Breaking a Few Eggs
#2 of Escape into the Frying Pan
Escape is not always what it seems but it at least can provide new challenges and bring back old friends.
That moment between sleeping and wakefulness, that space between dreams and the returning of sensation is usually but a barely perceived moment in your awareness. Sometimes though the moment drags on and if it lingers a bit too long it can become terrifying. Your brain is waking up, neural pathways linking and blinking into awareness but for some reason your thinking and sensing parts are not syncing. This extended between time can be worsened by fatigue or the use of sedatives.
Why is any of this relevant? Why, it's simple. The between time is now and this is what is going through the head of the creature its happening to right now. Sure, he's aware but the outside world refuses to come rushing back in.
Wait, there is a sensation after all. It is faint, just at the edge of perception.
Without any further warning there is a sudden sense of movement, of sliding uncontrollably to one side and being roughly dumped onto a hard surface with an accompanying blaze of light, blaring sounds and a cascade of presence.
Having been unceremoniously dumped onto the literal ground, the creature lay for a moment in an expanding pool of liquid. He coughs, still laying on his side, expelling more of the clear liquid from his lunges. He tests first one limb, the next and more until he is assured that he can actually attempt to stand. With a soft groan he rolls onto his stomach and lifts his eyes to look around. His vision is clouded so he takes a swipe at his eyes which only improves things marginally. With a grunt of effort he heaves his large body off the ground to stand on his four large feet. He shakes viperously, throwing off more of the clingy, slightly sticky fluid even though the action makes him stagger a little.
After blinking his eyes several more times he can finally look around at the environment he has been so rudely dumped into. He sees the crash pod quickly liquifying nearby, the singular job it was designed for having been done successfully. The pod's casing blackened by entry into an atmosphere and swiftly combining with the gasses in the atmosphere melt into only a large puddle on the ground. He watches the egg-shaped pod melt for a moment longer before looking higher into the sky. He finds the planet's solitary yellow sun and not far from it an even brighter, whiter light that begins to fade as he watches.
Looking back down, he notices eyes upon him from the branches of the trees and the underbrush. He senses them too. Some are curious, some are cautious, some just hiding because this new creature looks like a threat even though they have never seen something like him before. At least, as far as he can tell. He senses that the minds here work differently, he can't touch anyone, not that anyone immediately around him is even sentient as far as he can tell.
You see, this creature may look like a large feline predator from the old Earth of legend but he is not from Earth. In fact, he's far from it in time and space. Evolution though sometimes solves similar problems in similar ways. He has the fur, tail, ears and organs that make him look and even sound a little like a large, about six-hundred pounds, Siberian tiger, but he's not quite so cold adapted and he can sense and effect the thoughts like no Earthly predator can.
Although no one around him can understand, he's talking, grumbling to himself, "If I had known how that pod was going to be, I would have let myself burn up with the ship." He stretches, realigning the bones in his back. "That biting egg was too small and there was barely enough crash gel in there for me." He huffs and lashes his tail.
He takes a few tentative steps, stretches again and then wanders slowly to the top of a nearby rise that is barely higher then the ground around it. He looks, focusing all his senses in first on direction, then another and so on until he has scanned everything he can in the immediate vicinity. While his eyes are not sharp, his ears, mind and even whiskers on his face are.
He sits for a moment, curling his tail around his feet in a thinking pose. "Well," he thinks to himself, "this is a fine place to land. No one shooting at me but not a thing to eat for miles." He looks around again at the myriad of eyes that still watch him. "Nothing worth eating, anyway."
He feels a twitch in one of his whiskers and turns to look over his shoulder in an eastward direction. Without another thought he stands and starts off in that direction. First he moves slowly but as soon as he gets used to the slightly different gravity and the feel of the ground underneath his paws, he set himself into a mile eating lope that covers a good deal of ground without wasting too much energy.
After a while, he slows to a walk. Huffing quietly he approaches what he had sensed. He smells it. It smalls burnt, acrid, unnatural and rather like the crash pod he just emerged from. He creeps under a large bush to look into the small clearing where he suspects this other egg to be.
There it is. It has barely started to dissolve and is still smoking from the fall.
The tiger waits, watching the pod cool and melt. Soon enough of the seam dissolves and the pod cracks open with a wave of semi-liquified crash gel.
Flailing in the wave is another creature who shares similar colors but she's more humanoid looking, awake, naked except for a partially damaged collar around her neck and very, very annoyed.
When the tiger sees who's inside this pod he moves forward, out from under the bush and sits on his haunches to wait.
With a final flop into the soggy grass, the young woman groans, sits up and rubs at her eyes. She spits out more of the crash solution and wipes her face with her hands, not that this helps much. While she's getting reacquainted with planetary gravity and being outside of the crash pod, she is swearing, at least it sounds like swearing, in some language the tiger does not recognize. She looks around and spots the tiger sitting at the edge of the clearing.
"Itico! Ngut aethutem vjustika!"
Well, at least the tiger understood one of those words. He stands and cautiously approaches.
With a sigh, the young lady reaches up to her collar and fiddles with something on the less damaged side. "Blast it," she finely says in something he can understand. "I should have given myself more time to get this cursed thing off."
Itico sits on his haunches, looking quizzical. He makes a rumbling noise and looks a question at the other.
She swears again, "This thing blocks me. I can't hear you. I hope to the stars that you understand some GalStan."
Itico leans forward to touch noses with the other and licks her face. She smiles and hugs around his large neck. He pulls back and starts to draw in the mud around them. In a rough galactic standard script he draws the words, "I hear you but can not sense you."
She laughs and hugs again, then uses the larger tiger to leverage herself to her feet shakily.
"Yeah," she says, "so don't get lost is what you're saying." She stretches like Itico did, except she stands on her two feet. She groans and looks around, then down. "Oh mothers, I did not even know you were on that ship. How many more were there?"
Itico clears the mud with a swipe of a forepaw and scrawls, "About 50."
She looks disturbed, afraid to ask the next question but has to know. "How many made it off?"
"Most," Itico scrawls. He continues, "Some were too far gone to travel. Some died getting a shuttle."
She sways and has to lean on Itico for support in relief.
The last thing he writes is a single word, "Collar?"
She laughs, "Oh yeah," she takes the metal collar around her neck, "mobile prison, you know? I can't get it off myself but I think together we could."
They set off, gathering what they could find. They gathered thick, fresh green leaves and looked for stones that looked like they could be splintered thinly. After some gathering and a lot of cracking stone against stone, they wrapped the collar as tight as they could with the leaves and wedged in the thinnest slivers of stone that she had been able to hammer off. When they were done the collar was so tight around her neck that she found it hard to breath.
She lay on her back and wedged a final green stick into the very back of the collar. The other end of the stick had a large stone sitting on it. When she was ready, Itico moved to stand over her, looking down.
The young lady took the deepest breath she could and held it and then grabbed handfuls of the tiger's scruff as he leaned down and took the metal collar in his teeth. He bit down, only a little at first but then with a sudden jerk of his entire body he easily bit clean through the tough metal and at the same time he lunged backwards, pulling the young lady with him.
A fraction of a moment after the collar was cleaved, there was a loud crack and a cloud of acid smoke from the chemical burning of the leaves and the stick that held the collar in place.
Itico's motion had pulled her bodily clear of the collar and the immediate area so the little pool of foul smelling acid missed her.
This time when she exclaimed, "Mothers!" Itico could hear her speak and her thought almost simultaneously.
Itico sits back and shakes his ruff out, "Well," he says to Randa, "you really know how to pick the party favors R."
She gently punches him in the shoulder. "Good to see you too."