Quorilax

This story has a content rating of “13+”. What does that mean? In general terms, you can see what falls within a 13+ content rating by clicking on the “13+” in Quorilax’s item header, below the title at the top of the page. Specifically for this story, here is what you can expect:

Horror/Violence: Moderate There is a lot of death implied in this story, but Orion—who narrates most of the story from his perspective—does not see the vast majority of it, only hearing about it indirectly, usually with with no further detail. However, there are several instances of people or non-person animals being injured, killed, or found dead within view of Orion, and these occurrences are typically described more fully.

Touching/Sex: Mild Given their extreme size disadvantage compared to the other people in this story, Humans can do little to nothing to resist extraterrestrials who want to touch or pick up Humans against the will of said Humans, and some aliens take advantage of this major power imbalance on several occasions. In most cases, the non-consensual touching or full-body grabbing is not done with sexual intentions in mind; however, there are a few instances where Orion initially interprets the act that way or it is strongly implied that something may have happened “offscreen.” Full consensual sexual acts are referred to in passing but are not described in any detail; however, there are a couple of interactions, both intraspecies and interspecies, where female and/or male sexual arousal are mentioned, and brief touching of breasts and/or genitals occurs. Despite all our differences, the various species’ bodies are very similar to one another in that regard, and honest consideration and discussion about the logistics of sexual activity between people of such disparate scales takes place several times. For a few reasons, the alien races tend to have a more relaxed attitude toward nudity than Humans on Earth do, although the Humans featured in the story outside of Earth end up being naked a fair amount as well. Understandably, Orion sees fit to remark on this difference from Human cultures on multiple occasions, especially early on, but these observations do not pervade the story, and whether and how much characters are covered is left open to imagination much of the time.

Harsh Language: Mild English swear words like s***, d***, and a**hole appear very sparsely, mostly during a few emotionally charged scenes. There are also some instances of what you might call hate speech, with Humans referred to using derogatory words like “bugs” or “vermin” on several occasions.

The Bottom Line: This is not a very graphic story, but it is not light reading either; in fact, it’s thematically quite heavy. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of humor and scenes of sweetness, but they are not in the majority throughout most of the story. However, the phrase “It’s always darkest before the dawn” definitely applies here. Trust me when I say there is a light at the end of this long tunnel.