The foolish think they know something.
The building itself wasn’t rundown at all on the inside. It had the appearance of an abandoned, condemned office complex and defunct strip mall. Yet, the truth of the place was that it was more akin to luxury suites and a recreation center. The Guardians of the Chosen spared no expense in gutting and remodeling the place, and generously spent nothing towards an attractive exterior.
A clan of pariahs armed to the teeth with nonlethal force defending what the commoner considered their anti-social ‘holy ground’ proved viciously deterring, even to the worst of the dregs. It boiled down to the simple fact that they were to be noticed. The crackle of the taser was like the rattle of a rattlesnake; their bright colors turned people away the same as predators avoid poisonous prey.
But, just how stupid did they presume Niklas was? He’d forgotten their name, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t recall the rest of it. Granted, there were holes in his memory, but the longer he spent back home, on Earth, the more that fog began to lift, and in the wake of clarity, even he recognized that the Guardians of the Chosen weren’t after him for innocent fun.
He didn’t stare at Iizyn, and the bug didn’t seem to take issue with that. In fact, it was often busy cleaning its antennae and many limbs, like centipedes do.
“Man, luck-ee.” One of the Pink Grunts whistled.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” He hopped over the back of the couch, and Niklas idly handed him a controller.
What were they playing anyway? Did it matter? Before long they were bobbing and weaving like children who didn’t know how to sit still. Friendly enough, until Niklas got off the couch, and the Pink Grunt didn’t do anything suspicious.
He took his SMART DEVICE, which always required a data connection, and sauntered into the bathroom. It wasn’t exactly a phone, more like a Swiss Multi-tool. Just peering into the screen, he felt its probing, digital claws scraping the back of his skull as if to rake in as much info from him as it could. Naturally, he obliged.
“Hello, Yeehaw Hilda! Welcome to your new —”
“Next.”
“Would you like to skip setup —”
“Next.” He felt the speaker buzz, faintly, because it was getting ready to cue up something else. He turned it off, dropped it first on the floor, hard, and when he picked it up, the screen was cracked. Then he chucked it into the toilet.
“Everything alright in there?” The Pink Grunt shouted from the living room.
“Yeah, just got some shiny something-or-other I was trying to catch, and swiped my thingamajig into the toilet.”
“Ouch. I’d better see if they’ll issue you a new one.”
He flushed, left it in the toilet, and set foot back in the living room. The Grunt had left, just like he said he would.
All this was indicative of something. Their insistence on an obvious tracking device that accepted any information he gave it, their leaving at least one of their grunts with him for hours on end, the fact that they cooped him up with Iizyn — the fact that they even had Iizyn — all pointed to one conclusion.
They were going to kill him. He sensed it in his churning guts, the salt and vicious, explosive — well, maybe he didn’t sense it quite to that extent, but if he thought he did, someone else certainly did.
Soon enough, the same guy was back with a ‘company issued’ smart device. “By the way, what was that girl all about?”
“Sherri?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to make contact with her.”
“Crippling loneliness?”
“I thought she wasn’t human. Thought she was something disguised in human meat. She wasn’t supposed to get killed, but some jackwagon pointed me out to her, meanwhile I’d been living in her house and traveling to work with her.”
“Huh. I guess people really do ignore you.”
“When you’ve got giant spoopy roach-mantis-arachni-pedes that talk to you, yeah.” He flopped back down on the couch, set the thing on the armrest, and resumed playing.
To the Læch, the universe is an artist’s canvas, blank, rough, rudimentary. The Saun is not a vessel of time-space travel. It is a ‘ship’ that hops from one canvas to the next.
Fygn is the word for the Læch’s canvas; Qwaid is where they dwell, where there are many Fygns.
At once, a sharp pain hit his temple the same as if someone had put a chisel to his skull and smashed it in with a sledge hammer. He cocked his head back, grunted, hissed, then gripped the Pink Grunt’s arm.
“M-migr…”
“Migraine?”
Niklas could barely nod. The Pink Grunt launched himself off the couch and out the door.
The Saun is the ‘vessel’ that moves between universes. His temples were pounding. How had he lost his? All this time he’d been looking to make contact with a creature he knew wasn’t human, but might have hid itself amid humans some kind of way, possibly mimicking the human form.
By the time the Glittersuits arrived to assist him, blood was pouring from his nose. He cradled his face, though the taste of iron flooded his tongue because he could only breathe through his mouth.
They plugged him up, and popped a pill in his mouth. He washed it down with a liter of lemon-lime pop. By then, it was too late. Had they given him something for his migraine, or better yet, something to make him more inclined to tell them what he knew, he’d already forgotten.
It was better this way. For, being back on Earth, a Hoaxenthyne was essentially an Earth-bred alien to the riffraff.
As to the elites, and those desperate for social ascension? He understood that he had the misfortune of finding out. Not as an accessory, but as a star player in a losing RTS game.