Chapter five

Betty opened her eyes with lightening speed. Adrenaline held her heart in its icy grip. Oh my gosh, it wasn't a dream! They had picked a real, live (barely) alien u the night before and he was proceeding to tear their house apart!

Terrific! This was a grand day when a cryptozoologist could make actual contact with an actual alien!

If only Barney felt the same way...

Barney was out of the bed and running through the halls in smoochie boxers as fast as his lean legs would carry him, bellowing all kinds of words that the authoress refuses to put in here.

An alien was standing in the den turning on every electrical appliance he could reach---television, CD player, radio, tape player, and computer---- anything. The noise was deafening and overwhelming like a freight train in the head. He was holding a tin can of peaches in his tiny claws and staring up at a hysterical Barney and an amused Betty with the CUTEST innocent look on his face. As if the two humans were an annoyance he didn't want to deal with, the alien looked down at the can and started clawing at it fiercely.

"No-no! Let me open that for you!" Betty warned, but the alien didn't pay her any mind.

He looked at the ceiling and then at the can, and just as Barney started to protest, the alien tossed the peaches into the air. His tail came down with a terrific metallic CLANG and Barney felt peach slime cross his face, which then turned several shades of red and a few of purple.

The alien then bent down and started picking at the peaches out of one of the can-halves with his claws. He say back on his haunches, glaring at Betty and her husband the way an animal would if a rival was staring at his kill.

Betty laughed, "OF course! Two hearts, a set of wings, small body structure and long tail, you need to eat A LOT to maintain yourself, don't you?"

She ran through every inch of information she had gathered from her study of the alien. Barney looked at her like she dropped off the moon.

"He needs to eat a lot to keep his wings, but at the same time he has to burn enough energy to stay light enough to use them."

Barney gave her The Look, "Constant case of munchies?"

"Yup."

"Meat?"

"Yup."

Betty smiled at the alien, who gently growled something that was merely a warning and not a threat.

"I bet I know something you'd like!"

She held her hand out to the alien. He stared at it for a few seconds and then took it.

:30

Romora smirked at the two humans.

"You are surprised?"

General Thomas laughed, "Surprise isn't the word, girl..."

He paused and considered what he might say to ease the nervous-looking, though unmistakably confident, alien girl.

"Is your captain...ess okay?"

The tech nodded, "She will be okay, she is only thinking in her quarters. I have been instructed to give you the tour of the ship Neth'la, are you coming?"

Faust didn't even twitch, but the general, who had the heart of a child, nodded excitedly.

"Yes, my lady, by all means lead the way!"

:30

Within ten minutes, Barney was listening to bacon and sausage frying and eggs scrambling as he sat across from a red-headed alien that looked like it wanted to eat him.

The alien had hair like fire and eyes as cold and yellow as gold. His clothes were still caked with blood and---Barney admitted that his heart gave a pang of guilt at this---its wings were still crumpled, but showed early signs of healing and seemed to be getting sturdier as he watched them. The creature's tail gently swung back and forth, silver metallic duel-headed ax-blade and three barbs pointing to the mane shaft of the blade from the center, as deadly as strychnine, as quick as lightening. His horns were so metallic that, much like his tail, they reflected light.

Why Barney let his dearly beloved Batty carry that thing into the house was beyond him! It must have been the look of terror in her eyes that had bewitched him. Had to be that.

The alien had a pepper shaker in his hands and was twisting it over and over, looking at it. When enough spice accumulated on his hand to feel it, the alien cat gently touched it to his tongue. It then purred and put its hands down and picked up the salt shaker.

There was just one law of gravity-defying thing that didn't seem quite right.

The pepper shaker was still in the air.

:30

The ship was alive with music! It echoed! It waved, dipped, and reverberated back on itself a thousand times over in waves and arcs of sonic bliss!

They sounded like whales, graceful, huge sound in the infinance of space. It was wonderful, it was beautiful, it was...alien.

General Thomas's jaw dropped.

The alien girl, the tech officer, smiled, "You like?"

Her accent was strange, almost like an islander, but something about it was still a bit scholarly and the human couldn't place why or how. Thomas KNEW he had heard a similar accent before, but he was at a loss.

"Their singing is beautiful!"

Faust took a note on a clipboard as the alien girl, Romora, cocked her head in a quizzical look.

"Singing," Thomas tried to explain. "To make music with the voice."

Romora's eyes lit up and she finally caught on.

"OH! 'Communication' is probably more the word here."

The general widened his eyes. Faust looked around a little more.

Romora wrote a note down on some kind of electronic notepad she had, as if the humans, too, were being studied, and muttered, "I believe you call them whales, the ones that sing like we do to talk over long distances."

General Thomas nodded and smiled, "Yes, that's exactly what we call them!"

:30

Barney almost fell out of his seat.

"BETTY!" he screamed. "Look'it! Look at what he's doing!"

At the exact moment Betty turned around, the alien stared into Barney's blue eyes with its yellow, and the pepper shaker slowly floated downward.

Betty stared at her husband and the alien, who was calmly licking salt out of his palm. After she had suffeicently taken in the scene as if it was a normal family scene, she turned back to the stove.

At that exact moment, the pepper shaker lifted off the table again.

"BETTY!! BETTY, LOOK!"

At the exact moment she turned to see, the pepper shaker landed on the table noiselessly.

Betty gave her husband a curious glance and demanded, "What's the matter with you? He's just playing with the salt shaker!"

She turned away again and Barney stared at his new houseguest. He watched the alien's catlike mouth split into a wide grin, showing off serrated, catlike incisors. The pepper shaker lifted off the table all by itself again.

"He's teasing me, that's what he's doing," the human man hissed, hunkering down bitterly into his chair.

The alien purred contentedly.

Betty placed in front of the alien two strips of bacon, two eggs, and two sausages. She did the same for her husband and herself, and after seating herself, asked the blessing. The alien watched all this through wide, yellow eyes with curiosity.

He had seen some type of gathering like this before; that he knew.

:30

"So if your people talk over long distances like that, what does it all mean?" General Thomas asked Romora Miara.

Romora glared at a hole in the ceiling with a ladder coming out of it. She stood underneath it and hummed a high, whalelike noise in a part of her nose that Thomas couldn't begin to guess. Instantly, two kids---cubs no more than six or seven----jumped from the hole and tried to run past the older tech. Each child had hair in shades of blue and mottled blue horns that rolled over their heads, as well as fin-like quills and wide tailblades.

Young Water Nymphs, Thomas guessed. Faust wrote down a note.

Romora hissed at them and berated the two children in her strange, though familiar, language. She then took a metallic object from one of them and handed to the other and told them to go.

General Thomas looked around at the ship and its artificial trees and forestry, its fake lights made to simulate a blue-white alien sun, and the real soil beneath his feet. He looked at the aliens walking back at forth, staring at him and snickering. He noticed something about each one, yellow hair, green, or blue.

"How old are all of you?"

:30

The alien was picking at his meat and eggs like a bird, only with his claws. He didn't pay any attention to his silverware, and, once he figured out the strange, tangy, orange stuff in a glass container was edible, sipped at his orange juice by lapping at it with his pink tongue. He watched the strange, wingless and tailless bipeds with curiosity and mild annoyance, as if he couldn't quite figure or who or what they were.

Betty and Barney watched the alien, slowly pecking at his food with his burnished gold claws. He was a cute little boy, by human standards. Very sweet-looking, if his yellow eyes weren't so cold.

"Who are you people?" the alien asked.

Betty dropped her fork, Barney succeeded in falling out of his chair.

"W-what did you say?" Betty demanded, shocked and surprised, but greatly pleased. The alien could speak! An alien from another planet actually spoke!

"You heard me!" he repeated, getting even more annoyed. A growl softly escaped his lips, but it was little more than a warning not to test the redhead's patience. He groaned and growled once more over his shattered wings, little more than delicate, graceful skeletons of veins, and it sent a stab of pain through Betty's heart.

"I-I'm Barney, and this is my wife, Betty!" Barney stammered.

The alien glared at him with an unimpressed look. Another soft rumble escaped the alien's feline lips.

"I meant: what are you?" he growled again.

"H-humans! Barney and I are human!"

The alien's face changed into a quizzical look.

"This isn't your home planet. This is Earth. We weren't told where the Mother Ship came from, just that it had extraterrestrial origins!" Barney barely managed to stop himself from letting it all slide out in one word.

The alien gave a half-quizzical, half-unimpressed look, as if he had figured out that it wasn't his planet, but wasn't sure what "Mother Ship" meant.

A light went on in Betty's head.

"Wait a second! What's your name??" Betty almost screamed it at the top of her voice.

The alien gave her a blank, uncomfortable look and shifted in his seat. His tail moved around by his feet and by his side.

"OH GOSH!" Betty shouted, making the alien cringe. "You don't know!"

Barney watched this all. It was one of those ironic things where it SHOULD be completely insane and impossible, and yet you treat it like it's normal or go completely insane yourself. Still, Barney was convinced that he was the ONLY sane one in the room.

The alien diverted his gaze from the human female. He didn't look either of them in the eyes.

Barney thought for a minute and then asked, "You didn't---like----imprint on us as your species or family, did you?"

The alien laughed a very humans sound and answered, "I'm amnesic, my dear sir, not stupid."

:30

Romora was just about to answer her two guests, when something silvery and metallic went flying over their heads. A tanned hand caught it, just like a frisby, revealing it to be such a thing.

She was female, shorter and stockier---though still very willowy by human standards---than Romora. Her hair was cloudy white and her eyes were neon, jewel-like green. She was clothed from head to toe in white cottony material and white leather boots, which, by a nocturnal society's standards, identified her as a biker, bad girl, or Goth, pick your stereotype. Her wristspikes were soft tan and tipped in a pale, creamy green color. Her tail blade was shorter than Romora's, more rounded, and not as heavy as some of the red or yellow-haired children they had seen walking around. Her ears were pointed, like her catlike nose, and she smiled at the humans in a predatory, defensive smile.

"Most of us," she answered, "are in our early to mid adolescence. The youngest one on board isn't even a year yet, the oldest can't even drink on your world."

They were a race of children, nomadic and forlorn, led by the single tiny, frail-looking female who called herself Tyla Mneth of Moon Pride, Sai- Wielder, Daughter of Matriarch Leeria of Moon Pride, and Captainess of the ship Neth'la.

A race of children, none able to drink or drive or do anything on earth except go to school during the week and the mall on weekends.

A race of children searching for a new home, doing the work of adults with children of their own.

My gosh, what had those kids been through?