Aberrant

  Part One: Levantia

  Penned, Ms.Mural

  Talon looked out upon the burned world below. It was a shattered mess of hydrogen bomb craters and psma nce marks. The once teal, shining seas of Levantia now ran a putrid green. It had taken humanity two hundred years to colonize the world, it had taken eighty hours for the world to be lost to them; the Aberrant. That was the name given to them, though from what files Talon had the security clearance to read, they called themselves the Fal.

  The pnetary defense force of over a hundred starships was destroyed in seventy two hours. The following eight hours the pnet was seized upon by the Aberrant fleet overhead. Over a billion of the pnet's popution were killed, and the rest, some two billion people, were forced to begin “alteration,” a process by which the Aberrant horde first indoctrinated you, then infected you with a parasite, warping you into just another Aberration. The parasites infiltrated the body before becoming one with it. Those parasites were born in foul spawning pools, and from there, they could infect whole worlds with just a handful of vectors, acting often in total secrecy. Yet recently the Fal had taken a strategy of total war on all Terran pnets they could find.

  By the time a Terran battle fleet arrived, that of the United North America Federation, the pnet had fallen, and the only recourse was razing the entire pnet’s surface to the ground, a practice that gained a term; scorching. It had grown horridly common, fifteen Frontier worlds scorched, with billions dead, converted to Aberrants, or unaccounted for.

  Terribly, the scorching of Levantia failed; some Aberrant survived the bombardment, albeit, its entire productive capacity was destroyed. It did, however, provide an excellent source of weak, sick, isoted Fal to study, as the horde had abandoned the nuked world, perhaps rightly seeing it as a lost cause.

  Talon looked deeply into the rge, multi-yered gss container that held a live Fal parasite. She was onboard the Lagoon, a research and war ship; every ship on the Frontier needed to be a warship, just in case. Its sleek, white-painted metal and pstic was ubiquitous throughout the vessel inside and out. Outside her b’s window, one of the ship’s two massive drive pylons slowly glowed to life with a luminous blue . Talon watched as the image of Levantia’s shattered surface suddenly blinked away, to be repced by the ominous, yet almost distant purple glow of the Liminal. The Liminal wasn’t very well understood. The faster than light drives, Liminality Drives, that propelled ships through still worked on strange physics that bordered on magic. Talon presumed they had started their route to the pnet Gaia, a distant world from the core of the Human empire, but one located on the main spine of one of the fastest, and safest Liminality corridors, small, sometimes shifting regions of space that were safe for ships to cross at superluminal speeds.

  She sat in a b, clean, white, yet cluttered with equipment, papers, and test results yet to be read. The lights overhead all glowed with the same pale white LED shine that stung the eyes if exposed to it for more than a day or so. The LED sheen mixed with her pale complexion to make Talon’s skin almost cartoonishly desaturated.

  Talon’s eyes nervously shifted to look at the Fal parasite upon which she’d been running genetic edits. It was safely hidden behind gss in a rge, multi-yered container. Perhaps she was just deying the inevitable, that she, and she alone, would have to pull it from the container and test her hypothesis. She had come to the conclusion that much of what she knew about the Fal was conjecture. Fal were said to exist in hivemind, but she’d seen otherwise in several tests. Their inter-connectedness appeared to be more like a telepathy of sorts, simir to another xeno species, the Myst. Of course, it was impossible to know what an Aberrant was thinking without talking to one, and such was strictly prohibited.

  So, Talon came up with a solution: She was to become an Aberrant. It was the only way to prove her theory correct. Of course, she had other reasons for doing it too. Her wife, Eleanor, had been converted to an Aberrant during an attack two years previous. She had been shifted into something inhuman, then taken from Talon. Talon had convinced herself that she wasn’t acting in a selfish, emotional way. In fact, she was working for the good of humanity, the good of science, the good of all, even of the Fal themselves. She never considered this a kind of love-struck madness, as she would have if she’d been told of someone else doing it themself.

  It was te in the day, after all the researchers had gone to sleep, no one to stop her, no one to kill her if she succeeded. She pried the heavy duty tch that kept the container sealed, and pulled the containment chamber open. She spotted the Fal parasite in its slimy goop. It smelled foul, something like sewage. She retrieved the parasite with a pair of small tongs. It couldn’t have been longer than her pinky finger. She looked at the medical droid she’d reprogrammed to help her. It didn’t know what it was about to do, nor could it, it wasn't sentient. She was more than ok with that.

  “Med-One, retrieve impnt.” The droid marched over, silent. It grabbed the small, almost tadpole-esque creature from the tongs, it wriggled, but didn’t move much otherwise. She’d been clever about it, told the droid it was installing a synthetic biological impnt; it wouldn’t stick out if anyone was to check the machine's memory.

  “Next instruction required.” The bot chirped out as Talon took a deep breath.

  Talon walked over to the operation table, and id, face-down, upon it. “Sedate me, and install an impnt, according to the program thirteen gamma.”

  “Understood.” The bot walked over, its metallic feet cnking upon the floor as it stepped. It loomed over Talon, looking down upon her. It slipped a mask over her face. Talon took some deep breaths of the gas before she felt the machine insert an IV.

  Talon spoke, slowly, and calmly, she needed to. “Remember Talon, you have a mission. Don’t get distracted.”

  Reality slowly shifted, dissipating into the fog that seemed to become everything. Soon, she slipped beneath the veil of sleep

  #

  Waking up was odd. She was in her quarters, not where she felt she should’ve been: the b, or the medical bay. But that was ok, why would she have wanted to be in the b or medical bay to sleep? The room was cold, and the air slightly damp. It was dark, the dim purple lights she had installed were the only thing keeping the room lit. They colored the metallic and white pstic walls violet, and cast broad shadows from small objects.

  Talon was nude in her bed, which was soaked through with a slimy sweat. Her sheets, the pillows, the mattress, all of it was coated in this slime. Practically the only thing not covered in slime was the stuffed shark her wife had given her when they both were fifteen. Talon had just come out of the closet as a trans woman, and of course Eleanor, in her perfect way, embraced Talon’s transition. The stuffed shark was an old tradition from Earth, a gift all trans people received from their lover. Neither of them knew the origin of the tradition, but they still participated in it; it felt right. That shark of one of the few things Talon still had of Eleanor, the rest was back home with Eleanor’s parents.

  Talon looked at the odd slime, it was a translucent vender and stuck to everything it touched. It smelled foul in a way unlike anything else. Yet what Talon found most bizarre was that she liked the smell. She logically understood that it should’ve been gross; it smelt like an odd combination of body odor and distant manure. But Talon found it alluring, attractive almost. It wasn’t a big issue, she could clean the sheets she supposed.

  She shifted atop her bed, under her sheets. She realized, instantly, something was different. She sat up, and looked down at her arms. They were strong, muscur, though they still held a decent amount of fat upon them. She looked at them, puzzled over them, pyed with them for a moment, tensing her muscles. Her eyes traced down her arms to her hands. They ended in sharp, nearly angur cws. She examined the cws, tapped them against the wall, scraping the paint of the metal for a moment before her better reasoning told her to stop. She smiled, she couldn’t help it; she felt attractive. It didn’t make any sense to her, but she didn’t need to make sense, she supposed. She y back down into her slime. The warm and wet fluid gave an eerie comfort. It felt almost as if she wasn’t supposed to enjoy the feeling, but she couldn’t remember why.

  Suddenly, her foot ran headlong into something at the end of her bed. It toppled to the floor, a crimson red leaking from it. Talon panicked. She sat up before she jumped from her bed, only to topple onto the floor. Her legs were wrong. They bent at the wrong pces. She looked down upon them. They were muscur, if covered in a yer of fat one might consider beyond healthy. They looked, at least in bone structure, like a dog’s rear legs. She slowly stood, bancing and bracing on her bed. She managed to, almost instinctively, take a few steps. Her skin was different in its color, a greyish indigo had dominated her legs, arms, nether, and buttocks. Her stomach and up to her head was a softer shade, the natural pale of her body still shown through. It was weird. Were her legs always like this? And was the ceiling always so close?

  She walked over to the end of her bed and looked at what she had kicked off it; a rge, raw, hunk of nondescript meat, mostly eaten down to the bone. Her memory spun up, as she tried, and failed, to remember when she had eaten the meat. She salivated at the thought of food, any food at all. Her stomach growled like a wolf as she smiled and looked at the meat, it couldn’t have gone bad, could it have?

  Before she could bend down to gnaw at the remaining flesh on the bone, she felt something, something odd. It spun around her, wrapping itself around her right leg. She nearly sliced at it with her cws before she realized what it was: a rge, prehensile tail, her rge prehensile tail. It was colored the same as her legs. It was long, two, maybe three, meters. It was also thick, as thick as her calf for most of its length until it tapered near the end. She walked over to her mirror and looked at herself. She was taller, more muscur, though just as fat as she always had been. She smiled as she looked at her face. She had a slight snout, and in the snout were many sharp teeth. She was pretty for the first time in her life. She still, of course, bore the massive scar across her left cheek up overtop her eyes, but that too, somehow looked pretty with her new skin. Was this even new skin? Was she different than she was before? She was having a difficult time remembering what happened to make her look like this. Or, had she always looked like this?

  Some quiet, probably logical, part of her knew that all the endorphins, all the happy chemicals in her brain making her love how she looked, and how she smelled, and how odd she had become, couldn’t be natural, but she wasn’t sure how. She decided, then and there, she didn’t care. She was strangely happy, and that was worthwhile, wasn’t it? She sighed, the feeling of the slime slowly drying to her skin was getting on her nerves, it was almost like being covered in slowly drying glue. She looked at the door to her bathroom and smiled. She always liked warm showers.

  The quiet pneumatic hiss of the door allowed her inside the small bathroom. She walked up to her shower, still getting used to her legs. She pulled open the door to the shower and turned the water on. She let it run for a moment. The chaotic rhythm of water falling upon the ground was shortly followed by steam rising from the puddles. She stuck her right hand into the downpour and smiled. It was warm. The shower was small, and that came apparent as she crammed her body into it, but she managed it. She never realized how difficult it was to fit in the shower. She smiled as she felt the water wash the slime residue from her body. It stained the fluid purple, but she didn’t mind. She just stood there, enjoying the warmth for some time, letting the water entwine with her. She slowly pulled her hand to the shampoo bottle on the little shelf in the shower. She squirted out some of the liquid, and ran it through her wavy, purple hair. The sweet scent of the soap filled the air; it was a vague citrus. She enjoyed the smell. It felt nice. It made her think of the sweet fvor of the oranges that grew back home. She would spend summer days with her then wife , back in youth, back on Caribia. Eleanor would always tease her for picking out all the fibers in the orange. Talon couldn’t stand the texture of them, she never knew why.

  As she washed herself, Talon couldn’t help the feeling that she was forgetting something, that something was missing from her memory. She ran through the prior day in her memory. She got up, ate breakfast, went to the b and finished… Finished something. Something very important. Something she really didn’t want to forget. Something that was reted to her appearance.

  Something was wrong, but she didn’t understand what. Why didn’t she know what she did yesterday? Surely she should’ve remembered. Did she even eat dinner? Maybe that’s why she was so hungry. Then again, there was the meat… the raw meat…

  Talon’s mouth fell agape as her memory returned of the previous day. She stole a leg off a cow from the ship’s cargo. She ate it raw. It slowly sunk in that she’d lost total control of herself, that or she had some strange memory formation issue that was unexpined. It was almost like waking from a dream, or a stupor, everything seemed to suddenly become real in a way that it wasn’t before. Talon looked at her body. Its strange, warped appearance was clearly the doing of the Fal parasite, but how? It was meant to take days, not one night’s rest, to work. At least, that’s what she thought, that’s what the literature said. She hadn’t until that moment ever considered it could be wrong. Perhaps she had lost more than just one day. It was possible, if improbable. She looked around the shower, a slight panic growing through her gut. She washed the soap from her hair and jumped from the shower. She needed to act quickly. It would only be a matter of moments until-

  There was a knock at the door of her quarters.

  She pulled a towel from the rack and attempted to drape it around her body, only to find that her new, rather enrged form was too rge for the towel to wrap around her waist, and certainly not her chest either. She did her best to dry her hulking form, soaking through the towel. It was stained a pale vender as she tossed it aside and grabbed the next towel from her rack, pulling across her body until she felt dry enough.

  Again, there was a knock at the door, this time more forceful.

  Talon speed walked into her bedroom. Her legs felt strange walking so quickly, but she managed to find a comfortable rhythm, even if it meant she tread heavily, stomping with each step. She looked to her door just as there was a loud banging at it, followed by a shout.

  “Talon! Answer your damn door!” The annoyed voice of a man, Derrick, passed through the metal.

  Talon, as discreetly as she could, walked up to the door, “I’m a little busy.”

  “Oh yeah, you’ve been busy all week huh? What did you do? The Aberrant parasite we’re meant to deliver is gone!”

  “Oh? Is it?” Talon cringed at how bad of a liar she was.

  “Listen, I’m coming in.”

  “Wait!” Talon began to panic as she heard Derrick start typing into the door’s keypad, why’d you have to give him your door code?

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not decent!”

  “Like you care about being seen naked. You went tits out and dick out at your bachelorette party on that stripper pole on Valinar four.”

  “I- uh -was drunk!”

  “You had one beer, Tal, come on! I’m coming in. You know I’m no prude; sex isn't exactly my thing!”

  Talon stepped back from the door, she was unsure what to do. She ran through a dozen situations in her head before the heavy bulkhead hissed and slid open, allowing Derrick to absentmindedly walk into the room. The bright yellowed light of the hallway spilled through the aperture. It felt almost warm compared to the dim purple background of her room.

  “Talon for the love of god,” Derrick didn’t even look at her before he hit the button that shut the door, “can you expin to me what happened to that Aberrant specimen-” He sniffed the air, “Oh god! Talon what in the fuck is that sme-” Derrick finally looked at Talon, his eyes grew wide for a moment as he cocked his head. Talon could only give a little wave and hope he wasn’t too scared of her. “Talon, are my eyes working?”

  “Ok, so uh… Listen… This looks bad, I get it.”

  “Y-ye-yeah… Yeah it does…” Derrick backed against the door.

  “Ok but listen! I managed to get the gene edits I was working on finished: I’m still me!”

  “Talon you- You infected yourself with the…” Derrick trailed off, his words stretching until they broke.

  “But my edits worked! The Fal aren’t impervious to our gene editing!”

  “I- Ok… So this is a lot.” Derrick rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “I understand, but you know what this means, Derrick?”

  “No?”“It means that we can, at least in theory, pull people back out of the Aberrant.”

  “That’s insane and impossible, Talon. Have you lost your mind?” Derrick looked Talon up and down, “Clearly… Look who I’m talking to.”

  Talon sighed as she rolled her eyes “It’s not like I ever really had my mind, Derrick.”

  “Well that’s true at least…” He paused in thought, “If you’re still Talon… Tell me something only you and I know.” Derrick’s hands hovered, one over his sidearm, the other over the door’s open button“Come on Derrick, you fuck! I’m still me! Even if I was horde minded or whatever the fuck, I’d still have my memories in any case. I know you’re not gonna shoot me.”

  “That’s what a hordeling would say! Tell me something only we’d remember.” His hand drew nearer to the pistol on his belt.

  “Well… I met my wife though you! I, uh, learned how to code cause you taught me. You were the best man at my wedding! You saw as…” Talon’s eyes welled with tears. “You were there when they took my wife. The Aberrant, they dragged her, kicking and screaming and crying and you were the one that pulled me away from going after her.” Talon sighed, “Is that good enough for you?”

  “Geez, you didn't have to guilt trip me!” Derrick pulled his hand from the gun, crossing his arms over his chest. “Why in God’s name would you do this? What possessed you to think this was a good idea? The Talon I know would’ve scolded herself for even coming up with such an idea.” Derrick stepped closer and looked Talon up and down before taking a deep breath. He chuckled for a moment, “She also would’ve made sure she didn’t end up taller than me.” He smirked before ughing.

  “Well, Derrick, it’s not my fault you’re short.” Talon ughed before she let a strange clicking noise from her mouth. She paused as she looked at Derrick, her face dropping at the recognition of the sound. He looked on, mildly terrified but equally fascinated. Fal clicking was famous, and feared. It was most well-documented during war as Fal ripped through Terran soldiers. “I- I didn’t mean to do that! I-”

  “Wait, do it again!” Derrick walked over to Talon, examining her up and down.

  “Click again? I don’t know how… It just happened.”

  “Like a ugh?” Derrick raised an eyebrow. “I mean, it happened after you ughed. Maybe it’s involuntary. Maybe there’s multiple kinds of clicks?” He stopped looking at Talon, his mental gears clearly running.

  “Derrick… Pal… I get you’re a xenolinguist, but eye on the ball.” Again Talon ughed before clicking.

  “AH! There! See, it’s ughter! Just…” Derrick cracked up as he stepped forward from the door, “It’s just… Freakified .”

  “ Freakified ? What a scientific observation.” Talon chuckled with a slight click following.

  Derrick rolled his eyes. “Like how turning yourself into an Aberrant was somehow for science?”

  “Wha- Yes! Literally.”

  “Mhm. Yup totally.”

  “Derrick, fuck you.”

  Derrick chuckled, “Please don’t. I already don’t like sex, and frankly, you’ve got some weird tentacle shit going on down there now.”

  “I do? I-Is it bad?” Talon cringed at just the thought.

  “Well, uhhh, there’s- There’s four of them.”

  “Like an echidna?”

  “No, no, not like an echidna- that’s one shaft with four heads, this is four small, slightly wiggling, tentacles around a… I don’t want to call it a gaping maw, but it kinda looks that way? Like a closed mouth that wants to eat me.”

  “That’s a weird way to describe a vulva, Derrick.”

  “I-” Derrick hesitated, “maybe? If it is, I definitely don’t know where the clitoris is.” Derrick squinted and walked a pace forward before leaning down, as if he was trying to actually find it.

  “Derrick, hey! Just cause you don’t see my body as a sex object doesn’t mean you get to inspect my weird alien vagina.”

  “Vulva not vagina.”

  “Wha- sure whatever listen-.”

  “Vagina is the inside part.”“Why do you know that?” Talon paused before , “And better yet, why do you care?” Talon leaned down slightly, hoping she’d appear slightly threatening to Derrick, if only to make him stop looking at her genitals so intently. She wasn’t even uncomfortable with it, she was afraid that Derrick was gonna start seeing her as just another science experiment

  “My mom’s a vagina doctor.” Derrick said this with the confidence of someone who’d said it before to no adverse reaction.

  “An OB/GYN?”“Err, yes! That sounds right.” Derrick stood up before he looked at Talon again. His eyes fell, rather intently, on Talon’s breasts. “Your boobs… They’re bigger… Why are they bigger?”

  “Derrick!”

  “No seriously, why? Like Aberrant don’t need mammary gnds, do they?”

  Talon thought for a moment before coming to a simple conclusion, “I’m bigger so they’re bigger. ”

  “Yeah… But, even proportionally, they’re still rger.” Derrick raised an eyebrow, “Can I take some pictures?”

  “Derrick,” Talon bit her tongue, “my friend,” She sighed and took a deep breath, “you’re not going to be making porn of me.”

  Derrick recoiled, “Porn? It would not be porn!” He crossed his arms and puffed out his chest. “It would be for science-” He frowned, “A simple no would have done fine.” Derrick huffed for a moment.

  “Then no.” Talon turned to look in her mirror. She examined herself, her new darkened indigo skin, her strong, broad figure, and powerful looking muscles, all cloaked under a soft, supple yer of fat. “God, look at me…” Her eyes slipped down her reflection until they reached sight of her nether. It looked remarkably like her wife’s vulva, though it also had several strange structures Talon was unfamiliar with, and of course, the four tentacles that all seemed a little shriveled at the moment. “I mean, it’s basically free bottom surgery, right?” Talon clicked with a smile.

  “Your idea of ‘free’ is a lot different than mine.” Derrick examined Talon’s form from the back now. “Wait, you have a fucking tail?”

  Talon spun around and looked at the man

  “Yes?”

  Derrick considered for a moment, “Well then, never mind. I’m on board with becoming a freaky, weird, Aberrant guy if I get a cool-ass tail.”

  Talon ughed and clicked at the same time now. It felt nice somehow, like it was meant to be.

  “You know, the clicking is kinda cute once you realize that it doesn’t mean ‘I’m gonna eat your face.’” Derrick chuckled.

  “Whatever!” Talon click-ughed again as she turned to look at Derrick, he had always been a good friend, especially when she really needed him. “I think I’m gonna need some pants… And a shirt…”

  Derrick stifled a ugh, “Oh yeah, I have some clothes for an eight foot tall monster woman just ying around.”

  Talon rolled her eyes, “Derrick, it was an open statement! It was not directed at you.” She looked around her room in hopes of coming up with something.

  “I’m the only other person here, Talon.”

  “Whatever, can you help me think of clothing ideas?” Talon looked at the man, setting her cws on her hips.

  “You could wear a bed sheet.”

  Talon looked to her bed, it was up against the window that led out into the void. They were clearly in real space given how dark it was. Far below them was a greenish blue pearl, Gaia. It sat just barely in the port’s view. Talon looked at her slimy sheets that were slowly drying, growing visible crusty, and cringed at the thought of touching them.

  “I don’t think that’d work…”

  “Why? Surely they’d-” Derrick looked at the purple stained sheets

  “What is that? Did you spill soda on your bed?”

  “No it’s… It’s this weird slime I woke up in…”

  Derrick spoke with a slight awe, “Wait wait wait! Is that Aberrant Ichor?”

  “I-Ichor?”“You know, the Aberrant slime-juice they love!” Derrick hesitated, “You love? I don’t know your feelings about it.”

  Talon cringed as Derrick walked up to the soiled bed, “Mixed? It did… It did smell strangely nice, and felt nice on my skin.”

  “Cool! Wow, my god, Kurie in xenobiology will go crazy for this! This is amazing!” Derrick got up close to the bed and Talon could’ve sworn his face turned green, “-And kinda gross. I didn’t realize it would smell so bad.”

  “I- uh, I’m sorry.”“Why? It’s not like you meant to get slimy in bed… I’d presume?”

  “No, I don’t think I did.” There was a moment of quiet that passed through the air.

  “I feel the need to ask, what’s your pn, Talon? You’ve been out of it for a few days, and frankly, I don’t think the rest of the crew would take kindly to you- ya know, existing around them, right now.”

  “I’m a trans woman, they never did that anyway.”

  “Ok- Fair, but like, they might want to -ya know- murder if they see you.”

  “Need I repeat myself? I’m a trans woman, that’s run of the mill.” Talon clicked jovially as she pulled open her drawers and sorted through it. She smiled as she found her biggest shirt, underwear, and pants, all packed away together in the back of the drawer, her “wow I’m fat” outfit. She pulled them on. Each was ill fitting, but they worked. The shirt was more of a crop top, the leggings more of shorts, and the underwear’s estic unhappily over stretched, but Talon could manage. “How do I look?“Uhh, kinda like,” Derrick paused, as if considering whether or not to continue. “Kinda like one of those weird fetish art pieces of Arberrants. You know the kind.”

  “N-no? I do not know the kind.” Talon wasn’t sure whether to be fttered, angered, or both.

  “Oh, weird, normally you're on top of your fetishes.” Derrick ughed as he cocked his head.

  “Derrick, for an asexual, you know a lot about weird sex stuff.”

  “I know, right? Weird hyper-fixations. Sex being a, forgive my pun, alien concept, makes it really interesting to study.”

  “Ha, you know, it’s really fun to do.” Talon winked.

  “So you’ve told me.” Derrick raised an eyebrow, “But back to my point, what’s your pn?”

  “Ok, well, we’ve made it to Gaia. My pn was to take one of the starfighters in the hangar down to the surface, and from there steal a transport and head off into Fal space.”

  “Ok, ok, makes sense, only problem-” Derrick paused, a smirk spreading on his face, “How the fuck are you gonna do that?” Derrick csped his hands together, and leaned forward, clearly incredulous.

  “Good question. I was gonna climb into the vent and go that way but-” Talon flexed her arm and smirked at Derrick, only for him to stone face her back. “So, that pn’s moot. So pn B, I think I’m gonna go with the flow on this one.”

  Derrick rolled his eyes. “You? Winging it? Lord, I’ve not heard that one before!” Derrick smirked as he chuckled.

  “Shut it. Come on, let’s go!”

  “Girl, it’s three pm on a Saturday. People are gonna see you.”

  “It’s… it’s Saturday?” Talon quickly counted the days in her head, then recounted, then one more time to be sure, “That means I lost nearly a week.”

  “You lost? Like losing time? What do you mean?” Derrick narrowed his eyes.

  “My memory- or me? I- I don’t know. I don’t remember anything between having the parasite put into my body, and now basically.”

  Derrick paused in thought, “Huh. Well, if I needed to make my guess, it sounds like the parasite was integrating into your neuro pathways causing memory formation issues.”

  “That’s a leap.” Talon crossed her arms.

  “Well, infecting yourself with a poorly understood alien parasite is, and this is the scientific term, a batshit crazy leap.” Derrick spoke with his hands, as he was prone to do. Talon thought it was cute when he did it.

  “Fair, fair. I guess you have two options, Derrick. I can go on my own, and you mind your business. I couldn’t hold it against you. Or you could help me down to the hanger.”

  “What kinda friend would I be if I didn’t help you down to the hangar?”

  “A sane one, probably.”

  “Ehh, sanity is overrated.” Derrick sighed. “You know, I’m gonna have to report that this happened to the captain once you make it to the ground, cause…” Derrick looked Talon up and down, “that’s what Elly would’ve somehow convinced me to do. And I have a feeling you’re gonna try and come back with her. And that feeling is telling me that you’re gonna be successful if it’s the st thing you do.”

  “You have more faith in my abilities than I do.”

  “Maybe, but I know you're stubborn enough to succeed. So I trust you.” There was a momentary silence, allowing the hum of the ship, and the musk of the room to fill the void of conversation.

  “Can I hug you?” Talon opened her arms somewhat.

  “Please, do. I didn’t get to hug Elly goodbye.” Derrick stepped forward and outstretched his arms.

  Talon wrapped herself around him and pulled him into a tight hug. She could hear Derrick whimper and stifle a cry for a few moments. It wasn’t long before he was weeping.

  Derrick spoke, each word coming out between sobs.“Please, come back.”

  “I’ll come back, I promise. And Elly will be there, and we can go on lovely little adventures together like when we were kids, ok?” Talon pulled Derrick into an even tighter hug. He nodded weakly. Talon knew he didn’t believe her. They broke the hug, and Derrick wiped his snot away.

  “God. You smell.” Derrick gave a weak smile.

  Talon chortled, clicking a little. “I know. Is it weird that I kinda like it?”

  To Be Continued