Chapter 3. His origin is revealed.
#3 of Alec's Adventures
All characters places and names are completely fictitious and are not intended to relate to anyone living or dead. Some of the content is of an adult nature and is not intended to be read by anyone under the age of 18.
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In this chapter, Alec tries to find out who his parents were and where he came from.
As he had been brought up as an orphan, the best place to start was at the orphanage he grew up in. Alec made an appointment to speak to the supervisor. Luckily she'd been working at the orphanage since he was a young child.
"Hello Mrs Peterson, I'm trying to trace my parents. As you know, If I ask you have to tell me any information you may have on how I came to be here."
The woman looked back at him across the desk with a sad look on her face. "I realy wish I could help, but we've nothing to hide. You came to us at the age of five years old, and we never knew who your parents were. The police found you wandering in the street near the edge of town, unable to speak. Your clothes were ripped and torn, they were singed and had holes burned in them, you were almost naked, but the strange thing is you were completely uninjured."
"Social services and the educational psychiatrists tried for a couple of years to try to get any information from you, but you didn't begin to speak until you were six. Even then, you had no memory of your past whatsoever. They thought it might be that you had suffered some sort of trauma that affected your memory. It was almost as if they were starting from a blank slate, having to teach you to speak and getting you to interact with the other children. Your education continued to suffer until you were about eight. After that you seemed to recover ground and caught up with your peers."
Alec was a bit taken aback by this. "What about the police, weren't they able to trace anyone, surely someone must have missed a five year old child? What about missing person reports? Wouldn't social services or nursery schools have reported if a child disappeared?"
She looked back at him, a bit frustrated. "Yes, we tried all of that. All the schools and nurseries were checked, all the Health Visitor caseloads were searched to see if there were any disappearences, but nothing was found. We've tried everything we could think of. It was almost as if you'd appeared out of thin air"
It was no good, Alec wasn't getting anywhere through official channels. He tried to sallow his irritation, thanked her for her time and returned home. Something she had said struck him suddenly. Maybe he had come from nowhere, outside of normal society.
Regular channels hadn't proven very fruitful. He began looking on the internet whenever he had any spare time, looking for disappearances, strange occurrences and rumours. It led him into some strange places, but all possible leads were dead ends as far as he was concerned.
He'd more or less given up on finding his parents, but maybe he could find out more about his condition, his ability to change form, so started looking into historical documents, myths and legends.
The historical references to "beast-headed people" seemed to start with the ancient Egyptians, with dog-headed and crocodile headed gods. Indian gods also seemed to include animal heads, but once again nothing within the last couple of thousand years. European literature referred to regular contact, up to about a thousand years ago, with "dog-headed people", which were listed in medieval books called "Bestiaries", but they were more concerned with whether they had souls or not than where they came from. After that, all reference to them apart from the fanciful tales of sailors and explorers seemed to disappear altogether.
By now Alec was running out of ideas of where to look. He'd looked in all the sensible places, all that was left was myths and legends. Garlic, silver and wolfsbane had no effect on him, but could the bite from a werewolf transmit the ability? Obviously this would be difficult to test, he couldn't go around biting people, that would be a good way to get locked up. When he had visited the orphanage, even though they couldn't trace his parents, they had given him a file containing copies of all the records from that time. None of the pictures or records showed any trace of bite-marks, so if he had been bitten it probably wasn't then. As far as he was aware, he hadn't been bitten by anything since then either.
Having had no luck so far, Alec was beginning to despair of ever finding answers. He began to spend more and more of his spare time out on the hills and in the forest near where he lived, becoming more fond of his wolf form, enjoying the outdoor life, often out until early in the morning.
One night, there was a shower of shooting stars overhead. It wasn't one of the regular ones, like the Perseids, and it seemed to be directly above him. If he hadn't been up in the hills, away from the streetlights he would never have seen them. There was a strange smell of hot metal in the air, which didn't make sense. Shooting stars usually ended up being burnt up in the atmosphere, and even if any of it survived long enough to reach the ground, meteoric iron was very rare.
Somewhat curious about this, he decided to follow the smell to see where it came from. He had to cross a river, then he headed up the valley towards the top of the neighbouring hill. By this time he was about thirty miles from the nearest habitation, about as remote an area as it was possible to find. Cautiously, he headed towards the top of the hill. Looking over the crest he caught his breath in surprise. Down below him, hissing and steaming from the heat was a spaceship. He remained where he was on the hill and watched to see what would happen next.
Slowly, the ship cooled in the cold night air, the occasional crack could be heard from the contracting metal. A ramp extended from the side and a door opened above, revealing a dark silhouette framed by the light behind it. The figure stepped forward, walking down the ramp onto the ground. Alec gasped in shock. The figure walked upright like a man, but had a head like a wolf, exactly the same as himself when in Anthro form. Maybe they would have some information about his past.
He changed his shape to match and set off down the hill to meet them, for by now six had emerged from the craft. His heart was in his mouth about what might happen when they saw him. Climbing down the slope he disturbed some rocks, which tumbled down ahead of him, alerting the folk down below him to his presence.
To his surprise, they didn't seem to be alarmed by his appearance, if anything they seemed pleased to see him. The tallest one, who had emerged first, opened his arms and addressed him in accentless english. "Hello, we've been looking for you for some time."
"What do you mean?" Alec replied, puzzled at his reception.
"Well, it's a long story, maybe you'd like to come inside and talk about it. I'm sure you've got a lot of questions, but we might as well sit down and be comfortable. Pellock, have a look at the Gravity drive while we're busy" he said, talking to a burly male Anthro.
The rest of them led me into the ship, guiding me towards a comfortable lounge near the back, settling onto some couches that had slots built into them to take their tales. The leader waited for Allec to sit down then introduced himself.
"My name is Harrll, I'm the captain of our little group. We belong to the League of Sentient Planets, a group of many races and worlds, all working together in peace and harmony. We've been observing this planet for the last three thousand years, but we haven't revealed ourselves because we don't want to affect your culture adversely."
"Well, that explains who you are" said Alec, "but it doesn't explain why you weren't surprised to see me. It also doesn't explain why I am able to change forms between human, wolf, and as you see me now."
"The answer to that is quite simple, though rather sad news" replied Harrll. "Our visits here are about eighteen years apart, because it's such a big galaxy, and your parents were on a previous survey ship. Something went wrong with their ship, we still don't know what, and they crashed onto this planet. We received a distress message via sub-light radio, many years after the crash from the ship's computer system. All the crew died in the crash and you were the only survivor. I'm afraid your parents died in the crash"
"But if the computer was still working after the crash, how come no trace of the spaceship was ever found? I mean to say, this spaceship is over fifty feet in diameter. Even a satellite could spot it from orbit!" Alec exclaimed.
"In order to prevent cultural contamination, all our survey vessels are designed to self destruct if they crash beyond repair" Harrll replied. "Many small machines, the size of molecules, I believe Humans refer to them as Nanites, dissasemble the ship to it's component molecules, leaving a powdery grey dust to be dispersed by the wind. Unfortunately it left you stranded on the planet. If you don't remember any of it, maybe the trauma of the crash and losing your parents caused you to block off the memories.
"Yes, but how come I was Human until recently? One minute I was dying after a fall on the side of a mountain, the next I was shaped like a wolf," Alec asked.
"That's easy to explain" interrupted a female brown haired Anthro. "My name is Felln. I'm the medical officer. The reason you can change shape is because all our people carry nanites in our bodies. They can be controlled by your mind, enabling you to change shape to blend in on other planets, but their main purpose is to make sure you stay healthy and repair any damage resulting from injury. When you injured yourself in the fall, the default programming repaired your body and changed you automatically to a shape that would blend in with your environment. Repairing severe damage requires a lot of energy, so you probably found yourself very hungry and thirsty afterwards. The trauma and memory loss prevented you from controlling them before that."
Alec was interested to hear that. He'd finally got the answers he'd been looking for. Now he knew who his parents were and where he was from.
"Does this mean that you can take me with you?" He asked.
"We hope so," said Harrll. "That was one of our mission objectives. We knew where the ship crashed, and we've been searching this area for months."
Just then Pellock came into the lounge. He headed over to the captain and whispered something to him urgently. Harrll looked shocked for a moment, then said "I'm afraid it looks as if none of us are going home at all. Pellock's carried out a damage check to see what caused us to crash-land here and we can't even get into orbit. The reactor core of a dead satellite hit us while we were in low earth orbit. It was large enough to rupture our main fuel tank. We had just enough to land, plus a bit more for some low level flight."
"Does that mean you're stuck on this planet as well?" Alec asked.
I'm afraid it's not as simple as that" replied Harrll, sadly. "Standing orders are to destroy the ship, and to insure there is no cultural contamination, we have to kill ourselves as well. You spent eighteen years here without any problems, but you grew up here. We could make mistakes and expose our presence. It's too much of a risk for us to even try to "go native".
Is this the end for Captain Harrl and his crew? Are they going to have to destroy their ship and themselves?
Tune in, ladies, gentlemen and others, for the next thrilling episode!
(Evil cackle in the background)