Quorilax: High Tide, Part 1

First Quarter: "Quorilax: Rising Tide"  [13+]

Hub Folder: "Quorilax"  [13+]

This is the second quarter of Quorilax—if you have not read the previous quarter, then click on the “Hub Folder” link above.

Approximate word count of this quarter: 26,937

Chapter 6: Adoration
~11,483 words

Less than half of a Quorilaxian year had passed since that fateful June day that changed my life and altered the course of the entire Human race. For the sake of brevity and because the less spoken of it, the better, it simply became known to both Humans and the Quorilaxians we interacted with as “The Day.” I suppose I should say medisapiens instead of Quorilaxians, since I, too, had become a Quorilaxian in a sense, but then again, from a legal standpoint, I was still not considered to be a person on this planet—or really anywhere anymore, with Earth gone—so I had about as much claim to true “Quorilaxian” status as a koswok did.

Every time I heard the phrase “The Day,” I felt scarred all over again. In the meantime, I recovered from the injuries I suffered. Once my bones healed and I could shed my body cast, I gazed upon a horrific sight. I found it very difficult to believe that the person I saw was I. My muscles had atrophied throughout my entire body, making me haggard and thin, as weak and fragile as a kitten—and by that, I don’t mean a young Laxian. When I saw an enormous scar on my left leg, there was no question to whom the body belonged. I knew it was, indeed, my body.

Through intensive and extensive physical therapy, I rebuilt my body from what was not much more than scratch. With the passing of each day I felt stronger, and I made a relatively quick and full recovery, just as predicted. I hoped the Human race would follow suit. We were off to an auspicious start, with one of the seven women producing twins and all of the mothers and newborns surviving, increasing our population from eleven to nineteen. The children had been fathered by three males—I alone didn’t contribute to the first round of births due to my incapacitation, since I had not even had a chance to produce a sperm sample before it happened. The only permanent physical change I experienced from that trauma, however, was the presence of my scar, which would serve as a rather intimate and eternal reminder of the events that brought me here. Time could never completely erase that wound, nor did I expect it to ever fully mend the mental scars I sustained.

I had only seen two of the other Human females, one at a time, for the second round of impregnation, and I had not seen any of the other males. For obvious precautionary reasons, Project Noah didn’t concentrate more of us into a small area than absolutely necessary. As far as Human reproduction is concerned, we had no reason to ever meet a member of the same sex, and I wouldn’t see a Human woman except when it came time for us to mate. Given that my seed was all they needed, even direct encounters with women could have theoretically been avoided, but Project Noah felt that some level of physical interaction with our own species met the “absolutely necessary” qualification, and mating offered the most practical reason to bring us together.

In regards to the act of mating itself, it’s not as if the Project Noah personnel stood over us and watched. They left us alone in a private space, where we could talk to each other and take as much time as we needed beforehand and afterward. None of us were explicitly pressured to engage in sexual intercourse or even artificial insemination against our will—which proved that Project Noah valued us for more than just the sperm and eggs inside us—but I and the rest of my fellow Humans put aside any personal reservations we may have had for the sake of Humanity’s survival. When you can count all the members of your species on your fingers and toes, your protective instincts go into overdrive, but there is another drive that intensifies significantly as well. Specifically, I was amazed at how little time elapsed between discussing the awkwardness of the situation with my selected mating partners and lying exhausted next to them, but much more time passed before we finished discussing our lives before and after The Day and signaled that we were ready to leave each other’s company and be returned to our guardians.

Even with the opportunity to meet other Humans for mating, the relative infrequency of that activity still meant that interacting with anyone besides Project Noah and our guardians—and their immediate families, if applicable—was an extremely rare occurrence. It’s not as if we could wander outdoors and meet other people on our own, and even guardians introducing us to anyone besides their most trusted friends was fraught with risk, a lesson Zar quickly learned when she showed me to those two girls she invited to her home on The Day. When I first arrived on Quorilax, I only experienced the outside world from a pouch hanging at Zar’s waist, with my view partially obstructed. This was still where Zar would generally put me when we traveled together; however, through the wonders of technology, I could immerse myself in the environment around us to a much greater degree. This is because Project Noah had ordered tablets for us Humans—specially made, of course, since they would be nearly impossible for anyone else to use, even with the tiniest of styluses, and therefore had no market among the general public. Given that the Quorilaxians employed nanotechnology in their society, however, creating devices small enough for Humans to hold in our hands was hardly an impossibility for them. I could understand why an item like this was not sitting and waiting for me on my bed when Zar first brought me to my room on The Day, though, given that I got the impression that Project Noah is something that got organized on relatively short notice, and most of those who had approved the program had not honestly expected it to reach this point, where a sapient race, let alone the only known minisapiens, would need to be permanently taken in on Quorilax. Thus, not everything may have been exactly the way we may have wanted it right away in an ideal situation, and some improvisations had to be made to accommodate us tiniest of guests in a society that had not developed with the needs of anyone like us in mind. I feel like Project Noah managed to do a pretty good job with the small amount of preparation time and resources granted to them, and things gradually continued to get better and more comfortable for us.

By far the most exciting use of these tablets, for me, happened when Zar wore a pair of smart glasses with a camera built into them, because when we linked our respective gadgets, I would receive on my screen what the camera in her glasses captured, effectively providing me with a “Zar’s-eye view” of the world, seeing her surroundings as she did. I thought about the first time I used the relatively low-tech communicator in my room to reach Zar, and how much I marveled at the notion of speaking to her while we weren’t in physical proximity, allowing me to briefly forget our tremendous imbalance in size and power. Now, even when I knew I was attached to her colossal form, my eyes would nonetheless be glued to the screen in wonder for much the same reason, amazed at seeing the grand people and places around Zar brought down to a more manageable scale that I could more easily comprehend, almost like a reverse magnifying glass. Outside of my cocoon, my unaided eyes would mostly glimpse the lower parts of massive bodies, but then I looked back at the feed on my tablet and could easily see the faces that crowned those statuesque forms. From Zar’s perspective, I considered the young medisapien children she looked down at as small and cute, like they were meant to be among their own species, instead of simply seeming like the mildly less gigantic yet no less fearsome titans they appeared to be at my scale. My view would occasionally shift to the front of Zar’s body as she peered over the prow of her chest, down the length of her torso, as if to check to make sure that I was still there and she hadn’t lost me. I had to think about the fact that the ground upon which she strode was not a mere five or six feet below her eyes, as it would be for a Human, but over a one hundred foot drop, and in case I forgot that I resided in that pouch about halfway down her body, I would be reminded as I felt the light thumping and slight swaying in perfect timing with her steps, each of which carried us forward dozens of feet at a time.

These tablets also made communication much easier while we were out and about. Without them, I had no good way to speak up to Zar from her waist, and even her talking down at me without drawing attention would be difficult, if other people were nearby. Our devices would ferry our voices to each other more clearly, but even when we didn’t feel comfortable speaking audibly to each other, we could communicate visually, through written words. Since I could see the screen of Zar’s phone through her glasses, I theoretically could have read her words even without her sending them to my tablet, but in order to do so, I would have needed to be able to decipher her language. Perhaps I would learn more of it some day, but as things stood, I had to wait until she finished and delivered the message, after which I would see her thoughts appear on my screen, translated into English. Zar usually turned on her phone’s camera whenever using it, allowing me to watch an inset of her face on my screen, in addition to my view outward through her glasses, but I didn’t do the same. For one thing, the lighting wasn’t exactly conducive for her to see me well inside that pouch, but even if it were, we didn’t want to take the chance of someone glimpsing a Human face on her screen and starting to ask questions. As it was, without a visual of me, Zar using her phone to communicate with someone was nothing out of the ordinary, as I saw many others doing the same while they milled about, even though I’m sure the rest of them were talking across vast distances with other medisapiens, not with a Human hidden somewhere on their person. I dreamed of the day when we no longer had to play this covert game, when Zar and some of these other people would be holding a hand in front of their faces to speak to someone—not through a phone screen, but freely, publicly conversing with a live person, a Human, carried right in their palms.

While I already had means of one-on-one telecommunication, particularly with Zar, I did not yet have a good place to “gather” with other Humans—virtually, of course—but I learned that we were very close to completion of an ultra-secure social network that would only be open to Humans, guardians, and Project Noah personnel, finally giving us Humans an opportunity to connect with each other on a more regular, relaxed basis, if only in digital space; not to mention allowing us to do the same with guardians besides our own, whom we could arrange to meet in person, if we so chose. I should clarify what I mean by “guardians” in this context. Although only eleven Quorilaxians, including Zar, were actually matched with the initial group of us Humans, there were hundreds more that had already been accepted into the program as potential guardians—and I learned that the gender mixture skewed overwhelmingly female. As far as I knew, this unequal division hewed closely to the demographics of all those who applied, so the relative dearth of young men in the pool was more a result of self-selection than an implicit or explicit bias against male caretakers, much like in the nursing profession. I used the phrase “young men” intentionally, though, because age was a slightly different matter than sex, as the guardians were all roughly as young as we were, give or take a few years, the idea being that this made us more likely to see each other as peers and equals, instead of having guardians old enough to be our parents, which would only compound the deferential instincts we already naturally felt in the presence of their much bigger bodies. Even though our guardians were ultimately responsible for us, they didn’t want us to feel like children or otherwise “subordinate” to them any more than we already may have. And, of course, our guardians couldn’t be too much younger than us, or else our primary caregivers would be young children themselves, which would be a tremendous amount of responsibility for them. As we initial Humans aged and our species eventually featured people in all stages of adulthood again, I’m sure we’d start to see guardians to match.

All of the potential guardians would have access to the network, in addition to the active guardians. Guardianship of a specific ward—that was the official term for us in relation to our guardians—or even guardianship in general, was not expected to be a lifetime commitment for a Quorilaxian, so she or he could leave that role at any time, with fair notice to the ward, who would need to choose a new guardian, of which there were many eagerly waiting to be called upon. While a Human couldn’t realistically opt to have no guardian on Quorilax, at least at this point in time, we would be able to initiate a request for a new one; a pairing between guardian and ward needed to be agreeable to both parties. I couldn’t imagine either me or Zar ever wanting to part from each other, but I suspected that not everybody got matched as perfectly as we did on the first try, considering that Project Noah had little to no insight into each Human’s personality upon his or her abduction and therefore assigned us to the chosen guardians almost completely at random. Even the guardians, who all volunteered for their role, and who I’m sure were all wonderful people who would treat any ward with the utmost care and kindness, had their own personalities and preferences for what they wanted to get out of the experience, and they would be more compatible with some wards than with others, depending on how talkative each member of the pair was, how open they were to touching and holding, and so forth.

Just because my guardian and I were happy together, however, didn’t mean that I wouldn’t seize the opportunity to connect with other Quorilaxians besides her; not as potential replacement guardians—although, in the terrible event of a tragedy befalling Zar, perhaps I would be wise to not completely ignore that notion—but primarily as potential friends whom I could trust to see me as a fellow person. I felt hopeful that distant, virtual communication like this would, perhaps ironically, eventually be one of the best ways for Humans and the wider Quorilaxian populace alike to come together and focus on our similarities, and to empathize with our unavoidable differences, working to build an integrated society that would overcome those differences and maybe even harness them to our mutual advantage. Technology was at its best when it brought people together, not drove them apart.

At the moment, I lay naked in my bed, trying to fall asleep, but all this thinking probably wasn’t helping me achieve that goal. I came to crave tight, enclosed spaces such as my sleeping chamber, since the cozy quarters made me feel safe and protected. At least I didn’t have anything to worry about within the apartment’s walls once the family koswok became accustomed to my presence. Although I initially grew understandably terrified at the prospect of being so close to jaws that could carry an elephant, Zar held me with a solid grip right in front of the animal’s face, giving me a chance to rub my hands along the end of her snout, and the koswok reciprocated with gentle but sloppy licking from her long tongue like she was the giant dog I never had. She realized quickly that I was to be guarded like one of her own pack, not snatched up and devoured as prey like other small creatures that might scurry across her path. Nearly every night, this animal to which Drab had once threatened to feed me lay curled up on the floor below, next to Zar’s bed.

Speaking of Drab, his charge ended up being animal cruelty, as expected. Had I died, his punishment would have been significantly worse, not just because it would have been a greater crime against me but also because my death would have dramatically affected the mating program. My genes would have been lost to all future generations of Humanity, and that would profoundly impact our species’ development, particularly at this critical early stage, when I was one of only four sexually mature Human males in existence. The fact of the matter was that I didn’t die, though, so Drab didn’t face a heavy sentence. After he finished with the small punishment prescribed to him, he joined the military; therefore, he was out of my life, at least for the time being.

Shortly after my arrival upon Quorilax, I learned that Zar’s father passed away when she was younger. I could relate, as both of my parents died before I was even old enough to remember them. Once I learned the reason behind his death, though, I think it hurt me to hear more than it hurt Zar to talk about it. Her father was a soldier and was killed in the war with the Zgorbians, defending Earth…defending me. I felt guilty, but Zar assured me that I shouldn’t; he died defending those who couldn’t defend themselves, doing what he viewed as his duty, and it was clear that his mission, far from dying with him, lived on with at least equal vigor in one of his children. I knew Zar would give her life to protect me, but it pained me simply to contemplate what dreadful circumstances would necessitate that she make such a sacrifice.

Zar’s mother, who shared her daughter’s fondness for me, told me how much happiness I brought to Zar and that Zar’s father would have been proud to know just how much his sacrifice meant to his family, and even if he knew his ultimate fate, he would have done it all over again. If Zar’s father were still alive, I can only imagine the intimidation of proving myself worthy of the love of his “little” girl, but it sounds like I would have passed the test. Ironically, by killing me, Drab would have destroyed exactly what his father fought and died for, even though Drab focused on me as responsible for his death and used that as part of his reason to seek vengeance. Of course, I’m sure he was too blinded by anger at that point to fully consider the implications of his actions. Perhaps part of the reason he joined the military was to atone for his deeds.

From the first day I met Zar, I felt a connection between us that had only grown stronger, quickly blossoming into a passionate love. Zar admitted to me that she never expected this to happen when she applied to become a guardian. As I mentioned earlier, wards were assigned to guardians almost completely at random. Potential guardians answered a single question related to matching them with a specific ward, and it pertained to the only clue to our personality that was physically evident: our sex. They indicated whether they would only accept guardianship of wards of one sex, if they had a preference to care for one sex over the other, or that it did not make a difference to them, and Zar chose the last of those options. When she learned her ward was male, and even once she saw me for the first time, the possibility that she would develop romantic feelings—let alone that I would return them—had still not crossed her mind. To be fair, with the rocky start we got off to, she probably doubted in some of those initial moments whether we would even become friends, let alone something deeper. As much as Zar “loved” Humans, reading and learning all she could about us, actually falling in love with one was another matter entirely. Hearing Zar tell me all of this increased my confidence that she came to love me as a person and man as she got to know me, not simply exoticizing and objectifying the Human body I happened to inhabit. This is not to say that she couldn’t and didn’t still find our physical differences tantalizing—they certainly continued to enamor me too, especially when I considered how incredibly minor those differences seemed in the grand scheme of the universe—but that they were one part of our attraction to each other, not all that defined it. Zar went into this experience not really expecting it to affect her so much, but, perhaps ironically, that only intensified my desire to make her believe that bringing me into her life was one of the best decisions she ever made.

Our mismatch in magnitude must have made us seem like an odd pair in terms of outward appearance, but our size disparity presented fewer problems than one might have expected, because we found ways to adapt. Though we didn’t get a chance to partake of many of the most basic activities that young medisapien lovers typically engaged in and took for granted, like a romantic dinner at a restaurant or dancing at a club, this was less due to my stature in and of itself than the fact that Humans had become extremely rare and valuable, so I needed to stay hidden in public for fear that someone would nab me and try to sell me or hold me for ransom. After all, at home, Zar and I still shared intimate meals—truly intimate, since I often sat by her plate and ate off its edge—and I could still “slow dance” with her by standing in her palm while she held her thumb up, allowing me to wrap my arms around it like they would have encircled her waist if we were a similar size. There was plenty else we could do as well. Sometimes we would play board games, which served as a relaxing activity for Zar, but I would usually move my own playing pieces and other oversized props, which proved to be a great method of strength training. Other times she would read to me from her many books, because even if I could pull a two-stories-tall tome from a bookshelf, I still couldn’t understand most of her written language. Sure, I could get around both of these obstacles by downloading electronic versions of publications to my tablet, which translated their words as well as fit them to my screen, and I definitely took advantage of this; in fact, reading stories by Quorilaxian authors was one of the primary ways I occupied myself when I was home without Zar. But when she was around, I greatly preferred to curl up with her, which allowed me to not only hear her voice but often feel its vibrations if I perched somewhere on her upper body, and I loved to watch and listen to her casually flip physical pages as big as the walls of a human-scaled room.

I could have watched films on my tablet too, but that was something that I favored experiencing with Zar to an even greater degree than reading. Human languages, including English, were understandably never an option for Quorilaxian movie subtitles, but the audio translated to me just fine, so I often found myself in front of the television with Zar, gazing at a screen as big as at a cineplex back on Earth, except now I did it from the comfort and privacy of a living room—a home theater in the truest sense. Some themes are truly universal, like love, war, and—get this—giant monsters. One might think that people a hundred feet tall would have trouble conjuring up beasts massive enough to send them scattering through streets like rats at their feet, but that wasn’t the case at all. Just as an alien visitor to an urban area on Earth might have seen few animals besides dogs, cats, rodents, birds, and bugs, assuming from this limited sampling that Humans were our planet’s biggest beings, I had to remind myself on a regular basis that the Laxians were dwarfed by many of the wilder life forms on their world. On an excursion with Zar to a Quorilaxian zoo, I’d witnessed multiple species that moved on four legs yet still rose several hundred feet above the ground at their shoulders, which is to say nothing of the largest leviathans that swam in the seas. When I glimpsed such an animal in Zar’s sketchbook the first time, I noticed a creature a small fraction of its size drawn swimming nearby. My eyes went wide when I realized that creature was Zar, who confirmed that she drew herself and the animal to scale with each other. As I considered that she compared in size to the beast much the same as my size compared to hers, I calculated that it would have reached over half a mile in length and could have easily sucked me into its gullet whole, as if I were a krill faced with a baleen whale. That was the point at which I decided that the only swimming I ever wanted to do on Quorilax was in a bathtub with Zar, and even then, I preferred to spend most of my time lounging on the parts of her body above the water line.

Not only did the Laxians make movies featuring giant monsters, but I think they may have made even more than Humans did. Perhaps this was precisely because they were fully conscious of their lofty stature relative to life they’d documented on other worlds, especially Earth, and a curious mixture of fear and wonder lingered in the backs of their minds at the possibility that planets could still exist where the native people and creatures would make them feel as small as I did on Quorilax every day, without the illusion of special effects. Keeping that in mind, I didn’t find it so ironic that Zar would be the one of us who, as we watched these cheesy movies, gasped in terror as eyes peered into posh penthouse suites and hands reached inside to seize screaming Laxian starlets, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “window shopping.” As the monsters clutched their quivering quarry, Zar would likewise hold me tightly to herself, telling me not to be afraid. I couldn’t help but smile when I looked up at her and saw her bite her claws in fear, remembering how my first impression of my beloved upon our initial meeting had been that she was a giant monster. Far from feeling “love at first sight,” it was more like fright at first sight; I experienced pure terror upon my initial glimpse of her, positive that I was destined to be nothing but a mere morsel for her to snack upon, my life culminating in being useful to another creature for a few hours, if even that, tiding her over until she consumed a more substantial meal. Nowadays, I often detected a look of hunger in Zar’s eyes when our gazes met, but these appetites would not be satiated by sending me to her stomach.

Just because she wasn’t really a giant monster didn’t mean she couldn’t do a fair impression of one when we played hide-and-seek, though. Yes, I said we played hide-and-seek. That game had never interested me before, even as a child, but then again, I hadn’t been so much smaller than the one searching for me, which, I must say, makes the activity exponentially more exciting for the hider. It also greatly increases the challenge for the seeker, who has to search the smallest nooks and crannies for her prey, but Zar still always “won.” She refused to ever give up and admit defeat, so whenever she didn’t locate me in a reasonable amount of time, I would emerge from hiding and find her, at which point I'd scream up at her in mock terror just to ensure I didn’t go unnoticed. Upon “discovering” me, she would lumber my way, lifting her legs up high and crashing them against the floor in exaggerated stomps. I didn’t find her act completely convincing, though—not because she was a poor actress, but because seeing her breasts bounce and sway high above with each ponderous step made me realize that giant movie monsters, whether dreamed up by Quorilaxians or Humans, never seemed to have mammary organs, given that they tended to be either male or non-mammalian in appearance, if not both. I suppose this is because of the dissonance we would feel at seeing a beast rampaging one moment and then returning to her lair to be a caring, attentive mother suckling her young, or vice versa. I think we’d like to believe those two behaviors could not exist within the same being, but even among the Laxians, Zar and I had encountered a woman on the street who would have had no compunctions about crushing me to death in one hand while holding her young son’s hand in the other. I shudder to think of what someone like her would have been capable of on Earth, with countless Humans at her mercy.

Despite the clumsy gait Zar adopted, I still couldn’t outrun her even in a dead sprint, but, to be fair, I also didn’t possess much motivation to avoid capture, knowing that it meant I would once again feel the warm embrace of her hand around my body. In the unlikely event that I ever found myself alone and outside of the protective walls of my box around hostile Quorilaxians, however, my freedom or even my life could depend on my skill at concealing myself from those against whom I possessed little to no defense besides avoiding detection in the first place; so, like many other forms of play, our games of hide-and-seek served a serious purpose beyond just being a way for us to find some joy amidst the challenges presented by this most notable and consequential of the differences between us, which were outweighed by our many similarities. These likenesses never ceased to amaze me, considering that our species arose on entirely different planets light years away from each other. It was almost enough to make me believe we were both part of the same great, divine plan. I said almost enough.

The activity Zar loved more than any of the ones I’ve mentioned so far is drawing, and I, not surprisingly, had quickly become the subject she loved to draw the most. I had satisfied her request to use me as a live model…dozens of times over, most of them nude, allowing me to see all the patterns across my skin that she had long ago assured me were there, even if I couldn’t see them any other way. After some research, we found out that this phenomenon of Human skin had been known to Humans as “Blaschko’s lines,” usually only visible in the ultraviolet light spectrum, which Laxian eyes could apparently detect. As someone whose mate was no bigger than one of her fingers, Zar experienced the concept of scale in a major, personal way on a daily basis, and it clearly came to fascinate her. She not only drew me alongside relatively small objects to give a sense of my size, but would also practice drawing pictures which employed forced perspective, sometimes featuring those very same objects, to give the illusion that I was bigger. Occasionally, she would make herself be such an object, appearing less prominent because she was further in the background of the scene, though she displayed far more interest in drawing us truly together, which meant that she would be shown in all her glory, cradling me in her palm or letting me roam her body.

But then came images featuring us at equal height, not simply given that illusion through forced perspective. I know this because I saw us embracing, walking hand in hand while looking into each other’s eyes, or performing other simple actions that most medisapien couples could do, and did regularly, without much thought. As if those pages weren't surreal enough, another set of illustrations depicted us in a reversal of our true magnitudes—inspired, Zar told me, by my offhand suggestion to her on The Day that perhaps there existed some parallel universe where Humans are giants to Laxians. I noticed that these depictions seemed to be the most erotic in nature, with one of the tamer selections, for example, showing her lying seductively upon my palm, her torso arching toward my lips as they descended from above and gave her a full-body kiss.

As powerful and fearless as Zar could seem to me at certain moments, I knew from our time together that she was just an ordinary young woman who took on an extraordinary task. I could tell that she cherished her role as my protector and provider, but part of her clearly wished that she could, at least on occasion, feel as protected and provided for as I did. I knew she loved me for who and what I was; she just wished there were more of me to love, and the only place she could ever bring those longings to life was on these pages, because unfortunately, despite all the amazing technology the Quorilaxians devised, they had yet to discover a method to grow organisms to a size beyond the one destined by nature. Perhaps, over the course of thousands or even millions of years of gradual evolution, the Human race would ever so slowly increase in height with every generation to the point that my distant descendants would stand eye-to-eye with others instead of eye-to-ankle, but that didn’t change anything for Zar and me in the present time. I turned my head to gaze over at my living landscape of a lover, asleep on her bed, her form nude like mine and illuminated by moonlight streaming through the window. From her soft, pink nose, to the snow-white hills of her chest that rose and fell with each monumental breath, to her sleek onyx legs, her body’s external beauty, to my eyes, matched the beauty of the soul within. I’d like to think that true love would have transcended even more significant differences in our physical appearance, but I admit that I may have needed to spend some extra time and effort to learn to find the loveliness in and beyond eyes that protruded from her face on long stalks, drooling mandibles that twitched and clicked loudly, or cold, slimy tentacles that coiled around my body like a snake.

Even though Zar and I were mates, I still didn’t sleep next to her in the same bed, for my own safety. She may have been my “other half,” so to speak, but in terms of relative physical weight she was more like my other 99.99%, and we had no choice but to laugh along with the joke nature had played on us, leading me to dub myself her “insignificant other.” The gentleness, kindness, and humility that Zar exhibited toward me in her waking life made it clear that she didn’t truly believe her existence inherently possessed more value than mine by simple virtue of her body mass, which allowed us both to find humor in such a term; but at a time like this, as I watched her slumber from dozens of feet away, I sometimes reverted back to my original, natural instinct to see Zar as my superior: a monolithic goddess who, if I lay beside her as if I dared presume to be her equal, might unconsciously shift during the night and suffocate me beneath her body, if not outright crush me like an insect. In reality, Zar, far from being an immortal deity, was even younger than I, and recalling that she had for a time, however briefly, been smaller than a pea in her mother’s womb, while I was already a toddler mashing peas into my dinner plate on Earth, helped me keep some perspective.

Given the minimal use of clothing and consequent visibility of bodies in Quorilaxian society—a society in which I learned clothing oneself in public wasn’t a universal law but more of a social convention commonly observed—it didn’t surprise me that they placed high importance upon maintaining physical fitness, but Zar seemed especially strong, even for her height, which was quite exceptional for a Laxian female, making her taller than a majority of her male peers and nearly every other woman. Shortly after we met, and I described myself to Zar as “small,” she suggested the possibility that I could be the “normal-sized” person and she was simply a “giant.” Although she largely meant it as joke, it turns out those descriptions were quite apt to describe our size relative to others of our sex and species, because I strongly suspected that, even after effectively converting my and Zar’s heights to the same scale by looking at the distribution curve of female Laxian heights and overlaying it on top of the chart of male Human heights, then comparing where each of us fell on that spectrum, she would still be considered by far the taller one between us, at the extreme high end of possible heights among female Laxians, while I did not stray far from the average height of a male Human. On one hand, I found it incredible that she fell in love with someone of my stature despite her being something of a giantess even by Laxian standards, but on the other hand, that had probably primed her to expect that she may be looking down into the eyes of her eventual mate, even if she hadn’t quite expected him to be looking back up at her from next to her feet.

“Peskils” are the base unit of length on Quorilax, and Zar told me she stood about 6.5 of those in height. Using an online conversion tool that included Human measurements, we found that a peskil equaled approximately 18.67 feet, meaning that Zar was about 121 feet tall, not even counting her ears, while Drab, when I last saw him, reached about 5.2 peskils tall, or 97 feet. Quorilaxian measurements seemed to be a hybrid of the attributes of the imperial and metric systems that Humans used. They were like imperial units in the sense that they were not determined by a natural constant like the metric system—a meter, for example, was defined as the distance that light traveled in a vacuum in a vanishingly minuscule fraction of a second—but they followed the spirit of the metric system in that there was just a single base unit for each quality, to which one would then add a prefix to get a larger or smaller unit of measurement. The imperial system, for example, used inches, feet, and miles, among some other more obscure measures of length, but the ratio between these lengths did not increase at a constant multiple, since there were 12 inches in a foot but 5,280 feet in a mile. Meanwhile, in the metric system, a kilometer was equal to 1,000 meters, a centimeter was 0.01 meters, and a millimeter was 0.001 meters; you essentially just moved the decimal point to convert between increments. This same idea held on Quorilax, except instead of a base-10 decimal scheme, they used a “vigesimal” system, which had twenty digits. This meant that the next shortest measure below a peskil was one-twentieth of a peskil, which translated to me as a “duodecipeskil”; what a mouthful that was to say. Given that a peskil measured close to 20 feet, this meant that a duodecipeskil was a decent approximation of a foot; slightly more than 11 inches, to be more exact. While I stood slightly below 6 feet tall, I reached about 6.25 duodecipeskils, and defining my height in that way somehow managed to make me feel a little bigger.

I realized in hindsight that I had received early clues to Zar being tall among Laxian women, like when Drab teased her that she’d be able to pick up Laxian boys in her hands before too much longer, but her exceptional stature became quite evident to me once I started seeing the world through her glasses and observed that most other Laxian women did not even rise above her shoulders, which made me take notice when another woman’s eyes managed to reach the lower part of Zar’s face. Other people seemed to take notice of Zar, too, because even on a crowded street, I watched so many gazes fall upon her and linger, as if marveling at the size of this woman in their midst—just imagine how she looked from my perspective, folks. When I saw Zar from afar, she usually either stood alone or next to her mother, who, being only a few feet shorter than Zar, still stood much taller than average, meaning that they both literally rose head and shoulders above Drab. I felt sympathy for the poor guy, wondering how with genes like that in his family, instead of growing to make his mother and sister seem petite and dainty by comparison, he managed to accomplish the complete opposite, turning them into veritable Amazons when measured against him.

I wondered until I saw pictures of their family that included their father, I should say, at which point I understood why Zar said she would have been even more ashamed that she used the word “runt” as a slur against Drab if her father had been alive to know she did so. In the last photo taken of the four of them together, Zar’s father only came up to her mother’s shoulders. Zar, in turn, stood as tall as her father’s shoulders, yet Zar told me her father died when she was only three—about six in Earth terms. Meanwhile, Drab looked like he might have been even shorter relative to Zar than he was the last time I saw him, not even reaching her chest. It felt to me like the males and females of this family grew on completely segregated scales that differed from what I would have expected, both in the sex that had the height advantage and the magnitude of that advantage, since Laxian females were, on average, about shoulder height to males, not the other way around. Sure enough, when Zar gave me a quick lesson in the genetic basis of Laxian height, she confirmed that they would inherit it almost entirely from the parent of the same sex, so a mother’s height had minimal bearing on her son’s growth, and a father’s height did little to affect his daughter’s stature. Therefore, even if Zar and Drab’s parents had half a dozen children of each sex, the chances were slim that just one of the boys would end up bigger than the smallest girl, and the odds of Zar having a brother her size or Drab having a sister his size were close to zero. Despite the siblings’ divergent heights, however, they faced a convergent plight, because just as girls ridiculed Drab for his shortness, Zar’s bodily strength seemed to intimidate most boys as much as her mind did. At least Zar had her mother, a fellow female to confide in who understood the experience of rising above much of the male population and loving a man smaller than herself, whereas Drab’s father could no longer offer him advice on how to walk tall when he was far from that. Far from tall by Laxian standards, obviously—it’s not like those couple dozen feet of height difference between Zar and Drab mean much to a Human, even though the disparity seemed much greater to me than it did to them in relative terms. Zar was right when she once remarked to me that life is all about perspective. That saying could apply to physical perspective just as well as the mental variety, especially since the former clearly played a role in the latter.

The Quorilaxians’ different attitude toward public nakedness became most evident when they engaged in physical activity, which accounts for almost all the times I witnessed this right exercised, at least when it came to below the waist, since women’s bare breasts were a much more common sight. Rain, especially heavy rain, showcased another situation in which many outside of shelter would simply take off their clothes and pack them away if possible, rather than letting them get soaked and cling to their bodies, which left little to the imagination anyway. This is one reason that many layered by wearing bikini-like underwear, designed to withstand water, below their other garments, so they would not go naked in the event of precipitation, but some did end up totally exposed. Other than this exception, I seldom saw completely nude people walking along busy streets, and even less often inside buildings and public transport vehicles—partly because many businesses, especially ones where people would sit down, like restaurants, did request genitals to be covered while in the establishments—but when Zar strolled with me through a park, I would often see skirts, dresses, footwear, jewelry, and any other encumbering ornamentation strewn across the perimeter of playing fields and hung over low tree branches as the Quorilaxians who owned those articles ran, threw, and kicked. The conglomeration of largely bare, firm bodies made me feel like I was watching the ancient Olympics, but their titanic scale made it seem as though gods and goddesses themselves had decided to participate in the games. Quorilaxians managed to burn plenty of calories outside of sports like this, however. Neither Zar nor her mother owned any sort of personal motorized vehicle, and they were typical Quorilaxian city dwellers in that sense, since having even something akin to a moped, let alone an automobile proportional in size to a Human car was, by choice, an extreme rarity in the most highly urbanized areas of Quorilax, so the residents tended to move their massive bodies under their own power far more often as a part of their daily routine.

I considered how much space was wasted on parking lots for cars on Earth, and then I pictured a single Laxian-scale car occupying the same amount of land as hundreds of Human cars. Between that mental image and thinking about how much more energy would be required to move that vehicle than a Human vehicle while it wasn’t parked, I could quickly see how the Quorilaxians decided that designing their cities around the expectation that everyone would use that mode of individual transport to run even the simplest errand was a poor use of space and resources that would have seemed much more scarce to them because of their size—consider that the relatively modest 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartment I lived in had a floor area of about 1,375 square peskils, which is nearly 480,000 square feet, or over 11 acres, and that was all indoor space. In addition to the Quorilaxians walking on two feet or pedaling cycles to get around, I did also see streetcars, trains, buses, and canals among the other means of locomotion as well. The compact urban design meant that most daily essentials fell within a radius of an octokilopeskil—8,000 peskils, equivalent to a little over 28 miles—from home, reachable with a leisurely cycle of less than a quarter hour. I was quite grateful for the Quorilaxians’ transportation choices, as I think I would have been overwhelmed by the sounds of a city where movement was dominated by the constant roar of countless machines as large as Human naval warships. It was not uncommon to see relatively young medisapien children walking or cycling around the city unattended by adults, but often with friends, given the safety provided by the high number of people and the scarcity of deadly vehicles on the streets, and the fact that they could actually reach places they wanted or needed to go without requiring their parents to drive them. The few low-capacity vehicles present outside of the main boulevards were often there only temporarily, usually to provide services, and would travel at a crawl through the narrow rights-of-way—all of this said from the perspective of a medisapien, of course, given that even walking speed for a Laxian was a few dozen miles per hour and a “cozy” alleyway was still hundreds of feet across. While fatal transport crashes were not unheard of on Quorilax, they were so rare across the planet that they became major news stories, especially if at least one child was among the victims. Medisapiens had longer average lifespans than Humans did, meaning that the potential lost with the death of such a young person was considered all the more tragic.

Although I couldn’t partake in Quorilaxian sports or safely walk around the city alone, I found ways of my own to stay in shape, getting plenty of exercise and feeling some amount of independence running around freely at home, among rooms the size of playing fields. I couldn’t miss the sound, sight, and sensation of my three much larger female cohabitants approaching, so I would have received ample warning to dodge them if they strutted around completely oblivious to or uncaring of my presence, but, of course, they were far more conscientious than that. Even the koswok seemed to have learned to take special care to watch her step, keeping her head low and panning her eyes from side to side as she padded around, and I did my part to help them out by usually wearing clothing of bright, flashy colors that would more easily catch the attention of their six eyes, including the four belonging to Zar and her mother, which would survey their paths from over a hundred feet above me. I could be found other places besides the floor, though, because Zar installed nets and other aids around the apartment for me to climb and use to reach counters, tabletops, and other soaring plateaus without assistance. The first time Zar entered a room after I started climbing on my own, I could see in her eyes how much she yearned to pluck me from the net and lift me to the summit, so I insisted that she resist her natural inclination to help me in these cases. From that point on, she would often sit, crouch, or bend down nearby and watch in admiration, one time musing about how “strength” and “power” were not the same thing, and that, in fact, far too many of those with power—whether physical, political, social, or economic—were among the “weakest” people, in terms of spirit and character, while the least powerful, like me, often demonstrated immense strength in the face of our adversity. She said this all as I broke a sweat ascending to great heights…great heights she looked down upon simply by returning to a standing position. But as I saw her majestic body rise above me, I felt extremely grateful that Zar was someone whose inner strength seemed to manifest itself outwardly as much as her inner beauty did, and that she was on my side, using her power for good.

As much as Zar enjoyed city life and spending time with me at home, even she liked to venture further afield on occasion, and the Trestuvan central train station offered the best place for us to begin such a journey. The ceiling in the main concourse soared so far above Zar’s head as she looked up that, if I imagined Zar and this building at Human scale, it would have probably been nearly a hundred feet in the air, meaning that it was closer to a couple thousand feet in actuality. That would have been high enough that all but the very tallest of skyscrapers that Humans ever built would fit inside here, yet this was a wide open, expansive space, which achieved far more cubic footage than any of those single Human spires. It was a bustling hive of activity, featuring thousands of people at a time walking to and fro with pieces of luggage that could have carried Human houses, sitting and waiting for trains, or lingering in various shops and restaurants set up as stands scattered throughout the floor or in spaces along the hall’s edges.

I thought back to the first time Zar brought me there, and I saw a large crowd gathered around some sort of display in one part of the middle of the vast room. As Zar approached, she looked down at a model town, complete with an elaborate rail system that featured moving trains—rather fitting, considering the venue. Of course, these “models” were close to Human scale, so I could have fit inside the train cars and buildings if they had interior spaces. And, sure enough, the setup was complete with figurines roughly my height; in keeping with the general demographics of Quorilax, most of them were Laxians, but I could see other races interspersed throughout. I wouldn’t expect to see any Humans, although if Humans were scaled down to the same degree as everyone else in this model, we would look like ants, practically invisible anyway. The townspeople were out on the streets, unmoving but clearly going about their days, seemingly unfazed by all the giants looming over their rooftops and observing them. Given the number of people and the cacophony of sound around us, if Zar wanted to communicate with me, text offered the best way to do that, so she brought out her phone and began typing.

I saw her translated message come across on my tablet. Would you like to move to this town? It seems to have everything you need. I see a grocery store, a pharmacy, and a fur groomer, to start.

I chuckled at that last one. Obviously, she was kidding about me being able to live in a fake town, but I played along. We called fur groomers barbers or salons. This town does have a lot going for it, but it could never be home to what I need more than anything else.

And what is that?

You.

Yeah, it may have been corny, but it was the truth. I saw her smile slightly at this, but she took some time before she typed again. Then she wrote, But you would not need me to take care of you anymore if you had a place like this to live.

I don’t say I need you because you take care of my basic requirements, Zar. There are plenty of people who could be my guardian in that sense. I’m talking specifically about you as a person, not as a guardian. It doesn’t take a very special person to keep me fed every day, but I can’t imagine anyone nourishing my soul quite like you do.

Her face lit up after reading that message, and she pulled the stylus from her phone. Her screen went blank, and she began a crude drawing, with one circle on the left and then a circle about a quarter of its diameter to the right. Both looked very much like smiley faces, with the most prominent difference being that the larger one had pointed ears on top of its head, while the smaller one had semicircular ears on the side of its head. Even with the scale being way off for the sake of actually being able to see the face on the right as much more than a dot, I didn’t need any translation software to tell me that this represented the two of us.

Once I received the picture on my tablet, I declared in response, This is truly your greatest work of art to date.

While the camera in Zar’s smart glasses did not track every movement of her eyes themselves, I could get a pretty good idea of the types of things she focused on by the general direction that her face pointed, and I noticed her often watching people. Her attention occasionally settled on young men besides me, something I considered completely natural and healthy, even with us being mates; I never wanted her to feel like I had to be everything to her in the same way that she, by necessity, made up most of my interaction with other people. And, to be fair, I sometimes caught myself staring at these males right along with her. While I had never used a word like “beautiful” to describe other Human men, I had done so many times with non-sapient animals—including Earth’s felines, to whom the Laxians bore such an uncanny resemblance—without any care about whether the creatures were male or female. Likewise, with male medisapiens, I don’t know whether it was the wide gulf in size between us, the overall differences in appearance, or some of both, but I had come to find it difficult not to think of them as equally striking, perhaps even beautiful, as their female counterparts in many ways. I had always considered myself heterosexual, and while this sense of awe I felt toward the bodies of medisapien males—particularly young, athletic ones like the type I would see playing sports in a park—did not necessarily mean sexual attraction any more than it did for my admiration of non-sapient animals, I nonetheless found it to be quite a curious notion that I was still working to completely understand. Zar actually spent less time looking at unaccompanied young men, however, than at other couples, children, and families, all of which could be seen in abundance around the model display. Not surprisingly, kids in particular seemed utterly entranced by all the activity playing out before their wide eyes, in miniature form, pointing out various things to their parents, who often had to practically drag off their offspring if they had any hope of accomplishing other goals that day.

It took some effort for Zar to tear herself away too, but we eventually did so to catch our own train—one that both of us would fit inside, although she only bought a ticket for herself, of course. When we boarded one of the train cars, which must have been as large as an ocean-going cruise ship would have been back on Earth, I could see the rows of seats arranged in such a way as to have two on one side of the aisle and a single seat on the other, so Zar picked the latter. The Quorilaxian intercity trains used maglev technology, which made for an extremely smooth ride, something I was quite grateful for at my size. There are times that I would have barely even known that we were moving, resting against Zar’s lap as she relaxed in her seat, if I couldn’t share her perspective of watching the world pass outside the window. In relative terms, we didn’t travel as fast as many Human trains would have, but I gauged that we must have moved at least a thousand miles per hour at cruising speed. At the increased scale of everything, however, the world did not appear to rush by in an incoherent blur. This train seemed to be running an express route that did not make any stops until after it cleared Trestuva and its immediate suburbs. But once we escaped the capital’s orbit, we began passing by vistas of trees, marshes, and colorful fields of plants and flowers, in between stations serving industries and towns of various magnitudes, the most intriguing of which I found to be a seaside resort that featured an amusement park and pier jutting into the water. Quorilax was far from being composed of one endless, indistinct megalopolis.

Eventually, after traveling for an hour and a half or so—across a distance that would have probably taken me weeks to cross on my own feet, even with no obstacles in the way—we alighted in a “small” town, which still felt like it could easily be a piece of the peripheral regions of a big city like Trestuva: active and lively, where I could see and hear children playing, and people ambled and cycled down narrow streets lined densely with businesses, apartments, multiplexes, and townhomes, with only an occasional vehicle visible among the crowds. Quorilaxian architecture was generally pretty minimalist, without a lot of elaborate decorations, but they made up for this in the fact that they tended to dress their buildings in a variety of bright colors, like in so many tropical or subtropical locales on Earth. Come to think of it, this is much the same way they dressed their own bodies, too: clothing in a rainbow of hues, but seldom extravagant and flashy in other ways.

Even outside the large cities, Quorilaxians clearly designed places so the typical person could easily live without needing to purchase their own giant machine to move them around, at least most of the time. It occurred to me how much the variety and concentration of buildings here resembled the model town in the train station, and how much that drew people in. Just as no one wanted to hang around a vast, empty parking lot, I doubted that the station display would hold anyone’s attention to nearly the same degree if it had mostly consisted of a sea of pavement dotted with a few structures. After making the comparison between this town we were walking through and the model town we saw earlier, I amused myself with a mental image of Zar looking up into the sky here and seeing it filled with humongous faces smiling and peering down at us from all sides, revealing that we truly were part of a mere display created to entertain people far more massive than medisapiens. Perhaps those juggernauts would in turn find themselves in a similar position, their environment gawked at by beings of an even more unfathomable scale, and on and on, ad infinitum, as if countless worlds were nested within one another, each on display in a train station or other public venue, exhibited for the enjoyment of progressively more gigantic people, like part of some living fractal with no discernable end.

If that were the nature of our existence, however, then today wouldn’t be the day I made the shocking discovery. As Zar kept walking, we passed what looked to be single-family detached homes, but even these tended to be relatively compact, sometimes with small gardens and lawns that didn’t usually exceed more than a few acres in size. I did see small bays on many properties that offered space to park vehicles, and some of these areas were even currently being employed for that purpose, but although personal transport seemed more prevalent out here than in the core of cities, it still did not come close to overtaking everything else.

Eventually, we left the town behind altogether and made our way on a trail through a forest. Seeing other people was not a terribly rare occurrence at first, but as we traveled further, we seemed to be the only ones around, and Zar felt comfortable bringing me out of my pouch. I found myself in the open air, with nothing to shield me from anyone else’s view, something that had never happened to me before on Quorilax, outside of Zar’s home or other private spaces inside of buildings. The last time I had experienced anything like this was back on Earth, right before I was abducted. Thankfully, this time, no one dropped out of the sky and took us away. As Zar hiked along, holding me firmly in her grasp, I looked down to see many “small” animals, which still looked bigger than I was, clearing out of her path ahead of us, dashing into the foliage to avoid her mighty tread that occasionally snapped twigs more substantial than some thinner Earthly tree trunks. But we also saw some larger herbivores, including a mother, father, and youngling of a deerlike species. Each parent stood maybe seventy or eighty feet tall at the shoulders, with the baby looking to be a little less than half of that. Zar stopped as the family crossed our path, all of them taking a look at us—the curious child’s attention focused on me longest of all, probably trying to figure out the story behind this new and strange little furless biped in their midst—before continuing on their way, prompting Zar to do the same.

We did not completely avoid seeing any more people as we walked further into the woods. At one point, Zar moved to the side of the trail, turning her body ninety degrees so that she held me in her hand against her hip that faced away from the direction we had been traveling toward. I wondered what she was doing, but it became clear as I heard rapid footsteps—more than one set—quickly approaching. I couldn’t see around to the other side of Zar’s body from this position, but before long, she uttered a greeting that was then echoed by a different feminine and masculine voice right before I watched a Laxian couple blaze by us, jogging at least a hundred miles an hour side by side down the path we had just traversed. While this was not the first time I had seen medisapiens moving so fast under their own power, never had they been that close to me, and never had I been so exposed. This is not to say that Zar had not adequately hidden me from them, because these two clearly had no idea that, rather than meeting a lone wanderer, they had passed another pair of people experiencing this slice of nature together, exactly like them. I imagined how powerfully their hearts must have been beating, each pump likely sending dozens of gallons of blood coursing through their bodies, and although I was moving through this forest without exerting any physical effort of my own, I think my heart hammered in my chest just as hard in that moment, gradually slowing down as I watched them quickly recede further away from us.

Zar resumed walking, eventually stopping in a grove, and she asked me whether I would like her to set me down on the ground—just for a short time, of course. I enthusiastically agreed, and once I reached the forest floor, I marveled at the feeling of Quorilaxian dirt under my feet for the first time, and I gathered some in my hands. I craned my neck nearly straight up to glimpse Zar standing over me, and she in turn looked skyward in much the same fashion. Even many urban shade trees on Quorilax grew taller than the sequoias and redwoods of Earth, but now, being in a largely untouched, semi-wild area, I found myself gaping up at a canopy that would have towered over the top of the train station in Trestuva. Even though these enormous entities we beheld weren’t sentient animals, I nonetheless found it quite incredible to see Zar so dramatically overshadowed by other living beings. It brought home how much a mite of a creature I truly was in the universe, but being so thoroughly dwarfed by everything around me made it all the more impactful when Zar stooped down to gather me in her hand and lifted me back up, simply looking me over for a while with a smile and love in her eyes, before finally bringing me to her mouth for a kiss. Even with all this stunning, awe-inspiring beauty around her, she made me feel like I was nature’s most wondrous and breathtaking creation of all. A place like this was clearly special to her, and now it had become special to me…to us.

Chapter 7: Dream
~5,191 words

Shortly after thinking back on that happy memory, I closed my eyes, and it didn’t take long for me to enter the dream world. My dreams never meant much to me before The Day, but now they did hold a larger significance. I had my memories of Earth, sure, but dreams were the only way I could truly interact with the life I lost. I immediately recognized such dreams since they usually involved many Humans and other aspects only present on Earth, so I indulged all of my senses, knowing I didn’t have long to appreciate the experience.

The dream that just began was typical. I stood at the heart of a plaza in the center of a large Earthly metropolis, but I didn’t know exactly which one. It was quite possibly an imaginary city that my mind completely fabricated. On all sides of me, skyscrapers reached for the clouds and Humans rushed around, traveling to their various destinations. I felt strangely relaxed being a single, unimportant person within this hive of life, savoring the commotion that I had so often tried to escape before.

But that is the point at which the typicality ended.

Many of the people no longer moved, but instead stood still and looked upward at the sky. I followed their gaze and noticed a thin, long object shoot across the sky at a high speed. It was not a bird, it was not a plane, nor was it Superman. It soon vanished from view, and all resumed their normal business as though nothing unusual just happened, but soon, I heard a siren. Everyone rushed for shelter—everyone except for me, that is. When I tried to move my feet, I found they were attached to the ground as if held there by some mysterious magnetic force. I couldn’t move and therefore had no choice but to look dumbly around the plaza, which became uncomfortably expansive now that it was empty. I relaxed slightly, but only slightly, when I remembered it was a dream, so I could take some solace in the fact that what was happening was not real and would not hurt me.

It is just a dream, I told myself.

Suddenly, I heard a loud explosion, the ground started to rupture, and then all I could see around me was a blinding light. I seemed to be witnessing a cataclysmic event, but the ground remained firm under me, and I stood there, impervious to any harm. When the sound finally faded and the intense light at last vanished, I stood in a nightmarish landscape. The sky was a blood red, and there were no natural landforms or man made monuments to break its expanse. In fact, it seemed as though I was standing in the open ocean, but it was not an ocean of water.

It was an ocean of skulls; Human skulls.

I looked down toward the ground near my feet to find myself wading knee-deep in them. I wailed in horror, hearing the bones knock together as I moved through the mass. I tried to escape the horrifying sight, but it was no use, since the field of death stretched as far as I could see. I looked all around me, in every direction, but could see nothing except the bloody red sky above the horizon and the macabre white stretch of skulls beneath it.

“Help!” I pleaded. “Is anybody out there? Can anyone hear me? Somebody? Anybody? Answer me, please!” As I expected, my calls went unheeded, and I began to panic. I was completely alone in the middle of nowhere, lost, with no escape. I pinched myself in a desperate attempt to bring an end to the hellish ordeal. When that proved to be unsuccessful, I began mercilessly hitting myself on the head. Nothing worked, and I continued my solitary struggle through the desert of demise.

I wanted the nightmare to be over with, but I could do nothing to elude the situation. “No! I don’t want to be here! I can’t take this anymore! Please! I want this to end! Help me!” As though materializing out of nowhere, something touched me on the shoulder from behind. I spun around, finding myself looking at a cadaverous Human figure. In most places, the skin and hair were missing altogether, revealing the skeleton. Where skin was still present, it was shredded and bloody. One eye was absent from its socket, and the other stared at me widely since there was no lid to cover it. I stood there looking back at it with equally wide eyes, petrified with fear.

“Prepare for the end,” it said in a raspy voice, and I screamed louder than a banshee.

The nightmare ended there, but the scream carried over to my waking life. Once I finally stopped, I leapt out of my bed and threw my back against the wall, trying to retreat as far away from the piece of furniture as possible, looking at the once safe and comfortable refuge as if it were the portal to Hell. I was so drenched in sweat that droplets actually ran down my face, and I panted heavily. I heard loud barking and turned to see the koswok reared up, one paw on the table next to my box, supporting the front of her body, and the other paw scratching at my roof.

“I know, girl; I heard him too,” Zar groggily addressed the koswok before turning on the nearby light and peering in at me. I didn’t have to deactivate the one-way mirrors on my walls; I had stopped using those long ago. In fact, Zar and I slept nude for each other’s viewing pleasure as much as our own comfort. As if to highlight that fact, her eyes briefly darted halfway down my body, but they soon rose to meet mine. “What is wrong?” she asked. “Are you okay?” I responded in the negative, so she entered the code to unlock my roof, swung it open, and pulled me from my room, setting me on the palm of her open left hand. With her right, she stroked the koswok’s head and said, “Good girl,” prompting the animal to sit yet still keep watching her massive mistress and minuscule master, her eyes shifting between looking up at me and further up at Zar. To the best of my understanding of koswok social dynamics, the creature viewed Zar as the alpha female of her “pack,” and she understood from seeing my closeness to Zar that we were a bonded, mated pair, which, I suppose, made me the alpha male in the domestic hierarchy. Wow, I never expected to use the phrase “alpha male” to describe myself, let alone on this planet where I had never been near a man—or young boy, for that matter—who was anywhere close to as physically small and weak as I was.

Zar pushed herself into a seated position and lifted me to her face, a visage of beauty and beast all rolled into one. I looked at her eyes, indistinguishable from a Human’s without any reference to scale. This close to her gargantuan face, I could only focus on one of those glossy orbs at a time, so rather than choose a single one, my gaze darted back and forth between them. They vanished behind her eyelids as she yawned widely, revealing her cavernous throat. “I’m sorry for waking you up,” I told her.

Her mouth closed, and her eyes, each of them as deep and blue as the Quorilaxian ocean, settled on me once again. “That does not matter to me! It sounded like you were dying, and I would rather lose some sleep than lose you! What happened?” When I tried to speak, I stammered. I must have looked like a complete wreck. “Calm down,” she cooed. “I am right here. Nothing will happen to you. You are safe.” She reached out her other hand and caressed me along my spine with her index finger. Most of my body relaxed at the gentle contact, but my loins reacted to Zar’s touch in the polar opposite manner, going rigid and pointing up at her within seconds. Half a year ago, I wouldn’t have expected the love of my life would surpass my height, let alone more than twenty times over, and I didn’t think my body would ever learn to recognize the comical futility of this physiological response to her feminine touch. From her vantage, my manhood was as insubstantial as a grain of rice would have been to a Human woman: utterly, laughably useless at providing her with any physical stimulation. But Zar didn’t toss back her head and cackle at the sight, make a disparaging comment, or so much as hint at any sense of frustration on her face; in fact, the expression elicited by my instant reaction to her was one of pure delight: a coy smile. Thankfully, with her, it was the thought that counted. “I am excited to see you too, Ryan. There will be billions of Humans again in no time if they are all as amorous and loving as you,” she said, tenderly brushing the tip of my jutting penis with her fingertip, causing me to suck in a breath as it leapt at her attention. “What is the problem?”

“I had a nightmare,” I replied, my voice noticeably shaky. Some of that shakiness may have been due to the way she’d just touched me, but it was still mostly a result of fear.

“That must have been a horrible nightmare! What was it about?”

“I…I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

“Really? It helps to talk.”

“I know, but…I can’t stand to think about it again! I want to forget it ever happened!” I said, still trying to get the images out of my mind.

“Do not let your imagination get the best of you. Your only enemy is coming from within.” She brought me closer to her face slowly, but when her snout and I met, it still contacted me with enough force to knock me down, and I landed on my back on her palm. It was not the moments in which Zar pretended to be a rampaging kaiju, roaring and stomping her feet, or instances like that time on The Day that she slammed her fist against the roof of my room to prove its durability, that I most sensed how strong she was; it was times like this, when she showed that even her gentlest touch could still overpower me. “Forgive me, Ryan,” she apologized, her face looking down at me from directly above. “Leave it to me to spoil the moment. I am such a giant oaf.”

“True, but you’re by far the prettiest giant oaf I know.”

She guffawed. “My, what a charmer you are! Some other girl is going to steal you away from me if I am not careful.” Zar regarded the koswok still keeping her attention on us and warned, “Keep your paws off; he is mine,” causing us to laugh as our pet looked away and whined. Zar then returned her focus to me. “I need to keep an eye on you, handsome. Maybe I should keep my hand on you too,” she said as her right hand approached from behind and scooped me up, bringing me right to her lips before speaking again. “Oh, and while I am at it, I think I will keep my tongue on you as well.” Now the glistening pink muscle snaked out of her mouth and began to lick me. She pressed me right up to her muzzle, giggling as I returned the favor and tickled the tip of her nose with a flurry of my own little kisses and licks. I could feel her hot breath blowing against me with all the force of a gale wind while a rumbling purr resonated throughout my body like an earthquake.

I may have filled a hole in Zar’s soul, but her body still ached with a need I could never fully satisfy. Zar, however, never made me feel inadequate for what was completely out of my control. I gave her all I could, which may not have seemed like much, but she wanted nothing more from me. She didn’t use derogatory words to describe my stature, of course, but then again, she didn’t really use any words to describe my stature in the first place, since neither of us saw a need to state the obvious. Not once had I heard her refer to me as small, tiny, little, or any of the other synonyms that would highlight my...shortcomings, however seemingly innocuous they may be. The closest she got was chuckling when I called myself her “insignificant other,” but ironically, the nearer I got to her, the less insignificant and meaningless I felt. I felt like I mattered far more to her than I ever had to any Human I could remember.

After several minutes, Zar peeled me off her face, much to my reluctance. “How do you feel now?” she asked.

“Well…I feel damp,” I noted, having been smothered in a coating of her saliva.

She could have just wiped me off on her pillowcase or bed sheets and left it at that, but I knew she had a better idea when a playful smirk came to her face and she pulled her knee toward her chest, reaching out and pressing me against the bottom of her foot. She then moved me across the pads of her sole, through the space between her first and second toes, along her instep, and over her inside ankle, dragging me through the warm fur of her calf and inner thigh. She teased me by directing me just out of reach of her womanhood, but I could see that she was teasing herself as well, because...let’s just say that part of her would do quite the opposite of drying me off in its present state. When, in response to my arousal, Zar had said she was “excited” to see me too, she apparently meant it in a mutual physical sense at least as much as an emotional one. Her body, just like mine, was gearing up for an act that nature had perfected for us to conceive babies as its end goal, but even though our reasoning minds knew we were biologically incompatible for reproduction despite both of us being fertile individuals, raging teenage hormones clearly don’t care about such minor details as being different species and such different sizes. I use the descriptor “teenage” somewhat loosely for us, of course, given that my twentieth birthday, measured by Earth years, would have occurred sometime after I came to Quorilax, while in terms of Quorilaxian years, we last celebrated Zar’s ninth birthday, and I had just barely turned ten. But it was easy for me to see how we fooled each other’s primal instincts and urges. Just as Zar’s body shape almost perfectly matched a Human woman’s—and her face, though shaped differently from a Human’s, was no less expressive, right now beaming down at me in adoration past her overhanging breasts—she would see on my muzzleless countenance an equal vision of ardor and relish my bodily contours that so closely mimicked those of a strong young man of her own species, a like-sized partner who could plunge a sturdy pillar of flesh far into her welcoming depths, filling her with his yearnings and siring healthy offspring for her, when in reality my entire body was dwarfed by most Laxian male sexual endowments in their active state. Our love may not have been blind, but its eyes sure had a poor sense of scale.

Zar moved me along her abdominal muscles, which flexed impressively beneath her fur as I grazed them, and puffed out her chest. I sensed the drum-like beating of her enormous heart quicken as she pressed me into the mound in front of it. The erect pink nipple that dwarfed a Human woman’s entire breast made it abundantly clear just how enormous even her newborn children would be. Considering that, it was probably for the best that I couldn’t impregnate her, even though I knew she would make an excellent mother; the problem was that I couldn’t be much of a father to Laxian-scale kids, and I wouldn’t want to effectively make Zar a “single parent” to them for all intents and purposes, even if she claimed that didn’t matter to her. Zar now directed me straight for her exposed, sensitive skin instead of skirting around it like she had further below, so as the fleshy nub came within my reach, I grabbed it in both hands and squeezed at its ridges and grooves, making Zar’s chest swell with a gasp and causing the great mass of pliant, fur-covered fat to heave into me harmlessly. To think that the force of a bullet shot at her from a Human handgun may have made her flinch at most, yet all several hundred tons of her body spasmed at the delicate, loving touch of my comparatively tiny hand. I detected some sort of life lesson there—well, a lesson beyond a reminder of why Zar had yet to allow me to so much as graze her nether lips, since she didn’t trust herself not to lose control and hurt or even kill me with the powerful muscles in an area of her body not nearly as forgiving as her soft breasts, especially after my own body had been weakened by my recent injury. To say her conversation with Project Noah personnel after such an incident would be awkward is a tremendous understatement.

She lifted the arm not holding me and glided me over her armpit like a stick of deodorant, then along her taut bicep and the inner side of her forearm. Once I got to her hand, I spent a brief moment pressed to her palm before she moved me to the back of her hand and sent me up the opposite side of her arm, against her outer forearm and tricep. After traveling over her shoulder, collarbone, and up her graceful neck and the bottom of her muzzle, I finally ended up held in front of my gorgeous guardian’s smiling face again, having completed the grand tour of her body. “Is that better?” she asked, batting foot-long eyelashes.

“Much better,” I said. Despite my size, I think my face somehow managed to have the biggest grin in the universe on it at that moment.

She giggled. “You make a fine paintbrush. Someday, we will create masterpieces together, but...we should probably leave it at this for tonight, before we lose all desire to go back to sleep. Now, will you be okay?”

“Yes…I think so,” I replied.

“Are you sure? You do not sound like it.”

“I’m going to be fine,” I said with more confidence. “I promise.”

“That is what I want to hear. Goodnight, Ryan. I love you. I love you so much.”

“I love you more than anything,” I echoed. Zar set me back down onto my bed and locked the roof, smiling at me again before turning off the light. I could still see well enough to tell that the koswok continued to look at me expectantly from outside my box. “Oh, you know I love you too, girl,” I said to her, and she panted happily before lying back down on the floor. I lay down in bed myself and sighed in contentment, marveling at how much I had come to mean not just to Zar, but to all the ladies of this family—my family—in such a short time, and in...well, in such a short body. They truly made me feel like a “little king” in this realm where I possessed absolutely no physical influence, devoting themselves to my happiness and safety. Why me? What did I do to deserve all this love while most Humans didn’t even live to see this world?

I could barely remember why I’d woken up in the first place; instead, once I wasn’t quite so worked up, my mind lingered on what would happen if it were possible for Zar to bear my offspring. I laughed myself to sleep thinking about our hypothetical family’s sitcom-worthy misadventures, raising a rebellious adolescent daughter who, in Laxian fashion, took after her mother’s towering height, and her brother, whose male sex similarly fated him to inherit his father’s meager stature. Young lady, I imagined Zar booming in her lowest, sternest voice as she entered our girl’s room with me and our son in her hands, why were the boys trapped inside drinking glasses? Remember who you get your size from, because it means that when I come home and ground you for twice as long as your father did, you cannot just avoid that punishment by picking me up between your fingers and stashing me in the cupboard next to them!

My dreams were interrupted upon hearing the koswok barking again, and within a second, I saw her leap at something, which was followed by a flash of light and a loud, pained whimper. Meanwhile, Zar had shot up in bed and turned on her lamp, revealing an intruder. I could ascertain little besides the person’s sex due to a black outfit clinging tightly to feminine curves, covering all except her eyes, ears, and the end of her muzzle. She presently had a pistol pointed downward, where I saw the koswok in a heap, her face melted. In shock, I turned to Zar, who couldn’t afford to mourn at that moment. She hissed and bared her fangs, pouncing and knocking the other woman down just after the latter tossed the weapon away. Zar settled on top, swiping at her pinned opponent.

“Pick on someone your own species!” Zar snarled. Both of us had been so focused on that individual that we didn’t even notice she had a partner, who rushed to her aid from the other side of the room. This one was a male, and he pulled Zar up, holding her in a full nelson. Once the female rose to her feet, Zar delivered a mighty kick to her torso, propelling her backward and slamming her into the wall, giving me a surge of pride. That’s my girl!

The battered female got up again, baring her teeth in return. She swung her hand at Zar’s face, but Zar suddenly jerked her torso forward and brought the person restraining her right into the path of the female’s claws, which raked across his nose, causing him to roar in pain and release Zar from his hold in the process. Zar looked back and forth at her adversaries before moving toward the male. The female, meanwhile, pulled what looked to be a syringe from her belt and approached from the rear.

“Behind you, Zar!” I screamed, trying to help her the only way I possibly could, and without looking, she executed a rear kick that connected with the woman’s crotch. Too bad she hadn’t done that to the male. The female recipient of the blow, meanwhile, was largely unaffected and recovered quickly, and now she rejoined her partner in an attempt to wrestle Zar to the bed. When I said Zar was strong, I really meant that, because even against two other Laxians, one of them male, taking her down required a great deal of effort on their part, but they finally managed to topple her. I saw the female handling the syringe again, and my heart sank as she plunged it into Zar’s abdomen, whereupon Zar let out an anguished cry and the struggle ended abruptly. The anonymous duo backed away, and Zar turned her head in my direction, reaching an arm toward me with a look of absolute sadness. She pressed her hand against the glass wall in front of me, covering most of it, and I did likewise, my own digits looking like those of a mouse when faced with her prodigious palm. In a cruelly short length of time, her eyes closed and her hand slid away. I felt ready to break down.

The two others, both breathing heavily, turned their attention from Zar to me. The female, closer of the two, approached until I saw her face directly overhead, looking at the keypad for the lock, not surprisingly entering a combination without success. She made another attempt, and after entering the code this time, the roof unlocked and opened up, to my disbelief. I didn’t waste any time considering how she could have done that before I bolted out my door and leapt to the floor, landing on a cushion Zar had placed there at my request to break a possible fall, even though I probably could have dropped several dozen feet onto the bare carpet without suffering injury, an advantage of Humans evolving on a world with higher gravity than Quorilax. Of course, that difference between our planets had put me at a significant overall disadvantage against beings that had developed here, where several factors, including lower gravity, had encouraged life to grow to epic proportions that more than compensated for them being much weaker than I was on a pound-for-pound basis, in the same way I often heard that ants on Earth could lift many times their body weight. I darted under the bed and felt a rush of wind as a hand swiped for me and narrowly missed, and didn’t stop until I got as far as I could from the foot and sides of the piece of furniture, at which point I turned to see the female on her hands and knees, peering at me in frustration, incapable of squeezing below the bed herself. She stood up, unable to obtain me for the time being, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before the Laxians overcame this mild setback, so I seized the opportunity to make a break, hoping they’d be too preoccupied with getting under the bed to notice that I had already moved across the open floor and crawled beneath the door. Once they lost track of me, I could use my small size to its greatest advantage by hiding from them, and I knew the spots in the apartment where I would be most difficult to find, thanks to my and Zar’s sessions of hide-and-seek. This was not a game, though, so I would never reveal myself. Unlike Zar, these people were not merely playing a role as predators; they truly were giant monsters hunting me.

For the first time, I found myself wishing Zar didn’t keep our bedroom so neat and clean, because some of her clothes and other personal items left scattered across the carpet between the bed and door could have provided cover for my escape. I wouldn’t have even minded containers of old food that attracted bugs, which on Quorilax regularly dwarfed small dogs, if some mild harassment from them had meant I would escape from these far more dangerous people, who were much bigger, stronger, and smarter than vermin and, worst of all, seemed to possess about the same level of compassion. I moved toward the foot of the bed, from which Zar’s lower legs hung down so that I could see her feet dangling in front of me. Once I stood next to one, I ran my hand over it and kissed it, hoping she was still alive and that this wouldn’t be the last time I ever saw her. Speaking of feet, I saw the pairs belonging to both of the other Laxians still on one side of the bed, next to the clearly lifeless body of the koswok that died in my defense, as I started my sprint across the wide open floor, never daring to look back, even as I felt footsteps approaching and watched a shadow engulf me. I had reached the door and even slithered part of the way under it, glimpsing the hallway, before I felt fingers lightly pinching my calf.

Those fingers dragged me back into the bedroom, and I flipped onto my back to see the female lying on her stomach, her torso propped up by her forearms that lay flat across the floor behind me, acting as a corral. She leaned forward so her face loomed over me, and she spoke. “You Humans may be small in size, but you have immense spirits.”

“Oh, don’t patronize me!” I said, especially because she sounded like a young woman, probably not much older than I. “You were just watching me, waiting for the last possible moment to reach out and remind me that I’m nothing compared to you!”

“That is not true,” she attested. From what I could see of her face, she even appeared hurt by my accusation.

“Of course it is! I’ve been on this planet long enough to know that most of you Laxians think you’re bigger and better than even other medisapiens are, so we Humans are a downright joke! I get it, okay? Congratulations for being born the right species; I’m sure you worked hard to achieve that!”

“If you understand that attitude, then you are the only one between us who does. I am ashamed for my kind if those who see you as an equal person—or a person at all—are the exception and not the norm.” She briefly looked up at the male standing over us impatiently before returning her attention to me. “I had reservations about this, but you have reminded me why it must be done. Thank you.”

Before I could ask what she meant, she had shifted her weight to one arm, and the hand of her other arm approached from behind and captured me in her grip without notice, let alone my consent. So much for treating me like an equal person! She reached the other hand back along the length of her body, producing a syringe that looked ridiculously tiny in her hand but was still about as large as a pogo stick. I didn’t want to satisfy her lust for a sense of dominance by putting up a feeble fight against her fist, so I didn’t struggle, but in anticipation of resistance, she said, “This will hurt much less if you hold still.” She tilted her hand so that I lay parallel to the floor and lifted her three lower fingers from my body, exposing everything below my chest, and then gently pressed the needle into my stomach, releasing the fluid into my system. She then wrapped all her fingers around my body once more and stood up with me in her clutches. I could feel my body beginning to go limp and my mind starting to fade out of consciousness, and the last thing I remember thinking as I glimpsed Zar sprawled on the bed was that Zar’s joke about another girl stealing me away from her, having just become reality, wasn’t funny anymore.

Chapter 8: Nightmare
~4,885 words

As I awoke, I had an unsettling feeling of déjà vu. Even in my drowsy state, I could tell I was in a room—well, a portable cage to the ones who made it—much like the one that held me when I first arrived on Quorilax. It was a cubic container with air holes in the roof, and it measured about twenty feet in each direction. Judging by the manner in which I’d been stolen, I figured that the circumstances surrounding this incident were not pleasant ones, and my mind raced with thoughts of what would become of me. I rose to my feet and tried to learn what was happening. I couldn’t accomplish much, though. I heard a faint droning below me as though I were in some type of vehicle. Above, I could see light through the air holes, but they did nothing to illuminate the darkness. I walked around, looking upward and studying the holes from all possible angles. I assumed nothing else shared the box with me, so when I tripped over something and almost fell on my face, I got a rude awakening. With almost no light, I relied on my sense of touch to inform me of what it was. I carefully extended my hand toward the object and realized it was not an object at all, as I felt the long hair and smooth skin of a Human, almost certainly a woman. I drew back my hand, feeling an overwhelming sense of embarrassment at having caressed her head and the side of her face.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!” I apologized. She didn’t move or make any noise. She must have been sleeping…or dead. I shook her to wake her up, but as I should have expected, I received no response. I found her neck and put my hand there to check for a pulse, relieved when I felt a steady beat. She was alive but in an unconscious state. Assuming she endured the same ordeal I did, it may take longer for her body to process the tranquilizer since I assumed she was lighter than I was, or maybe she just experienced the events more recently. Perhaps both.

“Help!” I called to anyone who would listen. “Let us out! We’re trapped!” After some time waiting, I didn’t think I would obtain a response, but then the roof opened up, flooding the enclosure with light, and I saw a Laxian’s face above me. This one, who looked male, had the pattern of a jaguar, but if he was the one I saw earlier, he had removed his bodysuit and mask. Seeing as how I saw no marks on this one’s nose, I doubted he was the same person.

His hand approached me, and I reflexively backed up in a useless attempt to avoid being whisked away at his whim, but it turned out his target was my companion, whom he scooped up in his fist, lifting her to his face and examining her body, his eyes crossing slightly to focus on such a small target at such a close range. I had only observed fellow Humans being held in Laxian hands several times before, and seeing the size difference between our species from afar made me feel even tinier than when I would be handled like that myself. The limpness of her body caused her back to arch, her arms to hang down along the sides of his hand, and her chest to thrust out toward his face—not exactly the best pose for a woman to avoid unwanted attention. Unlike me, abducted in my natural state, she at least had clothes on, but as his eyes lingered on his puny prize, I worried he would change that. As if reading my thoughts, he carefully pinched the bottom of her shirt between his fingers and lifted it, uncovering her breasts in my plain sight as if to tease me like a schoolyard bully who had stolen something and was holding it just out of reach in sadistic delight as his victim jumped and grabbed for it. Of course, I saw no reason to amuse him with futile leaps; he didn’t even need to wave her above his head or toss her to someone else in a game of “keep away.” After all, even if he held her right in front of me in a tightly clenched fist, all the strength in my body wouldn’t come close to being enough to pry her from his grasp. When there are only eighteen other members of your species, your protective instincts can’t help but go into overdrive, but since I was clearly not equipped to protect this woman, I could only be grateful she wasn’t conscious for this degrading treatment. His predatory impulses would savor the sound of her terrified screams, the smell of her fear, and the sight and sensation of her struggling helplessly in his grip. My mind flashed back to the young Human woman terrorized by invading Quorilaxian soldiers in that dream I had on The Day, and I feared that I was about to witness a very similar scene in my waking life, but perhaps if this man weren’t granted the satisfaction of an aware victim soon, he would get bored and release his captive before she could react in the predictable manner upon waking up to find herself trapped in a fist in front of a huge, leering face, particularly one belonging to a member of the opposite sex. For the time being, however, he held on to her, pressing against her exposed left breast, his fingertip large enough to cover it entirely.

“Hey! We’re people, not playthings, you oversized pervert!” I yelled, suddenly beginning to wonder whether I had received similar treatment before I regained consciousness. I was hardly in a position to be spouting insults, but I knew he wouldn’t hurt me over it. They wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to kidnap me only to end up squashing me over a few words. In fact, maybe they just needed a Human to stand up to them before they realized that our two species had as much in common from the neck up as we did below our shoulders. If we just squealed and squirmed in their grasp like any other small animal would, I couldn’t blame them too much for sticking us in the same cages as creatures that couldn’t write poetry or discuss philosophy.

Our captor’s eyes shifted from the miniature young woman to me. “I cannot understand what you are saying,” he pointed out, and for the first time I realized my collar was missing, “but I know what you are thinking, and I merely lifted her shirt to more easily monitor her heartbeat. I did not want to remove her from your sight and let you have any doubts about what I was doing with her.” Returning his gaze to the living doll in his grasp, he continued. “She is extraordinarily beautiful, as are you, but we would never treat you as objects. It is precisely because others do and will that you must be protected.” After holding his finger against her for a short time longer, he replaced her covering and then lowered his hand to the floor in front of me, holding her at the ends of his fingers as if offering her back, so I lifted her from his hand and set her down gently. As the roof closed, darkness enveloped us yet again. I couldn’t really find any pleasure in him calling me beautiful, and like I mentioned earlier, I could have said the same thing about him, so my disgust had nothing to do with him being a fellow male; I would have been just as unsettled to hear the woman who extracted me from my home utter a similar “compliment.” Perhaps they thought flattery would make me lower my guard, but it only increased my skepticism of what they had planned for us. Being considered beautiful, yet powerless against those who saw us that way, was a bad combination.

Some time passed, and I was almost ready to fall asleep again. Being preoccupied by the current state of affairs, I found it difficult to do so, but I could only do so much stuck in a pitch black box. I teetered on the verge of sleep, succumbing to the darkness and the droning hum of the engine, when suddenly I was catapulted into alertness by a powerful jolt, as though something impacted our vehicle. I heard an alert buzzer sounding on and off like the quacking of some giant, robotic duck. That seemed to be a universal signal that something was amiss. This continued for quite some time, perhaps several minutes, and I started to question whether there was any problem at all. I obtained my answer right on cue when I heard a horrible scraping noise and flew off the floor of my box, bouncing violently against its walls. The top of the container apparently broke off, because I spilled out onto the floor outside of the enclosure. I had been tossed about, bruised and battered, but nothing was broken, and I was still completely mobile. Freedom! I got up and looked around, trying to figure out where I could go from here. I was in luck when I noticed that a large strip had been torn out of one side of the room, as though something sharp peeled open the armor like it was aluminum. I made my way toward the opening, and then I remembered something: the woman.

I looked around for my cellmate, making my way around some boxes littering the floor. As I should have expected, she didn’t land far from where I did, so finding her didn’t take long. I leaned down and picked her up under her knees and arms as I had shortly before, and then I traveled as fast as I possibly could toward the opening. I could hear the sound of fire, and the room started to fill with smoke, so I knew I had to be quick about what I did. I had a hard time running across the breadth of the room with a person in my arms, but a surge of adrenaline supplied me with the strength I needed to endure it. Once I reached the aperture, I looked down and noticed that the surface was about nine feet below. It was much too far to jump with the added weight of my partner, so I hung her arm over the edge and then leapt onto the barren ground. Once I was out, I grabbed her arm and gently pulled her over the edge, headfirst. After a certain distance, the weight of her body brought her the rest of the way, and she came crashing toward the ground. Fortunately, she landed on top of me, and I bore the brunt of the impact. I picked her up and made my exodus from the flaming wreckage.

I ran as fast as I could away from the crash. I didn’t turn around and look at where I came from until I was about five hundred feet away, clear of its immediate vicinity. At that point, I put the woman down, and upon closer inspection of the site I just left, I noticed I had escaped some type of aircraft, and it appeared to have skidded along the ground before coming to rest. That tear in the side must have been from a meeting with some sharp rocks in that outcropping I saw nearby.

I surveyed the vista before me. The host star beat down upon a desolate, windswept land. The only soul in my sight was the one who lay at my feet, and I had no idea how long she would remain in her dormant state. For now, I could only rely on myself. I knew I couldn’t stand in this spot forever; I had to find shelter. Conveniently, I saw a burrow on the side of a gently sloping hill about two hundred feet away. I picked the girl up and rushed over to the new dwelling, hoping I wouldn’t find a current resident. Fortunately, the hole was empty, but I knew that could change quickly. I would probably need to move on later, but this would serve as a more ideal place for a temporary rest than out in the open. I set the girl down onto the floor of the cool burrow and checked her pulse to verify that she was still alive. Indeed she was, so I breathed a sigh of relief and sat there next to her, exhausted from my labors, hoping she would wake up soon.

With other things on my mind, I didn’t really have the time yet to look at her very closely. It was dark inside the burrow, but we were relatively close to the opening, so I had ample light. That Laxian was right: she was beautiful. I guessed her to be about my age, and she looked like a relatively tan Caucasian with shoulder-length brown hair. As I mentioned, she wore clothes: a black, form-fitting long-sleeved shirt on her upper body, and black leggings with a red, mid-thigh-length miniskirt on her lower body. Although fur-covered Quorilaxians didn’t typically wear that much clothing, Project Noah gladly tailored clothes that provided us Humans with as much covering as we wanted. Given that Zar told me how much she enjoyed seeing and feeling my bare skin, however, I was happy to oblige her by usually wearing nothing more than skirts, when I wore anything at all. Even with much of this young woman’s body hidden from view, I could tell that she possessed an athlete’s physique. This was not one of the two Human females I had...um…“met” so far on Quorilax. She would be pregnant now, by someone else, but that happened too recently for there to be any visible indication. I started to feel guilty about scanning her body as she slept, so I decided to give her some privacy, looking out of the burrow toward the clear blue sky.

Before too much longer, I heard some movement and looked at the woman, who began to stir. Her eyelids squinted together and then parted slowly. Once she caught a glimpse of her surroundings, though, her eyes shot open and darted around before eventually settling on me, perplexed and clearly begging for an explanation.

“Please tell me you speak English,” I hoped.

“Yes, but why should it—“ she began but then stopped when she felt her neck, noticing that her collar, like mine, was missing. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

“Orion O’Reilly.”

Her eyes veered down to the lower part of my body, and she got a look of recognition. “Orion! Of course!”

I cocked my head to the side. “Have we met?”

“In a way. I’m the one who donated blood to you back when you got that nasty gash on your leg. Kelly Armstrong,” she introduced herself, reaching out to shake my hand with a strong arm. “Nice to meet you, Orion.”

“You can call me Ryan. So you know exactly what happened?”

She nodded and smiled, chuckling. “Yeah, I’ve never met anyone who got into a fight with a hundred-foot-tall cat and lived to tell about it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for you. I don’t really know how to thank you….”

“Thank me? There’s no need to thank me, Ryan. We Humans need to be there for each other. You needed blood or you would die, and I was the nearest person who could give it to you.”

“I hope I don’t have to return the favor someday, but that I can if I need to.”

“Unfortunately, you can’t. I’m blood type O, and you’re type A. I can give blood to you, but you can’t give it back to me.”

“I don’t understand how that works,” I admitted. “I’m glad someone knows what’s going on, though.”

Her thoughts turned back to the situation at hand. “Speaking of what’s going on…do you know how we got here?”

I motioned her to follow me out of the burrow, and she stood up…and up…and up. I was shocked to learn that the body I’d seen in that Laxian’s hand not long ago and referred to as “puny” and “miniature” was taller than my own; by a noticeable margin, in fact. My eyes were about level with the bottom of her chin, so I had to raise my gaze even to see her lips. And here I thought I couldn’t possibly feel any smaller in this universe.

“Do I have spinach in my teeth or something?” she asked, displaying an unbroken expanse of shiny enamel, and I suddenly realized I’d been staring at her mouth for several seconds.

“I…I’m sorry. It’s just….”

“Relax; I’m teasing you,” she said, smiling and patting my shoulder. “I know it’s not every day that you see a 6’3” girl. A 96’3” girl, on the other hand, is a different story.”

“Well, you see a 6’3” girl any time you view your reflection. Forgive me for gawking…I’m sure that’s gotten old by now. Were you a basketball player?”

“Speaking of a question that got old…and whose answer is no….”

“Volleyball?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Hockey. With the boys, that is.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. I mean, not because you look like a boy—jeez, anything but. And I see you didn’t get any teeth knocked out; no wonder you catch so much spinach.”

Kelly laughed as we climbed out of the burrow. Once we reached the surface, I didn’t need to direct her attention to the wreckage lying on its belly yet still as tall as many Human “skyscrapers” were, reaching hundreds of feet above the desert floor.

“My goodness! We were in there?” She looked down at her body. “That certainly explains the cuts and bruises; I’m thankful it’s not any worse! You saved my life!”

“You did the same for me. Karma, I guess.”

“What happened to them?” she asked me.

“To whom?”

“The Laxians.”

“Well, as far as I know, they’re still in there, in which case they’re probably—”

The aircraft exploded, engulfed in a huge fireball, and we leapt back in the hole, ducking and covering to protect ourselves from a potential shower of shards. “In which case they’re probably dead,” I finished my hypothesis, almost certainly just confirmed.

“What do we do now?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure what they had planned, but something tells me we should get out of here before their friends come to check out what happened. I don’t know what we’re going to do, though. We’re in a desert. We’re not going to survive for long out there.”

“Yeah, but there’s probably not much else that survives out there for very long either.”

I gaped at her. “Wow, that’s a real morale booster! You obviously weren’t a cheerleader!”

“Well, think about it: would you rather be in a rainforest teeming with life that’s larger than life? I think we have a better chance against the heat than something like a spider as big as a car or a King Kong-size spider monkey that’ll carry us up a tree taller than the Empire State Building!”

It was a fair argument. Even on my walk with Zar through those woods, I had to wonder how many creatures may have been perched up in the branches of the towering trees, looking down at us, and would have swooped in and snapped me up if I hadn’t already been in Zar’s hands or close at her feet, already “claimed” by a member of the planet’s apex predator species that they wouldn’t dare tangle with. Still, I wasn’t entirely convinced. “Tarantulas lived in deserts too…in burrows like this one,” I realized, looking around nervously.

“That’s all the more reason not to hang around here too long. Come on, Ryan. If a person thousands of times your size couldn’t kill you, I don’t know what will. You didn’t cheat death just to shrivel up in a hole, did you?”

“You’re right,” I agreed. We ventured back out of the safety of the nest and panned the horizon for any sign of…well…anything. I meant it when I said this place was desolate. “I have no idea where to go, though,” I admitted.

“Maybe there’s something over that hill,” she suggested, pointing to a very large hill in the direction opposite the host star. The terrain was quite rolling, but that was the largest rise in sight. There was a chance it concealed something.

“That sounds like as good a plan as any,” I accepted without argument, and we started to make our way to our destination, which I estimated to be at least five miles away. As we departed from the crash site, I turned around and observed the plume of smoke rising into the air. Following it upward, my attention was drawn to the moons, which were still visible even though the host star had begun its ascent. Wait a minute…something wasn’t right. “Um…Kelly?” I got her attention.

“Yes?” she acknowledged.

“Do you notice anything…strange about the moons?”

“No, they look pretty normal to me. What’s the big deal?”

“There are at least three of them there. Quorilax only has two moons. I don’t think we’re on Quorilax anymore, Dorothy….”

As she looked up, a worried expression crossed her face. “I think you’re right, Toto.”

I kept scanning our surroundings as we continued to walk. “We’re like sitting ducks out here! I wish there was some cover!”

“Our skin actually blends in pretty well with the ground,” she noted, “so we have some natural camouflage. That’s assuming we’re not towering over the horizon, but in that case I’d say camouflage would be rather unnecessary.”

“What do you mean by ‘towering over the horizon’?”

“Well, think about it: if we’re really on another planet, it could easily be full of animals—maybe even people—that are as small to us as we are to the Laxians. Maybe that ‘burrow’ was more like a big cave on this world.” I had been picturing us walking along from the perspective of this planet’s possible inhabitants, and after spending so much time on Quorilax, I naturally assumed that perspective would have been from a hundred feet above us; but upon processing Kelly’s comment, my mind’s eye zoomed to inches above the ground, instead imagining people the size of our thumbs taking a dip in a pool at some desert resort, their collective sigh of relief at being cast into shadow on this sweltering day changing to a chorus of screams when they look up and realize there’s still not a cloud in the sky. My complete nudity would probably just make matters worse. Maybe Kelly’s presence would actually help matters instead of doubling the terror they would feel upon seeing me alone, not only because her clothing would make her appear a bit more civilized, but if these people were anything like Humans or Laxians, then, as I had considered earlier, Kelly’s feminine features might create the impression of a gentle, maternal being in their minds. Whether or not that’s fair, I wouldn’t complain if it kept both of us from having a tactical military strike launched against us.

I found the notion of me and Kelly swatting at fighter planes whizzing by our heads hard to imagine, though, considering that everything I’d been told indicated that Humans were the universe’s smallest people—or, as Zar liked to say, “least massive,” always managing to find a way to describe me and my species without using diminutive words, even though, by any objective measure, as the only known minisapien race, we were tiny. People around the universe came in very different sizes, but Humans…were a bit more different from everyone else. A full-grown Laxian male of average height stood around two and a half times as tall as a typical adult of the shortest medisapien species, while Humans managed to differ in magnitude from those smallest medisapiens by a factor of around eight times. With Earth gone, we had lost the only civilization built at anything close to our scale, so even outside of Quorilax, we could not escape living among comparative giants who could all lift a Human in a single one of their hands, with varying degrees of ease, while none of them could ever know how it felt to be picked up in such a manner.

But would the Quorilaxians be aware of sapient beings smaller than their fingertips—nanosapiens?—even if they had flown right over this planet? If those people had developed technology at least on par with modern Humans, sending out broadcast signals and building “skyscrapers” dozens of feet tall to light up the night, the Quorilaxians likely would have detected them by now, but what if this planet harbored a primitive civilization that dwelled in huts no wider than a Laxian eyeball? Even in recent times, Humans would find new species of mammals on Earth, and the smallest mammals were enormous to so many insects and other relatively minute organisms constantly being discovered. If Humans couldn’t see so much so close to us, then what might beings as huge as the Laxians be missing in their explorations of a cosmos vast enough to make even them seem like specks? “You know,” Kelly continued, finally snapping me out of the contemplative state into which she’d unwittingly put me, “maybe you won’t have enough time to concentrate on being so anxious if you tell me a little about yourself.”

“There’s nothing to really tell,” I said with a shrug.

“That’s not true. Where were you from?”

“Minneapolis.”

“Minnesota was a really beautiful place, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” I agreed. Was. Was. Talking about Earth meant using the past tense. Minnesota is probably a bunch of barren asteroids floating around in outer space right about now. “What about you?” I redirected.

“Lived all my nineteen years in Fairbanks, Alaska, right smack dab in the middle of nowhere. I always wanted to get out and see the rest of the world. I suppose it’s a little late for that now,” she said with a heavy sigh.

“You’re getting to see more than the world, though,” I pointed out, trying to cheer her up. “You’re getting to see the entire universe.”

“True. I just wish I didn’t get drugged for each flight. I think I need a new travel agent.”

We continued to drift toward the ridge in the distance. Being from the two northernmost of the United States, Kelly and I were like fish out of water in an environment like this. That was an apt metaphor, considering that I came from a land where water was nearly as plentiful as air. The heat began to overwhelm me, and my throat yearned for water to lubricate its parched walls.

“Man, it’s hot!” Kelly complained, and I nodded. It didn’t help her that she wore black clothing, not having any reason to expect that she’d be marching through a scorching desert today. I looked away for a moment; by the time I turned back, she had already removed the top half of her clothing. I stared at her with wide eyes as she left the fabric on the ground behind us. She turned to me and must have noticed my expression, for she quickly crossed her arms over her now bare chest. “I didn’t think you would mind,” she explained. “I can put it back on.”

“No, I don’t want to make it even easier for you to overheat, and I don’t mind; I was just…surprised. Even if I did mind, I don’t have much right to tell you to keep it on,” I said, gesturing at my naked body.

“Well, it seems only fair, especially when just about the only scenery we’ve got out here is each other,” she told me, slipping out of her skirt and leggings as well. “I shouldn’t get to have all the fun.”

I smiled at the compliment—she certainly wasn’t shy! So much for at least one of us not appearing like a savage to any minuscule municipalities we might stumble across, though. We walked on, and I started feeling lightheaded, like I just stood up too fast and got a head rush, except the feeling wasn’t going away. I lost my balance and stumbled, falling to the ground.

“Come on, you can’t quit now. Get up,” she ordered, helping me to my feet. We crossed more of the bleak landscape, seeing nothing except for an occasional rocky outcropping or some brave plants with the courage to persevere in this merciless environment.

“We’re almost there,” Kelly commented as we neared the top of the hill and prepared to view what, if anything, lay on the other side. I hoped there would be some water, some food, or some shelter—anything that would help us. What awaited us behind the hill could mean the difference between life and death. If we didn’t get some water soon, our hours would be numbered—in the single digits, most likely.

Chapter 9: Salvation
~4,475 words

My heart raced with anticipation as we came within several hundred feet of the crest of the hill. Then I noticed something coming over the other side…toward us. Kelly obviously saw it too, because she immediately locked on to me, digging her fingers into my skin as a creature...a person...jogged up the hill and gradually revealed its bipedal form. I couldn’t discern its exact size yet, but I could safely say I was still the shortest person I knew of on this planet. I wanted to reciprocate Kelly’s reaction, but I tried to remain strong. We couldn’t possibly outrun it, so we stood still, watching the colossus stride toward us, hoping we would blend with the surroundings like two pale chameleons. As I got a better view of the canid being, I recognized them and remembered their name: Arquels, one of the more numerous of the alien races present on Quorilax, even though I had my doubts that we were currently on Quorilax itself. This one had white fur on his front that faded to a tan color on his sides and on the bushy tail that swayed behind him. His face would have been about level with Zar’s knees, so I approximated him to be thirty-five feet tall. He focused on something out in the distance, so although we weren’t overly small to him, he didn’t see us. Our camouflage worked, perhaps too well, for he was soon upon us with no sign of stopping. We screamed and leapt out of the way in unison, just in time to avoid his foot as it slammed down where we previously stood.

“What?” said an immature voice in surprise, sounding like I would expect from a Human boy of about nine or ten Earth years of age. The young medisapien froze his stance and swung his head around, trying to sense from what direction he heard the noise. Then he located us on the ground next to his feet, and his huge brown eyes stared at us inquisitively. “Sorry about that!” he apologized. “I did not see you there!” He lowered his massive body into a crouching position so that we came up to his sternum, then cocked his head to the side and curiously surveyed us. “What strange little animals…” he evaluated, now clearly talking to himself. “What are you? I have never seen you before.” He carefully reached out a hand toward Kelly and started petting her. He seemed particularly fascinated with her long hair, lifting it up and letting it fall back down several times. After he had his fill of that, he moved his finger down along her back, over her rump, and all the way down her thighs and calves. Kelly blushed and smiled at me. She partly seemed to be enjoying the attention, but I had a sense that she mainly felt embarrassment and uneasiness. Before long, the boy ceased his action, but he remained crouching, his gaze shifting back and forth between Kelly and me.

“Excuse me,” I said to the Arquelot pup. “Can you help us?” He looked back at me and giggled. Once again, I completely forgot that Kelly and I didn’t have our collars. Not only couldn’t he understand a single thing we said, but my words sounded like nothing more than cute, high-pitched squeaks to him, rather than a foreign tongue uttered in a low, masculine voice, such as Kelly would have heard if I’d been speaking French to her. We still had our translators, though, so we could understand everything he said. “What should we do?” I asked Kelly.

“Do we really have a choice? He knows where food and water are. We have to follow him.” We both walked closer to the Arquel, placing our hands on his leg and looking up at him in a supplicating manner, hoping he would understand the message. He smiled at us and bared his sharp white teeth, each the size of large trowel blades.

“I am going to take you home. I can see what that smoke is later.” He wrapped his “little” hands around our midsections and held one of us in each—me in his right and Kelly in his left—despite him being “only” about six times our height, and then rose up on his powerful haunches and headed back in the direction from which he originally came.

He started out walking but gradually sped up until he sprinted across the landscape, easily traveling at least thirty miles per hour. The wind rushed past our faces like we were dogs sticking our heads out of a car on a freeway. I constantly moved up and down as he bounded along the hilly terrain. I’m sure he meant well, but I soon felt somewhat sick. Add to this that I was quite lightheaded from dehydration, and you have a recipe for trouble. I leaned my head as far as I could over the edge of his hand and vomited. “Eeeeww!” he said in disgust. I glanced over at Kelly, but she seemed unaffected by the turbulent ride.

With the original ridge far behind us, we now climbed another one. As soon as we reached the summit, I saw a river—which was more like a stream on the Arquel’s scale—flowing through a small valley. Flanking either side of the stream were moderate amounts of tall grasses and small, sparsely adorned tree-bushes, and I could also see a single house along its banks, which I guessed to be our destination. It was a simple, rectangular-shaped mudbrick house. There was another much smaller building next to it, which, as we approached closer, appeared to be an outhouse, as near as I could tell. I suppose I would have been foolish to expect a luxury condominium in this real estate.

We soon stood immediately in front of the entrance to the humongous yet humble abode, where the Arquel set me down on the ground since he needed a free hand to turn the knob. After the door opened, he lifted me back up and proceeded to enter. The inside was just as the outer appearance suggested—simple, almost like a cabin. We entered the main room, which, among other things, had a central table surrounded by three chairs, a stove, and some raggedy looking furniture. There didn’t appear to be electrical fixtures of any kind, nor did I see indications of the presence of indoor plumbing, which made sense considering the outhouse. Two doors lined the far wall, and I assumed they led to bedrooms. A female Arquel with uniformly tan fur turned and looked in our direction.

“Khalgeth, where have you been?” she asked, worry evident in her voice.

“Mama, look what I found!” he said euphorically, completely ignoring the question and holding us out at his arm’s length proudly as though he were a fisherman showing off the bass he just snagged.

She walked toward us, studying Kelly and me closely. “I have never seen those before. What are they?”

“I am not sure. I found them out in the desert.”

“You are bringing wild animals into the house? Whatever they may be, wild animals should be left that way. You know that, Khal.”

“I know…” he admitted, “but they seem very tame. They touched my leg and looked me in the eyes. I thought they needed help.”

“Hmm…well….”

“Please, Mama?” he pleaded. “Can I keep them? I will take good care of them!”

The mother considered. “Let me see one,” she requested, and he looked at Kelly and me, soon thereafter transferring me to his mother’s possession. He clearly seemed to have taken a liking to Kelly—talk about puppy love. The mother inspected me closely, shifting me around in her powerful hands not much differently from how one would evaluate a piece of fruit in a supermarket. “Okay,” she consented, offering me back. “They seem very weak and harmless. I will let you keep them for now, but do not become too hopeful. We will discuss it with your father when he returns. Is that all right?”

“Thanks, Mama!” he said elatedly. “I love you!”

“I love you too, Khal. Make sure they are housetrained, and keep a close eye on them. I can tell that at least the male has not been neutered yet, and we cannot afford to be feeding a litter of puppies.”

“I will be careful, Mama.” Apparently, he’d already learned the facts of life, so to speak.

He began to walk toward one of the doors with us in hand, but then his mother called upon him. “Wait, Khal. We have nearly used up our supply of water. Could you go down to the stream and get some more?”

“Okay, Mama.”

“You should also take your animals to the stream and clean them off,” she added. “My hands are filthy just from touching the male.”

“Yes, Mama,” he said, now with a hint of impatience. After she enumerated all of his tasks, he set us down on the floor and procured a large, shiny metal bowl and a cloth towel from his mother. Once he opened the door, he called us to follow, and we began the short journey to the stream.

Upon our arrival, Khalgeth set the bowl down along the edge of the water. He grabbed me first, holding me above the rushing water and splashing me, trying to rub off some dirt. I enjoyed the revitalizing feeling of moisture finally returning to my sun-baked body. After he washed me from head to toe, he took the towel and dried me off, and the cloth felt good as it brushed against my skin. Once he finished with me, he picked up Kelly, with whom he did likewise, though I noticed her fidget and frown occasionally as she was handled. After she experienced the same routine of drying I did, he put her back next to me.

“Good as new!” he said, proud of his achievement. Kelly and I stood on the bank and watched as Khalgeth gathered the water into the bowl provided. Upon filling it, he stood up and lifted it with both of his hands, then walked toward the house, calling us to follow. En route to the house, I looked over at Kelly, who held her head low, looking down at the ground continuously for the entire trip.

Once he set the bowl down next to his mother, he picked us up and walked toward the back of the house to one of the doors. Upon entering, I saw it was a bedroom, just as I suspected. It was an uncomplicated space with no adornments, the main focus being a single, neatly made bed in the far corner. A bedside table occupied its namesake position, situated directly below a window that acted as the single source of illumination, flooding the room with light that radiated an aura of warmth to combat the cold surroundings.

He put us down onto the smooth floor. “Stay,” he told us and pointed toward the ground as if giving us a command. “I am going to get you some water to drink.” It wasn’t as though we could go anywhere anyway, since he closed the door behind him upon his departure from the room, and we couldn’t reach the knob, much less have the strength to turn it, even if one of us stood on the other’s shoulders. And we were too big to squeeze between the floor and the bottom of this door, unlike some on Quorilax.

Finally, I could quench my thirst! Neither Kelly nor I drank any water from the river since Khalgeth was too busy washing us. Speaking of Khalgeth, he returned within moments and placed a bowl on the floor next to us. I eagerly ran up to the edge of the bowl and downed some of the cool and refreshing liquid as though I had to drink Lake Superior in a day. It also helped to get the flavor of bile out of my mouth. Water had never tasted so good.

“You are really thirsty!” he realized, amazed at my heroic intake of water. “You must be pretty hungry too. I will see whether I can get you something to eat.” He exited the room yet again, and I continued to chug the water. Once I had my fill, I brought my head out of the pool. It surprised me to not see Kelly somewhere along the perimeter of the bowl, so I glanced back and realized that she was sitting on the floor with her legs folded, holding her head in her hands like a weight, still staring down toward the floor.

“Come on, Kelly! Aren’t you thirsty?” I asked, baffled. She lifted her head and acknowledged me with a blank stare, then slowly rose to her feet, walking toward the bowl in a very heavy and sluggish manner, like she wore a ball and chain around her ankles. Her face, so lovely and radiant before, appeared different, with her mouth in a frown and a profound look of sadness in her eyes. She eventually made it to the bowl, positioning herself about ninety degrees counterclockwise from me and leaning down to take a few sips, but then she just stood there, sniffling quietly, looking down at her reflection in the water. Something was clearly amiss in her world. “Is something the matter, Kelly?” I asked with concern. That prompted the dam to burst, and she started bawling her eyes out, the tears streaming down her face. I walked around so I stood right next to her, at which point she raised her head and looked down at me.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized.

“Sorry for what?” I inquired. “What did you do wrong?”

“I just…I’m not usually like this. I’m not the type of girl who cries at every little thing; I can usually handle myself much better. I know I’m making you feel uncomfortable.”

“No, you’re not. Besides, the way you usually are doesn’t matter; there’s nothing usual about this. Let it out,” I said, trying to make her feel relaxed. “I’m not going to think anything less of you. What’s wrong?”

“What isn’t wrong?” she turned the question around on me.

“I don’t follow you…” I confessed.

“Come on, Ryan! Just look at what we’ve become! We built the pyramids! We painted the Mona Lisa! We composed beautiful symphonies and wrote great books! Now what are we doing? We’re lapping water out of a bowl like we’re some farm animals at a trough! Wild animals? Housetrained? Neutered? Puppies? This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be! Something is horribly wrong with this situation!” Her sobbing somewhat subsided as she spoke, but now the floodgates reopened. She stood there with her arms across her chest and continued looking at her feet. I held out my arms in an offering of support, and she responded by uncrossing hers and lifting them limply into the air. I reached my arms around her and gave her a hug, rubbing one of my hands along the course of her back. She put her arms around my neck and buried her face in the crook of her elbow on my shoulder. I just stood there and held her, trying to calm her down.

“Don’t worry, Kelly,” I attempted to comfort her. “We’re in this together, and we’re going to get through it. Think about it: things could be a lot worse than this. We were about to die in the desert before this kid saved us. He obviously adores us, and I can’t think of any better feeling than bringing hope and happiness into someone’s life. He seems to have a special fondness for you in particular.”

“Oh, wonderful. Some giant, prepubescent alien boy has a crush on me. Please excuse me for becoming so giddy.”

“Standard size,” I commented.

“Say what?”

“He’s a standard-size, prepubescent alien boy. In fact, as far as extraterrestrials go, he’s about as small as they come. Most Laxian adults would need to duck through the doorways in here, if not hit their heads on the ceiling by standing straight up,” I observed as I looked up a hundred or so feet, which somehow made it the lowest ceiling I’d ever seen outside of Earth.

“I know! I feel like we’re living in an episode of The Twilight Zone! Tiny to mice, cats, dogs…what’s next?”

“Humans would seem to follow from that hierarchy,” I said, keeping a straight face.

Her weeping died down once again, and after she cried a little bit more, she lifted her head away from my shoulder and laughed, her bright smile shining like a rainbow after the downfall. “Giant Humans—I mean, medisapien Humans. That’s pretty funny. With everything that’s happened so far, though, I wouldn’t be surprised. It would certainly be the type of twist ending fit for The Twilight Zone. I’m sorry for getting snot all over your shoulder,” she apologized, wiping away her mucus.

“Hey, that’s what it’s there for,” I assured her. “Anyway, the point I was trying to make earlier is that I don’t know all the things some little Human boys did with small animals, and, honestly, I don’t think I want to know, but we’re basically all this kid has, and he’s not going to hurt us. We’re going to be safe here until everybody figures out what’s going on. Let’s make the best of a bad situation.”

I heard the sound of the front door open, and a pair of feet entered the house. I suspected I knew who it was. “Yes! Papa is home! Papa is home!” I heard Khalgeth proclaim, confirming my expectation.

“What timing,” the mother chimed in. “The food is nearly ready.”

“How is it going, Khal?” the father asked. “What have you been up to?”

“You will not believe what I found today!”

“What did you find?” the father inquired.

“Hold on, I am going to get them now,” Khalgeth said in excitement, at which point I heard heavy footsteps approach our door. He was thoughtful enough to open it gently and peer around it to make sure we weren’t in the path of the door’s arc before he opened it fully. He walked over to us and bent down, lifting us off the floor and hugging us to his chest, and then he walked out into the main room. The father already surveyed us in complete bewilderment as Khalgeth carried us toward him.

“Here, put them down on the table,” the father said, and Khalgeth obeyed. We stood there on the edge of the table, and I looked up to view the pack assembled in front of us. On our left was Khalgeth, who was approximately thirty-five feet tall; in the center was his father, at least ten or so feet taller; and on our right was his mother, several feet taller than the father. The monumental creature’s snowy white fur made him look to be more suited to an arctic environment, seeming out of place in this scorching climate. All three of them loomed above us, studying us closely.

“Do you know what they are?” the mother asked.

The father continued to examine us, looking at us from all possible angles. “I have no idea,” he said in defeat. “I have never seen anything like these before. One of my friends at the market in town is a pet vendor, and I pass by her constantly. I see the animals she is selling all the time.” His face contorted, indicating a state of deep thought. “I have seen some very strange things, but…I have never seen any of these. Where did you find them?”

“In the desert,” Khalgeth testified, pointing in the direction from whence he brought us.

“Right near our house? That is very, very odd…” the father evaluated, at a loss for answers. “In that case, it seems like we would have seen one of them by now. Then again, they have almost no fur, and their skin is relatively pale, which means there is a good chance they are predominantly subterranean creatures. That would also help explain how they could hide and survive in the wild despite being both so small and apparently defenseless, even for their size. They must have been desperate, revealing themselves to a potential predator as large as a person, even a small person.”

Now came the time for the big question. “Can I keep them, Papa? Please? Can I?” Khalgeth implored.

The father kept looking at us. “I do not know…” he pondered. “Tomorrow, I will bring them with me and ask my friend about them. I suspect that she will know what they are. If she is unaware of them, then I think it would be best to bring them to the authorities. These could very well be foreign creatures that do not belong here and are being sold on the black market. If that is the case, then it is in our best interest to inform someone. We do not want to be accused of illegally trafficking exotic and perhaps rare animals.”

“You mean I cannot keep them?” Khalgeth asked, crestfallen.

“I did not say that,” the father said, resurrecting a faint glimmer of hope in Khalgeth’s eyes. “It is possible. We need to find out more before we can make a decision about this.” I looked over at Kelly, and, as though our minds were fused into one, she simultaneously turned to look at me, her panic-stricken expression mirroring my feelings. Black market? Trafficking? I had no question in my mind that she had focused on the exact same phrases. It was a reminder of the reality that our Human bodies and lives were considered priceless, and I didn’t mean that in the warm and fuzzy “we’re all unique and special” sort of way.

“So,” the mother edged her way back into the conversation, “are you two just about ready to eat?”

“Oh, yes, of course!” said the father, who apparently had to be reminded he was hungry. The two males sat down in their respective chairs, and the mother brought the metal bowls over and set the food in front of them. Next, she went back to retrieve her own food and, in addition, returned with a small plate, which she set down on the table in front of Kelly and me.

“I hope they eat meat,” the mother wished. I did, and in fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that before Khalgeth appeared and discredited Kelly’s theory that this planet might be home to people much smaller than ourselves, my rumbling stomach prompted me to engage in a serious internal debate over whether I would eat any of the natives if my only alternative would be to die of starvation. I reasoned that I would have needed to consume at least several people at a time to preserve myself, a single person, and just because far less matter would make up their bodies didn’t mean they would matter any less to the ones who loved them. Having a soul mate with a physical form several thousand times larger than my own, I probably understood better than almost anyone that our souls had no dimensions. Would Zar be happy to get me back if she knew that I’d prevented so many others from ever again returning home to their families? Could my brain continue to think in such metaphysical terms if it were deteriorating from a lack of energy to keep it going? Thankfully, I’d been spared from my moral dilemma. I walked over to the edge of the plate and surveyed the two large chunks of meat covered in some type of gravy, each piece rivaling my foot in its bulk. I lost most of the contents of my stomach when I upchucked earlier, so I was ravenously hungry now. I grabbed one of the pieces with both hands and tore into it. “I wonder whether that will be too much for them to finish,” said the mother again.

“I doubt it!” Khalgeth laughed. “The boy one has quite an appetite! He can probably eat more than I can!”

“His partner needs to eat too,” the mother noted about Kelly, which prompted her to follow my lead and start gnawing away at her own share. “That a girl,” she said, reaching out her hand and stroking Kelly in encouragement.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to eat so much, but I effortlessly devoured my meal, even having enough room to finish the small portion that Kelly couldn’t handle. After dinner concluded, Khalgeth retired to his room with us, and he sat with his legs outstretched on the floor and his hands supporting his moderately reclined form.

“Why does he have to take you away?” he asked. “You are not hurting anybody.” I felt sorry for the poor kid. He seemed so lonely, and I wondered how he made it through each day. I looked up at his sad face, and I could tell his eyes were on Kelly, who in turn fixated her gaze on the window, probably staring out at some point in the evening sky.

The bedroom door opened, and Khalgeth’s mother’s head appeared. “It is time to go to bed, Khal,” she said in a tone that combined ordering and suggesting; however, he surrendered unconditionally. The host star had nearly completely set, and there was no electricity in this isolated locale, so for the most part, these people probably slumbered when the star did, having little to gain by just sitting idly in the dark. Sleeping was probably one of the most exciting activities here anyway.

“Goodnight, Mama,” said Khalgeth.

“Goodnight, Khal,” responded his mother, closing the door as she retreated. Khalgeth raised Kelly and me from the floor and brought us over to his bed. He settled in and set us down next to him on his pillow. He turned his face toward us, his broad muzzle resting mere feet from my face and surrounding me with warm, humid air as he exhaled.

“Do not worry,” he said to us, his eyes swinging back and forth between Kelly and me. “I am not going to let them do anything to you. They are not going to take you away. I do not know how, but I will think of something.” He sighed, settling his hand on top of us protectively like we were stuffed animals, which helped keep me warm from the cool breeze blowing through the window, and then closed his eyes and settled peacefully into sleep. Having experienced much more than a full day in a very short amount of time, I followed suit before too much longer.

Chapter 10: Repudiation
~903 words

I woke up and noticed it was still quite dark. It seemed like something roused me from my sleep, but I looked around in my post-waking stupor and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. As I set my head back down, I felt something touch me on my arm. This time, I turned around and noticed that Kelly lay immediately behind me, wide awake and staring at me.

“Kelly…” I groaned, “why did you wake me up?”

“It’s time,” she whispered.

“Time for what?” I begged for clarification.

“Time to get out of here.”

I chuckled, causing her expression to darken. “Wait a minute…you’re serious?”

“Do I look like I’m joking? I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”

“Okay, let’s see here…” I contemplated, trying to understand. “How do you propose we escape?” She pointed toward the open window. This was the first time I noticed the absurdly simple path lying right before my eyes. It would be no problem to climb from the bed to the bedside table and then to the window. Once there, it was probably no more than a twenty-foot drop to the ground, which was certainly no small jump. Still, two strong, young Humans could easily do it without hurting ourselves, especially since the gravity here was stronger than on Quorilax but not up to Earth’s level. “Okay, so we know how, but why?”

“Did you listen to anything they said? When Khalgeth’s father brings us to the market and figures out we’re Humans—a breeding pair, at that—he’s going to try to sell us!”

“How can you say that? How do you know what he’s going to do?”

“You just proved my point, Ryan; that’s precisely the problem. I have no idea what he’s going to do, but do you really think he would keep us instead of becoming rich and providing a better life—and better pets—for his family? We’re leaving our fate in others’ hands right now, quite literally. I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but right now I feel like we’re pawns in some cosmic chess game. We don’t have to be completely helpless, though. Do you want to be a pawn for the rest of your life, or are you going to be a king and take charge?”

“Are you asking me whether I want to escape?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, I want to be a pawn.”

“I can’t believe you just said that, Ryan. Do you like the thought of being someone’s pet for the rest of your life?”

“Of course I don’t like it, Kelly, but that’s not what this is about—not by a long shot. The fact of the matter is that we don’t have a choice!”

“You always have a choice.”

“Maybe, but when one of the options likely involves death or serious injury, I don’t really consider it a viable choice. How are we going to survive out there? Didn’t we already have this discussion?”

“We have a river nearby. It has everything we need. Food…water…”

“And predators! In case you’ve forgotten, we’re at the bottom of the food chain now! We’ll die in an instant out there!”

“Is this really a life worth living? We’re just pets! Our lives are meaningless! If we die, at least we’ll die as free people with dignity.”

“What are you talking about? There’s no dignity in starving or roasting to death! And if we’re eaten, we get to come out an asshole as feces! What could be more dignified than that?”

“Ryan, stop it! This is serious!”

“I know it is! That’s why I’m not going to let us make a stupid mistake! I don’t know about you, but I want to get home! If we just stay here, then everything will be resolved!”

“Fine. If you aren’t going to take charge, then I guess I’ll have to do it. I suppose that’s to be expected when the queen is the most powerful piece on the chessboard and the king usually hides behind his castle, but you can’t always sit back in the corner and hope everything works out. Sometimes you have to move yourself forward and do something. Sometimes you have to make a decision.”

“I did make a decision, and that decision is to stay here!”

“I’m leaving, Ryan…but I’m not leaving without you.”

“Then I guess you’re not leaving,” I told her. She seemed to take that as a challenge, and she started walking across the pillow toward the edge of the bed, then reached her arms up and hoisted herself onto the bedside table, crossing its surface until she stood right next to the windowsill, where she leaned over and looked down, then beckoned me to follow her with one of her arms. I remained in my position, shaking my head in response. I didn’t know how long she would keep it up, but eventually she would drop the charade and come back to her sanity. After I continually called her bluff, she shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the window. This time, she climbed up onto the sill and looked at me yet again, as though offering me one last chance to come along with her. I stared at her impatiently, trying to tell her, without speaking a single word, that she wasn’t fooling anybody.

And then she jumped.

Hub Folder: "Quorilax"  [13+]

Third Quarter: "Quorilax: High Tide, Part 2"  [13+]