Fanfic: The Last Kidnapping, Part 12
Title: The Last Kidnapping, Part 12
Author: Joan
Length: 2555 words
Rating: PG for nudity and adult topics
Summary: This one is mostly Wayne studying history, then a short scene of the other three encountering the food and dining customs of their new world.
Warning: short chapter.
Links to previous chapters under the cut
Links: Part 1; Part 2;: Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; >Part 11;
Wayne spent the first hour just on the physical characteristics of his people. He learned that his powers were pretty normal for his kind, that their limits were about what he had discovered for himself. What was not normal was having them active from infancy. Puberty was the normal age for acquiring the powers; early activation would occur when a breastfeeding mother was in a constant state of fear, breakdown products of adrenaline would pass to the child in the milk. The child would then grow up with a hyper-mature appearance but without sexual function and would need medical treatments to truly reach puberty. He paid special attention to those medical treatments, to the symptoms of power deactivation and to the description of a normal Glau sex life. He also learned of two new powers, one that he hadn't realized was unique to the Glau and one that he hadn't even guessed at.
He'd been fascinated by the subtle directionless depth and texture of Wormhole Space and surprised that Megamind had not showed the slightest interest in it even before Roxanne began to undress. He now knew that neither Megamind nor Minion (whose peoples, written as the Yi#vi and the Opuulu, formed a single civilization called the Tseri#uu) could even see it; Wormhole Space looked completely black to them. Not only was the ability to see in Wormhole Space unique to the Glau, so was the ability to change direction within it. The other species, and the Glau themselves when their powers were inactive, would be killed instantly if the vessel they were riding in did anything other than stay the course it had been on when it left normal space. For this reason, rescue and law enforcement vessels patrolling Wormhole Space had always been piloted by Glau.
"It was one of these patrol ships that initiated the sequence of events that led to the survival of remnants of the Five Peoples after the destruction of the Home Star Group." When he read this sentence, Wayne immediately shifted his line of inquiry to that history.
"Several Glau passengers aboard passenger liner 238, bound from Abru to the Glaupunk Quadrant of the 57 Draconis star system, observed a small vessel on an unregistered course in Wormhole Space just before emergence into Tseri#uu space." At this point, Wayne backed out of the historical narrative, looked up the Glaupunk Quadrant and learned that there were several. The Glau were better at mining gas giant planets than any machinery, so mining colonies, populated mostly by Glau, had been established in every inhabited star system, even those that were legally claimed by one of the other civilizations. These colonies were typically networks of artificial habitats floating in the thick, gaseous atmospheres of the planets they mined. The one orbiting 57 Draconis, which was also the Sun of Lup, the Tseri#uu homeworld, had been about three hundred years old and had a population of about two million.
He returned to the story of its end. "Assuming that this unknown vessel was off course, they notified Wormhole Space Rescue Tug 18. The one-man crew of the tug, upon intercepting the vessel, finding it unmanned and recognizing that it did not resemble any known spacecraft, delivered it, not to the local Glau authorities, but to Lup High Orbit 3, headquarters of the codebreaker unit of the Tseri#uu Interstellar Forces. It took the code breakers seventeen days to translate the message carried by the unknown vessel. The message read as follows: [After consideration of all reports, the Expansion Manager has chosen to use the Star Eater, recognizing that it will result in the destruction of fourteen habitable planets. The potential value of these planets is less important than the fact that their present inhabitants possess conventional military capabilities significantly more advanced than ours. If they were to learn of our existence, they could take from us everything of value including our lives. All units are therefore ordered to return to their Exploration Centers. Initiation of the Star Eater process will not be held up for those who fail in promptness.]
Immediately after translation, Lup High Command sent out the following orders: all unarmed vessels with interstellar capability were to leave the Home Star Group immediately. Those with Tseri#uu pilots were ordered to Harolup; those with Glau pilots to Imbarnan; those with Colna pilots to Chria!eyi and those with Equa pilots to Bimbimin-Oach. Armed space ships were assigned places in a defensive three-dimensional grid designed to maximize the likelihood that at least one would be near enough to spot the Star Eater, whatever it turned out to be, and to both attack it immediately and call nearby ships to the attack. If they failed to stop the Star Eater, any surviving vessels were to follow the unarmed ones."
A list followed, of the fourteen starships that made it to Harolup, their passengers and crews. (Wayne skimmed over it, with a mental note to come back to it, since there were people on it that he would probably be dealing with.) Twelve were civilian interstellar vessels, the last two military survivors. These two reported that several unauthorized launches had been seen taking off from the surface of Lup and from the Glaupunk. Too small to hold an adult of either the mammalian species or the Colna, at least two are now known to have carried infants to Earth, one a Tseri#uu pair, the other a Glau. These three have gained enough notoriety on Earth that their activities have been documented in broadcasts, but there is no reason to assume that they are the only survivors to have reached Earth. A search of the oceans might be particularly fruitful." Then there was a list of other planets, inhabited by civilizations without interstellar flight, to which young/small survivors might have been sent.
So that's where I came from. And why. Harolup is where I am. It looks like Imbarnan is where I want to be, the last place in the universe where there are other Glau. What does this computer know about Imbarnan?
The answer turned out to be Not Much. It was another Earth-like world, its ecosystem in a stage characterized by gigantic animals - not dinosaurs, exactly, but creatures that functioned about the same. And it was seventy-seven light years from Harolup, eighty-one from Earth. The forty-three Glau, sixteen Colna and three Equa who had left Harolup for Imbarnan fifty-six years ago had not even arrived yet. Since Glau life expectancy was about 110 years, minus time spent in superspeed, he could expect to die of old age about the time they found out about him. Unless he found a way to go to them.
Those travelers from Harolup had prepared for three contingencies. The one they were hoping for was, of course, to find other Glau survivors. If they found the place uninhabited, they planned to turn around and go back to Harolup. It was the third possibility that caught his attention.
The Star Eater people might have found it first. They were known to have a goal of expanding onto Earth-like planets. They might already be colonizing Imbarnan. In that case, the expedition would become an intelligence-gathering mission. One of the travelers was a Glau interplanetary fighter pilot, Khenhig il Daniikyen, one of the two survivors of the failed battle to save their star. Inside their large habitat-ship, they carried another spacecraft, il Daniikyen's tiny, swift, agile one-man fighter, which had been fitted with Tseri#uu stealth technology in Harolup High Orbit. The plan was that the habitat-ship would come out of Wormhole Space thirty-one standard light-days from Imbarnan. Then il Daniikyen, in his fighter, would return to Wormhole Space and maneuver so that he would come out again near Imbarnan on the trajectory he would have been on if he had come straight from the destroyed star group. That was in case the Star Eater people had some way of detecting him in spite of having the stealth mode engaged. If he found the planet empty or populated by a Glau colony, he was to return to the habitat-ship immediately. If he found an unknown people, he was to gather as much data as he could in the three hours before his little ship needed refueling. The habitat-ship carried enough fuel for five such expeditions, plus enough to return all of them to Harolup.
When he read the description of the plan, the hero in Wayne responded. He wanted to be Khenhig il Daniikyen, flying a fighter jet that Megamind's people had made invisible, going up against the monsters who had destroyed both their homeworlds. He asked the computer for information on il Daniikyen, and the computer readily obeyed. Beside a table of contents that included chapters on the other Glau's ancestry and medical history as well as his education and military record, it showed a picture that made Wayne blink in surprise. Why didn't I expect that my species would include black people? The man in the picture looked more South Indian than African American, with wispy, wavy hair that reminded Wayne of Beethoven and a long Arabic-looking nose. He stood at attention (the required military stance seemed to be the same all over the galaxy) in front of a skinless vessel that was little more than a structure of poles about as thick as his ankle, holding together various components that he recognized from the Adventure (the pilot's seat mounted on the front, a large jet on the back, several smaller maneuvering jets, the Wormhole Shifter, air tanks, etc.) and several things he didn't, although one of them reminded him vaguely of the thing the Invisible Car had that other cars didn't. There isn't any canopy, just a helmet connected by a hose to the air tanks. When he thought about it a moment, it made sense. Invulnerability meant there was no need to fear the explosive decompression that would kill any other species, and in vacuum there's no wind resistance, so why bother with glass?
I want to fly one of those.
###
"Are there insects in this?" Roxanne was staring into her bowl. She was naked in warm water again, hip deep, sitting at a table that stood with its single leg rising from the bottom on which she sat and its round, transparent top at the height of her elbows. Megamind and Ivri[click] Tsveö sat at the table with her. Minion and Tsveö's Opuulu, Ivri[click] Naüÿng, were in the water under the table. At the fourth "place" was a floating container with their food in it. All around them in the big pool room were groups, large and small, around tables like theirs. The place didn't echo as much as she'd expected, probably because of the many colorful cloth things that hung from the ceiling. It was the only place in the habitat where she'd seen bright colors. She'd intended to ask about them, but then had been distracted by Tsveö's and Naüÿng's explanation and demonstration of the traditional beginning of a sit-down meal, with a dish of raw scallop-like shellfish. Each Yi[gulp]vi would take one, open it, hold it in the water and his or her Opuulu would eat the meat from the shell. It was a reenactment, he'd explained, of the earliest co-operation between the two species: the Opuulu with their bioluminescent appendages (called blüÿps in Tseri[gulp]uu) could find shellfish even in lightless underwater caves, but couldn't open them; the Yi[gulp]vi could open them, but only if led to them by the Opuulu. Megamind had been charmed by the little ceremony, saying that it reminded him of their boyhood on Earth, when Megamind would feed Minion from his tray in the prison cafeteria. Minion felt some of the same sentiment, but he was uncomfortable being under the table. He felt like a family dog.
Then Tsveö had gotten out the soup, kept hot in wide cylindrical bowls, and Naüÿng had opened a compartment underneath and begun to pull out long black ribbons of seaweed with rows of little reddish translucent things like sticky pearls along their length. In the steaming brown broth, along with dark green fronds that looked like tiny ferns and whitish chunks of something that could be anything, Roxanne saw pink multilegged things with bodies about the size of the chocolate sprinkles her mother used to put on cookies. It smelled really good in an Asian shrimp dish sort of way, but the sight of those little critters stopped her cold.
"They're newly hatched crustaceans," said Tsveö.
"I used to love them when I was a kid," said Minion, looking up from his meal of sticky reddish pearl-like things. "Wait, the ones I had were on Lup. They'd be extinct now. These must be a different species."
"Actually," said Naüÿng, "they are the Lup species. The NGanyäö [Squish]lek was a luxury liner and they had a tank of live ones aboard for the passengers."
"So this is the food of our homeworld," murmured Megamind, who had a bowl of the same soup in front of him. "I might have been weaned on these. How poignant." He was not in a good mood. The doctor had forbidden him sweets until further notice, with a warning that the notice would not be given for at least a month. He was also thinking back to the crowd in the hallway. Gratifying though it had been, he was unhappily aware of the large percentage of his own people that he'd had to look up at, including Tsveö, who was sixteen years old. When Anyöp Lei had mentioned the markers for inlander's malnutrition, that was the most obvious one. Megamind was the shortest man on Harolup. The doctor had assured him that it was not quite too late, that after a year or so on the diet, he might grow a little, and he was eager for that, but at the same time another part of his brain was plotting to get into the stash of treats that they'd brought on the Adventure, perhaps by arranging to visit the biology lab and sneaking off at an opportune moment. Minion was also small for his age, only a little bigger than Naüÿng, who was seventeen, but he was taking it in stride, and he'd never had his boss' sweet tooth.
Then Megamind picked up the bowl, as he'd seen Tsveö do, took a sip and his expression completely changed. His body responded to the soup as it had never responded to any Earth food. This was what he was meant to eat, and suddenly he couldn't get enough of it. He poured the entire bowlful down.
"[I'm home!] he said, ignoring the slightly shocked expression on Tsveö's face. "Roxanne, I'm home. [Menang, do you feel it? We're home!]"
"[I sure do, sir,]" replied Minion. "[Isn't it great?]"
Author: Joan
Length: 2555 words
Rating: PG for nudity and adult topics
Summary: This one is mostly Wayne studying history, then a short scene of the other three encountering the food and dining customs of their new world.
Warning: short chapter.
Links to previous chapters under the cut
Links: Part 1; Part 2;: Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; >Part 11;
Wayne spent the first hour just on the physical characteristics of his people. He learned that his powers were pretty normal for his kind, that their limits were about what he had discovered for himself. What was not normal was having them active from infancy. Puberty was the normal age for acquiring the powers; early activation would occur when a breastfeeding mother was in a constant state of fear, breakdown products of adrenaline would pass to the child in the milk. The child would then grow up with a hyper-mature appearance but without sexual function and would need medical treatments to truly reach puberty. He paid special attention to those medical treatments, to the symptoms of power deactivation and to the description of a normal Glau sex life. He also learned of two new powers, one that he hadn't realized was unique to the Glau and one that he hadn't even guessed at.
He'd been fascinated by the subtle directionless depth and texture of Wormhole Space and surprised that Megamind had not showed the slightest interest in it even before Roxanne began to undress. He now knew that neither Megamind nor Minion (whose peoples, written as the Yi#vi and the Opuulu, formed a single civilization called the Tseri#uu) could even see it; Wormhole Space looked completely black to them. Not only was the ability to see in Wormhole Space unique to the Glau, so was the ability to change direction within it. The other species, and the Glau themselves when their powers were inactive, would be killed instantly if the vessel they were riding in did anything other than stay the course it had been on when it left normal space. For this reason, rescue and law enforcement vessels patrolling Wormhole Space had always been piloted by Glau.
"It was one of these patrol ships that initiated the sequence of events that led to the survival of remnants of the Five Peoples after the destruction of the Home Star Group." When he read this sentence, Wayne immediately shifted his line of inquiry to that history.
"Several Glau passengers aboard passenger liner 238, bound from Abru to the Glaupunk Quadrant of the 57 Draconis star system, observed a small vessel on an unregistered course in Wormhole Space just before emergence into Tseri#uu space." At this point, Wayne backed out of the historical narrative, looked up the Glaupunk Quadrant and learned that there were several. The Glau were better at mining gas giant planets than any machinery, so mining colonies, populated mostly by Glau, had been established in every inhabited star system, even those that were legally claimed by one of the other civilizations. These colonies were typically networks of artificial habitats floating in the thick, gaseous atmospheres of the planets they mined. The one orbiting 57 Draconis, which was also the Sun of Lup, the Tseri#uu homeworld, had been about three hundred years old and had a population of about two million.
He returned to the story of its end. "Assuming that this unknown vessel was off course, they notified Wormhole Space Rescue Tug 18. The one-man crew of the tug, upon intercepting the vessel, finding it unmanned and recognizing that it did not resemble any known spacecraft, delivered it, not to the local Glau authorities, but to Lup High Orbit 3, headquarters of the codebreaker unit of the Tseri#uu Interstellar Forces. It took the code breakers seventeen days to translate the message carried by the unknown vessel. The message read as follows: [After consideration of all reports, the Expansion Manager has chosen to use the Star Eater, recognizing that it will result in the destruction of fourteen habitable planets. The potential value of these planets is less important than the fact that their present inhabitants possess conventional military capabilities significantly more advanced than ours. If they were to learn of our existence, they could take from us everything of value including our lives. All units are therefore ordered to return to their Exploration Centers. Initiation of the Star Eater process will not be held up for those who fail in promptness.]
Immediately after translation, Lup High Command sent out the following orders: all unarmed vessels with interstellar capability were to leave the Home Star Group immediately. Those with Tseri#uu pilots were ordered to Harolup; those with Glau pilots to Imbarnan; those with Colna pilots to Chria!eyi and those with Equa pilots to Bimbimin-Oach. Armed space ships were assigned places in a defensive three-dimensional grid designed to maximize the likelihood that at least one would be near enough to spot the Star Eater, whatever it turned out to be, and to both attack it immediately and call nearby ships to the attack. If they failed to stop the Star Eater, any surviving vessels were to follow the unarmed ones."
A list followed, of the fourteen starships that made it to Harolup, their passengers and crews. (Wayne skimmed over it, with a mental note to come back to it, since there were people on it that he would probably be dealing with.) Twelve were civilian interstellar vessels, the last two military survivors. These two reported that several unauthorized launches had been seen taking off from the surface of Lup and from the Glaupunk. Too small to hold an adult of either the mammalian species or the Colna, at least two are now known to have carried infants to Earth, one a Tseri#uu pair, the other a Glau. These three have gained enough notoriety on Earth that their activities have been documented in broadcasts, but there is no reason to assume that they are the only survivors to have reached Earth. A search of the oceans might be particularly fruitful." Then there was a list of other planets, inhabited by civilizations without interstellar flight, to which young/small survivors might have been sent.
So that's where I came from. And why. Harolup is where I am. It looks like Imbarnan is where I want to be, the last place in the universe where there are other Glau. What does this computer know about Imbarnan?
The answer turned out to be Not Much. It was another Earth-like world, its ecosystem in a stage characterized by gigantic animals - not dinosaurs, exactly, but creatures that functioned about the same. And it was seventy-seven light years from Harolup, eighty-one from Earth. The forty-three Glau, sixteen Colna and three Equa who had left Harolup for Imbarnan fifty-six years ago had not even arrived yet. Since Glau life expectancy was about 110 years, minus time spent in superspeed, he could expect to die of old age about the time they found out about him. Unless he found a way to go to them.
Those travelers from Harolup had prepared for three contingencies. The one they were hoping for was, of course, to find other Glau survivors. If they found the place uninhabited, they planned to turn around and go back to Harolup. It was the third possibility that caught his attention.
The Star Eater people might have found it first. They were known to have a goal of expanding onto Earth-like planets. They might already be colonizing Imbarnan. In that case, the expedition would become an intelligence-gathering mission. One of the travelers was a Glau interplanetary fighter pilot, Khenhig il Daniikyen, one of the two survivors of the failed battle to save their star. Inside their large habitat-ship, they carried another spacecraft, il Daniikyen's tiny, swift, agile one-man fighter, which had been fitted with Tseri#uu stealth technology in Harolup High Orbit. The plan was that the habitat-ship would come out of Wormhole Space thirty-one standard light-days from Imbarnan. Then il Daniikyen, in his fighter, would return to Wormhole Space and maneuver so that he would come out again near Imbarnan on the trajectory he would have been on if he had come straight from the destroyed star group. That was in case the Star Eater people had some way of detecting him in spite of having the stealth mode engaged. If he found the planet empty or populated by a Glau colony, he was to return to the habitat-ship immediately. If he found an unknown people, he was to gather as much data as he could in the three hours before his little ship needed refueling. The habitat-ship carried enough fuel for five such expeditions, plus enough to return all of them to Harolup.
When he read the description of the plan, the hero in Wayne responded. He wanted to be Khenhig il Daniikyen, flying a fighter jet that Megamind's people had made invisible, going up against the monsters who had destroyed both their homeworlds. He asked the computer for information on il Daniikyen, and the computer readily obeyed. Beside a table of contents that included chapters on the other Glau's ancestry and medical history as well as his education and military record, it showed a picture that made Wayne blink in surprise. Why didn't I expect that my species would include black people? The man in the picture looked more South Indian than African American, with wispy, wavy hair that reminded Wayne of Beethoven and a long Arabic-looking nose. He stood at attention (the required military stance seemed to be the same all over the galaxy) in front of a skinless vessel that was little more than a structure of poles about as thick as his ankle, holding together various components that he recognized from the Adventure (the pilot's seat mounted on the front, a large jet on the back, several smaller maneuvering jets, the Wormhole Shifter, air tanks, etc.) and several things he didn't, although one of them reminded him vaguely of the thing the Invisible Car had that other cars didn't. There isn't any canopy, just a helmet connected by a hose to the air tanks. When he thought about it a moment, it made sense. Invulnerability meant there was no need to fear the explosive decompression that would kill any other species, and in vacuum there's no wind resistance, so why bother with glass?
I want to fly one of those.
###
"Are there insects in this?" Roxanne was staring into her bowl. She was naked in warm water again, hip deep, sitting at a table that stood with its single leg rising from the bottom on which she sat and its round, transparent top at the height of her elbows. Megamind and Ivri[click] Tsveö sat at the table with her. Minion and Tsveö's Opuulu, Ivri[click] Naüÿng, were in the water under the table. At the fourth "place" was a floating container with their food in it. All around them in the big pool room were groups, large and small, around tables like theirs. The place didn't echo as much as she'd expected, probably because of the many colorful cloth things that hung from the ceiling. It was the only place in the habitat where she'd seen bright colors. She'd intended to ask about them, but then had been distracted by Tsveö's and Naüÿng's explanation and demonstration of the traditional beginning of a sit-down meal, with a dish of raw scallop-like shellfish. Each Yi[gulp]vi would take one, open it, hold it in the water and his or her Opuulu would eat the meat from the shell. It was a reenactment, he'd explained, of the earliest co-operation between the two species: the Opuulu with their bioluminescent appendages (called blüÿps in Tseri[gulp]uu) could find shellfish even in lightless underwater caves, but couldn't open them; the Yi[gulp]vi could open them, but only if led to them by the Opuulu. Megamind had been charmed by the little ceremony, saying that it reminded him of their boyhood on Earth, when Megamind would feed Minion from his tray in the prison cafeteria. Minion felt some of the same sentiment, but he was uncomfortable being under the table. He felt like a family dog.
Then Tsveö had gotten out the soup, kept hot in wide cylindrical bowls, and Naüÿng had opened a compartment underneath and begun to pull out long black ribbons of seaweed with rows of little reddish translucent things like sticky pearls along their length. In the steaming brown broth, along with dark green fronds that looked like tiny ferns and whitish chunks of something that could be anything, Roxanne saw pink multilegged things with bodies about the size of the chocolate sprinkles her mother used to put on cookies. It smelled really good in an Asian shrimp dish sort of way, but the sight of those little critters stopped her cold.
"They're newly hatched crustaceans," said Tsveö.
"I used to love them when I was a kid," said Minion, looking up from his meal of sticky reddish pearl-like things. "Wait, the ones I had were on Lup. They'd be extinct now. These must be a different species."
"Actually," said Naüÿng, "they are the Lup species. The NGanyäö [Squish]lek was a luxury liner and they had a tank of live ones aboard for the passengers."
"So this is the food of our homeworld," murmured Megamind, who had a bowl of the same soup in front of him. "I might have been weaned on these. How poignant." He was not in a good mood. The doctor had forbidden him sweets until further notice, with a warning that the notice would not be given for at least a month. He was also thinking back to the crowd in the hallway. Gratifying though it had been, he was unhappily aware of the large percentage of his own people that he'd had to look up at, including Tsveö, who was sixteen years old. When Anyöp Lei had mentioned the markers for inlander's malnutrition, that was the most obvious one. Megamind was the shortest man on Harolup. The doctor had assured him that it was not quite too late, that after a year or so on the diet, he might grow a little, and he was eager for that, but at the same time another part of his brain was plotting to get into the stash of treats that they'd brought on the Adventure, perhaps by arranging to visit the biology lab and sneaking off at an opportune moment. Minion was also small for his age, only a little bigger than Naüÿng, who was seventeen, but he was taking it in stride, and he'd never had his boss' sweet tooth.
Then Megamind picked up the bowl, as he'd seen Tsveö do, took a sip and his expression completely changed. His body responded to the soup as it had never responded to any Earth food. This was what he was meant to eat, and suddenly he couldn't get enough of it. He poured the entire bowlful down.
"[I'm home!] he said, ignoring the slightly shocked expression on Tsveö's face. "Roxanne, I'm home. [Menang, do you feel it? We're home!]"
"[I sure do, sir,]" replied Minion. "[Isn't it great?]"