FCF - The Carnivorous Plant

Meeting with the Raali

This chapter is the first translation from Czech to English. You are welcome to rewrite it, if you make it better, I will send you 10 000 Gift Points.

Please note that I'm trying to write simplest way possible. The story is moved forwards mostly just by using various events.

---

The earthlings Sammy, Jerry and John, who carries a heavy backpack with water and food, are going to the jungle with the aliens Jaffa and Neme.
A little farther the aliens are working on small farms and fields. Other inhabitants are just standing there and staring at the departing earthlings, many small children are among them.
"I don’t know if it’s a good idea to let you go alone, without any help." Jaffa objects on the way.
"Are you sure you have everything you need?"
Their guides seem to be worried. Jerry is trying to calm them down with his confident gestures. It wouldn’t be good if they’d decide to go with them. They would have to go towards the desert and go over it, maybe even as far as ten kilometres until they are out of sight.
It was Sammy's main condition in the morning planning and Jerry didn’t object. Academy graduates are not yet accustomed to these lengthy walks through infinite nature.
"We'll be fine, don’t worry. Your idea has saved our village, you couldn’t do more for us!" Jerry encourages their conscience.
"Exactly, I can’t wait to try your style of farming, guys. My hands are trembling with impatience, just as I think of digging the first hole in the ground." Sammy suppresses laughter.
The aliens are obviously flattered.
"You can give it a try today; just stay with us a bit longer." Jaffa doesn’t let them to leave so easily.
Both aliens don’t seem to want to have their lives back on the same track.
Sammy smiles, but for a moment he needs to turn his back to them so he can relieve his face and make an ironic expression saying "what the…?".
Jerry has prepared an argument.
"Unfortunately, every day of waiting means a great loss to our brothers and women. We are dying too fast and cannot wait. We came to you just to look for an answer and we got all the food that our friends and families had... When things get better at our place, we’ll come back and celebrate, deal?"
"I see." Jaffa replies.
Life is certainly much more important for him than fun.
"I hope you’ll get home alright and let your inhabitants know about us!" Neme adds.
"We definitely will."
The expedition is now behind the walls and trying to get through the jungle. Neme and Jaffa stand and say goodbye to the earthlings with prolonged waving even though they are already lost among the trees.
As soon as the earthlings manage to get out of sight, Jerry contacts Sammy via the silent communicator despite the fact they are walking next to each other.
"Don’t panic, Jerry. Now be quiet, I have to tell you something important before it's too late."
Jerry rolls his eyes.
"Why are you doing that?"
"John, can you hear us?" Sammy ignores Jerry’s objection.
"I'm connected."
"Great, so do you remember what I told you yesterday? My suspicions about these plants are still very likely to be true. Anyway, if they do have a little intelligence, they won’t let us back to the ship without a fight."
"You think that the Raali gonna attack us?" Jerry and shoots a few precautionary pulses from his pistol on the nearby carnivorous leaves.
Sammy instinctively checks the charge in his pistol. About three quarters of the energy is still left. Not bad.
"They have already telepathically influenced you to insanity and that was probably just one bush. You called me dumbass." Sammy says offended.
"Yeah, I was mad as hell." Jerry admits.
The jungle thickens and the earthlings are looking at strange vines, tree growths oddly moving against the wind, berries in various colours and leaves with many teeth, soaked with stomach acids and poison.
"Moreover, there is one other thing I didn’t mention. The telepathic signal hasn’t stopped for me. They are still sending it to my head and it often changes." Sammy says in the most decent way possible.
"What?"
"I tell you, they will not let us out of here! Just calm down, me and John have a plan."
Jerry doesn’t feel well anymore.
"s***, I can’t wait to get on the ship and finally have a sleep in our soft blankets." Sammy stretches as if nothing was going on.
The tension in his head intensified once more. This is another piece of proof that the plant perceives the spoken words, but cannot hear the electronic communicator.
Sammy is also aware that it depends on what he visually imagines. When previously he thought of some technology or events from home, as if he had suddenly a taste to think of them in more and more details.
The Raali not only wants to find out who it is, but also where they´re from and all that the Earthlings can do. When it starts, Sammy blocks the Raali by using his thoughts of the beautiful round ass of that girl from the bar, or of how he once found himself in the heat of passion with a young English teacher. At that point Raali usually gives up. The plant has no interest whatsoever in the passionate adventures of earthlings.
After a moment, Jerry speaks to him again via the silent communicator, this time with much more respect.
"Why is John supposed to hear that? He’s not doing anything anyway, he’s just walking beside us... and it was you who said that it was just a metal-head."
"He must record what we say to each other, so the engineers at home can put what's going on here into perspective. Also, I think that when we meet with the Raali and you go crazy again, I'll stay here alone with John."
The realization of that is very annoying to Jerry. But he can’t do anything about it. It’s as though an ugly fat woman is going to sit on him, and he realizes at the last moment that he is chained to the bed.
"That s***, I made this morning, could be handy for the Raali since it's a bush, isn’t it?" Jerry says aloud to courage himself.
"Certainly, the Raali must be pretty smelly pig. We gotta hope it’s not gonna invite us to its birthday party."

It doesn’t take too long, and they enter the places where John fired a kilometre circle in the jungle the previous day.
"Do you remember this place, John? Are you at least a little bit ashamed?"
The Android gives a very cold look around.
"These buildings were destroyed by my pulse weapon."
"I can’t believe you're the newest version." Jerry says shaking his head.
Suddenly, when the expedition takes them through the burnt centre of the circle, Jerry collapses on the ground and gets something resembling an epileptic fit. He´s shaking and then lies motionless, but with his eyes fully open.
Sammy looks around waiting to see what’s going to happen. Meanwhile, John jumps in to help.
"Are you alright, Jerry?" He asks and watches him with his biological analyzer.
"The state of health is good. No signs of tissue or nerve connection damage," he says aloud and records it into his database.
Sammy is sitting down by him and tries to wake his colleague up with a few slaps.
Jerry begins to blink blankly and gets to his feet with the Android’s help. But he still has the strange blank expression on his face. Once he is standing, he withdraws a few steps from them and speaks in a low, modulated, authoritative voice:
"We took your friend. Drop your weapons."
"What are you doing?" Sammy asks, even though he already suspects the answer.
He begins to feel a new, but this time much stronger wave of telepathic signal. As if the reality around was shattered into a million pieces, everything looks plastic and he can hear a rumbling of low frequency waves.
He calls quietly to John.
"There are more of them here, John. I'll try to block it, just don’t do anything, they got Jerry!“
At that moment, from the east side of the jungle, about 10 hopping tumbling bushes rush towards them.
Jerry points a pulse pistol at Sammy, while the Raali are forming in a circle around them and rolling slowly, as if they were waiting for something.
"Drop your weapon, stranger, right now!" Jerry yells at him.
Sammy is trying to take time. He slightly modified his thoughts, focusing on the shrubs, he´s curious and wants to know who they are. They move very oddly, wrapped in branches to be able to roll. It works! As if something in his head cracked and the telepathic pressure moved to back of his head. Such a relief!
John is standing next to him and does nothing, as Sammy requested. So he drops his weapon to the ground.
"What do you want Raali?"
The telepathic signal is amplified by hundred-fold, the bushes stand around them and sway up and down intently. Sammy’s thought blockade, however, works very well. Now he wonders why they are swinging up and down, and all he feels is a slight burning at the top of his head.
After a while, it becomes very boring.
"Can you stop it? You´re just wasting time you moron."
The telepathic signal stops.
"Thanks." Sammy appreciates.
Nothing happens, the bushes are lazily rolling around them and Jerry is still pointing his weapon towards them.
"You and your electronic friend are immune to my influence. The only creatures that are immune are Actans."
"What is it, Actan?"
"You called them moles."
"So you've heard all the things we talked about." Sammy changes the topic.
The conversation is interrupted for a while and again nothing happens.
"Now you are going to see Raali, a long journey awaits you." Jerry speaks and with a wave of his gun suggests to them to move.
The shrubs form a line and slowly roll in the direction from which they came.
"John, stay close to me ... by the way, they probably aren’t very intelligent. We are going the same way they came from, no secrets about what we said. What do you think it is?" Sammy asks and he doesn’t want to show what an exciting opportunity they are getting.
"But you were talking to Jerry, Sammy." The android replies.
"Thanks for the information, I wouldn’t have noticed it."
"You're welcome, Sammy."

The expedition surrounded by the rolling Raali continues in along the way for quite some time. The only one who looks exhausted is Sammy, because John doesn’t need to simulate fatigue in this situation. Jerry is still telepathically controlled and watches the two from behind with a gun in his hand.
"We're almost there, strangers." Jerry suddenly says.
Sammy doesn’t try to accelerate, slow down or do any other unnecessary movements. He only has to put one foot in front of other.
"By the way, the bush never gets tired? Shouldn’t they drink water or dip their roots in some s***?" Sammy tries entertain himself.
"That's none of your business!"
The group enters a meadow with a shallow grass. One of the Raali separates from the group, rolls very quickly to the nearest large tree and cut it with a fast, strong flick of his long tentacle.
"Dude, aren’t those trees your cousins ​​or something?"
"They are my servants." Jerry replies.
The Raali and Jerry stop in the meadow beside the cut tree.
"I have to ask you to turn your android off before you can visit me."
Sammy and John are giving him a puzzled look.
"Why?"
"Don’t play stupid. I know it’s got a weapon in its eyes and can kill all of us. Turn it off right now, or you and your friend will die." Jerry insists and points the gun close to his head.
Sammy thinks for a moment and tries to concentrate. The telepathic signal returns. Oh here we go again, that’s all they needed at this moment.
"John, before I turn you off, you have to set the remote module from the ship, the time and place where it should pick us up." He turns to the android quietly and tries to focus on how to wipe off the glue s*** off his shoes.
"No problem. What settings do you need?"
The plant changes and intensifies the telepathic signal again, as if it had suspicion, but it doesn’t know what´s happening.
Jerry suddenly falls to the ground and vomits violently.
"What, what happened? I feel as if a hammer hit my head."
Sammy smiles at Jerry and immediately passes to John, as if the Jerry’s release was exactly what he wanted.
"So quickly, John. In about 20 minutes, one kilometre away in the directions where we are going, over there beyond that hill. Set it to immediate park next to two people. It must be done really quickly, do you get it? What’s your deactivation code?"
"I understand, the instructions have been sent. My deactivation code is 12345."
"I noticed that your developers are probably massive assholes." Sammy says.
By entering the confirmation code into the uncovered stomach control panel, John turns off. Before closing down he winked conspiratorially at Sammy. Such a gesture was totally unexpected.
Jerry is just watching and breathing heavily. They are right in the middle of circle of bushes, it seems weird to him, but still he can barely stand.
"You are turning John off, so we're probably in deep s***, huh?" He says with the feeling of being choked.
“Something like that. Raali fiddled about a bit with your brain, so don´t try to talk or think too much, if you know what I mean.“
"Okay. Pull some water out of the bag or I’ll die of thirst." Jerry giggles with the sun in his face.
It seems quite comical to Sammy, who less than a minute ago was receiving completely different set of commands from the same person.
They didn´t even get time to refresh and shrubs around them start moving again.
Jerry is so surprised that he almost choked again. He wants to point his weapon at them, but Sammy stops him.
"These are the famous Raali, our new buddies. By the way drop your gun on the ground." Sammy grins ironically at him.
"What's going on here?"
"We are more than half a day's journey from our ship. The Raali came and captured us and you were nicely mutating. Now don’t stop and follow them before they change their minds again about your freedom."
Jerry finally gets it.
"How do you actually resist telepathy? I feel as if grenade exploded in my head."
"My training, remember?"
"Yeah, but anyway. It must be difficult." Jerry looks defeated.
At that moment, the telepathic signal transmitted interrupts Sammy. What a relief again!
"Thanks, Raali."