Fortnightly Writing Competition - “Eavesdropping” (Result)

[Stupot]

Theme: Eavesdropping

Shhh, they’re listening.

A conversation overheard, accidentally, or on purpose. A family secret revealed. A tapped phone line or a muffled conversation heard from inside a linen closet. How you approach the theme is up to you, but it must include some kind of eavesdropping activity as a plot device, or as the central story itself. It could be that the overheard conversation is what kicks of the journey, or it could play an important part in the grand finale.



Deadline is the end of the day on August 2nd

[Sinitrena]

For once, I'm early.
Though I have to admit that I somehow thought the topic was "Overheard" and not "Eavesdropping", so the story doesn't fit the topic very well. It's still close enough, I think.

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May Day

It was a hot day late in May. Soft jazz played on the radio and the transceiver was tuned to the frequency of the local airport. She heard neither, really, with the vacuum cleaner going and the children, Mickey and Ally, screaming in the inflatable pool in the garden. Only during the breaks, when both were silent, did the sound of the music drift to her ears, only to be interrupted right away by the anew howling of the vacuum. The radio transceiver only added a bit of cackling to the cadence of the saxophone from time to time. Even less frequent, voices broke through the mixture of other sounds, cracking and stuttering.

Even if she had heard them properly, she wouldn’t have paid much attention to them or understood the meaning of what was said. Even after all these years, she had not really learned the lingo of her husband’s hobby. Still, with the voices on the radio, she felt close to Jim when he was out and about cruising through the clouds.

Nonetheless, it was mostly the jazz she paid attention to when she turned off the vacuum for a moment and dragged it towards the next corner of their small house, only to start it up again a second later.

Lizzy often griped about the cost of the small airplane, of which she didn’t even know make and model, but her hobby of fancy opera wasn’t exactly cheap either. Driving three hours to the big city, dressing up in fancy clothes and sparkling jewelry, admission to performances by stars of the genre…

Her thoughts were interrupted by the unmistakable cry of her daughter whose brother just pulled her hair. With a sigh, Lizzy turned off the vacuum again and sprinted to the open kitchen window.

“Stop, torturing your sister, Micky!” she called without really looking at what was going on outside. She knew her two rascals all too well.

“Sorry, Mommy!” the answer came far too quick and without any sign of contriteness, but Lizzy knew that if it had been a real fight between the two, the sounds would have been different.

Back in the living room, the swinging saxophone on the radio was replaced by the deep, seducing voice of a singer, that droned through the room like the engine of Jim’s plane. Lizzy leaned against the door for a moment and wiped some sweat from her forehead. The day was far too hot and far too humid to do any work and still she was here doing her household chores while her husband…

She sighed. He had his hobbies, she had hers and it wasn’t like he didn’t have and did his chores either. She just had a bad day, that was all.

Meanwhile, the radio transceiver cackled to life for the hundredth or thousandth time that day. “Three Six Zero Delta Omega, head Zero Four Zero for a -”

She tuned the voice out again right away. Sometimes she wondered why she even listened to this. It was not like she understood anything or cared about it too much. It wasn’t like she could recognizes her husband’s voice on the radio either, too distorted was it and too bare of any emotion. Professional, he called it. They all sounded professional on the radio, they all sounded bored. Lizzy didn’t even know the call-sign of her husband’s plane. When he talked about it â€" her, for him it was a her â€" he never referred to the number on her tail, always just calling her Elizabeth.

You are my Lizzy, my love, my first, my all. How else would I call my second love, but Elizabeth? he always said. It was sweet, in a way. And then he used to add with an impish smile: That way, I’ll never scream the wrong name in bed! She usually hit him with a pillow after that.

Lizzy was just about to turn the vacuum back on and drone out the transmissions from airport and planes for the time being, when she heard the one word she had feared the most since falling in love with Jim.

“Mayday.”

For a moment, time seemed to stand still. The voice was distorted, like they always were on the radio. The word was so softly spoken, without any panic, that it took a moment for her head to register its meaning, even though her heart skipped a beat right away.

And then, it was repeated twice more. “Mayday. Mayday.” There was no mistaking the word, no mistaking the fear that suddenly crept up her spine. It was the one word she never wanted to hear on the radio and the one word for which she had always tuned in to the airport even though she never bothered to learn the meanings of all the other transmissions.

If something went wrong, she wanted to know it. If something went wrong, if he died, if Jim died, she wanted to hear his last words.

Mayday didn’t mean that the flight would end in tragedy and loss of life, Jim had explained more than once, and she understood that, but the fear stayed. Just in case, she still tuned in every time. She had tried again and again to turn it off, to not listen when Jim was flying, but she couldn’t. If something happened, if he died, she wanted to know, she wanted to be there, to be close to him. In life and in death.

“Engine â€" failure” the next words came through the radio. “Cannot keep altitude, Five Five Bravo Delta.”

Whose voice was it? Whose plane? Why couldn’t she ever remember Jim’s call-sign? She gripped the tube of the vacuum cleaner tight in her hands, nearly squishing it under her cramped fingers. Was it Jim’s voice?

It sounded like it, panic convinced her that it did. “Say more,” she whispered, “Say more.” she prayed. But the next words came from the airport controller, not the plane, confirming what was just said.

Lizzy stood there with bated breath and waited, her heartbeat and the blood rushing through her veins impossibly loud. Even though she now listened with all her senses, only parts of the following conversation reached from her ears to her brain.

“- 4500’ â€" declining â€" trying to restart engine â€" gliding - “

The other voice, “5 miles â€" cleared to land any runway -”

At some point she had gripped the handheld and was crushing it now instead of the vacuum. She pressed it close to her ear, to hear better. It only seemed to make the distortions worse, the cackling louder, the cracking more choppy.

“Won’t make it to the airport -”

She was out of the door before the last word was spoken. The radio playing her favorite jazz was long forgotten, the two children in the garden slipped from her mind. She tore open the door to their beat-up truck and…

There was no key in the ignition, only the radio pressed to her chest and cackling more communication that made little sense to her. There were other voices, other planes coming and maybe going filling the frequency. Why did they exists? Why couldn’t they just disappear from the face of the earth and leave her with her Jim, high in the skies and going down, down, down...

She ran back in, grabbed the keys, ran back out. There was no panic in the voices. Only cold professionalism. All the panic had fallen right from the sky into her little house and into her racing heart.

She turned the key in the ignition. The old truck stuttered and spluttered. She turned the key back, turned it again and the old car sprang to life.

The airport wasn’t far away, just a few miles on the Main Street. A left on Bradfort, then a right into Summerset Lane and she was on the motorway, driving in an almost straight line towards the little airfield a bit outside of town.

She swerved in and out of traffic, going faster than she should go, the radio still cackling right next to her riding shotgun.

“State intentions?” The still calm voice came in distorted breaths from the handheld, each syllable a heartbeat for her, each cramping her muscles and dimming her senses to everything else around her.

Stopped at a red light, tapping her right foot on the pedal in frustration and anguish, she hardly heard the next words: “I’ve no choice. Airport’s too far. I’ll try to land on Main Street.”

There was a moment’s pause and then a dispassionate: “Roger.” How could he stay so calm? How could they both stay so calm?

But before the thought could fully form, one of a thousand, all different, all circling the same topic, two things happened at once.

The next transmission from the airport made her gasp. “Radar contact lost, for Five Five Bravo Delta.” And in the next moment a small airplane rushed over her head and the heads of all the other people stuck in front of the red light on this warm summer day.

It glided close over the traffic lights, its gear nearly hitting the metal. Cars from the right came to a sudden stop. For a moment, it seemed like the plane stood still in the air. The wings swerved left and right slightly, just as if it was bowing to the cars driving in the opposite direction. Then, the wheels came down on the tarmac. Once or twice, the little airplane jumped from potholes the city never bothered to fix. It slowed down, but it had started fast and soon it had vanished from Lizzy’s view.

Two cars were in front of hers and they didn’t move even as the traffic lights turned green again. Lizzy pressed on the horn and let the motor howl, to no avail. The cars did not move, but she had to. She had to move. The plane had disappeared behind a hill and she couldn’t see it any longer. But she had to see it, she had to know.

She jumped out of the car, then, as if it were a lifeline, she turned back and grabbed the handheld again without a conscious thought. The whole afternoon she hadn’t been thinking straight.

Two yards, ten, maybe twenty, she ran in the direction of the downed â€" or, hopefully, landed â€" plane in the middle of the eerily empty street as all the cars had stopped for a moment. Then, the first ones slowly started to inch forward again. The honking from the cars driving around her, from the cars impeded by her truck standing in the middle of the road, shook her and she stumbled forward a bit. Her toe sandals slipped uncomfortably from her feet, scraping the soft skin between the great toe and the next.

But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. The radio in her hand still cackled to life from time to time. The words hardly reached her. Only fragments came through the equipment and even fewer words registered with her.

“-just â€" plane â€" land â€" street â€" check -”

She had nearly reached the small airplane sitting at the side of the street on the bus lane, parked calmly like a broken down car, when the droning of another airplane overhead, flying deep over the accident, let her body vibrate. It was still so high up that it seemed almost like a bird, but still down so deep that you could read the letters and numbers on its tail. They seemed vaguely familiar.

But Lizzy had no eyes for them, not really. She was just staring at the plane at the side of the road. It seemed intact. No damage was visible and the door to the cockpit stood open and a man leaned against the white body of the plane. In the distance, sirens howled.

“Plane seems intact,” a voice on the radio said at that moment, but Lizzy only had eyes for the man next to the plane. He was tall, just like Jim, and with his back to her, the wild blond hair could have been Jim’s.

“Pilot’s out, it looks like.”

Lizzy doubled over, catching her breath, as cars slowly inched past her and the plane on the curb. The pilot petted the machine, then he turned around, towards the sound of the sirens. It was then that Lizzy was able to see him properly. It was not Jim.

“Pilot looks safe. Emergency vehicles are close by. And is that â€" Lizzy?” the voice on the radio from the plane overhead said.

“Say again?” the airport answered.

“Sorry, I thought I saw my wife down there. She should be home with the kids.” Jim hesitated a moment, his plane long gone from the accident. “Sorry, disregard, the last transmission.”

“Roger that.”

Thoughts ordered themselves in Lizzy’s mind, registering slowly what was said and where Jim was. And then, one thought jumped to the forefront of her imagination: “Oh god, the kids!” Lizzy turned around suddenly, sprinting back to the abandoned car just as fast as she had ran towards the plane. Mickey and Ally, they were still at home, fighting. Alone. In the pool.

[Stupot]

Thanks Sini for getting the ball rolling.

Don’t worry if your story is not strictly about eavesdropping. My original description lets you off the hook:

A conversation overheard, accidentally, or on purpose

[Mandle]

So, I'm in draft 1.5 of my story but the ending isn't even written yet, or fully decided on... Been too zonked with the heat the last few days to write, and I don't expect a visit from my muse today either. I suspect she is drunk at a beach resort somewhere.

Extension anyone? I would actually like to ask for an extra 5-7 days. A nice round week extra would work!

[WHAM]

Sorry, but as much as I love the theme I'm out of this one. Returning to work after summer vacation has my brain worn out.

[Baron]

Whisper whisper extension! Whisper whisper whisper....

[Stupot]

I’ve also got a lot on my plate at the moment too, with covid in the household (so far I’m fine). So let’s extend the deadline until next weekend. Let’s say end of Sunday.

[Sinitrena]

Whisper whisper extension! Whisper whisper whisper....

Whisper whisper lazy! Whisper whisper whisper....

No, just kidding. I don't mind an extension, even though I got mine done early this time. With  so much extra time, I might even write the second idea I had, though I don't know about that. It's supposed to get 40°C here again this week and it's diffficult to write while melting.

I’ve also got a lot on my plate at the moment too, with covid in the household (so far I’m fine). So let’s extend the deadline until next weekend. Let’s say end of Sunday.

Good luck not getting sick and get well soon to your family!!!

[Mandle]

Almost done here... just need to write the finale scene and do another pass to find all the gremlins in the text.

[Mandle]

Gonna need some hours extra past the end of today to get it finished probably. Not a whole day I imagine.

[Mandle]

TRIGGER WARNING: THE STORY BELOW CONTAINS INTENSE SCENES. I DON'T WANT TO SPOIL THE STORY BY SAYING EXACTLY WHAT. IF YOU NEED MORE INFO PLEASE PM ME.

IT'S  ALIENS

Spoiler

CHAPTER ONE:

In the great Mothership of their species, silence was the default.

Not because they weren't able to speak out of any of their orifices, or that there were any official rules about doing so, or because of any religious vows.

But just simply because it was so much easier to speak mind-to-mind.

Jzzzpr got the mind-message while he was sleeping that, while he didn't know it at the time, would change the entire future of his race, and then that of the galaxy.

It jolted him awake.

His mind vibrated with the excitement his Grand Controller was pouring into it but that he, himself, did not feel.

This was a planet they had revisited at least seven times over the course of the last twenty-something million years, as measured by their home-planet Addr's oribital cycle, and Jzzzpr was honestly just really sick of coming back here.

It wasn't an especially unique or beautiful planet, he thought again as he looked out at it through the window of his cabin and saw the little blue globe growing closer in the inky-black expanse.

There were plenty of these young infantile planets scattered around the galaxy. And most of them were as ugly as this one, with its blue oceans and green and brown continents.

"I repeat, please come immediately to the drop-down room for your..." came the mind-message again.

"Yes! I understand!" replied Jzzzpr, trying to shield from his superior officer the mind-giveaways of his cranky emotions , "I will be there soon!".

He took another glance backwards over the long, flabby slope of his aging back, that had once been so well-defined with vertical muscle-bands spreading from his neck down to the juncture where his tail split in two.

The blue and green and brown planet was growing in the window of his disheveled bachelor cabin.

He didn't hate the planet. He just felt annoyed by it mostly. He had heard rumors of one or two of these carbon-based water-filled planets reaching some level of intelligent life, but they were few, and millions of Addr-years between.

CHAPTER TWO:

"They have reached some level of intelligent life." heard Jzzzpr in his mind as the Grand Controller spun around in the air to face him.

Jzzzpr glanced down three of his eyes to the floor with an inward sigh of resignation, but forced the other to swivel up and feign intense concentration on his boss.

His Grand Controller settled slowly back to the floor, twin-tails spreading out over its gray surface, and then wrapping around his front four feet in the gesture that meant "Let's get comfortable and talk" in the Addr culture.

"I sensed some... unease... from you during our mind-talk." spoke the Grand Controller, still only through the same very business-only silent link, his five vocal orifices grimaced tightly shut in unreadable emotions.   

Jzzzpr pulled all the rest of his eyes up to look directly at Kkllb, his Grand Controller, and tried to squint them to look as interested as possible.

"It's just that these kinds of worlds never really get very far with all their water and carbon and...", mind-spoke Jzzzpr back at first, but then, when Grand Controller Kkllb opened one of the "crude" mouths on his thin pale chest and another of his "high-speech" mouths on the side of his narrow head and they spoke together, Jzzzpr knew to just shut up and listen.

It had been many centuries since Jzzzpr had heard the physical voice from another of his race and he had a moment of vertigo as the two mouths said to him:

"WE (have not been back) HERE SINCE (this planet was) ONLY (inhabited by) MICROBOBES BUT NOW THERE ARE (beings here that have built a) CIVILIZATION AND ARE (under consideration for) ENTRY INTO THE (Galactic Body)."

The very fact that Grand Controller Kkllb had spoken to him through not one, but two, of his physical mouths had shaken Jzzzpr's emotions to the point where he had had to concentrate very hard to listen to the overlapping syllables and take in the totality of their meaning.

All of his four eyes were now fixed on his Grand Controller's face.

Jzzzpr was officially impressed.

He lacked, however, the social confidence to open any of his physical mouths to reply. Instead, he just relied through the failsafe of their mind-link and said "Is this for real? They might be actual candidates? But they are so young!"

With the huge hexagonal window showing the rapid approach of the blue and green and brown planet framing him as a backdrop, Grand Controller Kkllb swivled his head around on its long, pale, and plated neck to look out at the view behind him and mind-spoke to Jzzzpr "That is what we need YOU to find out for us."

CHAPTER THREE:

Jzzzpr got suited and booted in the drop-down room.

The equipment had changed just slightly enough over the couple of thousand years since he had last used it that he only required a brief update from Ttjkkl, the ancient master-at-arms, on its usage:

Using three of his grizzled mouths, the two "rude" ones on his chest and the "norm-speak" one at mid-face centered betwixt the quadrangle of his intense yellow eyes, Ttjkkl barked:

"THE (cloaking) (TECH) IN YOUR SUIT IS THE (same as the last) (TIME YOU) used it. (THERE ARE) THOUGH (new additions to your) arm-band (UNIT)."

Jzzzpr had barely had the time to look down at his arm-mounted unit before several of Ttjkkl's sinewy shoulder-strands were already reeling out all over it, sliding switches and pointing to the changes on the display while rattling off:

"THIS is (your) (RECORDING SEGMENT!) the new (UPDATE ON THIS) tech is (that) IT WILL NOW RECORD (and) (translate) the (LOCAL LANGUAGE) when you push (HERE) (and here) and then (HERE, LIKE THIS!)"

Jzzzpr, realizing that he had been wincing his two bottom eyes shut a little from this onslaught of verbal information and pulling his long neck away from Ttjkkl's face slightly, but stiffly, reminded himself that this was just how the master-at-arms was.

Ttjkkl was an old-school military man, as the burn-scars on the left side of his head, the ones that had mauled and sealed the "high-speech" mouth there almost completely shut, showed very well.

He wasn't one for using the mind-speech very much. Well, actually, not at all, in Jzzzpr's experience.

Jzzzpr was still wondering why not, as the long, tapered drop-cylinder he was strapped into hit the edge of the planet's atmosphere and the ride down got all hot and rocky.

CHAPTER FOUR:

Dennis saw the falling star, bright in the night sky like all get-out, even before he topped the hill in his truck.

It wasn't like any he had seen before. It didn't streak across the dark sky above in a split second.

It just fell straight down, with a flaming green-hued trail behind it.

"What the actual fff..." he muttered to himself.

It had been a lonely drive from Florida all the way up to New York. There had been a lot of stuff on his truck's radio about some nuclear arms-race resulting from some beef that America and Russia has had for some time, but Dennis didn't care about all that. In fact, it depressed him.

So, he had switched the channel to one only playing rock 24/7 and just now they were playing something with a guy with a weird accent yelling about if he should stay or go. It was cool. He settled back into the seat of his cab and bobbed his head along with the beat.

He didn't care about this nuclear war shit. He only cared about getting this shipment of "shoes" in the back of his truck to the loading bay at the New York docks and getting his pay.

Dennis needed the money. His rent was almost two months overdue and his mother's 50th birthday was coming up at the end of this month of November.

She wasn't doing well, health-wise. She had been born in 1915, and had lived through so many leaps and bounds over what the horrors of science and politics had brought with them since. She was old and tired and deserved better than he had been able to give back.

Dennis' eyes came back into focus from such thoughts, the damn mental nuisance of them always popping up in his head at the strangest moments again, and fixated on the falling green-trailing droplet from the sky.

Dennis started to stammer "What the actual ffffff!" but then what he saw next made him just interrupt the "ffffs" coming out from between his bitten bottom lip and just open his mouth and yell out "FUUUUUUUCK!!!" for real.

All of the lighted windows in the expanse of the towering cliffs of New York City's skyscrapers in the distance were going dark in rapid succession from the top down as the green-flaming "shooting star" fell faster and faster towards the heart of the city.

Just as Dennis was trying to decide between hitting the brakes or the gas to get there either slower or faster, he saw the sputtering trail from the falling needle start to light up the dark towers around it with its unearthly green flickering as it passed out of his view beyond the skyscrapers.

And then there was nothing but blackness down there ahead where New York City had been just a moment before.

He let his foot make the decision of which peddle to hit; the brakes or the gas.

After a hovering moment of hesitation, it chose the latter.

CHAPTER FIVE:

In the clear lexi-glass window below his spread rear two feet Jzzzpr saw the last licks of green flame pour away around its convex exterior.

An up-rushing blackness became visible as the fiery curtain drew away, with liquidy hints of breaking white froth here and there.

"Oh, great." he thought to himself "A water landing. These hurt!"

SPLASH!!!

The impact itself was fine. Jzzzpr had wound his twin tails around the circular interior of the drop-down ship to brace. That wasn't the part of a water landing on Earth that hurts.

He and his capsule were now underwater, in the storm of bubbles pouring up around it from the splashdown.

His drop-down canister immediately started melting in the brine surrounding it.

Jzzzpr breathed a dual sigh of relief out through his chest mouths. The capsule's systems were working perfectly. There wouldn't be another malfunction this time that dragged him all the way down to the bottom before he could get out.

The salt water started pouring in through the thin sections of the drop-down craft that had already dissolved, as they were designed to. A spout from above and another down around his waist hit Jzzzpr's head and body and stung really really bad.

But, fortunately, he had been through this before on other planets, and also on this one.

He had learned some painful lessons from his other drops here and there into similar conditions; Instead of turning away from the burning pain of the salt water, he turned into its flow.

Keeping all of his mouths shut in grimaces of determination, Jzzzpr reached out and ripped apart the eroded edges around the holes in his dissolving craft, and then pushed through the gap, off of the floor with his rear legs and tails, and was free in a world of liquid pain as his drop-down pod spun away below him into the depths, billowing
methane bubbles from some sections, and pouring solid mercury fragments from others.

Before the mercury components had even melted fully back in their liquid state, to be absorbed back harmlessly into the planet's ecosystem, Jzzzpr's head was already breaking water and snapping around in search of an egress from this stinging ocean of salt.

And that's when he saw her. She was so beautiful. And so tall!

CHAPTER SIX:

It was a funky drive through the blacked-out suburbs of New York for Dennis, hunched over his steering wheel, the pale green lights from the dashboard instruments illuminating his long narrow face topped by its mop of blonde hair.

In the dark suburbs people were still only just coming out of their houses in huddled clusters, discussing their concerns in lowered voices not audible to Dennis through the windows of his truck as he powered past them.

The swiveled head of a bystander here and there, as his truck's headlights briefly illuminated their increasingly fear-filled faces, turned into something much worse as he drove his rig into the city proper.

CHAPTER SEVEN:

Jzzzpr raced up the stony base of her, his body healing rapidly from the acidic bath of the ocean he had just dragged himself out from.

The claws at the ends of his many feet rained showers of powdered stone down from the divots they dug out on his vertical climb up and over the lip of the lady's base.

There were no further obstacles between him and her feet and so he scampered over to them and kissed their toes one after the other, in the ordered greeting of mouths that was the custom of his race, his twin tails whipping around frantically in devotion to her, when a human voice said something from somewhere nearby.   

Jzzzpr froze, his tongue pausing mid-lick on the giant green lady's little toe of her left foot.

From below him, somewhere near the base of the stone block he had climbed, he heard garbled human talk.

He made his shoulder-tendrils rush out from their hiding-places and hone in on the screen of the arm-mounted translator that master-at-arms Ttjkkl had been boasting so much about.

CHAPTER EIGHT:

Freddy "The Knife" Harolds, and his partner-in-rape Kevin Carre, dragged their victim to the wall in the dark triangle cast by the shadow of the spotlights aimed up at Lady Liberty.

It had been easy to lure the naïve Japanese tourist woman away from her husband as they boarded the last ferry back from what was almost certainly their honeymoon tour of New York.

All they had had to do was shout nonsense at her and gesture for her to come back from the boarding ramp.

Her husband had rushed to the railing as the ferry pulled away, shouting out in his foreign language, but nobody had understood.

And now the ferry was long gone and night had fallen and Kevin had the woman up against the wall, both her wrists pinned against it with his hands.

Freddy flicked open the sharp dagger of his switchblade knife with one greasy slide of his thumb on its little metal nub and Kevin shuffled over to the right, his hands still holding the wall-eyed Japanese woman's wrists to the wall.

Kevin said "Give her a good seeing to!" and Freddy grinned back and unzipped the fly of his jeans.

CHAPTER NINE:

The translation of the human vocalization of "Give her a good seeing to!" appeared on Jzzzpr's arm-mounted readout as "Make sure she is treated with care!" in his native language's characters.

The first stage of his recon mission was already complete through mere happenstance. He had recorded an unexpected human interaction on one of their remote island settlements away from the main city. The one with the lovely green lady.

Jzzzpr turned his many eyes to the vast dark cliffs of what must certainly be the densest concentration of human beings on the planet and, with no other choice, given the vast expanse of acidic salt-water between him and there, reached out his shoulder-tendrils to waver across his console again, touching its screen here and there, and then took flight. The anti-grav field would drain the energy core of the device quicker than he would have liked, but there was no way he was going back into that acid-bath anytime soon.

He flew soundlessly away from the stone deck under the lovely green lady, over what he now knew were the celebratory sounds of a female of the human species being cared for in a time of great need.

It wasn't enough though. This kind of altruistic behavior may not be the norm. It was not the time yet to send a report back to the Mother Ship.

He needed more samples.

At least two more.

CHAPTER TEN:

Through the darkness of the misty road ahead, Dennis saw several flashlights waving their beams about in overhead arcs through what had been a well-lit downtown strip of restaurants and other businesses until just a few hours before.

He slowed down. The people on the other end of the flashlights saw this and pulled their beams down out of the sky and started ripping them sideways to their right.

On that side of the road were the inviting lights of a grocery store sandwiched between the frontage of a dark bar on one side and a dark laundromat on the other.

Did they have an emergency generator? Did they just get lucky somehow?

Dennis had no idea. He knew nothing about power grids. He did know, however, that he hadn't yet bought his mom any kind of present. Her birthday was still some weeks away and he had planned to get her that really nice new color TV out of his pay from this delivery.

But, who even knew now?

Maybe the whole country was blacked-out. Maybe that whole news thing about nuclear war he had been ignoring was coming true?

Maybe he should pull over to the lighted grocery store and buy his mom a bunch of potato chips and sodas and just drive over to her place instead of making his delivery and just...

Dennis snapped back to attention when the drifting course of his truck to the right parted the flashlight-waving thugs and some of them started thumping on the windows of his cab.

"Oh, fuck, what was I thinking?!" flashed through his head, as he floored the pedal and swerved his rig back onto the road, scattering the bandits that he now recognized them as.

Luke would have been pissed if his truck got jacked just because he had wanted to buy a present for his mom, but Rod might have gotten physical with him... might have even dragged him to the boss to be "dealt with" if he had lost his cargo.

Dennis heard a few last thumps on the back of his truck's trailer as he left the flashlight mob behind him.

Boss Vinnie wouldn't be upset about a few dents back there, but he might put an extra hole in Dennis' head if he failed to deliver this shipment.

The road ahead has clear and the docks were less than an hour away.

Dennis pushed down with his foot on the pedal as much as he dared.

The beams from his headlights grew whiter and darker intermittently as more and more fog rolled across them the closer he drove to the port.

CHAPTER ELEVEN:

Callum Henderson had just finished locking the accordion shutter of his pawn-shop when the disgruntled customers that had been in just after lunch-time stepped out into view, blocking the only egress from the alleyway.

They cast their shadows, elongated, and swiveling, as cars' headlights went by behind them, down across the trash-littered ground towards him.

He reacted immediately, his face squinched in fear and concentration, trying to fit that one key, from his ring of many keys, back into the lock.

That one key, the one that now mattered this completely in his entire life, chose this moment to duck its tip through the narrow wire circle holding another in place.

He tried to wrench the key free from its prison, but the deep divot between its front two teeth was caught on the wire ring.

By that time, the rushing footsteps were right behind him.

Something smashed into the side of his elderly head.

Callum's big ring of keys hit the ground, and then bounced and slid, rattling across it even before his collapsing body was all the way down.

The keys slid and spun, only another foot or so, before the steel-capped toe of a boot crunched down on them.

Owen Johnson, better known as "Skin-Flicks" around the neighborhood, bent down, his shaved head displaying the bold swastika tattoo on its peak to his fallen victim for just a moment before he snatched the keys up.

Callum looked up at his attacker, his vision doubling and then tripling, and held up one hand feebly when he saw the skinhead raise the long black bar over his head, preparing for another blow.

"Look's like you're gonna be getting a taste of your own medicine, old man!" spat Owen as he stood, his Doc Martin boots straddling Callum's torso, the police-issue nightstick he had bought from another rip-off merchant, just like this old cunt was, held high. 

Then Owen saw the old-man's fearful eyes, which had been fixated on the weapon up until now, dart even further upwards and open even wider in a new expression of surprise.

Owen, even in the moment just before what he correctly suspected would be his last, saw something that amazed him.

Crouched up on a ledge over the alleyway he had run his pawn shop out of for decades was something even odder:

From the bulbous head at the end of the curving stalk of a long, plated neck, an unnatural number of eyes were staring down at him. The pitched curve of the neck suggested something like curiosity to Callum, and he wasn't wrong about that.

From the neck down, whatever the thing was, it was sleek, and arched up the alley's wall, from where its front claws gripped the ledge, all the way up along past its other four legs with their wall-clenching feet, to the point where it split apart into two poised tails twitching only at their very ends.

Owen, never having learned the oldest-trick-in-the-book, looked back over his shoulder and saw only a flash of movement over his head, too fast for his eyes to track, before it was gone.

He looked around, searching for a new enemy, but only found his old one, still cowering under him between his spread legs.

He brought down the night-stick hard.

CHAPTER TWELVE:

Jzzzpr reacted instantly the moment he made eye(s) contact with one of the specimens he was here to study.

He was busted! He had been SEEN!

This would not go down well back on the Mother Ship if and/or when he was back there to report on it.

He pushed off from the wall and ledge he had been digging his claws into and pounced over the heads of his specimens and onto the other wall and scrambled quickly up it and onto a roof.

Crouching behind a cubical machine that blasted welcome hot air over him, Jzzzpr slid his glowing white strands back out from the divots on his shoulders and used them to tap on his arm bracelet once again to decypher the human words the device had recorded.

There was a confusing sentence on its red readout, written in his own language, to pour through, but, as best as he could tell, the phrase "a taste of your own medicine" indicated that the man in the alleyway was receiving emergency medical care via the long black stick that Jzzzpr had seen being drawn up and impacting back down on the man's head.

These beings must need just that kind of intensive care to heal them.

Jzzzpr swiveled his head left and right on its long sinewy neck. He needed a third example to demonstrate this race's caring nature to even start to make a case for them in front of his elders, especially after his screw-up of having been spotted by the natives.

Out of the darkness, from between the cliffs of the black towers of this city, two brilliant pricks of light shone white cones out before them through the haze, illuminating the advance of what was certainly a vehicle.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

Dennis, the headlights of his truck piercing the fog that was rolling in off the harbor, had made it all the way through the chaos of this unprecedented city-wide blackout.

He had driven through the sounds of smashing glass and dodged around people, some carrying television sets and others pushing shopping trolleys loaded with supermarket goods.

But, suppressing his rising panic, he had kept driving his truck slow and careful, no matter how many flashing police sirens went wailing by back-to-front, or front-to-back, past him.

And now, he was at the docks.

He had made it to his drop-off point and only wanted to get done with the deal and get his ride back out of town when something landed on the hood of his truck.

After all the sirens and broken glass and rioting on his drive into New York, Dennis was quite desensitized to any further shocks, and that's why he pumped the brakes of his truck to a calm stop when the being that would change his life forever fell out of the night, and crouched on the hood of his rig.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

Through the rolling fog of that moment, Dennis and Jzzzpr looked at each other through their opposite sides of the windscreen.

One of them thought "What the fuck is that thing?!", while the other thought "Yup, it looks a bit scared! Better do something to make it less so."

However, before Jzzzpr could do anything to make the human any less frightened, Dennis had already cranked the truck's gear lever back into its "R" slot and slammed down hard on the go-pedal.

Jzzzpr clenched the claws on all six of his hands into the hood of the truck, easily ripping through its thin steel surface, and then just slung his body low to the deck and hung on for the ride. 

The truck jack-knifed to the left just before it slammed backwards into a shipping container, which tipped over the container and, most likely, saved the truck cab from twisting off from its coupling and pulled it back down from its precarious leaning position to one side with a thump of rubber.

Dennis' face rapped up against the window of the cab after the spill, but not all that hard. His rig kept swaying a little from side to side as he shook his head to clear it.

It was still there.

It was still there on the hood of the truck.

It was still there looking at him with, oh-fucking-Jesus, with all four of those eyes it had on its face.

But, it wasn't making a move to hurt him.

Dennis unsquinched his eyes just a bit and said "Ahhh, what are y..." and then lurched forward and vomited his Taco Bell dinner all over his lap, splattering down onto the floor of his truck's cabin.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

Inside the warehouse, Luke and Rod and Michael glanced up from their poker game when they heard the truck coming in down the dock.

They glanced around at each other, over the cigarette-scarred folding card table.

Rod, always the leader of the crew, pinched his fanned cards into a stack, placed them face-down, and got up.

He walked over to one of the propped-open windows of the place and took a look out into the night.

The beams of the truck's headlights panned across the bollards at the pier's edge through the misty night and then turned to reflect off the tilted glass of the window he was looking through, blinding his view.

He muttered "Fuck!" and shuffled to the right over to another window, holding his hand up to shield the glare, and barked out to the other two "I think our guy is here. Open the doors and get ready to..."

Luke and Michael were already on their feet, placing their own cards down, until Rod put them on alert when he suddenly shouted "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!"

Three hands slid in under the lapels of three jackets and gripped the three handles of the pistols in the three shoulder holsters of three suddenly very frightened men.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

Jzzzpr mind-spoke to the human inside the vehicle.

This kind of contact wasn't really allowed, but he made the call to ignore the rules and mind-spoke "Are you okay?".

The human looked up at him through the fractured window of the vehicle, chunky yellow drool dripping from his chin, and tried to talk but choked and spluttered instead.

"Talk to me with your mind." telepathed Jzzzpr.

The human's eyes grew wide. Jzzzpr heard something coming in like "Ohjesusohfuckingjesuschristwhatthefuckisevenhappeni..." before he slammed down a psychic hammer of "CALM DOWN!" at maximum mental volume.

The human's eyes lost their darting, panicked haze and fixated on him.

Jzzzpr released his claws from the metal of the vehicle's front end with a clang that vibrated along its length. He started to sit down and wrap his twin tails around his front legs in the cultural gesture of sensible conversation that was native to his race.

And that's when the "BANG! BANG! BANG!" started.

[close]

(CONTINUED IN POST BELOW)

[Mandle]

(CONTINUED FROM POST ABOVE)

Spoiler

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:

As they poured out through the door of the warehouse, Luke stepped out from behind Rod, who was already firing, drew aim on the impossible creature on the hood of the truck, and started to pull his own trigger "BLAM BLAM", when Michael popped up in front of him and had his brains blown out by the third shot.

"FUCK!"

"WHAT THE FUCK?!"

The "THUD-RATTLE" of Michael's body hitting the dock and his gun sliding away from his spasming hand.

"MIKE! ARE YOU..."

"HE'S FUCKING DEAD! YOU FUCKING SHOT HIM IN THE HEAD YOU FUCKING IDIO..."

And that is as far as their exchange went before stunted blue electrical arcs started leaping across the dock towards them and the truck floated up into the air and they both stood there, slack-jawed, eyes rising, just looking at it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

Jzzzpr released his shoulder-tendrils and, by the glowing light from them, rapidly typed in the commands on his wrist-unit that made the next several things happen.

Batteries be damned!

As he made the door of the vehicle tear off and fly through the night, he pulled the human out through the newly created gap and hung him in the air like a childhood doll forgetten in a closet, with an extra few taps of his sixth-from-the-right tendril to set a reminder alarm.

A few taps later, as bullets were zipping past him, Jzzzpr felt the tremble from the ground as the vehicle tipped up into the air, its forward and back sections folding down at their juncture.

As he rode up on the levitating vehicle, still squatted sitting on its front section, he fired off another two commands rapidly with his glowing shoulder tendrils, and then sprung off of the front end of the vehicle and landed, crouched on his six feet, on the deck of the dock.

His programmed electrical arcs began leaping across the ground towards the bad people firing weapons at him, preparing the pathway for the vehicle to do what he had told it to.

CHAPTER NINETEEN:

Michael was dead from a shot through the head.

There was no getting around that.

Rod's mind, drawing on the experience he had had in this kind of situation, came up a complete blank.

He kept pulling the trigger of his pistol long after its clip was dry.

The knee-high arcs of crackling pale-blue electricity passed by between his legs and he felt a slight tingle as they did so.

That was when Rod felt the weird sensation, creeping up over his scalp, that made his hair start to stand up all on end.

He looked over at Luke, whose own greased-back hair was trying to escape the bounds of its gel and do the same. A flap of a thick black slab of it snapped up suddenly but then there was the noise.

It was the noise of gallons of air rushing out of the way between the two of them and the approaching airborne truck.

Both of them had only a split-second to realize their fate before the truck, carried along above arcs of leaping blue electricity, smashed down on them and the docks exploded in a flare of orange in the otherwise dark night of The Great New York Blackout of November the 9th, 1965.

CHAPTER TWENTY:

The alarm on Jzzzpr's bracelet went off in his mind.

He hadn't exactly forgotten about the human he had left hanging up there above him, framed, suspended limply against the night sky. The night sky in which he knew the Mothership was hovering far above... inside her cloak.

But he had been a bit busy recently and his battery was down to the lowest of its bars that he had ever seen it at.

Which made his next decision all the more important.

Jzzzpr hit a button on his bracelet unit with his main shoulder tendril and leapt up into the air within the anti-gravity field created.

He flew up and then slowed his flight to become face-to-face with the human.

And then he pulled back his physical tendrils, and pushed out his mental ones.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE:

Dennis felt invisible fingers writhing through his mind, poking up against its far corners, and forcing him back into the world.

"What is it you want?" they pulsed through Dennis' kidnapped mind, his eyes rolled back in his head.

His brain had no choice but to answer "I want to show my mother that I love her."

Jzzzpr felt dirty.

He had never, until this moment, forced mind-speak on a lower race who did not possess the ability to initiate contact willingly from their side.

He had never used mind-speak as an inquisitional tool on another lifeform before, and he didn't know if he should be doing this but, it felt important and so, as much as he wanted to, he did not withdraw.

As they both hovered in the air several dozen feet above the burning dock below, Jzzzpr felt the consciousness inside Dennis start to fight against the intrusion of his invisible mental tendrils, and pulled them back into his own head with many rushes and snaps that only he felt in his mind.

Dennis came back into the world, his eyes rolling back down, at least partially conscious again, and looked into the face of this thing from another world called Jzzzpr, and had to make a choice.

He had to choose between insanity or just saying "Well, hello there, four-eyes. Nice to meet ya.".

His mouth chose the latter.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO:

Jzzzpr used his wrist device to translate the human's speech. It told him that the human had recognized him in a primitive way, but that it hadn't disrepected his higher two eyes in any form.

Dennis snapped his head around to try to clear it. He looked down first of all, as he felt no solid ground beneath his feet.

The dock was far below his now scampering feet, and engulfed in flames.

Himself hovering in the air confirmed, Dennis looked back up into the "face" of the thing in front of him and screamed "AAARGGGH~! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN, MAN?!"

Jzzzpr extended all his shoulder-tendrils out at lightning-speed, down onto the screen of his wrist unit. The human's eyes grew huger and huger in the glow of their light and then the device spoke back "SAID MOTHER. LOVE MOTHER?"

Dennis snapped his eyes back up and looked into the four eyes set into the squarish head of this thing. He didn't really know which eye or eyes to look into but just blurted out "YES! I love my mom!"

The thin, glowing physical curves of light coming from this thing's shoulders flexed and writhed, light pulsing along them, drawing Dennis' eyes back down to the device it had on the front wrist of its many limbs.

On the screen there were symbols scrolling up on the left side while very different symbols scrolled down on the right. It was very rapid the way, every so often, some of the left and right glowing symbols would make the screen pause and flash, as if they had matched up.

"PUT ME DOWN! PLEASE! I DON'T WANT THI-HIS-HISIIIS!" barked Dennis, the words bubbling out through his running nose and tears.

The speakers on the device on Jzzzpr's wrist said "ME IS LIKE YOU." in their soft metal voice.

Dennis, his eyes now back up on those of his captor, stuttered "P-p-please. This is r-real?"

"YES!", came back the answer from the device under the rapidly moving tendrils typing on it.

And then, in this cumbersome manner, the two of them had the following conversation, eventually... after much panic on one side and confusion on the other:

"Okay, so you're... an alien.. okaaay..."

"YES"

"What.. I mean.. why are you here?"

"TO AUDIT"

"Audit? Like a tax thing!?"

"SORRY"

"Hey, man, don't be sorry. It's all good."

"TO... JUDGE"

"Ahhh, that doesn't sound better."

"DO NOT WORRY"

"Okay, but "judge" sounds kind of final and all that."

"NOT FINAL JUDGE"

"So not like Judgement Day, like in the Bible or..."

"NOT LIKE IN YOUR BIBLE"

"Okay, then what?"

"JUDGE IF WORTHY"

"Worthy?"

"WORTHY OF CONSILIDATION"

"Wait... like the Borg?!"

"NOT LIKE BORG"

"You've met the Borg?!"

"NO. FICTIONAL RACE OF YOUR CULTURE. NOT IN COLLECTIVE"

"Not in what?!"

"COLLECTIVE OF WORLDS"

"So... you mean like the UN?"

"YES. LIKE YOU-EN"

"But why are you asking me about this? I'm just a..."

"THIRD EXAMPLE"

"... a random dude... Wait... example of what?"

"ALTRUISM"

"I dunno what that word means."

"CHARITY. CONCERN FOR OTHERS. ONESELF BEHIND OTHERS."

"Ah, I'm probably the last guy you'd wanna ask about that."

"LOVE FOR MOTHER. INTERESTED."

"Yeah, okay. I get you. But everyone does that, right?"

"ON SOME WORLDS"

"Look, man. Can you just put me down? I'll just go on my way and..."

"BATTERY LOW. NEED THIRD EXAMPLE"

"Third? What were the first two?"

[close]

(CONTINUED IN POST BELOW)

[Mandle]

(CONTINUED FROM POST ABOVE)

Spoiler

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE:

Dennis and Jzzzpr hung above the flaming docks below, the towering unlit cliffs of New York's skyscrapers their backdrop.

Jzzzpr told Dennis about the lady under the beautiful Green Lady that the men had cared for, and replayed the voice-clip of them saying "We're gonna give you a good seeing to" as proof of their altruism.

It took some time for Dennis to put the situation Jzzzpr had described into context in his mind but, by the time he had done so, the alien was already tapping on his console and continuing on with:

The old man in the alley that the doctors had rushed into and given him his medicine with their sticks at the last moment.

Dennis understood now, finally, through the explanation from the being before him, with its four eyes radiating around its mouth, and its twin-tails whipping around behind it in the dark, dank, New York harbor air, that it had gotten everything completely and perfectly wrong.

"Wait! No! You just didn't understand what was going on!"

"EXPLAIN"

"Ummm, look... when you are dealing with... I mean... in our language, you have to take some things with a grain of salt... I mean that you have to..."

Jzzzpr reacted immediately to the human's words with...

"SALT?! YOUR WORDS IS POISONED!!!"

... and then flew sideways a few dozen feet, high over the black waters below, lapping their white foam up against the pillars of the dock, before cutting his console's connection to the human, letting it plummet into the brine of the bath of poison below it.

Then he tapped on his console to call in the fast-track pickup option to get him back up home. His shitty little apartment on the great Mothership was looking pretty non-shitty to him right about now.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR:

In the great Mothership, silence was the default.

The guards lined up along each side took their respectful positions on top of their black circular pillars, hovering down with their tails curling around their front feet, their shock-wands still clenched, buzzing, ready to strike, in some of their other hands.

Jzzzpt walked down the long, black path to his Grand Controller's throne, on his own four walking-feet, as was the respectful custom when coming before a leader.

Kkllb pulled his head up from between his front two feet where he had been pretending to doze, blinked his eyes in the succession from top-left-to-right and then bottom-right-to-left that was supposed to make it look like he had just woken up.

Jzzzpt was not fooled, but he went along with it anyway. 

Mind-to-mind Kkllb asked "How are you and yours?"

Right back at him, Jzzzpr telepathed "Very well. Thanks for asking."

They did the usual "little-talk" for a few microseconds before Jzzzpr heard in his head, his Grand Controller's voice vibrating with emotion:

"ARE THEY READY, JZZZPR?!"

Jzzzpr telepathed back "YES. THEY HAVE MET OUR REQUIREMENTS.. BUT...  WELL..."

"WELL?!" mind-spoke the Grand Controller, the guards down the sides of the chamber snapping to attention at that one word.

Jzzzpr ducked his head down. He didn't know if these Earth savages were ready or not. Why had all this been put on his aged, flabby back?!

He considered mentioning the one human that had spoken to him with salty, poisonous words. The one that had tried to belittle the other humans that Jzzzpr had witnessed caring for others.

But, he had surely been in cahoots with the weapon-bearing humans on the wooden deck, the ones the Jzzzpr had had to kill.

It had been a mistake to save that one of their violent mob that had been driving the vehicle. However, Jzzzpr, shield-thought to himself "How am I expected to know everything?!" and then thought-swore, also behind the brief barrier he hoped the Grand Controller wouldn't notice.

The inquisitive narrowing of Kkllb's main eyes, the logical-thinking ones, made him feel pressed for time.

Jzzzpr quickly pulled the mind-shield back in, and felt the middle of a further asking of the question "ARE THEY READY?" bubbling up, impatiently from his boss.

Jzzzpr was exhausted, fed up, and had almost died down there on that stupid, ugly, blue and green and brown planet.

All the other signs from his first two positive contacts pointed to "YES" and so that is what he mind-spoke to the Grand Controller.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE:

Dennis, limbs flailing, plunged below the surface of the New York harbor down to a depth of about 5 feet from his fall.

He swung his arms wide in the motions he had learnt from swimming school as an infant. His head broke the surface next to a crustacean-encrusted pillar of the dock. He glanced around. There was a ladder not far away.

He started to swim for it when he heard the noise.

The same noise that everyone all over the Earth heard eventually, as it ripped around the planet.

The noise of the Mothership coming out of cloak and pushing its bottom half down into the atmosphere.

By the time Dennis had gripped the rusty iron ladder, covered as it was with barnacles, cutting his palms in several places, and had hauled himself up onto the deck of the pier, the racket from above was growing to a pummeling volume.

He rolled over onto his back, legs still hanging off the side of the dock from the knees down.

Dennis opened his eyes, coughed up some salty water all down his chin, and saw the underbelly of the alien ship parting the atmosphere over New York City.

It was huge. It was roughly oval-shaped except for some angular sections that stuck out a bit from one side, and a lot more from the other. It was terrifying. It was creating new bands of weather patterns around its convex hull, lightning flashing off its sides into the fleeing, rolling ripples of thunderhead clouds.

Dennis, at first, started laughing wildly up at the sight of the crackling blue-white arcs of electricity forking off the edges of the impossible thing up there above him but, by the time the pealing blasts of the thunder's noise hit him and the docks, blasting discarded candy wrappers and soda cans off its deck, his mouth was grimaced down, trembling, as his streams of tears poured past the corners of it.

His eyes rolled up into his head and, a bit later, when the police arrived at the flaming dock, they found him only barely conscious, bubbles of spit forming, pouring, and breaking from the corner of his rigidly downturned mouth.

Dennis was crammed into the back of one of their black-and-whites, as neither the fire brigade nor the ambulances were there on the scene yet, or even their sirens within hearing distance over the thunderous rallies of sonic BOOMS rolling in from above.

The cop looked up again at the underbelly of the impossible thing, just before he got into the driver's seat, and muttered "Well, fuck me." under his breath.

As it turned out, the impossible thing was here to stay... for a while.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX:

Then, after six weeks, or around about that, the alien Mothership left. It just suddenly left.

Dennis was sleeping, under the deep veil of his prescribed medication, when it happened.

His lids, below his sweaty brow, were squinched shut, the eyes under them darting back and forth frantically as his mother mopped his forehead back and forth with an icepack.

The sonic boom reverberating through the atmosphere above the city only made Elaine glance up for a moment before she got back to caring for Dennis.

Her Dennis. The one child that she had birthed.

The one unique being that had changed the future of the galaxy forever, although she did not know this at the time, and never would.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN:

The funeral was tough on Dennis. He hadn't been conscious when his mother had keeled over suddenly from a heart-attack right next to his bed. The hospital staff had tried their best to assure him that it was not his fault. That she hadn't stressed herself to breaking point caring for him while he was out of it.

But, he didn't believe them.

And, in turn, nobody believed him either. Neither about his face-to-face showdown with the alien in mid-air over the New York docks, nor about what he had tried to tell it about humanity.

His mother's coffin being lowered into the ground to the whirring sound of electric motors as the background music to his thoughts, Dennis wondered "Was it telling the truth? Why did it save me?"

Then his mind wandered away as people he didn't care all that much about patted him on the back and hugged him and pulled him away from his mother's gravesite to eat suspicious shrimp cocktails and drink way too much at a local bar.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT:

After the forty-two revolutions of Earth that it took the delegations with the humans to be done with, Kkllb ordered the great Mothership to depart.

It was enough.

It was enough rampant violence on the surface of this world as another primitive race reacted to having their entire philosophy uprooted.

It was enough frustrating back-and-forth through his delegates' vocal translator bracelets.

But that's not all the reasons, for Kkllb, for why it was enough

It was also enough because of Jzzzpr's constant intrusions into his command center.

And here was yet another one!

Why was this agent of his, once sleek and competent, now slinking his flabby back onto his ship's bridge so often? And why was he pushing his mind-shield out so often while he asked his stupid questions?

Annoyed to his breaking point, Grand Controller Kkllb yelled through his physical mouths, all of them this time, both logical and emotional:

"WHY DO YOU PLAGUE ME SO?!"

Jzzzpr, suddenly crouched down on the deck on his six limbs, squinted up at his boss and whispered through his higher-function mouths, keeping the emotive ones shut tight.

He whispered "I just hoped I did a good enough job..."

"SPEAK UP!" roared Kkllb.

Jzzzpr paused, trembling, and then spoke his mind through his mouths, using all of them for the first time in a very long time.

He asked "What have we given them?"

Still suspended in the air, the Grand Controller said "We have given them our energy technology. All the energy they will ever need to improve their dying planet."

Jzzzpr asked, by mind-link this time "And the Galactic Collective contract?"

"It was signed today, between us and their dominant organization, the same one we entrusted the technology to," replied Kkllb. "Some peacekeeping group of theirs that calls itself the Central Intelligence Agency. Smart guys by the sound of it."

[close]

(THE END)

[Stupot]

Okay, let’s close this bad-boy. Sorry if you were working on something, Baron.

As there are only two entries, we won’t have any special voting system. Just pick your favourite of the two. The story with the most votes wins.

No need to PM me, you can vote using the poll above. You have 5 days to read the stories and vote. I will do so too, and I will not look at the voting tally before I place my own vote.

Enjoy the stories.

[Baron]

Wait, you didn't accept my 6 word submission? 

Yeah, sorry, we're travelling and I just couldn't squeeze out the time.  I'll be sure to vote, though! 

[Mandle]

Just finished reading Sini's story and WOW! It was amazing! I was drawn along the whole time. I felt the emotions of the main character even without them being pointed out to me. A masterful work!

I would have voted for it over mine even if I didn't have to.

[Sinitrena]

Just finished reading Sini's story and WOW! It was amazing! I was drawn along the whole time. I felt the emotions of the main character even without them being pointed out to me. A masterful work!

I would have voted for it over mine even if I didn't have to.

Thank you. 


As for your story, what a wild ride! But before I say something about the plot, what's with your formatting this round? A paragraph is usually more than one sentence. This was hard to read, though I did like the bite-sized chapters.  I like the general plot: An alien missunderstands so much of humanity that we end up with them liking us more than we probably deserve. Nice. But I stumbled over some details in the execution: The amount of knowledge Jzzpr has about humanity is inconsistent. Jzzpr just learns that there is some intelligent life on Earth, still he seems familiar with things; Jazzpr reacts to the Statue of Liberty almost like she is alive (greeting her, kissing her feet) while at the same time fully aware that he needs to record human conversation. He finds her beautiful despite the fact that anything with a human form really shouldn't be beautiful to this creature (beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder, but generally based on what the beholder is used to). The misunderstandings make sense, in a way, though Dennis attempt to clear them up less so. One can argue that Dennis didn't think through what he was saying (obviously, given the situation) but wouldn't it make more sense to try to appease the thing holding him prisoner? Also, the reaction to Dennis saying "salt" seemed a bit extreme. Jzzpr hates salt, it's dangerous for his species, alright, but this reaction to just mentioning the word? Strange. (And yes, you can always say he's an alien, he doesn't follow the same logic as humans, but we are in Jzzpr's head for the most part, so this doesn't work.) While I like the little dig against the CIA at the end, this really wasn't set up at all. Yes, it might be another missunderstanding but is it, really?  Poor Dennis, why did you have to kill off his mom?
Overall, this is a good idea for a story, an interesting plot, but another week of editing and streamlining the plot would have been good, I think.

I have voted.

[Mandle]

Yeah, writing this kind of story with every loose end tied up probably requires a a lot more time and editing, and probably pages, than I had. I actually consider this draft 1.5 still pretty much as I was really rushing to get it posted at the end there.

But I think I can answer a few of your issues:

* It is mentioned at the start of the story that Jzzzpr has visited this planet before in the past, although a very long time ago, possibly before humans existed or were in a much more primitive stage. I left the timescale of that vague as it is measured in millions of his home-planet's years, and we don't know how long a year is there but, millions still infers a very long time.

* My idea was that he was probably more enamored by the statue's impressive size and beautiful flowing lines. And yeah, his emotional reactions to things aren't supposed to completely make sense to the human reader. Just enough so that we can follow his thoughts, but weird enough so we feel a bit off-kilter in his mind.

* I will improve the "salt" thing a bit in a future version. The idea was that, in Jzzzpr's language, it translated to something like "blah blah blah... but I am lying to you with the intention of doing you harm" and he had a reaction of hatred to that. Remember, he's also not an unusually smart dude, or even all that invested in his mission. A bit of a lazy slob, really, although I did give him a slight redemption at the end where he is worried about what he may have done, giving humans so much sudden power.

* The CIA thing at the end was supposed to indicate that the forementioned "change the future of the galaxy forever" was not meant in a positive way. That we were going to use the energy tech to create weapons instead of save our planet, and then head out to conquer more worlds once ours was screwed.

* His mom died just because I didn't have the time or space to complete the intended story-arc between her and Dennis in this draft. I did actually intend for her to meet Jzzzpr as well, but that got way beyond the scale of this entry. Perhaps in a future version.

Cheers for the feedback.

I copied it for reference for when I revisit the story in the future. It will be valuable for reenforcing the points that made sense to me at the time of writing but probably won't to a reader. Always a difficult balancing act: under-explaining and over-explaining. And yeah, the format will be improved. I just personally find it easier to read text on a scrolling device when it is chopped up like this. It also helped me edit the story quickly. But I will put it in a more traditional format in future versions.

I intend to write a bit more on your story as well.

[Mandle]

I read back through Sini's story and the only nitpick I have is that this sentence could spoil the final twist only very very slightly:

"It sounded like it, panic convinced her that it did."

Maybe "It sounded like it, as she dashed, panicked towards the..." could be more subtle. I dunno... I thought I had more to say as feedback for the story but I guess I don't. It's pretty much perfect.

[Stupot]

Sorry for the delay in wrapping this up, but as you all are aware the winner is.... Sinitrena for her emotional story May Day.

We'll be eagerly awaiting the next topic, Sini.

Brief bit of feedback:
I really enjoyed both stories. Mandle's was three posts long but never felt like a slog. The writing was good and I could really visualize the set pieces in almost a graphic novel style. A few more examples of the misinterpretations would have been fun. My vote went to Sinitrena though. I felt this story had a little more tension and definitely more feels. I had a couple of problems with believability (like why she would listen to the radio feed in the first place when she didn't really seem to care about what the voices were saying), but they are nitpicks in what was a good read.

Over to you Sini.