Nobody Left Behind 2 (Patreon)

Continuing with Sarsuk in a lab.

Nobody Left Behind 1

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Commissioner Sarsuk blinked furiously as his eyes adjusted to the sudden light. He was in some sort of … laboratory! Yes, it was definitely a lab with two lab benches, stools, glassware, microscopes, and other pieces of equipment. But it wasn’t the sort of “mad scientist” look he might have expected. There were no crazy distillate columns nor high energy platforms crackling with static electricity. It looked … positively ordinary, like the sort of lab they had in college.

The door opened the rest of the way, and a lio in a lab coat walked in. The tawny-pelted feline looked up at him and paused, the two staring at one another in silence.

“A lio!” growled Sarsuk at his empire’s sworn enemy. “I should have known the lio were behind… Behind…” He looked around the little lab once more and realized he had no idea how to finish that sentence. What were the lio behind?

The lio’s little round ears spread in something akin to a geroo smile, and he said some yowling, spitting words that meant nothing to the krakun.

A pause. Then the lio spoke again.

Sarsuk shrugged. “I don’t understand Lio.”

The feline didn’t seem to understand the Krakun language either, at least there was no hint from his mannerism that he had. Instead, he spoke more to himself as he set about his morning routine—booting up a tablet computer, brewing some javea in a corner kiosk.

While the lio busied himself, Sarsuk took everything in. He had no idea what was going on, but he wanted to be ready for anything. He quickly memorized the number of stools in the lab, the number of cabinets, the number of beakers left out. He even tried to internalize the braid pattern woven into the lio’s dark mane, but the geometry—so complex it bordered on the verge of non-Euclidian, perhaps—seemed too daunting to mentally unwind.

The krakun craned his head hard to one side, trying to look back at himself. How was his head stuck in this tiny lab? Was his neck threaded through in a hole in the wall?

The lio said something, and Sarsuk turned back around, paying full attention to the enemy mammal once more. With a tablet on his lap, the feline sat on a stool, not far in front of Sarsuk’s snout. He tapped the computer’s screen, then fiddled with some buttons on the device’s edge to turn the volume up to its maximum extent. A recorded segment played—a voice speaking casually, but alien words in a high-pitched and squeaky tone.

The scientist looked up from the device and stared at Sarsuk a moment. Eventually, the commissioner shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

The lio tapped again and the recording stopped. More taps and another segment began to play. A different alien voice, different alien sounds. Sarsuk shook his head a second time.

And so, the researcher ran through many different recordings. Some of the languages seemed familiar, but yet, were nothing he understood. “No, I don’t know what any of this is,” he said in frustration. “What do you want from me?”

But then, the lio played a clip that made Sarsuk groan. It said, “Nucleic acid types differ in the structure of the sugar in their nucleotides…” in the Geroo language. He nodded “yes” and then grumbled, “Why? Why is it always the geroo when horrible things happen to me? I understand the Ringel tongue too!”

But the lio was already nodding and tapping some notes as he wandered back to the far edges of the lab.

“No, wait! Where are you going?” asked Sarsuk, raising his voice. “I demand! I demand…”

The words died in his throat. He didn’t know what was going on, but all his memories seemed to contradict what his senses told him. “Is this a dream? A nightmare?”

He sat down on his bed and ran his palms over the covers. Though he couldn’t see it, he felt for his pillow and snatched it from one end of the bed. Setting it on his lap and resting his palms on it, everything felt precisely how he remembered. The pillow was cool and soft and kind of lumpy, the bed-covers wrinkled, a little gritty and in need of a change. Lifting the pillow, he closed his eyes and buried his snout into it. He could feel the familiar softness on his nose and cheeks, but no matter how hard he inhaled, he could only smell the lab. None of home’s comforting scents could reach his nose.

Sarsuk opened his eyes, and the pillow was nowhere to be seen—neither were his claws. He slapped his cheek and could feel the impact, how his hide stung afterwards, but the slap didn’t jar his face sideways. He couldn’t hear it happen.

He tried it a few more times until the pain made him stop. If this was supposed to wake him up, it wasn’t working.

“Could someone please explain…?” he whimpered. He turned about once more and stared at the wall his neck came through. He tried putting his palms against the other side of the wall to pull himself free, but he couldn’t feel it. To his sense of touch, there was no wall. He was in his bedroom, sitting on his bed. But to his head, he was in the lab. The effect was … most distressing.

The krakun’s curiosity gave way to a profound sadness, and he spent the rest of the day in a funk, crying, and wishing he could hide his face from the lio. He didn’t want to be seen like this—especially not by a lesser creature. He tried to wipe away his tears, and though he could feel his claws against his face, they were intangible. The salty drops rolled down his cheeks unabated.

The scientist kept to himself. At lunch, he paused to talk with two others—one with a charcoal pelt and one with yellow fur so fair that it was nearly white—but then they left for an hour or so without even asking Sarsuk if he was hungry. Not that it truly mattered. He felt too sad, too alone to eat.

Near the end of the day, a dark-brown geroo entered the lab. She spoke with the scientist, mimicking his terrible yowling words, but her eyes never left Sarsuk’s face. After a bit of discussion, he led her to the stool and sat her down before him, with tablet in paw, waiting.

Sarsuk sniffled and stared at her a moment. She had hazel eyes and long, pointed ears. She was young—twenty, perhaps, or even younger—and profoundly bottom-heavy like most of her people tended to be. He thought the extra weight made her look fat and unattractive, but he doubted other geroo would feel that way. He’d met plenty of geroo in the past four hundred years, and the males loved that dumpy sort of look.

The geroo wore a white bracelet at the base of her thick tail, a leather strand holster on her shoulder, and a necklace of all black beads. Single, he thought, or she’d have a mismatched bead from trading one with her mate.

“So,” Sarsuk said quietly in the Krakun language, “I guess you’re my translator?”

Instead of speaking, she looked down at her tablet and typed some notes.

When she didn’t reply, he cleared his throat. “Hey? You do understand Krakun, don’t you? You’re not going to make me try and pronounce all those squeaks and chuffs you geroo use, are you?”

She typed some more.

“Are you going to talk to me or what?”

The geroo seemed torn between the krakun and her tablet. She typed again, then looked back up and said, “Um, hi,” in her native tongue. She reached out with a paw for him to touch, but then realizing how pointless the gesture was, she put it back down.

Sarsuk frowned in frustration. “Listen to me, slave,” he growled, “I’ve been here all day, and no one has explained one damn thing! What in the dead gods’ names is going on here?”

He had expected his words to make her cower. On any of the gateships he administered, it would have. Demanding an explanation from a member of his cleaning crew would probably make the little mammal crap itself. But not this geroo, no.

Instead, her ears drooped in anger—unlike krakun, geroo lack sophisticated facial muscles and emote by how they hold their ears. She stood and tucked the tablet beneath her arm. With fur on end, the tiny thing growled, “First off, I am not a slave, and if you wish to talk with me, you will not use that vile word.”

“But we conquered your world—” he choked in surprise.

“And then the lio, thank the ancestors, liberated our vessel,” she interrupted, “liberated it—I’ll repeat—they freed all of us. I’m here because I choose to be, not because a krakun demands it.”

She glanced over at her lio employer, but he seemed supportive of her insolence. He certainly didn’t reprimand her. “And because Doctor Palani is paying me four and a half sovereigns per hour,” she added, more meekly.

Sarsuk stared at her for a long while, unsure what to say. He felt like he was on one of those old unscripted comedy shows from a millennium back where they’d put an unsuspecting stranger in a ridiculous situation and catch it all on hidden camera. When she said nothing else, he asked, “Is that a lot?”

The geroo shrugged. “It beats the hells out of the three sovereigns per hour I was getting to prepare agar plates.”

He still didn’t have a feel for how much it was, but suspected it wasn’t much. “I suppose so,” he agreed. “Fifty percent raise. Nice! I think the best raise I ever got was like one and half percent, but inflation was pretty bad that decade with the war and all, so…”

His words tapered, and the two stared at each other in silence.

Sarsuk cleared his throat, making the geroo jump. He smacked his lips a couple times, hoping he wouldn’t have to drive the conversation, but eventually felt compelled to. He asked, “So, uh, Doctor Palani didn’t explain this … experiment, I’m guessing? He didn’t mention why I’m stuck here like a tubby burglar who thought he could sneak in through an open window?”

At that, the geroo’s rigid posture finally softened. She giggled and covered her mouth with a paw. She retook her seat but said nothing, just shaking her head “no”.

Sarsuk frowned. Attempting a friendly voice, he asked, “Did you take psychology in school? Maybe it’s like one of those experiments where they’re watching us, and they want to see how we’ll react.” With a grin, he added, “You know, two mortal enemies trapped in a room together…”

When the expression on her ears turned tragic, he stopped talking.

“Are you my mortal enemy?”

He blinked and sputtered a bit. Eventually, he covered with, “I don’t think so? I don’t even know you. But I’d understand if you felt we were. I know we’re not well-liked—the krakun, I mean.”

Instead of replying to his implied question, she explained, “Doctor Palani said he’d brief me in the morning, but that he wouldn’t have time today.”

“Oh, okay. I guess I’m staying overnight then. Whee,” he sighed sarcastically. “I hope dinner is better than lunch.”

The conversation sputtered and died once more, so he offered, “I’m Sarsuk, by the way, Commissioner Sarsuk. Don’t know if he mentioned that.”

“Siki,” said the geroo, starting to offer him a paw for the second time before taking it back. “Just Siki.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KJjLW5LVTCM_JC4OsMBPtC80dPnSHj5vypC9wRH0mG0/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?