The Cave

Justin and I decided to work on a story together, with me writing and him illustrating it. We have a full story fleshed out, but this is what is written so far. Pictures will hopefully follow.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two pairs of eyes stared at me, reflecting the light from my camp fire as it danced across the walls of the wooded ravine I was in. One pair, large, blue, and friendly, belonged to my companion Snow. A large white wolf, he doesn’t say much, and as such, asks for very little. The other pair, dull, yellow, and menacing, peered out from the cave near my campsite. They belonged to the troll I was hunting, and it did not appear happy to have a squatter.

Now, I realize relaxing in front of the lair of a vicious, man-eating troll does not seem smart, but it had been a long last few days and I wanted to be rested up before our fight. Plus, only a fool chooses a monster’s lair as the sight of a fight, you never know what you’ll run into in such a place. So, I was waiting patiently outside, hoping eventually it would become bored or hungry enough to come out and face me. One thing a hunter must learn is to be patient, and I had mastered such a skill long before.

I tossed Snow a piece of the rabbit I had had for supper, and he chewed on it gratefully. When he finished, he nodded his head in thanks and placed himself between me and the cave troll. With his eyes and my sword and shield within reach, I felt I could relax a bit, and staring into the fire, I felt my mind began to wander. Without meaning to, I found myself reflecting on how I came to be here, a soldier over half a century old relaxing in the middle of nowhere with a wolf and a troll.

Truth be told, I’m not the biggest fan of people. When you’ve lived as long as I, you see a lot, and as a career soldier, a lot of that isn’t good. It had started out well enough, going off to fight as a young man to protect my homeland, but after several long years of campaigns, my homeland fell. Unfortunately, put enough years into war and that becomes a part of your identity, and I just never could bring myself to really do anything else. So, for a long while I ended up as a sword for hire, making what I could with an army before it inevitably fell to someone else. I’m not sure how I kept surviving so many final battlefields, but somehow I always found a way. After awhile though, I grew tired of making friends and enemies only to lose them, and grew tired of so much death. So, combining that feeling with my own skills in survival, I eventually became a scout.

That was a few years ago, and about when Snow came into the picture. I was scouting a mountain pass at the time, and, well, I screwed up. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

Anyways, I had decided to find a place to camp for the night. I had seen a small cave up high, so I climbed up to it and, in my haste, did not notice the wolf signs outside as I rushed in. As soon as I entered, I heard some snarling and saw a large wolf in the back feeding her puppies. She struggled to rise and the pups started complaining, so I took the opportunity to shrink down low and back slowly out of the cave. The wolf continued growling, but made no pursuit. Unfortunately, walking backwards in the snow in a mountain pass is not the best idea, and I slipped, rolling down the mountain side and making a rather ridiculous amount of noise as I did so. This, of course, attracted the notice of the enemy (I was spying on them, after all). A group of six of them, possibly a foraging party, had me beaten and trussed up before I could regain my balance after the fall.

Apparently, the enemy soldiers also knew about the cave as well, for they carried me back up and decided to camp there for the night so they could be sheltered while they tortured me for information. Needless to say, I was not looking forward to this.

When we got to the top, the first man to go inside was killed by the mother wolf, who was still riled up from my earlier entrance. Sadly, that was all she could do, and the remaining armored soldiers killed her and her puppies, tossing the corpses outside the cave. I grimaced at this, for no family deserved such a death, and reaffirming that I was on the right side of this particular conflict if these were representatives of the other guys. Perhaps now you can see why I don’t like people much. After that, they got on with the questions and the torturing, which definitely was not my favorite part of the evening. They were very thorough and proficient in their attempts, and I probably would have broken if they had not killed the wolves. Perhaps that sounds foolish given that I was protecting men I had fought and spilled blood with, but that was a somewhat distant feeling, while my anger at what they had just done was fresh. Anger is a powerful force. Eventually, they got tired and bored, so they tied me up and placed me near the cave entrance as far from the fire as possible. In my state, I wasn’t exactly about to go anywhere. Since neither army would march in such weather, they decided they could rest, and promptly all fell asleep except for one man placed as a guard, both on me and on the entrance.

I slipped in and out of sleep depending on how bad the pain decided to be at the time, and during one of my conscious times, I heard the mournful howl of a wolf off in the distance.

The next time I awoke, it was because I felt something huge and furry brush by me. I shifted slightly and opened my eyes in time to see a huge male wolf sneaking into the cave. Sensing my movement, it turned to look at me. Our eyes met, and I swear to this day an understanding passed between us. I remained quiet.

The wolf turned its gaze away from me and crept passed the sentry, who apparently had fallen asleep in a sitting position. It went up to the first of the soldiers and silently ripped out his throat. The dying man’s gargling awoke the others, but slowly (I guess I had worn them out a bit), and the wolf managed to kill two more before the sentry and the leader realized what was going on. They grabbed their swords and cornered the wolf at the back of the cave.

The wolf bristled, and there was death in its eyes, but I knew it had no chance against two armed and armored men. I could not let such a creature die, not after what had happened to its family, so I gathered up what little strength I had left and threw myself at the men. They were looking at the wolf and not me, and my charge had the intended effect of knocking both of them over. This was all the opening the wolf needed, and it made short work of the remaining two soldiers.

I had barely managed to sit up by the time it was all over, and it came over and sat in front of me. We were at the same level, eye to eye, and I was not sure what would happen next. With nothing else to say, I simply said “I am sorry about your family.”
The wolf showed the unerring amount of understanding that I would later become well acclimated to and nodded its head, and I think we both realized we had saved each other’s lives. Then it ran off.

Shrugging, I used one of the fallen men’s swords to cut the ropes that bound me. By the time I was finished, the wolf was back with a rabbit in its jaws, probably the meal it had been out finding for its family when the soldiers came. So, I put the rabbit on a spit over the fire and tended to my wounds while it cooked. I shared the meal with him, and when I left to return to the base, he followed me. I resigned after that, citing the whole torture thing, and took up selling my services as an experienced tracker, hunter, and woodsman. You’d be amazed what people will pay you to do.

New Horizons

For those that checked out the first post, thanks for reading. I appreciate any feedback, and one of the comments I heard was that the first story was a little scary. So, here's a slightly lighter take on the topic. And don't worry, the whole blog won't be about aliens, just felt like trying a different approach.

Oh, and this one is a little longer. Sorry :)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I awoke to the soothing rays of a supernova burning through the windows of my house and into my corneas. Okay, supernova might be a little extreme, but whatever was out there was quite bright to my sleep-filled eyes.

A moment’s thought resulted in the conclusion that, since I live out in the middle of nowhere, that was probably a bad thing. Thinking it was probably just some high school kids having a secret kegger or a lost trucker, I headed to the front door.

Just as I left my room I ran into my brother, who was visiting me for the weekend.

“Friends of yours?” he asked.

“Just my alien buddies, time for my weekly probing” I retorted before opening the door.

My brother and I walked outside, and the lights dimmed enough to silhouette the people out there. We gasped in surprise.

“Son of a…” we started to say, but the rest of our sentences were cut off by heavy blows to the back of our heads. My last thought before descending into darkness was “I hate being right…”

**********

We awoke eventually (not sure how long it took, kinda hard to keep track of time when you’re unconscious) and found ourselves strapped down in an alien ship. Our captors were hovering around us (not literally, not those kind of aliens, just were all around us), and pretty much fit every stereotype that exists for aliens… small in stature, big heads, almond eyes, the works. Guess there had been more truth to those descriptions than I had previously thought.

Anyways, what happened next was… well, actually, I’m not going to tell you what happened next because you wouldn’t be interested. See, absolutely nothing happened. It was super boring and uneventful, and in no way was it a dark time in my life that I am trying my best to forget. Nope, nothing happened. No probing whatsoever. Zero, zip, zilch.

Where was I? Oh, right, after a few boring days in their holding cells full of non-probe related activities, the ship we were on was essentially pulled over by the cops. I learned then that there was a massive galactic government called “The Overlords” (real nice and diplomatic, right?), and the beings that had taken us were essentially a research team that had not obtained the proper permits. Apparently, any race that had not achieved intergalactic travel was considered more animal than intelligent being, and thus were studied basically like humans studied lions or gorillas. Not sure if we were just test subjects or if we would have eventually been sold to a zoo or advertising firm (even these humans are smart enough to have Black Holes Happen Life Insurance!), but luckily I never had to find out.

We were taken from the grey aliens and placed in yet another holding cell aboard the Overlord’s ship. The Overlords themselves were a blue skinned race that was a lot taller than us, with scales, large fangs, and protruding brows. They didn’t speak our language on their own, but the ones that escorted us to our cell had a small arm band. They would press the button, speak, press another button, and then the device would translate it into English. They didn’t say much though, basically just told us to wait. Given the fact that we were locked in a cell, we really didn’t have much choice in the matter, but at least we learned communication was possible. So, we sat down and stared at one another. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would come anywhere near encapsulating the last few days, so I resorted to my default setting of sarcasm.

“Well thanks for coming to visit bro, I hope you’ve had a great time!”

He stared at me incredulously for a moment before laughing half-heartedly. “I’ll give you this, nobody can say visiting you is boring… what do you think is gonna happen to us?”

“At this point I have no clue… can’t really get worse at this point though, can it?”

“I don’t see how it could, but somehow, anytime somebody says that it gets worse anyways.”

“True… and, uh, whoops.”

As if on cue, the door to our cell opened and a bored, fat, bureaucratic looking creature came in.

“We need to program your ID chips with your personal information” he said through his translator.

“Why?” I asked, and was surprised that he understood me without the use of one of those pads.

“All citizens of the Overlord Domain are required to have one. It acts as a translator, banking device, tracker, and identification.”

“So you’re not going to kill us?”

The man narrowed his eyes. “No, not yet. You are, however, forever barred from returning to your home world. Should you try to return you will be executed. We do not want knowledge of the galaxy to reach your primitive planet yet, and while it is unlikely anyone would believe you, we didn’t conquer the galaxy by making assumptions.”

“Fair enough… so what are we supposed to do?”

“That’s not my concern. In lieu of having to deal with the time and money associated with litigation, the captain of the ship that took you from your planet has agreed to give you each a pittance of 10,000 datari, which is a fair amount. That will be added to your chips and you will be released at the nearest habitable planet free to do what you will. As long as you respect our laws and never go to Earth you will have no further issues with us.”

“Oh, hey, that’s great, free to go anywhere but home, that’s real helpful.”

“If you’d prefer, we could always just kill you and save the tax payers the cost of your ID chip” he said without a touch of humor.

My brother glared at me. “That’s okay, we’ll take it. What info do you need?”

“Let’s see… race I can fill out, don’t get human too much, so… names?”

“Captain Awesome” I replied and laughed when he started to type that onto his keypad. “I’m just kidding, it’s Jarek Balkner” I said, receiving a withering glare from the alien.

“Don’t mess with me human, unless you want to be “Dead Fool.”

“Yes sir.”

“And yours?” he asked, looking at my brother.

“Vincent Balkner” he replied.

We then had to go through a list of descriptions that involved our height (tall for me, shorter for my older brother, something I enjoy taunting him about), hair color (brown for us both, although mine was short and his long), eye color (green for me, blue for him) and address (not applicable).

After that, they injected us with two chips, the identity chip in our right rists and the translator chip in the back of our neck. At that point we were left to our own devices until we arrived at the planet we would be dropped off at. Without much to do, we mostly just slept and tried to figure out our next move, but without any idea where we would be going, there was not much planning to be done.

A couple of days later, we arrived at our destination, a planet called Talen. We were led to the exit of the ship, at which point our nameless bureaucrat spoke his parting words. Interestingly enough, we could understand him this time without the translator pad… basically we heard what he said in our ears in his language, but as our brain processed it, it somehow translated it to make sense. This was a little disorienting, but we could at least grasp what he was saying.

“Don’t cause any trouble. Your wrist chip acts as your bank account, and as we said earlier, you were given 10,000 dactari each. Try to return to earth and you will be killed.”

With that, the hatch of the ship closed and it took off, leaving the two of us alone on an alien planet.

“Well, at least we could understand him this time” I said to Vincent once we were alone.

“Yeah, shame I didn’t much like what he had to say, although I do appreciate the translator chips and money.”

“Agreed.”

“So what’s the next move?”

I hesitated for a second, thinking about what I had considered during our voyage on the Overlord ship. “I’m leaning towards two options. Either we try to get the lay of the land, maybe get a job and try to learn a bit about these Overlords, or we spend our ten grand on whatever the alien equivalent of whiskey is and drink our problems away. I currently don’t have a preference.”

“Ah… what about using our money to buy a ship and return to Earth? I’m not exactly ready to give up on my life right now.”

“Besides the fact that they’ll kill us if we go anywhere near Earth, do you really think you could go back to your normal life now after knowing all of this is out there?”

“I’d sure like to try.”

“Fair enough… but again, besides the death part, do you know how to fly a spaceship? How much a ship costs? How to navigate around a solar system? Or even where Earth is in relation tot his planet?”

“Er, uh… well…”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought. Look, I want to see Earth again too, not a big fan of evil empires, but I also don’t want to crash into a star or try to fly through a black hole. So for right now, I really think we need to just try and gather as much information as possible about the galaxy and see where that takes us.”

“And how do you suggest we start that?”

I did not actually have an answer to that question, but as I looked at him to divulge this I noticed a sign down the street that read “Information.” It was in an alien language, but somehow I could read it. Don’t ask me how, I didn’t create the translator chip, I just use it. So I pointed it out to him, and we walked over to the sign. It was right above what looked like a computer terminal, and as we approached the screen flickered on to say “Please present identification.” I remembered the bureaucrat mentioning that the chip in my wrist was my ID, so I moved my wrist towards the terminal. It beeped, said “Thank you” and then a directory came up. I ran a search for history, and one entry was listed: “Museum of Planet and Galactic History.” Luckily enough, it was just down the street from the terminal, probably by design… we couldn’t have been the first newworlders to come to this planet and want to know more.

We found the museum without incident, paid for entry with our severance cash, and proceeded to skip all of the planet history until we came to the section on the Overlord Empire.

Basically, what we found out was that the Overlords had come from an older solar system on the edge of an older Galaxy. They fled when their sun went supernova, and their entire civilization came to our galaxy in warfleets and colonization ships. Initially, they were simply looking for a place to live, but once they saw how much more advanced they were than the peoples of our Galaxy, they became conquerors. While they believed they were superior to the races they conquered, they never exterminated or sought to destroy the other cultures, they wanted those to survive so that they could be compared unfavorably to their own. They only bothered with species that could achieve faster than light speed, which the museum reduced to being called “FTLS travel,” because those were the only races worth considering. However, once they had conquered the entire galaxy, they stopped expanding and had to focus on running what they conquered. So, over time, they changed from a proud warrior race to one of more bureaucratic tendencies.

So, what I took from that was that the Overlords were not some much evil as conceited, and I got the impression that the Galaxy had become somewhat stale under their rule. But, given the whole “kill you if you return to earth spiel,” they obviously still have a little ruthlessness in them. This was going to be interesting…

Hello World

I recently decided that I wanted to start writing again. I'm not sure if this is related to a genuine desire to create something or just a reaction to my impending graduation with all its uncertainty, but here we go. Oh, and as a quick side note, the blog title is an Animaniacs quote.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 19th was not a good day. To put it bluntly, it was the day our world ended.

To me, it started out like any other day, waking up way too early to go to a class I probably slept through. The specifics of the class or what school I went to or even my name seem rather moot at this point, so I think I shall skip the pleasantries. As I left class that morning, I noticed that it was dark, despite the fact that it had been a sunny spring day when I first entered the dreary building I was exiting. Looking up, I was amazed to see the sun being blotted out by a massive bronze-colored sphere with a tripod set of legs that was descending from the sky. After gaping up at it, I returned my gaze to earth and looked around at the people beside me. Some looked up in wonder, some in fear, and others in hope, and while I was not sure how I felt about it all myself, I knew things would never be the same.

The ship landed, and the news reported that approximately a thousand spheres had landed all over the earth. Initially the spheres seemed to lack any form of entrance, and after landing they did not seem to attempt any kind of communication. However, after about an hour they started to transmit a message across all radio frequencies, first in English, and then in a cycle of different languages.

“Your planet is dying. These ships have been sent to rescue as many of you as they can, and they will open their doors shortly. Please enter them in a calm and reasonable manner within the next 24 hours. We wish we could send more ships, but we only recently discovered your plight and this was all we could do. We are truly sorry.”

Massive confusion ensued after that. Everyone wanted to believe that it was a hoax, but the ships were rather convincing. The governments of the world tried to tell people not to panic, that the best scientists saw no evidence of these claims, and some even went as far as placing barricades at the entrances to the ships once they opened up. Others, however, left the choice up to the people, and those that tried to prevent entry were eventually pushed aside. Some discussion developed on how they spoke our languages and used our communications, but there just was not enough time for people to focus too much on such things. So, lines began to form at the spheres as people decided there was nothing else to do. We soon found out that the ships were large enough to accommodate about a million people, which meant only a billion people would survive. This initially brought about fear of riots, but eventually it became clear that many were either too distrustful, too afraid, or too set in their ways to get onto the ships, causing very few of them to fill completely.

I was one of the one’s that got onto the ships right away. Bereft of family and young and ready for adventure, I could not help but be drawn to the alien craft. Once inside, I followed a series of lights and a flat female voice that gave instructions. This led me to my “room,” which was little more than a prison cell with a bed, toilet, and a type of view screen that seemed to show feeds from the news agencies covering the evacuations. Unlike a prison cell the door did not lock immediately behind me, and I took a small measure of comfort from that. The voice also said that the quarters were only temporary until we got to the closest refugee camp, and they were small so as many people as possible could be accommodated. All of this made sense to me.

With little else to do, I sat on the bed and watched the video screen and the people entering the ship. There was also a timer, which I assumed meant the time until the launch of the ship. It all seemed crazy and overwhelming at that point, sitting in my little cell with a countdown to the earth’s destruction, but there was nothing else I could do, so I tried to focus on a possible bright future involving new planets and exotic aliens.

After awhile, the line going into the ship dwindled and stopped, at which point the view screen changed to that of the earth, apparently viewed from some unknown vantage point. The ship started to vibrate, and the door to my room slammed shut. A moment of panic was brought to a close when the voice intoned that this was just a safety measure for departure.

A few minutes later, the vibrations stopped. I continued to stare at the earth, and to my dread I noticed that the oceans were changing colors. First they darkened to black, and then lightened to a dark red color, like lava. The continents flared orange, and soon after, the planet simply exploded, sending huge chunks of rock out into space and taking the moon out in the process. Shocked, I could do nothing but stare in horror at the scene.

Then, before I could fully comprehend what had happened, the screen went black. The light in my cell went out, and in the darkness I heard the voice once again.
“We have destroyed your planet. You are now our slaves. Do as we say and you will not be harmed.”

Like I said, March 19th was not a good day.