FCF - The Carnivorous Plant

Ten years later

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.

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After ten years the alien settlement on planet Zebra looks completely different. The ruined huts and poor population turned into a big farmhouse, surrounded by stone walls, with plump farmers, pregnant women, and many children under the age of nine.
By one house, in a large stone pool, there is about a hundred small Actans, someone breeds a sort of monkey in cages, there are creatures looking like chickens and horses that help to cultivate a few small fields.
Jaffa ten years older evaluates with a satisfied expression that farming rules. He is standing in front of the place where once he struggled to build his hut. Instead of that, there is now a stone house with two large rooms and a solid wooden roof.
The house resounds with the laughter of several small children. Arvin is coming to him, carrying his leather bag.
"And don’t forget to collect fresh leaves, we are running out of diapers!"
"Yes yes, I know."
He takes the bag. From the house you can hear the sound of something breaking. Arvin turns and runs in to shout at the children, without saying bye to Jaffa. Jaffa with an unhappy sigh checks the large wooden club. Thoughtfully he attaches his bag with rope to one shoulder and a bow to the other.
Neme is also coming out. His friend is waiting for him outside the house and conspiratorially ding on the bow-string.
"Hi Jaffa! So are you ready?" Neme shouts at him enthusiastically and sets off towards him, also laden with different hunting weapons.
"Have you got a bow?"
"Sure! Who shoots down more cones, he gets the wife of the other as a reward!" Neme jokes.
Layka is coming out the door behind him, nervous, and hysterically yells at him.
"And come back for lunch, or don’t come back at all, you bastard!" She yells at him and for herself she adds: "He is going to have fun in the forest and leave me here alone!"
Their children are crying inside.
"You meant, he gets it as a punishment." Jaffa adds with a sad irony.
And they both set off silently towards the stone walls at the entrance to the jungle.

In the jungle they move cautiously so they don’t step on a carnivorous leaf. A hot acid from such a leaf leaves burn for few days. They have apparently stepped into similar trouble a few times because their legs are pretty scarred in those places.
Jaffa wants to shoot the arrow at the red-coloured berry at the top of one tree. While he notices that in the sky some kind of gigantic stone with a whistle lands towards the south.
"Look at that! The flying stone must be huge!" And shoots his arrow in that direction.
"Missed!"
The arrow just turns back in the air to the ground in about a kilometre from the spaceship.
"It looks like it's pretty high!"
"A huge flying rock!"
They both continue in silence on their way towards the west. They have well-researched this part of the jungle, so they know they won’t encounter the dead forest or Raali anywhere near.
After about an hour, they turn and go back. Their women don’t like it too much when they reside outside the village for a long time. The aliens fearfully look at each other to see the reaction on the idea of going back home as soon as possible. They haven’t been hunting in the forests for so long. These walks are intended to capture some free game which would eventually expand the already diverse variety of animals on the farm. However, the truth is that they haven’t seen any game for a quite some time.
Since the invention of farming life in the village has taken a completely new direction. People are no longer hungry. Adventurers no longer exist because they aren´t needed, and therefore women have nobody to look up to. Stories about various experiences are repeated in the evenings by the fire and incidents of new adventures don’t happen every week as they used to.
Now, there are other, more important obligations, which need to be taken care of.

A terrestrial spacecraft with a soft hiss lands on the plain near the place where Jaffa and Neme walk through.
Two young astronauts and an android that is unrecognizable from a human, are getting off in their astronaut suits without helmets.
Sammy takes a deep breath.
"I would say that this air is way too fresh."
Both earthlings are beginning to feel sick.
"Did you rise up the level of oxygen in the cabin before landing, you metal-head?" Jerry tries to suppress vomiting.
"Why should I?" Android asks.
"Well, if you haven’t noticed yet, people need to breathe to live."
"Please specify your explanation."
The android stands in a place without signs of discomfort and waits for the instructions.
"The air is alright, we just need to adapt a bit. Five sprints around the ship and the last one to finish, goes to collect caterpillars with the metal-head!"
Sammy sees that Jerry understood so he sets off first and then they both sprinted off as if something was chasing them.
A few minutes later, they are sitting on the nearby stones, trying to catch their breath. John the android is meanwhile unloading various boxes and bags from the ship.
"Hell, I still got it!" Jerry says, watching John's work wearily and turning to Sammy with a grin.
"How could you get him mad?"
"Who?"
"Rone from SDOP."
Sammy’s expression is suddenly bored.
"I was trying to get his girlfriend. Do you remember the last party?"
"Yeah, but I didn’t think you could really do it." His colleague giggles.
He cannot believe it and after a while he explodes with laughter. Sammy is silent and just watches him. Then Jerry gets it.
"Oh yes, I see, she goes out with Rone, the most arrogant moron around. I bet that girl adores types like... you."
Sammy rolls his eyes up and goes to help android with the unpacking.
"I would bet that you adore your mother."
All three Earthlings are already in the forest, dressed in camouflaged clothing, a little like that of a soldier. John the android carries all their luggage, Jerry and Sammy holds small pulse pistols in their hands, just in case.
"Well John, get out a map." Jerry commands.
One of John's eyes begins to glow as a three-dimensional projection of planet Zebra appears in the air in front of them. Jerry stretches and moves fingers over the projection, and it zooms in so to see the place where they are currently located.
"So we landed here, about three kilometres south of the turtle shells. Because you are such good friend with Rone from the commission," he turns to Sammy and continues: "We got rewarded with an android, which is useful in the jungle like a robot for the production of whipped cream."
"There are only trees, bushes, rivers, and maybe a couple of turtles. Calm down."
Jerry still thoughtfully examines the map and looks around. His training in the academy for space agents was among others primarily focused on orientation and survival in the wild.
"Look, if we continue north for about three kilometres, we can’t miss them."
Suddenly the map projection begins to shake. John's leg is getting wrapped by some weird half-live lain, which tries to pull him away. John can’t stand very well, but he makes every effort not to interrupt the map projection.
"John, you're in danger, so don’t take your job so seriously and save your ass first." Sammy shakes his head in disbelief.
"Thank you." The android replies.
After about a second of idleness he turns off the map and quickly fires a dose of pulse rays from his eyes to the lain.
"Lesson number one, John. Nature on this planet can be very hungry and we are its food."
Jerry is silently disappointed.
John is idle for a few seconds, as if he was frozen. Then he suddenly furiously spins around and his eyes shoot a brutal volley of pulsed rays on trees, shrubs and grass around!
"Stop! Hold it! What are you doing?" Jerry screams urgently.
John stops to answer him.
"Prevention, dangerous kind of alien life should be eliminated."
"Great, and what we will take the samples from, you metal-head?"
Both earthlings shake their heads after watching the mess, their android has just made.
For a kilometre around them not a single plant stayed alive after five seconds of John's work. Everything either burned immediately after contact with the laser, or it's burning out and smouldering.
"What the hell did you tell him?" Jerry asks with anger.
"Just to watch out for himself! How could I have known that he will go nuts?"
"You are supposed to be the brain of the operation, but you probably aren’t the best with artificial intelligence. We have to delete this part of the record from John's mind, so Rone doesn’t eat us for breakfast."
"That asshole would be in seventh heaven if he saw the mess." Sammy agrees and scratches his neck.
His colleague points his finger at John, he is obviously upset.
"Never use that thing again, we have our own guns, see?" Waving a gun in front of him.
John calmly looks at their weapons, and then "freezes" again for a few seconds.

Jaffa and Neme the aliens are already on their way to the village with their bags full of mushrooms and delicate leaves that their women use as diapers for babies.
Neme sniffs the smell of burning in the air.
"Wait, do you smell it?"
"Well, its like someone´s making a fire on the other side."
"Do you think it’s spontaneous?"
Jaffa looks puzzled about the fine cloud of smoke above the trees, at about kilometre from them.
"I don’t think so, the smoke is everywhere, but it’s not too dense. It’s more like two or three separate fires were made." He expertly estimates.
"Shall we go there?" Neme asks excitedly.
"The women will yell if we're late, but what if some young hunter lit it?"
"Raali will get them!"
So without further hesitation they are headed off to the place.

The group of earthlings continue walking through the jungle. The vegetation around gets thicker and thicker. It seems strange to them that they still haven’t encountered any animals, beetle or even a fly, anything but weird-looking, dangerous plants.
Sammy and Jerry sometimes shoot at the closest carnivorous leaves, moving vines or anything that looks suspicious to avoid another accident with the Android.
Sammy likes that.
"Finally a place where I can enjoy myself with impunity!"
"It's scary here." Jerry states uncomfortable after a while.
Everything around moves, yet no one is here.
"Maybe all the plants on this planet except grass are carnivorous, look how weird they look."
Both men with bated breath, re-examine the leaves on the trees with reinforced stems and something that looks like a jaw. And wispy growths that aren’t blown by wind, although they are soft and move. It looks like they are monitoring the events around them and mainly those guys.
"Tell me about it, it looks like a party, hosted by your psycho-crackers training club. It would be a miracle if any woman showed up."
After a while of continuous journey, Jerry asks a question.
"Tell me, how did you convince her to go out with you?"
"You know Jerry, I don’t think it's so difficult to actually do it. You always talk about getting girls as if it was some special privilege. But in the end you actually do s*** for it and just wait for things to come."
"No no no," he laughs mischievously: "Don’t think you’ll get out of this so easily, buddy. Tell me, how it happened!"
Sammy looks in his direction. Jerry suppresses laughter and tries to look innocent
"All right. I spoke with her twice before, trying to be cool and stuff. And when it worked out, the most important was to get out somewhere else as soon as possible... so when we meet next time, she would think that we kinda already ... know each other."
"What? And what happened afterwards, Mr. Scientist?" Jerry responds immediately with a fine irony in his voice and shoots at several carnivorous leaves nearby.
Sammy gets involved and also burns a few leaves around so he looks busy and gets time to think what to say. After a while, he continues.
"You know, the final ceremony was boring and we just met, so I invited her to the bar... it looked as if I was used to kill time with tentative conversations and things like that. It was f***ing hard to say something that would make sense every time, but when we looked at each other at the bar... then it just went naturally from there."
Jerry smiles with a little more understanding when he sees, what Sammy actually fights with.
Sammy went through completely different training in the academy. It was the so-called cognitive-emotional specialization, in which the students are put in different hypothetical situations. During their solutions, the doctors send differently prepared sequences of emotional pictures and sounds into their brains to stimulate "contradictory" tendencies. So, the student learns to decide on something, despite their feelings.
What they don’t learn at this school, are the social ties and life with other people.
To gleeful Jerry it seems comical again that Sammy talks about his crooked privacy.
"So, did you enjoy? Wetting yourself?"
"No."
"What? How come?"
"Rone showed up after a half hour and took her away, end of the story."
Jerry stops and continues in the conversation.
"The bastard! So you at least confronted him, right? What did you say?"
"Confronted ... what?" Sammy looks at him, he apparently doesn’t understand at all what he meant.
Jerry is disgusted and squeezes his thumb and forefinger on his nose. This is unbelievable!
"You aren’t trying to tell me that an arrogant asshole like you did absolutely nothing about it, are you?"
"And what do you think I should have done?"
"If you told him to piss off, you could have maybe got laid that night."
Sammy thoughtfully stands for a moment, he takes a deep breath and his eyes scan the surrounding nature.
"Wait, how is it possible that I would get laid?"
"You know, Mr Scientist," Jerry explains tired and doesn’t really understand it all: "What if she went for drink with you, mainly because she wasn’t happy in the relationship?"
Sammy stands and thinks, looks around at the trees, plays all the key moments with Susan hastily in his mind and compares them with what Jerry just said. In the meantime both of his colleagues leave him alone and quietly keep walking.