though, Virgil really suspected that their friendship had blossomed so quickly because of Patton's rare Reytin ability to see emotions with his frog-like eyes. Once he realized that Virgil was actually terrified of everything, and it wasn’t just ploy to kill them (or maybe despite that….Virgil hadn’t gotten a straight answer from him), Patton had done his best to befriend him back to good health.
And Virgil liked being on the ship. He liked his room, which was filled with stupid alien plants he had managed to collect and the weird shapes of the bed. He liked being right down the hall from the kitchen so he could smell when Patton was cooking something, and the way that he could always hear Roman singing in his room. He liked slipping out to the observation deck and just seeing Space the way no other human really had.
(Its stupid really, that sometimes he forgot it had been three years. Its stupid really, that sometimes he still turned to ask a question of someone who was never going to be there. Its stupid really that he could be so happy and still feel the gaping hole where someone used to be.)
“Oh this is so exciting!” Patton said happily, shaking his hands in the air to show his excitement. “Isn’t this exciting, guys?”
“Exciting isn’t the word I would use,” Virgil said hoisting the smaller creature from around his waist to settle him on the floor carefully.
“More like Vexing! Or perhaps burdensome! Irksome! Problematic!” Roman snarled, finally finding the armor that would fit around his plates and slipping it on. “You know what? Let’s forget it! Remus got himself into this mess and he can get himself out!”
“Now kiddo…” Patton warned, and wow, Virgil sometimes forgot that the alien who was half Virgil's height and twice as lively, was also older than all of them combined. Reytin lifespans were literally off the chart. Patton had been around way back when humans were first declared illegal on this side of the cosmos. “You know that we can’t do that! He invoked the Oath of Brothers so we have to!”
“We don’t have to do anything,” Roman griped. “Worse case, my soul just becomes eternally damned and I’m shamed by the rest of my race until I die a lonely, lonely death on some distant planet!”
“Must you be so dramatic?” Logan asked.
“You won't die alone!” Patton said, “We’ll be right there with you! Probably even die right next to you as well!”
“No offense Pat,” Roman said glumly, “But that makes me feel like I’m gonna be the cause of your death.”
“It’ll be fun!”
Thankfully before Roman could explain exactly there was nothing fun about making all his friends die, Logan cleared his throat and made his upper two palms glow with a soft blue light. Green and pink bulbs flashed up and down his neck. “I have mapped out the perceived trajectory of the enemy ship so we should be able to beam directly into the hold. However because of possible miscalculations I believe that I should be--”
“--The first to beam aboard as I am the only one who is not affected by the lack of gaseous properties and the extreme temperatures of the expanse of space.” Roman, Patton, and Virgil chorused together.
“Must you all?” Logan asked, with just enough fondness in his tone for Virgil to know that he wasn’t actually bothered.
“Change up your speech sometime, Teach,” Roman suggested, and then he sighed dropping his head. “You guys are really willing to do this for me? These are mercenaries, you know. If this doesn’t go well they’ll likely sell us for parts.”
Virgil really didn’t need the reminder. Just the thought of once again having his arms restrained, having his clothes striped away, being reduced from a person to a thing used for entertainment, was enough to have Virgil eyeing the door back to the rest of the ship. Even on the off chance that they didn’t try to take him apart to see how he ticked, they would still sell him for griot. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, survive being thrust back into the fighting rings. He’d shake himself apart before they managed to drag him into that dust riddled death trap.
Patton reached up and tugged the edge of Virgil’s under armor tunic, drawing his eyes away from the door and down to his friend. Patton, of course, was smiling, imitating the human action of bearing his teeth (something that Logan had explained was incredibly threatening to all other species and you may want to avoid participating in that activity with Roman in the vicinity, Virgil).
It was silly things like that that make Virgil hopelessly certain that he would do anything to protect his friends. He didn’t need to worry about being caught and sold off because the others wouldn’t let that happen again, and in turn, he wouldn’t allow them to be taken away either. They were a family, for better or worse.
(He wasn’t going to lose someone again. Not like before. Not without a fight, a trace-- not without Virgil doing every single thing he could to get them back first.)
“We’ll be fine!” Patton told Roman brightly.
“Yeah, cheer up, Princey,” Virgil added, hooking his satchel over his shoulder, “Worse case scenarios are my thing.” He offered out a folded fist, palm up and Roman dutifully knocked his own knuckles against it, as an upside down fistbump (a signal of friendship in Erefrenian).
Patton let out a chittering and jumped up to knock his own knuckles with them. And Logan’s left forearms flickered pastel pink from the wrist up to his neck and he begrudgingly added his own to the pile.
“Everyone remembers their part of the plan, correct?” Logan asked, letting his two lower arms finish typing a final sequence into the control panel.
Patton sprung in the air, jumping Virgil’s entire height, and shook his palms. “I’ve got the emergency pods and the armory, using Virgil’s thingies to shut down the access to the lower rooms and blocking off escapes as I make my way to the medic bay!”
“I’ve got the crew quarters to where I’ll use Virgil’s thingies--”
��Can we not call them thingies?” Virgil grumbled. “They’re just EMPs. Barely enough to take out the door locks. And it's likely they won’t do much of anything if this group has an emergency system reboot in case of an electrical surge. It’ll buy us five minutes, max.”
“--Virgil’s thingies,” Roman repeated with his tail rattling in that way that said he took pleasure in Virgil’s annoyance. “To lock as many of the doors as I can, before travelling to the cell blocks to get my brother and his crew and move them to the medic bay where Patton will have the necessary supplies ready incase of injuries.”
“I will take the Bridge,” Logan said, “and act as the major distraction, as Tenkarie are very rare and it is likely that they will have never encountered nor have preemptive measures against my Lightdancing. Once I have control of the bridge I will cut off the communications to other ships in the area and start inputting the redirection course. Once I have the new coordinates I will send them to Virgil for him to implement.”
“I’ve got the engineering deck,” Virgil said, finally, “To make sure they don’t try to blow us all up with the warp core and whatever. Then I’ll redirect the teleporting course and get us home while the rest of you take out the bad guys. Piece of cake.”
Logan’s neck notches glowed red, “There should be no stopping for cake--.”
“Idiom,” Virgil interrupted quickly, “Human saying. Means it should be easy.”
Logan hummed musically, which sent a vibration of multicolored lights off his shoulders and down under his clothes. “Ah, interesting. This should indeed then be a piece of cake.” He picked up one of the teleportation bracelets from their charging pads and fixed it on his upper right wrist. “I’ve already added in the coordinates to the watches, so merely wait for my signal and press the button.”
Virgil would be lying if he said he didn’t have a little bit of anxiety over their plan. It was pretty slapshot compared to the things that they had put together before, but Remus’s transmission had been shoddy, even after Roman and his combined efforts to clean it up. It was hard to remember that Remus was every bit a ship captain as Roman was with how he had appeared in the picture dressed in ripped and tattered clothes, oozing green poison from his forearm plates, and bleeding profusely from a wound on his forehead. He had been leaning heavily on the communication panel, gritting his teeth through the pain, but his tail had been dancing in the air behind him in the same motions that Roman’s did when he saw a new sword to add to his collection.
Remus had invoked the Oath of Brothers, spit up blood on the console, and then relayed as much information as he could about the attacking ship. They were lucky, in that way. Most of the Pol’tur ships followed the same base model, which meant that the Bridge was always going to be at the bottom, the engines would be at the top and the engine core center would be between them.
If it was possible Virgil was sure they all would have wanted more time to make a better plan, but they all knew that Pol’turs loved to work quickly. They had already lost three days chasing after the ship, and in that time, Pol’turs could cut apart fifty Reytins like Patton.
They were working mostly on the assumption that the Pol’turs would save Remus for near last, and they were going to be absolutely fucked if they had chosen to chop up the other Erefren first.
In addition, their plan had Virgil avoiding most of the fighting. well, as much as he could while being on an enemy ship. Virgil himself wasn’t sure how he would do in a lot of combat, but they had seen what happened when one of the others were in danger (when Logan’s glasses had broken, when the space pirates had almost shot Patton through both his hearts, when the spikes had been pulled from Roman’s spine by the Quitans before the new ones had grown in--). He could fight, and he could fight well, but the cost was a little bit of Virgil’s sanity and his ability to sleep through the night.
Patton plucked his own teleportation watch from the pad and hooked it on, before offering Virgil his. Well it wasn’t really his, the same way that the red one wasn’t Roman’s and Patton didn’t own the blue one. They were all Logan’s pet projects, but he had tailored them to their favorite colors. It felt a bit like coming home when Virgil clicked the locking mechanism into place and the screen lit up with the digital alien symbols.
“I shall see you all soon,” Logan said matter-of-factly, as if he couldn’t see all the ways that their plan could go wrong. Then with barely more than a breath he clicked the activation button and his form flickered out of existence.
Roman made a nervous noise with the back of his throat, which ended up sounding a bit like the first bars of a Disney song Virgil had forgotten. Virgil gently tapped his tail with the toe of his boot, avoiding the glisten poison spikes. Roman startled just enough to laugh.
“Its funny, you know?” He said, glancing towards Virgil. “A year ago Remus told me he had taken in a Deathworlder, and I thought he was crazy. A Deathworlder? But now that I know you guys I can’t believe I didn’t get my own sooner.”
“Remus has a human on his crew?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, I wonder if you know each other!” Patton added.
Virgil bit back his original comment, and let the weight settle in his stomach. If Remus had a human in his crew there was even more of a chance that Remus was dead, because the Pol’turs had chosen to save the mysterious human for last.
“Earth is a big place,” Virgil said instead. “Like really big. They’d probably be from like Russia or something.”
At the blank stares he got, Virgil tried rewording, “We probably never have met before. Or speak the same language.”
"There's more than one human language?"
Virgil breathed through his nose, warding off a memory of rolling Rs and failed pop quizzes. "Yeah," he said, "Humans can't agree on anything."
Roman thoughtfully crossed his arms, but Patton made a chittering again and bounced, “Oh well! Now you guys are gonna meet! All the way out in space! How cool is that?!”
Virgil hid a smile in his shoulder. Trust the Reytin to find the bright side to everything.
Roman looked like he had more questions (questions that Virgil wasn't exactly enthusiastic to answer; Earth was a sore topic for him) but mercifully each of their watches let out several musical bars from Patton’s favorite song. The alien shook his palms one last time, beaming at each of them.
“Oh this is gonna be so much fun, guys!” He said right before pressing the activation button and disappearing.
“I’m so going to kill Remus for this,” Roman grumbled, one hand on his sword hilt.
And, really, Virgil agreed with him on that. Tossing Remus into the airlock and ejecting him directly into the void sounded like an excellent plan for when they got back to their ship alive and whole and safe.
“Let’s do this,” Virgil said and jabbed his thumb into the activation button.
***
Predictably, their flimsy plan fell apart within seconds of them appearing on the ship. Starting with, exactly, Virgil did not appear in or near the engineering deck. Instead he had landed approximately two feet above a box in the Cargo hold of the Pol’turian ship, which likely meant he was somewhere left of where he needed to be.
It also meant that the Pol’turs in the Cargo Hold had a grand view of his body blitzing into existence, landing on a crate, and then tumbling off it with a lot of English cursing. It was a mere matter of luck that Virgil was able to roll his body to the side just before the first BZZZTTRRRT of their blasters went off.
(There was an actual name for the guns that most aliens used, and Virgil was pretty sure that it started with a hard K sound but he had never been able to remember it. He stuck to calling them blasters in his head, and hoped somewhere back on Earth George Lucas was proud of himself.)
The Polyfurnish of the crate hissed and sizzled as it took the brunt of the attack meant to vaporize Virgil, and the human hissed another curse as his hands dug through his satchel.
One of the Pol’turs-- the deep purple one although Virgil hadn’t truly been able to catch sight of how many there were-- shouted something in its language. Probably something along the lines of “Stop”, “Surrender”, or “Kill him”. Virgil wasn’t exactly a fan of any of those options.
He had heard them before-- too many times. The hundreds of variations of the terms spat and yelled and cheered down at him, and he scrambled away from the edge of a sword, as he tasted nothing by dust and dirt as he dodged another attempt on his life, as he desperately backed away from an opponent who couldn’t understand that Virgil didn’t want to fight, please, stop, please, I’m sorry, please I don’t want to hurt anyone--
Virgil curled up as another gold blast ricocheted off the top of the crate he was cowering behind. The air was cooler here, he told himself, the air was cooler and the floor was slicker, and he was surrounded by shelves of goods. He was not in a colosseum and he was not in a fighting ring and he was not alone.
He had the others to regroup with and no time to panic over the past here and now. Virgil gritted his teeth, remembering the feel of Roman’s knuckles bumping his, the sight of Logan’s excited lights, the sound of Patton’s laughter, and then his hand wrapped around the homemade smoke bombs in his satchel.
He yanked the pins from their sockets, wound back, and launched them over the crate into the mass of where all the shooting was coming from. Almost immediately the shoots veered off course, and the cavernous room echoed with high pitched screams. Virgil ripped his turtleneck up and over his nose and then he grabbed the edges of the nearest shelf and hoisted himself to a higher area, out of the range of the low hanging gas.
It was a pale red, near pink thing: a concoction formed by Logan out of Roman’s poison that had taken them literal years to perfect. Virgil was mostly immune to it, the same way he was mostly immune to most poisons that horrified the other species. Inhaling it made his head dizzy and his limbs a little numb, which was just unpleasant enough that he tried to avoid inhaling anything when he had the chance. Other species though...they weren’t so lucky. According to Logan, inhaling it allowed it directly into the bloodstream where it would swiftly ignite all the pain sensors in the body and could make one feel like they were being stabbed everywhere at once.
(He knew this, Logan admitted, because it had taken him many times to get it right. His scientific journals recorded experiments #1 through #357 as “unpleasant” and “ill-advised” and Virgil had nearly throttled him when he discovered that Logan had used himself as a test subject.)
Using the shelves he boosted himself another level until his head was parallel with a box of what he thought were floating Welsor hearts, before he scanned the ground under him. There were three Pol’turs on the ground writhing in pain, blasters discarded, and pale smoke floating ominous above them. Their usually languid tentacles flopped up and down on the floor like a bunch of fish out of water.
The glass container next to his hip exploded, missing him by mere millimeters. Virgil cursed as he scrambled up another level, eyes darting around to find where the hell that shot came from. His armor took much of the hit but it was sizzling with heat in a way that was decidedly not-comforting.
“Up there!” Something shouted.
Another blast missed his ear and a container of Sblorp fangs shattered and sent the teeth spilling to the floor. Virgil kicked his feet through the lower shelf pushing through a crate and a dozen jars of various indeterminable body parts and squeezed his body in the place of them. The crashes on the next isle were rather satisfying.
He ripped the pin from another smoke bomb with his teeth, and felt his tongue buzz slightly as the proximity to the toxin before he launched it out at the direction of the other shooter. There was another scream and Virgil took the time to roll into the next isle and leap back down to the floor.
The gas still hadn’t cleared around the original three Pol’turs, but they had gone unconscious from the pain, with a few seizing tentacles here and there. Virgil would feel bad about it, really he would, but the last time he had been in a room of Pol’turs they had been discussing how nicely his skull would look in the centerpieces of their tables and tried to buy him for 270 griot.
His skin tingled the same way he thought it might right before he would get struck by lightning back on Earth. Virgil ignored the feeling in honor of sliding across the polished flooring to the nearest fallen mercenary and hoisting it up as a shield, while he grabbed its blaster from the floor.
Two blaster shots sunk into his Pol’tur shield and it dissolved into ashes in his hand. Virgil cursed again, raising the blaster with his other arm and using his ash coated hand to slide the trigger, because this blaster-- like all other blasters-- were not made for human anatomy at all.
The last Pol’tur was a sickly orange color, like some type of invasive evil moss with long arms. Virgil grinned as the blast exploded forth in a dangerous golden ray of death. The heat singed the edge of his fingers, although the mild numbness prevented him from feeling much more than the slight pressure he assumed was warmth. The shot went wide, and the kickback sent Virgil to the floor, but it was enough.
The blast shattered though several items on the shelves and Pol’tur scrambled back to avoid the avalanche of perishables-- scrambled back right into the pink fog of Virgil's last smoke bomb. It was screaming before Virgil could even sit back up.
Virgil inhaled heavily, sucking as much oxygen into his lung as he could afford and breathing it out through his nose. He squeezed his hand around the handle of the blaster, and tried to pretend like his skin didn’t feel too small. His empty hand-- the one that had held the Pol’tur-- was trembling, shaking, burning.
“I just think you’d be better off spending time with someone else.”
“You’re not fooling anyone, Storm!”
“What was it like, Virgil? When you killed him?”
His hand was covered in soot, tingling from nerves and poison and the heat of the blast that had annihilated all evidence of the living, breathing alien.
“It wasn’t….” Virgil breathed heavily, “I didn’t….”
He sucked in another breath, two, three, seven breaths, until he could feel the masquerading gas in the air turn his face numb, and the voices in his head went back to threatening buzzing.
“Fuck,” he whispered softly, and pushed himself off the ground.
Virgil took the blaster with him, and made a private note to ask Logan to look into building communicators for times like this. There were an untold number of things that could have happened to get them mixed up: the Pol’tur ship could have barrel rolled at the time of, or before the final teleportation codes were in, it could have slowed or sped up, it could have marginally changed direction. All of which just proved that only stupid people like Virgil, Logan, Roman, and Patton would dare attempt a teleportation on a moving ship. Virgil tried not to think about what would have happened if his coordinates had been a little lower in space, a little closer to the box he had landed on, a little more personal and prompted whatever was inside of the crate merged with whatever was inside of Virgil.
It took him a moment to realize that the lights had started flashing an interspaced red and yellow series: a visual alarm to the crew.
“Fun,” Virgil mumbled, hugging the wall next to the exit, with one last breath, and then punching the exit lock. The hydraulics took a moment to work (probably due to excessive use of the doors and wear on the components), but it opened to reveal a brightly lit, completely empty hallway. Virgil raised his blaster, checking both the direction before he stepped out and punched the door closed behind him. Then he lined the blaster up with the door controls and fired.
You know, for safekeeping. The last thing they needed was the Pol’turs inside to wake up with a vengeance and come after them before they were off the ship.
(If he was still on the ship by the time that they woke up, Virgil was pretty sure he’d be dead. But hey! Surprising things happened all the time when one lived in fucking space.)
The floor was springy under his feet, some mixture of carpet and flooring that Virgil didn’t know the name of, just that it was weird and he didn’t want it in his Sims House. He could feel the fibers through his shoes as he hugged the wall and sprinted towards where he thought the Engine room would be located.
He could hear the sound of more blasters echoing from the depths of the ship, some yelling, some cursing: all lovely signs that Roman was doing his best to be the most annoying moving target anyone had ever seen. Virgil found his lips curling into a smile as he faintly at the noise.
“Oh come on!” Roman taunted, “I’m a big guy! Surely, you can’t be that bad of a shot!”
There was deafening BZZZTTRRRT, a clamorous crashing, and an ear splitting series of screams.
Virgil flung around the last corner but in time to see Roman stand up from a kneeling position over a clump of bodies that had probably been more alive a few seconds ago. There were blaster marks all along the walls, and several had blown through a wall revealing a cozy living quarters with giant sword slices in the beddings and floors.
“Oooh, so close!” Roman said with faux-empathy bordering on smugness which at this point should just be his default to the mass. “Maybe next time you’ll think more before attacking an Erefren!” He spun at the sight of Virgil coming around the corner, pointing his sword and then shaking his tail in a greeting.
“Roman,” Virgil sighed in relief. “You okay?”
“Virgil! It seems like I got a little off course! Checked the prisoner cells but they were all empty. And then a few new friends of mine had some fun things to say about Remus.” Roman looked feral as he bared his teeth. He jabbed his sword down into the corpses and something wheezed painfully. Virgil didn’t look at them, didn’t look at them, didn’t look.
“Do you know where he is?” Virgil asked.
Roman used the edge of his shirt to wipe the blue grey blood from the tip of his blade. “Not yet, but if you give me a few more minutes with these lovely fellows of mine I will!”
It did not take “a few more minutes”. Roman hoisted on still gasping Pol’tur up by its gangly neck and it had already started blubbering in a mix of languages. Virgil watched the halls while Roman took notes from their new best friend.
Half a minute later Roman dropped their captive to the ground with a fire in his eyes and turned to Virgil with his bone plates clinking, and dripping poison.
“He was on the Bridge.” He said, coldly, “He didn’t know if they had finished with Re or not, but he was up there”
“Okay,” Virgil said.
“The rest of his crew, Virgil,” Roman growled, squeezing the hilt of his sword. “His friends! His family!” He stared down at the shaking cowering alien life. “They..!”
The back of Virgil’s throat tasted like his stomach acids.
Remus had tried to have them killed, he had sold them out, he had been a thorn in their side since before Virgil had become part of the team. Between the harrowing escapes and the near deaths, it wasn’t hard for Virgil to absolutely despise him.
But his crew? His entire crew? In three days?
Just….gone?
Condensed into the memories with a snap, removed from the future in just a blink. The initial attack on them must have been bad and bloody for Remus to call them for help, a surprise ambush type of attack. And for all Virgil hated Remus, he couldn’t help but wonder if Remus had had plans with them-- had they been discussing visiting the bars on L3-012 or shopping on K5-369 or relaxing on C2-276? Had Remus made plans with the people he had been close with and now those plans were meaningless because the people he had made them with were dead and gone and never coming ba--
The Pol’tur on the ground giggled something hysterically, one last brave blubbering comment, and Roman took the toe of his boot right into the creature's soft flesh. Its tentacles flopped on the floor with a plu-plat.
“Virgil,” Roman hissed, without looking up.
Virgil blinked and swallowed hard, “Right, Engines,” He said, turning to go back to his task but Roman reached out and hooked his claws on Virgil’s shoulder, stopping him there.
“Change of plans,” The Erefren said, “You’re coming with me to the Bridge to get my idiot brother.”
Logan was on the Bridge too. Roman didn’t need to have Virgil come with him-- in fact, Virgil shouldn’t come with him. Too many people, too close to fighting, and Virgil couldn’t wipe away the feeling of grit on his hand.
His entire crew. In just three days.
Roman didn’t mention anything about how Virgil was shaking from head to toe, and Virgil didn’t point out the way that Roman’s voice wobbled with silent pleading. He just nodded at the alien and let him lead the way towards where they suspected the examination rooms would be.
Two heads are better than one, and all that.
It was less of a guessing game when the halls and doors were labeled and Roman was very fluent in Pol’turian. Roman was quick to move, quick to sort his way through the poorly designed areas, quick to move. Virgil kept the pace as well as he could, watching the halls behind them for stragglers attempting to get the drop on them and Roman cut down anything in his way.
Blue grey blood splattered across their shoes, filling the air with a sickly sour smell that made Virgil want to gag. He settled for squeezing the handle of the balster and counting out his breaths again as he avoided Roman’s tail striking forward at astonishing speeds and squeezing his eyes shut when he thought he saw a pair of mismatching eyes in the reflection of the lights.
There was no way for them to go quietly through the halls, not with Roman stomping hard enough to shake the entire ship and his poison attacks turning every enemy into a screaming, begging, crying puddle.
“Roman!” Virgil yelled as heat billowed around them, and the taller alien stumbled back, hit the wall and fell to his knees.
Virgil snarled at one of the mercenaries and fired three times at them. Between the near misses and the scattered yells of “Deathworlder!” they retreated into nearby rooms and locked the doors after them. Virgil tore one of his EMPs from Roman’s belt and sent it flying down the hall to keep them trapped there for a little bit, before he turned to check on Roman.
His shirt was smoldering, and one of his bone plates were cracked, but he just looked out of breath and angry, “I’m fine.” His claws scraped the floor as he stood up. “Armor took most of it.”
Virgil checked the hallway again. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, like a cancerous lump that he couldn’t get rid off no matter how much he swallowed or coughed. It pulsed to a beat that he wasn’t sure he could replicate: too fast and yet the space between each thud had felt like forever. It was so loud he almost was afraid of missing the sounds of another attack.
(An attack where Roman’s armor wouldn’t be enough, where he wouldn’t be able to wheeze off the pain, where he’d hit the wall then the floor and he wouldn’t be able to get back up and it would be all Virgil’s faul--)
Roman’s claws pricked his shoulder as he looked. With a slightly trembling hand he pointed in the direction they needed to go and Virgil did his best not to let his churning stomach get the better of him.
“Virgil! Roman!” They both spun at the voice; Roman in particular struck out with his tail, and just narrowly avoided impaling Logan’s crystalline chest on spikes.
Logan didn’t even flinch, not that he could really. His lower arms spread with palms out to signal innocence but his upper arms were busy holding up the profusely bleeding Erefren that was leaning mostly on him. Logan’s arms were flickering with so many colors Virgil couldn’t keep track of them. (Vaguely it reminded him of a disco ball, of party lights, of something so Earthly it would have made him laugh if he wasn’t so busy trying to hold back a panic attack.)
“Remus,” Roman breathed, reaching forward, impossibly gently.
“Ro’mn,” Remus slurred, shifting his head ever so slightly. His blood was pooling down the left half of his face, his eyes were partially glassy, but other than that he looked remarkably like Roman: they shared the same face with a strong jawline, the same dark dark hair curled the same way, and the same long tail with dozens of bone plates. The only real difference was the tinge of white in Remus’s hair, the oozing green poison leaking from his bone structures in place of Roman’s red, and the gaps where someone had torn out his bone plates before Remus had grown new ones in.
“Didn’t think…” Remus’s head lulled to the side, showing off the smile he was desperately forcing on his face, “didn’t think… you were comin’.”
“I’m throwing you out of the airlock,” Roman told him.
“‘ounds fun…” Remus murmured, dropping his head back to Logan’s back, and wincing like each inhale was a battle.
“They had him on the Bridge,” Logan explained, “When I arrived, they were attempting to retrieve information from him through barbaric methods. I may have gone overboard with my retaliation.” Logan shifted Remus’s weight slightly, drawing a groan from the other alien. “I am by no means a medical examiner, however, I suspect that he may have several rib fractures, and a few wounds that need to be looked at and well bandaged.”
Roman nodded, although Virgil didn’t think he actually heard anything. Virgil was an only child himself, but he could guess that even if Remus had been the biggest asshole in the entire cosmos seeing him reduced to this weakened, bloody, broken mess was terrifying. From the stories of their childhood, Virgil had always guessed that Remus was as lively as they came. But this version of him couldn’t even stand by himself.
Roman’s head shot up, “Patton. Where’s Pat? We’ve got Re, now its time to get out of here and get him help--”
“NO!” Remus shouted lunging forward suddenly. Logan stumbled at the change of weight, nearly dropping him to the floor, but it seemed that the movement had taken most of the rest of his power. “I can’t… They have…Jay… I prom’sed…”
Virgil checked the hall for enemies because that was easier than looking at the desperation in Remus’s eyes. His voice was scratched and grated like a glass under the assault of a diamond. He coughed so violently it dragged out a glob of purple blood from him.
“Remus, you can’t--” Roman said.
And despite Remus looking like a simple breeze could end his life, he grabbed at Roman’s outreached arm, above the danger of the forearm spikes.“Me and... my crew,” Remus coughed, weakly. “The oath…”
“I talked to one of those bastards,” Roman countered, forcibly soft, forcibly strained. “Re, your crew is--”
“Ro…” He pleaded, “Please.”
Roman made a noise like something in him was physically shredding him apart. Virgil suspected it was his hero complex, which usually manifested the urge to save every living being he saw. Lost wasn’t a good look on Erefrens, Virgil decided right then and there. Hopeless and terrified and sad-- all of them made Roman look wrong.
“What's wrong, Vee? You look like you want to say something.”
“....It’s nothing.”
“What? Not even a joke? Come on, I know you--”
“Let it go, Ekans.”
Virgil blinked away the unwanted memory. He sighed out of his nose and reached up to hook on the back of Roman’s armor collar. “Let’s go.”
“Virge…” Roman murmured.
“If we don’t do this now,” Virgil said, “We’ll regret it.”
He didn’t wait for the others to catch up with his train of thought, or maybe he wasn’t waiting for his own train of thought to catch up. He tugged Roman back a step and nodded at Logan. “We’ll double back and find any crew that’s left and get Pat. You take Remus to the engine room room and get the codes ready for us to get back.”
“For real?” Roman said.
“Understood, Virgil.” Logan nodded back. He glowed purple softly, around his neck notches as if he had expected this after all. “Don’t be late.”
“Time is a construct.”
Remus laughed like he was choking on a handful of rusted nails. Roman tensed at the sound, gritted his teeth, and then tightened his grip on his sword. Resolved hardened in his eyes, burning through the lost expression like a lighthouse in the middle of a storm.
“Right,” Roman said, “Let’s go.” Roman grabbed Virgil’s hand and took off in the direction they had come from. “Any guesses where the guy’s gonna be? Or where Pat is?”
Virgil felt his stomach churn. He closed his eyes and let Roman pull him along as he tried to remember the 3D diagram of a Pol’turian ship. “Well if I was in cargo, you landed near the prisoner blocks, while Logan was on the Bridge...that means that while Logan was doing the calculations the ship probably did a half roll on the longitudinal axis, which he couldn’t have accounted for. Since this ship appears to be the same as the other makes and models of Pol’turs that means that Patton probably ended up in the medical bay. And if I had to guess that’s where any last member of the crew would be as well. Take this left here.”
Roman nearly stumbled over his own feet. “How in the name of the Great God, Disney-- have you memorized all the maps?”
Virgil furrowed his brow at the alien, “Haven’t you?”
“Well yes, but--” Roman’s face flushed with a bit of his purple blood, “Nevermind, Deathworlder.”
The medical wing of the ship was easy to get to compared to the other places. It seemed that either the Pol’turs had wisened up for an ambush or they had fled when they had the chance. Either way they only came across two mercenaries and Roman made quick work of them.
He knew they had arrived by the buzzing of air, the tingle of his skin that made him feel too big and too small at the same time. The walls were bare and there were four rooms lining them, each with a number engraved in the door and the lock panels glowing red with what Virgil guessed was the Pol’turian symbol for “closed” or “locked” or “dangerous chemical inside do not release”. Virgil reached for another EMP, but his bag was empty. There were scents around them, faint scents: something metallic, something sour, something clean, something, something, something--
Something that smelled like blood. So many different kinds of blood.
Virgil swallowed hard. He hadn’t known a lot about Remus’s crew, but he knew that Remus had had a dozen different species with him. A dozen different species that hadn’t survived the encounter.
“Pat!” Roman yelled down the hall, brandishing his sword.
“Roman! In here! Help--” A voice that was most definitely Patton’s yelled out.
Roman didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward to the room the voice had come from, almost feverishly, desperately, and he didn’t bother with the password. With a swift violent motion he jabbed his sword into the locking panel and then pried open the door with his claws and his hands.
Virgil thought that it would have been one hell of a sight: if he had been strapped to a table, a knife jab from death’s door, begging, pleading, crying and knowing that all his friends had been taking to the room before him and had not come back out intact? If Virgil had been bleeding out and clinging to the slippery bit of hope that was a miracle, and then he saw his captain’s brother literally prying open the door with his bare claws to get to him---
Virgil thought it would have been pretty awesome.
Not something that should have warranted a knife being thrown at them.
Roman let out a curse in Erefren and it was one of those don’t-repeat-this-don’t-tell-Patton curses that Roman specialized in. He staggered back, clutching his shoulder where the knife had sunk in all the way to the hilt, Jesus! What the hell! Virgil kicked the rest of the door open, dropping low as scalpel skirted by where his body should have been, and then he sprung back up with his blaster set on that asshole.
Except.
“Virgil!”
The room was small, almost claustrophobically small. Just standing in the doorway made Virgil’s breath shorten (his cell back at the Welsor fighting rings had been bigger than this--). And it was lit with cold harsh white light, nearly blinding, if it weren’t for the greyed walls and the splashes-- the splashes of faded pink and blue and other colors that Virgil recognized all too well as blood. The table took up most of the room, leaving just enough space for a Pol’tur to sweep around and a small hand tray of twisted instruments.
In fact there was a Pol’tur on the ground right there. Limp and unmoving with an eye scoop so far in it’s skull there was no way it was coming back out.
But Virgil wasn’t staring at the body.
“Don’t you get tired of being everyone’s favorite person?”
It couldn’t--
“Just shut up and help me with these conjugations, will you?”
This wasn’t--
“What do you mean no one can find him?”
He hadn’t--
The detective had looked at him with such a pity that it had made Virgil’s entire body flinch. He squeezed the plastic cup in his hand, crushing it, letting the fragments cut into his skin. He couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything. The man was still talking to him, talking softly like anything louder would shatter the fragile reality around them, talking so quietly Virgil couldn’t hear a single thing he was saying at all over the sound of his own heartbeat.
“You’re wrong,” Virgil had croaked. “He’s not dead.”
But he had been.
He had been for nearly two years now.
And everyone had thought that Virgil had done something to him, had thought that Virgil was the last to see him, had thought that his dark clothes and his eye shadow and a few sneers in the hall had meant that Virgil was suddenly capable of killing Janus Ekans in cold blood.
Except.
Except that Virgil was staring at Janus --fucking-- Ekans right now.
It was unmistakable, the shape of his face, the curve of his lips, the slimness of his nose. The wispy brown hair that turned golden under the summer sun, the mischievous eyes danced with different colors, the flick of his tongue that moved so freely when he let it, the tattoo of two theater masks on his chest that no one was supposed to know about-- Virgil could have spent days naming things, committing them to memory, staring in disbelief at him. This was the same boy who had sat next to him in Spanish. The same Janus who had been convinced he was so completely untouchable up until Virgil had dragged him off his stupid, golden pedastal.
It was the same Janus who was currently wrapped around Patton like a boa constrictor cutting off the alien’s ability to move and had a knife perched ever so closely to one of Patton’s eyes.
“What the hell?” Virgil had said because-- because--
Because Virgil had asked Logan once if there was a race that could pick through minds, pull memories from heads, change the way someone thought. And Logan didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t lie to him. There were no alien types that could break into a mind and drag illusions into reality and there were no races that could bring ghosts back from oblivion.
“Virgil,” Janus said barely a whisper, barely enough to be heard, barely enough to mean anything. The knife was tilting in his hand, tipped like he wasn’t sure what he was saying, wasn’t sure what he was doing. “What-?”
Partially drugged, Virgil thought with absolutely no room to breathe in his chest. Partially drugged, holding a knife to Patton’s weakest point, and alive.
“Janus,” Virgil said, ”Put down the knife.”
He’s still partially strapped to the table, bound by his left ankle and sporting a lovely series of cuts on the side of his face as if someone had started carving scales into his cheek for funsies. If Virgil had to hazard a guess he would have assumed that Patton had dropped in literally as the Pol’tur was taking Janus-- Janus, alive, breathing, real-- apart one centimeter at a time, then proceeded to win a very cramped fight in the room. Virgil would even say that Patton had started taking the restraints off of Janus when he had gained enough consciousness to realize that he needed to defend himself.
(The fact that they found something capable of drugging a human, a Deathworlder, was concerning, so concerning, terrifying--)
“Virgil….You are not real,” Janus said, slowly, blood dripping down his neck. “You cannot be real. None of this is real.”
“I’m the one thats not real?” Virgil muttered. “You’re the one that was declared dead.”
He laughed. Virgil’s stomach swooped.
For a second, a brief fleeting second, he could have sworn that this was all a dream. A fever dream in which Virgil would blink himself awake from and find himself on the floor of Janus’s stupid, giant ass room surrounded by a dozen cans of off-brand energy drinks, a half eaten bucket of popcorn, and the credits for a horror movie scrolling on the screen. For a second it felt like he would roll over and bump elbows with Janus who had woken up an hour previously to study for that stupid Spanish test that wasn’t until Monday. For a second it was like he was seventeen again and his biggest worry was figuring out if it was too weird to ask to run his hands through Janus’s silky hair.
“Of course, I was declared fucking dead!” Janus said, like it was the obvious thing that would happen, “I am dead. I have to be, because there’s no other way that the kid who's afraid of going outside made it this far into space.”
“Janus, put down the knife.” Virgil took a step forward, a half a step, but Janus just squeezed the knife tighter.
“Why don’t you come and make me?” Janus smiled at him, smiled, smiled, smiled.
Smiled like he knew that this was a dream and nothing he did was going to matter. Smiled like they were back on that balcony of his room with their feet swinging between the bars and two Seagrams gone each and they were going to get in a shit ton of trouble for it. Smiled like he had never been dead and Virgil hadn’t had to bury the thought of him.
Patton made a noise, a small whimper, and Virgil felt it in his chest. The near silence of the room, the soft muted buzzing in his head, the fuzzy dream like quality of reality-- it all shattered at the sound. Shattered like glass, like a mirror, like the concept of “forever”. It shattered and Virgil was suddenly hyperaware of how small the room was, how cold he felt, how metallic the air smelt.
“Hm, just as I thought,” Janus said softly, smile dropping into something wistful and disappointed, “I really am just seeing thin--”
Virgil didn’t give him the satisfaction of finishing; he surged forward, throwing his blaster to the side, and using his left hand to catch Janus’s wrist millimeters from putting that knife in Patton. He twisted his hand, pining his fingers into the soft flesh of Janus’s nerves until his hand jerked open on reflex and the knife fell into the open air.
Janus froze, inhaling so sharply Virgil was certain that he took all the oxygen in the room away.
He was warm, Virgil realized absently. He was warm and had a pulse and for some reason both those things made Virgil’s chest hurt. His skin was soft and his breath was sweet and Virgil had gotten punch-drunk stupid on less.
Which probably explained why, how, when, Virgil’s lips ended up on his, pressing firmly, and tasting like something from a past Virgil had thought he had given up on. Virgil had always been stupid, but this was another level of stupid. This was incredibly dumb, unbelievable, ridiculous.
Janus’s mouth was on his, and Virgil’s hand was tipping his head back ever so slightly, and Patton had managed to scramble out of Janus’s absolutely shocked slacked hold.
“You’ve always been so annoying,” Virgil gasped between breaths, “Always thinking you know everything. Have you ever considered you might be wrong before?”
“You’re--” Janus whispered, “Real? For real?” Then, “Don’t you know what the fuck consent is?”
“Fuck you,” Virgil told him.
Janus grabbed him by his collar and yanked him forward again. “Since you asked so nicely.”
“Don’t be cute.”
“Don’t be coy.” Janus shot back because he was still the same asshole who needed to have the last word. He bit at Virgil’s lip, and then pulled back to show off a wolfish grin.
Virgil was stuck somewhere between wanting to smash his stupid smug face in and wanting to kiss him until he lost all sense of direction. Janus was like that, Virgil remembered suddenly, even when they were kids, when Janus was trapped on that pedestal everyone had put him on, when Virgil couldn’t have cared less about him and somehow had ended up unsure how to live without him.
“Not that this isn’t the fucking cutest shit I’ve ever seen--“ A voice behind them called and Virgil stiffened.
“Language!” Patton interrupted, as Roman grunted through the pain of still having a surgical knife in his shoulder.
“--But can the two of you save your weird-ass….human…. greeting custom…. for some other time?” The Erefren snarled with one hand clutching the hilt and then yanking it out with a wheeze that Virgil felt physically. His purple blood spouted out from the wound but Roman didn’t seem to care, beyond tossing the knife to the floor.
“That’s an Erefren,” Janus said because he’s just as good at stating the obvious as he is at kissing. “That is not Remus.”
Roman snapped out something in his native tongue, which by the stress on the syllables was probably not nice and definitely not Patton approved. The Reytin even puffed up, shaking his head in a way that normally prefaced an hour long lecture on manners and the reintroduction of a swear jar.
However, Janus just laughed that pretty stupid little laugh of his but when he opened his mouth the words were all forgein. It took Virgil a moment to catch up, a moment to realize that he hadn’t even fumbled, that Janus had actually spoken Erefrenian and it had been grammatically correct enough that stunned Roman for a whole half second.
“You speak Erefrenian?” Virgil asked.
Janus blinked up at him a smug looking expression on his face. “You don’t?”
Virgil had a good response, he did. It was a response that had been some-three years in the making and Virgil had been ready to wipe that prideful expression of his face. But before they could do anything the entire ship lurched to the side, taking gravity with it. Virgil let out a yelp and grabbed for Janus and clung for stability.
(Space had done wonders for Janus’s abs, Virgil thought distantly.)
Roman slammed into the door frame and stumbled out into the hall, with all the grace a drunken ballerina, and cursed again when Patton landed on top of him.
“That’s our cue to leave!” Roman growled.
“Ya think?” Virgil shot back. He lunged for the end of the table where Janus’s bare foot was still strapped to the table. He didn’t look at the rusted color on the buckle, at the stiffness of the leather strap, at the rawness of Janus’s skin where it was biting into his ankle. He didn’t, didn’t, didn’t--
His hands shook. Janus reached over and clasped his forearms, the fabric of his tunic, him.
“Virgil--” Janus said, softly, unsuredly, with no trace of that previous pompous expression on him. “I--”
There was blood on his face, trailing all the way down his neck in scarlet silvers from the cuts. His hair was sweat matted, pressed and tousled in a way that made Virgil feel a certain rage in his chest, like someone had been running fingers through his curls while they sliced him apart. His eyes were still slightly glassy from whatever they put in him. There was an unspoken question on his lips, in his eyes, through his fingers as he clung to Virgil.
“I’ve got you,” Virgil told him, practically scooping him up. Janus heaved a breath as his feet touched the ground again. “Us humans have to stick together, right?”
Janus Ekans was alive.
It sounded surreal even in the moment, because Virgil had been mourning him since they were seventeen and stupid. Everyone else had moved on, had buried his memory, had forgotten about him. But he was not dead, and Virgil had not killed him. Somehow he had ended up in space, ended up with Remus, ended up here on this ship in the several billions of lightyears from anything they had known previously.
There would be no more late-nights-turned-early-mornings study sessions, no more sneaking over the gated walls of the Ekans mansion, and no more scaling the lattice underneath Janus’s balcony. They were never going to go stargazing on the hills outside of town again, never going to ruthlessly text each other under the desk during History class, never going to skip prom together to go trespassing in the woods somewhere to find Mothman. He was never going to butcher Spanish past participles in the cozy corner of the school library after hours and he was never going to get to listen to Janus brag about obtaining his Seal of Biliteracy finally despite his proficiency in about three languages.
Janus had disappeared right before senior year. And Virgil, who had been the biggest thorn in his side, the biggest instigator of all their fights, the wild and unruly punk kid that lived in detention-- Virgil had stopped looking for him. Because everyone said he had died. Because everyone said that Virgil had killed him.
But Virgil could feel Janus’s pulse, could hear his heartbeat, could see the way his chest moved as they stumbled out of the room.
Part of him was afraid that if he let go now, later, ever, Janus would disappear again. Shimmer and fade like a mirage in the desert.
“Careful Virgil,” Janus said breathily. “I almost think you missed me.”
“I hate you so much,” Virgil said back, as Roman and Patton led the way toward the engine rooms by blade and alien jujutsu and well-placed pun.
“Somehow, I don’t think you mean that, at all.” Janus said, grinning.
And then he closed that last little bit of space between them again.
[Next installment: Stars Die (But We Don’t)]
#Sanders sides#Virgil Sanders#Janus Sanders#Patton Sanders#Roman Sanders#Remus Sanders#Logan Sanders#Alien Au#Sympathetic Deceit#Sympathetic Remus#23 pages of Virgil in space#humans are space orcs#blood#Anxceit#background intrulogical#Probably will end up as part of series if you guys want more
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Running Through My Veins (Chapter One)
TITLE: Running Through My Veins
FANDOM: Sanders Sides
Pairings: Princexiety, Logicality, Dukeceit
Warnings: mentions of torture and surgical procedures, but nothing more graphic than the presence of a scalpel--but will get more graphic down the line.
SUMMARY: The Mindscape is a shoddy freighter eking its way through the galaxy, captained by a Ronisian named Patton Sanders and crewed by the Angelus, Logan Berry, as well as Patton's adopted son, a young Kaelian named Roman. They keep to themselves, taking mostly honest jobs to get by as well as the occasional passenger.
One passenger, a Decirite researcher named Janus, booked passage with cargo--and when said cargo is inadvertently opened, the ragtag crew must contend with the addition of a primitive, violent species rarely seen outside captivity.
Former research specimen, Virgil Storm: an honest to goodness, real life Human.
Notes: I don't know what this is yet. I don't know what it will be. It wanted to be written.
Like it? Say so, I may do more. For now, I just wanted a gay disaster, to hurt Virgil, and some Logicality tenderness. That is all.
AO3 link here.
“Roman? What's the holdup, kiddo?”
He almost didn't hear Patton coming up behind him—almost. Kaelian hearing was too keen to miss it, but Roman was also a warrior...or wanted to be. He prided himself on his awareness of personal space.
Patton's warm, bulky fingers, however, were a welcome visitor within his personal sphere, gently curling around the nape of Roman's neck in a gesture of Kaelian comfort and Ronisian concern.
A concern that was very much warranted, because Roman was both awed and horrified by the thing he had found in the cargo bay of their ship.
Their newest passenger, a shady looking Decirite named Janus, was the one who owned the large cargo container Roman had opened. He knew it was wrong, he wasn't allowed down here for a reason, but he'd heard something and couldn't contain his curiosity...
He heard the sharp intake of air when Patton spotted what was in the cargo container.
“I'm sorry, Patton, I...I know I shouldn't have opened it, but--”
“Never mind, kiddo. Just...get Logan. Now.”
**********
Fear and pain and fear and pain andfearandpainandfearandpain oh god oh god not again please someone help help help help--
Virgil's eyes snapped open, hands lashing out against shadows he couldn't name, faces he couldn't bring to mind.
Slim, powerful fingers circled his wrists, immobilizing him. Rough, guttural words he didn't understand filled his ears. The scream in Virgil's throat was choking him, couldn't escape, he couldn't breathe...
“Qu'a rho.”
Virgil froze, recognizing the word but only barely. He'd heard it enough times before to have gleaned an understanding. It belonged to the race of elves—at least they looked like elves.
The Kael. The warriors. That word...
It was supposed to mean 'safe.'
Virgil stilled, though he couldn't control his trembling. He finally drew back just a little, just to see who had hold of him...
...oh God, he was entirely too gay for this shit.
The young man looked to be his age, give or take. He was lean, but powerfully built, with dark hair that hung nearly to his shoulders and those delicately pointed ears Virgil had seen before. His skin wasn't quite red, but close enough to make him look like a badly sunburned Irish dude. Nearly normal, basically.
Well, Earth normal. He wasn't on Earth anymore.
“Qu'a rho.” the beautiful elf boy said again, dark eyes earnest as they seemed to search his face with an expression Virgil could only call hopeful.
There was something about the Kael...God, why couldn't he remember? His brain felt like it was filled with syrup, his thoughts slow and sluggish and sticking to things like broad shoulders and glossy, touchable hair that brushed them as he leaned in closer to Virgil--
Gay. Gay, too gay, too fucking gay for this shit.
“Ka-ah row.” Virgil echoed, wincing as he butchered the pronunciation of the word. From the Kaelian, it sounded rough and powerful—from him it sounded like he was coughing. Or barking...one of the two.
The Kaelian smiled, and Virgil thought vaguely that he might pass out from how fucking pretty it was before the Kaelian began talking to him a mile a minute in his native tongue. Virgil would have been happy to listen, uncomprehending, forever...
...but then one of them suddenly appeared just over the Kaelian's shoulder, and Virgil knew he was going to die.
**********
“Very smart, Dr. Berry—approach a torture victim with whom you can't communicate with a scalpel when your own people were the ones that tortured him.”
Logan spun around to face the Decirite passenger, who, as far as Logan was concerned, ought to be locked in his quarters. Patton was captain, however, and as such the man walked free.
“He does not, in all likelihood, even understand that this is for him.” Logan pointed out. “He is, after all, human.”
The Decirite—Janus, if Logan recalled correctly (and he did, he possessed total recall like every normal Angelus did) was incapable of rolling both of his eyes, but the humanoid graft on one half of his head provided a lovely honey brown eye with which to emote, opposite the gleaming black one that had no lid nor visible iris.
“Of course, I forgot: deathworlders are too primitive to comprehend much in the way of anything.” Janus shot back. Nudging his way past Logan, Janus approached the human, speaking in a strange variation of Common Logan was unfamiliar with.
Seeing Janus seemed to melt the human—it was the best description Logan had as the creature sagged, then all but fell into Janus's six arms when he perched on the edge of the bed and opened them to accept the seemingly frightened creature in a gentle embrace.
“Logan?”
Glancing to the side at Patton as he came up beside him, Logan let out a huff and watched the odd scene of Janus and the human conversing while young Roman sat on the opposite side of the human, watching him with a blatantly enraptured expression.
“Do you believe him, Patton?” Logan asked uncertainly. “Janus—do you feel his story holds any validity?”
Patton laughed, the musical sound filling him with light as it always did.
“It's like I told you, Lo-lo.” Patton giggled, gesturing to the pair. “Honesty doesn't require as many words as lies doe—they're not saying anything right now, but what do you hear?”
Logan opened his mouth to remind Patton that one could not hear in silence...but as was becoming common in the two solar cycles he'd been aboard the Mindscape, a beat up old freighter with barely enough crew to run her, Logan's mind caught up with his mouth.
He saw the way the human clung to the Decirite. He saw the way the Decirite ran fingers through the human's hair while another hand rubbed his back and still another found one of the human's to cling tight, their fingers meshed firmly together.
Closing his mouth, Logan sighed.
“I see...trust.” he finally relented. “The human clearly finds comfort in the presence of a fellow deathworlder.”
“Good job, Lo.”
Logan glanced over at Patton, whose thick and craggy features only just managed to emote as he smiled, eyes lost in the rocky landscape of his face.
Reaching out, Logan gently touched one of the protrusions on Patton's cheek. Though it looked solid as the stone it emulated, it yielded under his spindly fingertip, and flecked away from the skin below when Logan gently slipped under a place where it separated from the rest of his face.
“You have a shed coming.” Logan reminded him quietly. “Will you require assistance?”
Patton didn't answer right away. If Logan didn't know better, he would have said that Patton was leaning into the touch of his hand.
“I'll let you know, kiddo.” he reassured Logan softly, reaching up to pat Logan's hand. Briefly, it felt like sparks danced over Logan's pale skin with the simple brush of Patton's boulder-like fingers.
“Am Virgil, son of Dirt.”
Logan's attention turned sharply towards the trio again. The human was looking right at him, trembling, eyes wide and overly shiny.
He was also speaking Kaelian—badly, but still speaking it.
“There were several among the guards at the facility who were Orin—honor-dead Kael.” Janus explained in Common, then again in the strange variant of the language that Logan's translator could not yet parse—seemingly for the human's benefit. “He picked up some, that's how we began conversing. I was led to believe he was a lab rat, bred and born in that facility, but when I realized he'd been a victim of body snatchers, what he'd endured...”
Janus trailed off, turning back to the young human—to Virgil—and abruptly pulled him close again.
Little more explanation was required. Janus had clearly escaped the Angelus science facility in which he was working as a researcher, with Virgil in tow—stashed in a stasis crate with a faulty seal that had drawn Roman's attention.
Moving closer, Logan made sure Virgil was watching as he laid his scalpel aside.
“Can you explain the translator to him, Janus?” he finally asked.
Janus nodded, speaking softly to Virgil. After a moment, Virgil glanced at Roman questioningly. Roman, visibly distraught, reached carefully for Virgil's hand and spoke to him.
“On the honor of my house and my blood, new friend: you shall come to no harm by our hands. Logan is a good man. He will keep you safe.”
Virgil just stared at him, uncomprehending, but seemed to find something in Roman's face that soothed him. Nodding, he glanced at Janus again, and repeated the action.
“I'll sedate him.” Janus replied for their benefit. “I did it for transport, he trusts me.”
“Very well.” Logan sighed.
Gently tipping Virgil's head to meet his gaze, Janus stared into his eyes. Logan averted his own eyes just slightly, making sure that the unique musculature of the Decirite iris didn't catch him unawares.
Within a few moments, Virgil was slumping back into Janus's arms, unconscious. Refocusing, Logan moved towards the infirmary bed.
It was time to get to work.
**********
Virgil woke up a second time, just as panicked as the last.
Because when he woke up this time, he was just as slow and sluggish, his thoughts slow and thick—and he hurt.
Lashing out with one arm that was quickly caught by an unseen assailant, the throbbing that pierced his head had him falling back with a moan, despondent because he was gonna die this time they were coming and Janus lied he lied Virgil was going to die alone and afraid...
“...you hear me? Virgil, please...please, come back...”
Blinking, Virgil realized a face was hovering over his—pale red, not quite light enough to be pink, with those delicate features and dark eyes...
The Kaelian. From before...the stupidly pretty Kaelian...
Gay Disaster, thy name is Virgil Storm.
The Kaelian grinned, revealing too-straight teeth, edges like razors. Too often, the smiles with those teeth showing meant he was about to suffer some new atrocity for reasons he couldn't fathom and no one was willing to explain to him.
“...pain? Is it pain? We implanted a translator node, but connecting to the right portion of the brain is tricky, as human physiology is still a bit new to us...”
The Kaelian was talking again—wait. The Kaelian was talking. In Kaelian—but Virgil could understand him as effortlessly as if he were speaking English.
“Yeah, hurts. Like hell.” Virgil managed softly. He got a blank stare for his trouble.
“I'm sorry, par ma'a—can you nod or point? Our translators are still parsing your native tongue, I can't understand you.”
Shutting his eyes, Virgil touched his head.
“Expected. Just a moment, stay still...”
Unable to help himself, Virgil cracked his eyes open to watch the Kaelian bustle across the...infirmary?...to pick up a very small device made of black metal, about the size of a square Lego brick, only flat. He reached out, and in spite of himself, Virgil flinched.
The Kaelian looked stricken, and his expression...Virgil suddenly wished he spoke fluent Kaelian to tell him it was okay.
“Lhoj.” was all he could muster—the Kaelian word for 'sorry,' and probably not the right one.
Still, the other boy smiled again, more softly this time.
“No apologies are needed, Son of Dirt.” he soothed, reaching out again more slowly to affix the device to Virgil's temple. It was cool, and pulled uncomfortably for a second as it adhered—but then the Kaelian did something, and he couldn't feel it any longer.
The pain was already dulling, too. Wow. Now he could focus on the important thing...
“My name's not Son of Dirt.” he grumbled. “It's Earth, son of Earth. It's, uh...”
He fumbled, trying the Kaelian greeting again with the English word for Earth.
“Am Virgil, Son Of Earth.”
The Kaelian blinked, then spread his arms in a pretty theatrical display of joy.
“Oh, rapture! Virgil, Son of Earth—a pleasure to know you, properly this time. I am Roman, Son Of...ah...”
The Kaelian, Roman, trailed off with a frown as he returned to Virgil's bedside.
“I, uhm...I don't have a House anymore.” he admitted quietly. The way he hung his head, the way his ruddy skin went paler...
Virgil didn't know a lot about Kaelian culture, but he understood the mercenaries that worked in the facility where he'd been kept were outcasts without a House, something like a family. That was something Virgil definitely understood, given his own situation before he was taken.
Reaching out for Roman's hand, Virgil shifted so he was gripping Roman's forearm, and he was gripping Virgil's—the way the mercenary guards always greeted each other.
“Good journey, Roman, Son Of Kael.” Virgil declared, exhausting what little Kaelian he knew.
Roman just gazed at him, expression full of wonder. It made the warrior boy look oddly fragile, and it made Virgil's chest feel light and...fuzzy, like his insides had been stuffed with a warm fleece blanket.
“No one has addressed me that way since I was small.” he confessed. “I am orin, but...but perhaps you're right. If we have no House to honor, we can honor our...oh, that's your planet, isn't it? Not your house! That's the word for it, Earth!”
Grinning, Virgil nodded. Roman laughed at that.
“You are a fierce and noble creature, Virgil, Son of Earth—may the Prophet bless your house for generations to come!” he boomed with another grand gesture, fists pumping into the air that made Virgil laugh.
“God, you are so extra.” he huffed with a shake of his head. “If you weren't so hot, it'd be annoying.”
Roman pointed at him accusingly, but he was still smiling. “I do not understand your words, but from where I stand, Human, your tone is one of doubt! You must trust me: you could flee captivity to no finer vessel than the Mindscape, and be no safer under any captain than that of my heart-father, Patton Sanders. We are wayward brothers, you and I...on my honor, we shall avenge your mistreatment and bring honor to your house!”
Virgil watched Roman start swanning around the infirmary and relaxed back into his bed, finding himself strangely comforted. He hoped the guy didn't mean literal brothers, because...well.
Gay disaster. Pretty alien.
Virgil was just plain fucked all around—and if he was lucky, that might even be literal.
#fanfic#sanders sides#virgil sanders#logan sanders#patton sanders#janus sanders#roman sanders#sci fi#humans as deathworlders#ts logic#ts anxiety#ts deceit#ts creativity#ts morality#i'm experimenting let's see what happens
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