HOZ 2

Ooh we gettin into it now

“That’s a human…” Ryan could barely speak.

“Yes.” Shoky replied matter of factly, though what Ryan said wasn’t a question.

“That’s a human.”

“Yea, we’ve established that.” Shoky was becoming impatient.

Ryan tore his eyes from the young girl to gawk at Shoky wildly. “THAT’S A gud jävla heliga helvetet i hela skapelsen verkliga liv HUMAN.”

Shoky shrunk a bit. Ryan only swore when he was really pissed off and only in Swedish . “FAN FAN FAN FAN FAN FAN FAN, WHAT THE HELL SHOKY?!” he continued. He began to pace his room. “Fan, fan, FAN…. What…. What?” He stopped and stared at the two females. He tried again to form a question but only came up with another, “What?” then, “How? What? Wh- wh-”

Shoky carefully put her hand on his shoulder. “Just listen to Nalie’s story. It’s really good.”

“Listen to a jävla human?” Ryan slumped on his bed, becoming completely defeated by his own overheating brain.

“Listen,” Shoky repeated coolly. She turned to the girl who was still standing in the door and waved her in. “Tell him what you told me.”

She stepped forwards. She was one of those dark skinned girls that the caucasian humans are uneasy about. Her eyes were very big. “So, like I said, my name is Nalie. Bout 4 years ago, I was... abducted by these aliens. They sent... a tornado to my house. I dunno know if my family survived…” Nalie paused as she let a distant gaze into her eyes before looking down to continue. “They said they needed me, they needed to test some things out. I was on that ship for 4 years. They had me in this cell and all there was was a TV, a bed, a table, and some things to write or draw with and some toys. Sometimes people in lab coats and masks would come in an' poke me with things. They put me through all these machines an' made me take all these drugs-”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Ryan interrupted. He was beginning to regain his senses. “What did these aliens look like?”

Nalie looked at him nervously. “Like you guys. No pupils, yellow eyes, pointy fingers with no nails. Different shades of green.”

Ryan blinked. “You’re saying that our people, my race of people, kidnapped and performed experiments on you?”

“Yea.”

“I find that incredibly hard to believe.” stated Ryan. “Perhaps it was the Sozarians. They kinda look like us.”

“They’re purple,” Shoky reminded him. Ryan inspected his own baby green skin.

“It’s a light purple. Under the right lighting…”

“Ryan.” Shoky warned him.

“I’m sorry, I just find it hard to believe that any sound of mind zenonite would go to Earth and abduct a human.” Ryan retorted defensively. “We are terrified of humans! We do everything in our power to hide from them. No citizen of this planet would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever willingly go to Earth, much less snag someone from there.”

“My question is,” Shoky added, one hand rubbing her chin, the other holding the first’s elbow, “how they would get to Earth. Zenonites don’t have any private property besides their homes, privately owned transportation was outlawed when we first developed ships, and our rentals are closely monitored.”

“The ship y'all found me on was the ship I came in on,” Nalie offered.

The words felt like a slap both to Ryan’s physical face and his mental world. “You’re saying our government officials were the ones who took you?!”

Nalie shrugged.

“No. No, no, no. No. That’s not possible. We would never do that. Never. Not ever.” he protested.

Shoky squinted her face because she knew what she was about to say was blasphemous. “Well, they did just go to Earth for the first time ever...”

“To gather food!” Ryan jumped up. He couldn’t sit still anymore.

“Which you said was a stupid reason to go to Earth many, many times,” argued Shoky. “Unless they had an ulterior motive…”

“This is insane!” Ryan shouted. “Our government isn’t like that! Our government doesn’t conspire. They are the most honest, open government in the universe. The opposite of human governments.” Nalie’s face tightened at his pointed disrespect.

“The timing matches up. And how else did she get here? How else did she end up on that ship?” Shoky demanded.

Ryan thought a moment. Sort of. “She must be a stowaway.” His eyes widened. “Omygod... Shoky!” He grabbed her and pulled her away from Nalie. “Shoky,” he whispered. “What if she’s a spy?”

Shoky gave him a very confused look in response so he explained further: “What if the humans have known about us all along? But they could never get to us because of our amazing cloaking and shielding abilities. But they knew we watched their shows so they made them all subtly project how awesome their food was. Luring us to come to them. Then, they sneak an unassuming girl onto one of the ships when no one’s looking. Free ride to Zenon. What if they’re infiltrating us? They know that we know that their children are the least terrifying. They make us think we’re the bad guys, get us to go on this journey to send her back to Earth, we get closer as a species and learn about ourselves in the process then BOOM. She’s got the codes to the cloaking ring that’s around our planet and how best to extract all our oil and destroy everything we’ve tried to protect.”

It took Shoky a moment to process Ryan’s words before coming up with her own. “That’s some terrascoist conspiracy right there,” she said, in reference to the group of zenonites who obsessively fear over what Ryan had just described. “You really think the humans are capable of somehow knowing we exist?”

“They’re really good bluffs!” said Ryan defensively. “We don’t fully know what they know.”

“Yes we do!” Shoky reminded him. “Remember when we were all really worried about the exact thing you just said. Like, how they could actually know about us. So our government hacked into all the top secret government databases of Earth but found nothing except more reasons as to why humans are terrible beings.”

Nalie scrunched her face,“Wait, what?” Her eyes took turns looking at Ryan then Shoky but they both ignored her.

Shoky shook her head. “I still can’t stop thinking about those poor Israeli people.”

“What Israeli people?” Nalie whined.

“Yea, but what if they had some secret-er databases that our technology couldn’t pick up?” Ryan tried again. Nalie’s pouts continued to be ignored.

Shoky icked. “You know our technology is way more advanced than any human’s.” She paused before adding, “Look, you’re being ridiculous. You’re starting to sound like me!”

“At least you’re admitting you’re the crazy one in the relationship.” Ryan shot back. “And I didn’t have a reason to believe those crackpot theories until a human showed up in my house unannounced. Y’know, you do this all the time. You find something dangerous, think it’s a friend- and it’s usually not- then you can’t handle it and you come to me to help you get rid of it. You’re just a naive, dumma  flicka that runs around, doing whatever, not thinking that maybe the thing everyone says is dangerous is actually dangerous and maybe you shouldn’t mess with it!”

Words got stuck in Shoky’s throat like a cube in a tube. She couldn’t say them so the words moved to her eyes, making them wide and glistening. She stared at Ryan with those eyes, making him instantly regret saying what was said.

“Look, Ryan…” Nalie thought to remind everyone of her presence.

“She knows my name!” Ryan snapped out of his self regret to point at the human dramatically. Perhaps if he proved himself right, Shoky wouldn’t be so upset with him.

Shoky managed to roll her eyes back to normal. “I told her your name on the way over here,” she explained quietly.

“Ryan,” Nalie said more firmly. “I promise, I don’t want any of yo' government secrets-”

“My government doesn’t have secrets!”

“I’m not here to destroy your planet, ok?!” Nalie was losing her patience. “I just wanna leave and go back home and see if my family’s ok. I’m not sure because yo' stupid government sicked a tornado on them!”

“Lies.” Ryan hissed.

“Ok, everyone shut up!” Shoky exclaimed. She turned to her hysterical boyfriend. “Ryan, whatever the reason, wouldn’t you agree the best course of action is to get her off our planet?”

“...Maybe….”

“So we should do that, then, shouldn’t we?” pushed Shoky.

Ryan thought further. He glanced nervously at the child in his room. “We should turn her into the government.”

"No!" was the immediate protest from both Nalie and Shoky.

“The same government that kidnapped her?!” Shoky shrieked.

“The government didn't kidnap her! She’s lying! She’s obviously lying!” Ryan shot back.

“Am not!” Nalie stomped her foot.

“You said so yourself,” Shoky interjected. “Going to Earth was stupid. It was a perfect cover-up.”

“Our. Goverment. Doesn’t. Cover. Up.” Ryan seethed.

“They obviously do.” muttered Nalie under her breath, just loudly enough for everyone to hear her anyways. Shoky raised her hand towards her, begging for her patience.

Ryan ignored Nalie’s comment and began to rub his head again. “Why? Why would they take her? What purpose does that serve?”

Shoky, at a loss for an explanation, looked to Nalie for the answer. “They never told me what they needed me for,” she said. “Way back, I heard them talking about something, like, reprociptve systems or something.”

“Reprociptive? That’s not a word. Shoky, that’s not a word,” Ryan looked desperately at his zenonite partner.

“Ok, let’s stop worrying about how and why; let’s just focus on the what.” Shoky raised her hands in surrender. “Let’s review what we know. We know Nalie is here and she says she just wants to go back to Earth. So let’s just do that and we can forget about this whole business- like it never happened. Ok?”

“How?! How would we take her back to Earth?!” Ryan shouted. “Mission Grab ‘N’ Go was the first flight to Earth since the Galactic Debate that determined humans were too dangerous to come into contact with. No planetary transport system, especially Zenon’s, is going to fly there publicly or privately.”

“So... we borrow a ship…” Shoky coyly implied.

Ryan blinked. He suddenly realized why Shoky had brought this human to him in the first place. She just wanted to use his knowledge and access of ships. He was a pilot, after all. Fine. She can have his expert opinion: “You want to hijack a ship?” he swallowed. “You do realize how tight transportation security is, right?”

Shoky rolled her eyes again. “Not hijack. We rent a ship, say we’re taking a camping trip to Mars, and then go slightly farther than that.”

Ryan stared at her a while before repeating, “You do realize how tight transportation security is, right?”

“Ughk,” Shoky gave in but Ryan continued.

“Every rental has a Galactic Positioning System in it to help keep track of all the ships and make sure they don’t get into trouble. As soon as we passed Mars, they would know something was up.”

“We can try to outrun them once they catch on. We could-”

“Outrun the Galactic Police?!” Ryan interrupted. “Are you mad? No rental is going to ‘outrun’ Galactic Police.”

Shoky thought a moment before replying. “What if you... jammed the thing that told them where we were? The GPS thing.”

Ryan blinked. “ ‘Jam’ it? You want me to ‘jam’ it?”

“Yea, can’t you do that? Don’t they teach you stuff like that in pilot school?
“No!” he cried.  “They teach me how to fly! Not break the equipment!”

“They must have told you where it was on the ship, what it looked like, how to make sure it’s working and all that, though, right?” Shoky tried again.

Ryan wanted to say no but they had.

“You don’t have to do anything techy with it. Just…” Shoky paused as she started to mime what she was going to say. “...smash it.”

“Smash it?” he echoed. “It’s lodged deep inside of the engine of the ship so dummies like you don’t break it ‘accidentally’. How are we meant to smash it?”

“Ok,” Shoky thought some more. Not really her style. “We actually go to Mars, then. We’ll land, get out, reach inside the engine and grab it, smash the bugger, then head off to Earth.”

“That’s…. That could actually work.”

Shoky lit up as she was filled with new and sudden hope. “Yea?”

“Yea…” Ryan thought. “They’ll call us to ask what happened once they lose our signal. We’ll just play dumb; they’ll tell us to go to the nearest repair station and there’s only 3 on Mars because Mars is pretty lame. Hardly anyone goes there. Maybe break the communication box afterwards, too. And then we’ll just… go to Earth instead.”

“Yea!” Shoky punched the air. In the corner of the room, Nalie began to smile.

“Wait, no,” Ryan shook his head. “I still don’t trust her.” He eyed Nalie.

“What if we kept her locked up somewhere?” suggested Shoky.

“What?” Ryan and Nalie both said simultaneously.

“Well, I’m sorry, Nalie,” Shoky apologized. “But I don’t think there’s anything we can say to convince Ryan that you’re an honest kid. Besides, getting rentals and taking time off work takes at least a week’s notice and we can’t have you roaming freely around during that time. So the best solution is to keep you here at Ryan’s until we got everything and it’s all ready to go. Then further contained in a box or something because the rental people are going to notice a human on board but a box- not so much.”

“Whoa, why does she have to stay at my house?” Ryan demanded.

Shoky placed her hands behind her back and started swaying with her eyes wide and looking at the floor, lips pursed. She looked up as soon as she started speaking again. “I mean, I guess I could take her all the way back to where I live in Zenon Central where a lot of people- especially authority figures- live. Try to hide her from the fuzz, in the very place she was last known to have been. I doubt anyone would be especially looking for her there.”

Now it was Ryan’s turn to roll his eyes. “Alright, I get it. Fine.”

Nalie quietly grumbled.

Shoky smiled. “Good.” She looked around the room, hoping to spot more things to say. “Well, unless there are any objections, I think this has been a long night and we all better catch some rest. We got an adventure ahead of us.” She gleamed brightly at the glum and annoyed faces in front of her before turning around to leave.

“Wait, Shoky.” Ryan grabbed her elbow. “Can we… you should....” He stopped suddenly  to turn to Nalie. “Don’t touch anything,” he warned her as firmly as he could. She scowled at him. Ryan ignored it to take his girlfriend into the hallway for a private chat. As soon as he left, Nalie immediately began defiantly poking everything in his room.

“Shoky,” Ryan said once they were out of earshot. “You do realize this is insane, right? We’re taking a human back to Earth... I really think it’d be better to tell an official about this and have them deal with it-” He ignored her, ‘ugh’. “-We have no reason to believe our government is capable of something like this nor do we have any reason to believe her. If we get- and there’s a good chance of that- we could get in serious trouble. This is treason, Shoky. That’s not something shrug off.” He hoped his pleading eyes would be enough to convince her. She simply stared at them. And stared.

She eventually took his face and rubbed it a moment with her thumb before allowing her hand to fall to his shoulder. Finally, she quietly said, “Do you remember that time we went to Jurgan and I started feeding that bofollian in the park?”

Ryan sighed. “Yea....”

“You said it was common knowledge that bofollians are nasty creatures that’ll attack anything and everyone for no reason.”

“They do! That’s why no one was in the park except you!” The look on Shoky’s face told him to shut up. He did.

“But I kept feeding it,” she continued. “When I saw it roaming the park, I didn’t see an aggressor. I saw a creature just trying to do what it does. Do you remember what happened after I gave it some food?”

Ryan scrunched his face. “No.”

“It gave me one of its feathers then ran off with my food. No harm done to me.”

“So what, Shoky?” He demanded. “So you got a typically territorial animal to not attack you. We are not dealing with a cutesy, typically territorial animal here. We’re dealing with a human.”

Shoky put her hand up. “I’m just saying that everyone, including you, sees danger in a thing where I see fear and a need to survive. Not everything is as it seems. When I look at Nalie, I don’t see lies or danger. I see that same fear and need to survive. I know you don’t see it but I’m asking you to trust my judgement.”

“What about my judgement?” he didn’t shout it or demand it. Just asked quietly.

“It’s the same as everyone else’s judgement,” she told him dismissively. “The same everyone else that say bofollians are dangerous.”

“Just because everyone else says it doesn’t make it wrong,” he argued.

“Yea, but it keeps people from testing it every so often when everyone just accepts it.”

“We don’t need to test the sun to see if it still blinds us when we stare at it. We don’t need to jump to make sure gravity is still a thing. We don’t need to cut ourselves to make sure we’ll still die if we don’t stop the bleeding. There are some things that don’t need to be tested every now and then because it’s not just a theory; it’s fact.”

“It’s not, though!” Shoky shouted abruptly. There was great conviction in her voice. “We’ve never interacted with them once! We just watch their movies which are probably over exaggerated anyways. How can we know for sure if that’s the only evidence we have?”

Ryan searched his brain. “Do you remember Men in Black?”

The question was so heavy with ridiculousness, the weight of it caused Shoky’s head to fall to her right shoulder. She didn’t say anything but her expression said, “Really?”

“You remember the part when J. was saying that people are smart enough to handle the knowledge of alien existence and K. said that a person is smart but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals?”

“Well, good thing Nalie isn’t people. Just a person. We’ll probably be able to handle it.”

“No, Shoky,” Ryan stopped her. “What I’m saying is, even humans on numerous occasions have admitted that they can’t, on a whole, handle the truth. It’s just… It’s not realistic to dream of a day and age when humans know about the rest of the universe and still have everything be cool.”

“Maybe…” Shoky admitted. “Maybe it’ll be bad for a bit. But we can work it out. We are a people that can work it out.”

“But they’re not a people that listen.”

Shoky stared at Ryan, wondering if he’d expand on that statement. He didn’t. “Fine,” Shoky surrendered. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a girl in your room who supposedly wants to go home. We can do that, at least, because we all know she can’t stay here.”

“Or we can inform the authorities and have them take care of it,” Ryan tried once more. “They’d probably send her home, too. And more legally, as well.”

“Unless they do weird experiments on her instead.”

“Fine!” Ryan shot his hands up. He was not having this conversation again. “We’ll do it your way. But first sign of trouble and I’m telling,” he warned her.

Shoky’s lips made an O as she shook her head and held up her hands, sarcastically terrified.

“I mean it,” Ryan reiterated. “I swear, this is literally every movie where if the dumb teenagers just called the cops in the first place instead of getting all cocky and naive, they’d still be alive and well.”

Shoky rolled her eyes and turned to walk towards the door. “Not everything is like in the movies, Ryan.”

“Wait, where are you going?” Ryan called after her.

“Home,” she replied shortly.

“Are you crazy? You’re leaving me alone with that human?!”

Shoky turned to shrug at him. “Why not? She’s not so bad once you stop insulting her species and calling her a lying terrorist.”

“I- didn’t-” Ryan stuttered.

“You did.” she continued walking towards the door.

“Wait!” he grabbed her arm and spun her around. She glared at him, obviously upset. Which reminded him. “Shoky,” he said gently. “I’m sorry for calling you a dumma flicka. You’re not. If anything, you are a pigg kvinna and I was just-”

“Being an åsna?” Shoky offered.

“I was going to say ‘really upset’ but that works, too.” Ryan accepted the insult.

Shoky face briefly cracked into a smile. “Well, I do appreciate being called  ‘pigg’  so I accept your apology.”

Ryan smiled back. “Please stay the night.”

One corner of Shoky’s mouth flicked higher than the other. “Ok.”

Author's Note

Anything scientifically inaccurate, let me know.

Reviews

[KTizzle]

You know what would be really cool is in the beginning you have something that talks about common phrases of Zenonites. You don't have to, but it would be nice to know what they're saying. It's kind of fun, like that one SpongeBob episode where SpongeBob swore at Mr. Krabs that one time for making him get so much stuff for Mrs. Puff, but the TV just had him make sounds to replace to cuss/angry words.

I would have loved if Nalie had more of a reaction throughout the chapter. She seems again more friendly than I would have anticipated, especially seeing as she was experimented on. I would think she would shudder seeing Ryan angry, even if she's accustomed to seeing aliens. I would have liked to see her whisper some of the words, look down when she remembers that she was taken away from her family, look away when she talks about experimentation. I thought it was weird she'd go into her story about experimentation so willingly and so easily. I feel like that would be a hard thing to talk about to a bunch of strangers with no urgency to go home or any notable emotions in the narration.

This line is a bit vague, "“The ship y'all found me on was the ship I came in on,” Nalie offered" Who is "y'all?" I think this chapter would do better without Nalie explaining her situation so much. I was more interested in how Shoky found her. Was she running out of a building that looked ordinary, but turned out to be a lab? Did she see other humans or was it just her by herself? I just think Nalie is a bit too bold for someone who's been taken from her family, experimented on, and now has to rely on the same kind of people who experimented on her to get her home. If she's going to be bold, it would be more interesting to here her be mad and yell about how she doesn't really like being rescued by them. How about have her express how she really wants to go home. Also, shouldn't Nalie have some kind of scars on her that proves she was experimented on? I may have missed this detail, but how old is Nalie now?

I would have also liked a little more interaction between Nalie and Shoky because I'm having a hard time believing Shoky would risk everything to send an aloof human home. I wished there was this interesting bond beginning to form like having Nalie show comfort around Shoky and Shoky show some sort of affection. I guess I can see that Shoky is just compassionate and likes to do the right thing, but I wish there was more to her desire to risk everything to get a human home even if she's just really curious about earth. I feel like I'm being too harsh in this regard because you might be setting up for a plot twist of sorts. Maybe it's just a lofty idea that Ryan won't even go along with.

I would love more from Shoky also. Has she always been skeptical of her government or is she just really that neutral? Also, what else did she bring home that was dangerous? I felt like I knew what you were trying to do with that detail, but it left me with more questions than explanations. You have a good contrast between Shoky and Ryan already, but I think their views on government would add more dimension to them.

Otherwise, I do find Shoky and Ryan to be interesting. I like their relationship. I think they compliment each other well. You have this really emotional, energetic being mixed with someone practical and logical. It's cute.

A little grammar problems:

"Shoky shrunk a bit. Ryan only swore when he was really pissed off and only in Swedish ." How do Zenonites know Swedish?

watch the verb tense shifts like here:

"She was one of those dark skinned girls that the caucasian humans are uneasy about. " "are" should be "were."

Sooo, I love the suspense though. I think you do a good job at building suspense and showing Shoky and Ryan's affection for one another. I like Ryan's freaking out and coming up with conspiracy theories. I love that he has this blind faith in his government that is problematic in human society with blind faith in a lot of things.

Definitely interested to read more.

-Jazz Lover

[Curly Q]

Time seems to be a little different for the two planets. Has Nalie been away from earth, four earth years or four sozarian years?

I'm curious about the size of the Sozarian people, versus the humans.

So fat the story is great and entertaining.

I do want to know more about the interior of the houses. Are they one room or multiple, inside.

[DB Heinemann]

You mean zenonite? Your computer must have auto-correct. And time is very different. A year is a lot longer on Zenon than on Earth which I intentionally left hints about instead of sayng it directly. But basically, Zenon has 30 months in one Zenon year and each month is as long as one Earth year but days are only 12 hours long. I'm also making it so zenonites actually live for about 10,000 Earth years which makes it so Ryan and Shoky were babies around when Earthlings were first starting their A.D. period. But Nalie has been away 4 Earth years and about 4 Zenon months- bit confusing, I might need to revise that, too. It is based on Saturn/Zenon's actual orbits, though, so I can't really change the numbers on it. But I'll try to explain it better.
I do kind of leave details out like what zenonites actually look like compared to humans and I'm not super specific on the inside of houses. That I will have to put in later. I'll give you that one.
I'm glad you like it at least, though. Your critiques are much appreciated.