A night passed and so had my euphoria, my musings persisting as they became a kind of plan. Then, another day passed. I kept trying to crawl out of the mental hole I was in, thoughts of home lingering and dragging me down. A distraction, something productive, or at least some excitement was needed since wandering the grounds only did so much.
The next morning would have been similar to the last two were it not for one key difference.
“H'afl dryorsa!”
Part of me thought that they–whoever was overseeing me, possibly Nabe– would have sent either Syvis or Nushala since I was already familiar with them, and not someone new.
Walking through the double set entrance was this mid-height blond, wearing another beige dress, similar to those worn by the servant-looking girls, hers having red highlights at the collars of her sleeves, around her neck where an equally hued scarf was tied, and at the hem of her knee-length dress. I would have expected something more average, yet the figure she bore was of decently shaped shoulders, hips, and a gentle waist with larger-than-average breasts that begged for a fondling. Blond hair as straight as Nabe’s reached just above her shoulders, gleaming an etheric, silver shine under the room’s lighting, almost making her haunting and spiritual. Eyes with deep-green irises bespoke of excitement and nervousness, decently thick brows jutting up to emphasize that emotion that she tried to hide with a warm smile.
It took considerable will power to restrain myself, lest a bulge start to form in my greyish, loose sweatpants. “Good morning?” I responded lamely, after finishing a bite of one of those strange fruits.
As the doors shut behind her, the girl’s eyes shifted, growing slightly wider as she stood straighter when she took sight of my sitting self at the kitchen’s island. “Aaahum… Good moorn-ing,” she responded in the cutest accent.
Now I felt my eyes widen in surprise. “I didn’t think anyone spoke English.”
“Nu– Nou… Uml Ieryimayloy, Ould Angelo… Nout many… say it.” Her effort was quickly becoming adorable.
“Why is that?”
“Ould, very ould…” She bounced on her feet, likely trying to dispel some of that nervous energy into the floor. “Theere are different sayins… Ancestors find easier ways to… say… outhers find hardor ways.”
I nodded in understanding, “Changing semantics?”
She tilted her head to one side. “Whaat is… sem-an-ticks?”
“It’s… different ways of describing things.”
“Ah, lidsaraetc, ay liie… Nou, that is nout… right.”
“How old is it… English?”
“Aah…” Her head was righted, and she put a finger to her lip in thought. “Rype uml… ddon xiysar adr dayffietaaysa… ten thou-sand years?”
I felt my blood become frosty. “… In what context?”
“Con-text?”
“I mean… of what event… in history.”
It took her a moment, before she answered. “Ten thou-sand years before, when ould mo-thers and… fa-thers leave Erda.”
There were so many questions to be asked of that, but they would have to wait, I decided, clearing my mind and reasserting a calmer attitude. My blood returned to room temperature.
The blond girl again spoke, anchoring me back in the moment, “Naberoa… she say you, woke spea-king Angelo? How do you perform this?”
“I take it ‘Angelo’ is hard to learn?”
“Mmh, no… it is… tedi-ous, not as hard as Msaaer… that is… La-tune.”
Latin… Does she mean Spanish or the others? I decided to disclose some of the truth, uncertain as to how much Nabe, or ‘Naberoa,’ wanted me to share. Lying would do me no good. “Well… I woke up speaking it. Whatever treatment they had done… it gave me memories. I remember speaking it as though it were my first language.”
She nodded in understanding. “I have heard… mind treat-ment is… not easy. And be-cause of this… you can-not speak Vinlis?
“No, I can’t. It’s a guessing game, like trying to figure out the lyrics of a song from memory.”
“Is that what wee sound, singing?” She giggled.
I couldn’t help but give a cocky smirk as I leaned into my chair. “It almost does… How long have you studied English… Ang-elo?”
“Four… four years?”
“You don’t know how many years you studied?” The words came out playful, the smirk growing wider.
There seemed to be a mimic of my own smile across her lips as she again giggled. Across the stars and languages, teasing remains universal. “Leryimayloy aur wylol msartaisaara su mliar.”
“I’m afraid I can’t speak Korean.”
“… Kor-e-aun?”
“Latin. Do you have a name, or should I call you yellow?” It came as a surprise at just how ballsy I was being. It was a typical struggle to maintain this level of confidence in front of cute girls, especially in front of someone appearing no younger than 19, one who looked like the one-that-got-away; one that showed all of the right indicators of interest.
“Daratrine.”
She reminds me of Holly from high school… What a missed opportunity. Her small mouth and thin lips, and a roundish face accentuated a beauty not unlike the prettiest-exchange-student. That name is fitting. “Dara-trine… it almost sounds as sweet as mine.”
She took a purposeful step closer, leaning over me. “Are you… flat-ering, Thelamein?”
At that, the confidence was gone. Fuck, what do I say?
“… Maybe?” You fucking idiot.
She giggled again. You lucky prick… bitch.
We kept staring, the silence lingering as though this were an awkward first date. I decided I didn’t like it. “You’re Nabe’s professional?”
She blinked once, standing straight again, hands clasping to her front. “Naberoa say you… need help… about this home?”
It was earlier in the morning that I took advantage of Nabe’s offer, using the device that looked like a cylindrical capsule with a button in it, putting two and two together to know that it was a kind of communication device. No one had answered through it, which left me a bit befuddled if I was using it correctly.
“Yeah… I can’t figure out this place.” It wasn’t a lie per se, but more of an excuse. It would be nice to know how to use most of the stuff here, however it was the experiment I had in mind, and Daratrine seemed the perfect, and willing, candidate for it.
“A guide, then?”
“If you’re capable of guiding.”
She drew herself closer, bringing a hand to mine as she beckoned me to stand, the surprising move sending a chill in my skin, energizing currents along my spin. As I stood, I decided to escalate, brushing my other hand along her shoulder for the briefest moment. That seemed to draw her attention away from eyes to there.
At my full height, it saw just how short she was compared to me. Where I might have stood a freakish six foot eleven inches (or seven foot?), she seemed to be five-foot-eight, her eyes reaching the level of my sports-bra-covered boobs. It made her helplessly cute.
The spell Dara had been under seemed to quickly lose its affect, and she began her tour in earnest. “Houw much do you know of the kit-chen?”
The pickup artist world is a strange one… or was. Out of college, desperate to crawl out of a lonely crevice I carved myself, I had sought out that community, feeling like I was stooping to a new low, perhaps how a heroin addict felt about rehab. There is (or was) no denying how effective their methods were. Mastery of even one of their techniques is still beyond me, but I knew certain things: don’t be needy, be relaxed, ask questions (not the ‘interview’ kind), find commonality, and be ok with rejection.
Even having practiced those things before arriving, they were still difficult to pull off.
“So… I press this?”
Especially with how close Dara seemed to sit, with those forest hued eyes and the heat of her breath enticing me. I had been under a whiplash of nervousness and desire for the last half an hour, for she seemed to take to my amateurish advances, brushing her shoulders to mine, keeping eye contact far longer than normal, and at times biting her lip. It was unusual ground for me, never having received such reactions from the one girl I’ve only ever dated, and it was unusual that those indicators seemed to be given so easily.
“For main page,” her finger gently pressed the key, and the screen of the ‘TV’ shifted to a desktop-esq page, with icons not dissimilar in look to those from Apple’s, with the layout decidedly Windows. It was like a custom built Linux homepage, the background shifting between beautiful yet alien naturescapes, to aerial shots of what were the most pristine cities, towns, and villages in an array of different designs that were human yet not; and of those in low orbit around a decidedly green planet and its blue gas giant; things which Elon would have wet dreams about. All I had thought was how I was a stranger in a strange land.
I really tried to exude my inner Shepard… female Shepard. The effort was bordering on nauseating, the shuffle of hormones and emotions similar to drifting through a sea of towering swells under stormy skies, a sea captain against insurmountable odds.
“Uh hu…” I muttered.
Distracted as I was, Dara’s tour wasn’t completely ignored, slow as it was due to my injury. We had gone through what could and couldn’t be feasted, even going through several, basic meals I could make. After showing how to operate some of the appliances, she began the tour in earnest.
The tower had been named after the borough’s founder, Zashar, the name feeling off in their language’s phonetics. It had been built as a kind of pleasure palace for the ‘leadership,’ which for whatever reason had been dedicated to me, a ‘loyieda.’ I wasn’t about to question why, yet there was the assumption that this was more of an animal pen than an actual home, the richness of it feeling like an off-putting deference, like the doting of an absent mother to her only child.
Some of the furnishings and tech had taken me. The kitchen’s oven and refrigerator appear not so dissimilar to good-old traditional designs, the stove top using induction to cook and freeze food, with some stored, specialized canteens and miniaturized appliances using the same method. (How they accomplished this I have no idea.) When we explored the second floor from the ground, I was introduced as to how the water was heated and cooled. Segments of the plumbing also using induction rather than burning gas, with water funneled through a filtration system before being injected with certain minerals and other substances. Those towering, server-like machines in the adjacent room turned out to be much more, a kind of ‘repository,’ a branch of a ‘mind’ which ‘administered’ the borough; artificial intelligence. Whether it was like Chat GPT or something more, she didn’t say.
“And we can talk to it?” I had asked Dara.
“If… it ch-oose.”
“It can’t be shy, not like you,” I poked her shoulder lightheartedly.
Another giggle left her “Nou! Some-times it grow… tired.”
There was one other, mildly interesting thing: the tower’s windows were some type of smart glass (even though Dara described them ‘shading glass’), their tinting controlled either by a not-iPad or by touch panels beside each, and could go near pitch black to crystal-clear. Everything else appeared as a high-tech or artisanal version of something I was already familiar with, not limited to the computers, practically all of the furniture, the lighting, air conditioning, circuit breakers, alarm systems, plumbing, some of the gym equipment, appliances, and the message chairs. All of it looked impressive, a level above what you would find in a New York pent house, a lot better than my dinky apartment in Oceanside.
Strangely, there were no robots, nothing like what I had seen outside the premises, not even something like a Roomba. The simple explanation Dara gave was that they “are nout nee-ded, nout al-ways.”
The door system was one other thing that was covered. Apparently, they were not completely beholden to the white pads for their use, which makes sense in hindsight since if they lost power it would make opening and closing them a challenge. Each panel could be unlocked and lifted to reveal the mechanism beneath, where a ‘key’ could be inserted into a pinhole and manually opened. It only turned out to be a frustrating set up since Dara was evasive about answering what the ‘key’ was, and where it could be found. She, perhaps, shared Nabe’s worries for my ‘safety.’
As Daratrine guided me through each floor and its uses, it became more intuitive as to how to make use of them. One of the things that would keep me from mastering this new environment was the damn language barrier.
“Can you run me through these keys again?” I asked, gesturing to the keyboard before us.
There was pause by Dara, her cheeks seeming to blush as I eyed her. “Say a-gain?”
“… I still don’t understand the keys. Can we try accessing that… ‘page’ again?”
We kept toying with the not-TV for another thirty minutes. For those same thirty minutes, it felt as though I hadn’t made any progress understanding it.
“Our alph-a-bet… not easy… I know," Dara tried comforting me.
Leaning way back into the couch, I allowed some of that tension to release, arms crossing under my assets. “Nah… totally easy…”
She made an adorable snort. “Nou, you fail.”
“Maybe it’s because I have a bad teacher.”
“No! Bad stu-dent.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her shimmy closer, purposefully eyeing the ‘TV.’ “You app-ear sm-art enough tou know what tou do.
“Eventually…”
I began formulating the next phase of my experiment, feeling out a possible conversation. From what I’ve seen of the girls and women, there was the distinct impression that they were far less prudish to their counterparts on Earth, if the Syvis, Nushala, and the alley-way women were anything to go by. Since I didn’t have the balls to go straight to what I wanted, what she (probably) wanted, and since my mind was still in a whirlwind, I did the next best thing.
Looking at her, I wore a confident smile… or tried to. “You’ve dated before, right?”
Dara gave me another funny look. “Date-ed?”
“… Dating, as in, going out with others out of… attraction?”
A thoughtful look played across her features. “Mmmh… yes.”
“And… what were they like?”
“… My… sis-ters?”
That smirk faded for a second. “Your sisters?”
It seemed she realized her mistake, her face growing beat red. “Nou! Nout re-late!”
“I didn’t realize it was like that.”
Grabbing a nearby pillow, she tried disguising her embarrassment, muttering something in Vinlis. Did I push too hard?
“Did you mean your roommates, or your… sorority?”
“Xiyadi hol ayr de tuffietaery Nnamainn… not sis-ters… we are… close.”
“Who asked who out? You or them?”
The pillow slowly dropped with her hands, the smile from before filled with mirth, her cheeks a faded red. “Nout just ‘ask out,’ it is just…” Dara gestured with a subtle movement of her hand and head.
“Wait,” I placed a hand on her thigh, pulling back quickly as panic engulfed me, fearing I might fucked up from touching a no-no spot. “Shit… sorry.”
Another funny look, seemingly unbothered by the contact. “What for?”
I gave her an owlish look, my mind falling through ruinous failure. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck I fucked up!
“Thela?”
“I uhh… ahm…” Abort abort abort!
She stared at me intently, and finally brought myself to enough control to utter, “It’s… getting late…” It wasn’t true since sunlight from the window indicated that it was getting closer to noon–whatever noon counted for on this planet. All I knew was that I needed to flee.
Seeming to understand the implication, she stood up just as I had, following me to the double set doors. “Do you want me to walk you to the gate?” The question was automatic as my mind still kept doing backflips.
As we approached the main entrance, with my hand on the white pad (flashing green and opening the door), I turned back to see Daratrine really close, so close it almost made me jump. “Dara?”
A step closer and she stood herself almost a hair-width away. The joviality she seemed to have had faded for the same emotions when she first arrived, green eyes gazing into mine, head tilted and looking up to me. Slowly, slender arms snaked around my hips, hands softly pressing on my back and above my rear, where the waist band of my pants began. That panic evaporated, for all of attention fell to her.