Captured
A story about aliens who were brought to earth.
Quiet is a silent form of rebellion, when used to its lethal advantage. That's how the people of the planet Nuari were when the people of earth came to steal their children. They were silent. They were aware of everything around them as they watched with their big glowing eyes, listened with their cat-like ears, and smelled the air with their shiny black noses. They were still when chaos erupted in the children's rooms. The people of Nuari were silent, as they knew they could not overtake these people of earth.
The spacecrafts shuddered and whirred, hovering only feet of the ground, spitting out people dressed completely in black, decorated with every sort of weapon possible. The Nuari were still silent. Men shot the glass-like shells of their homes. They were silent. The men descended upon them, clad in black uniform. The Nuari held silent.
An adolescent female Nuari was the first to break the silence with a hiss of defiance. Her gills flapped up and down like stagnant wings. The protective layers of fungus on her arms were shaking. Her skin was pale moonlight silver. Her webbed hands were clenching and unclenching. Everything about her was moving except her feet. She didn't mean to attack, so when the people of earth stuck a needle in between the folds of fungus on her arm, she didn't fight. As she fell, her skin began to glow. Other children did fight, but none were successful. The Nuari children were loaded up into a spacecraft carelessly. Soon, they'd be in a foreign environment. Soon they'd be on earth.
The adolescent female was the first to wake up in the facility. The bright lights hurt her huge eyes. Her ears hurt from the overabundance of noise coming from outside of the room she was in. She their language well, as the Nuari children had studied earth for years, knowing they would be taken. A woman in a white lab coat came in to the room. The clicking of the door's hinges almost sent the young Nuari to vomiting. The woman's voice boomed in her sensitive ears "Can you understand me?"
"Yes I can understand you," the girl's calm, quiet voice stretched across the room. Her voice was raspy and dry. The woman put a glass of water in front of her. The girl reached out for it with her clawed, webbed hands as if it were her savior. It tasted different than the water on their planet, as they had different minerals running through their soil, but it soaked both of her dry throats. Once the glass was empty and stowed in its upright position on the table. The girl observed the human before her. Her black-rimmed spectacles had unnerved the girl, as she had never encountered removable eyes. Their noses and ears were different too, although surely they had same enough anatomy. They moved in the same way she observed, each moving with the pattern of their breathing. She had studied all forms of anatomy, as the girl was an apprentice healer on planet Nuari, although she exceeded her master in her ability to transfer healing energy to their patients. She looked at the woman's skin. It did not glow as hers did and it did not seem to have as much need for moisture. The human had no gills by which to breath in the water. The girl was also able to smell the different hormones put off by the human's olfactory glands. She could tell the woman thought she was ugly, she could smell the disgust as if it were a strong perfume. The woman had a mane much like hers, auburn. The girl was the first to speak.
"Why did you steal us?" she asked. Out of all of the information the Nuari had found about the attack, this was not part of it. Why has always been the hardest question to answer.
"For study," the woman answered.
"But you know very little about your own planet. You only know 70% of the species that inhabit the Earth. Wouldn't it be better to spend time curing diseases and discovering your own world than stealing part of ours? Why venture further when you have no self knowledge?" the girl asked. It perplexed her greatly, as the Nuari put very little energy into creating weapons or invading other lands. Why should they? They were a peaceful people that all shared a sort of energy link to all of the life around them. Humans had spent all of their lives at war and were far more capable of taking lives if need be.
"You might have become a danger to us. It was only logical," the woman replied coolly.
"To prey on the peaceful? Or would you call it weak?" the girl asked. The woman avoided the question.
"You are not tethered to the chair. Why do you not try and run?" the woman inquired.
"That would be pointless, seeing as I am in a foreign land where I stick out like a sore thumb."
"You speak our language much better than some of the others. Why is that? Why is it that you know our language at all?"
"The Nuari people have known about your plans for eight years now. All of the children have studied it for at least three years. I studied by ear." She could see this scared the woman. Her blue eyes widened. Her heart beat sped up. Her nostrils flared. She ordered the girl out of the room.
"I can escort myself," The girl said to the woman.