A Vast and Endless Sky 2

This is probably really rough but I do still need to get back into the habit of writing regularly again, so here is another section! Thoughts ideas and observations in the comments!

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Rees was so taken aback by the sight over the ground outside that he at first didn’t do anything but feel his stomach well into a knot. Was the Shiny Egg dangerous? It didn’t seem to be doing anything but shining lights and hovering. But it was just so blatantly unnatural, floating there, perfectly still; if not for the light he may have overlooked it entirely for being so out of place.

Somewhere, a reawk started cawing, though the noise of reawks making noises at bumps in the night was so common nobody was likely to have paid any attention.

Rees suddenly realized he needed his camera. He bolted to the other side of the room, peeling open his backpack, but the camera he usually kept wasn’t in there. He quickly thought back to when he had it last—he remembered having it over the summer when he took pictures on the boardwalk parade in Tentown. Yeah, it hadn’t left the drawer since then. He opened up the drawer just underneath his bed and popped over the back cover.

No film.

Dammit, that’s right, the pictures are out for development… and he hadn’t bothered to buy a new roll.

He did have a digital camera, but the thing was a crappy gimmick; it was at such low battery that it’d likely die in the effort of taking one picture, and even when it did it had almost no ability to focus, and what good would that do him now?

Video camera? They had one in the den, but his mom kept the tapes in her room. There was probably one in the camera, but Rees really didn’t want to go downstairs.

And he was spending all this time not looking at the weird alien thing outside.

Rees pressed himself up to the window again. The Shiny Egg had opened up along the bottom, somehow. A claw popped out of the bottom and reached down toward the ground, suspended by a long metal cable.

He didn’t want to miss any of this! This was something… monumental! Did aliens really send that thing here, or was this some top secret government device? If it was a government device what was it doing here and not isolated in the middle of the Northern Wastes?

The weirder thing was, he hadn’t even heard it arrive. The thing itself was dead silent, ruffling reawk feathers notwithstanding. That just wasn’t something that happened with current technology. Conspiracy theorists would be quick to assume that top secret government projects were hiding all sorts of ultra-tech that could explain this, but Rees hadn’t ever seen any evidence that was the case.

Well, until this very moment, at least.

He considered, while staring dumbly, if it was at all possible he could report this without camera proof. Or hell, even with camera proof, the Shiny Egg looked like it was ripped off the cover of a math textbook. Even a tabloid rag wouldn’t believe something as phony as this. So his options for the rest of his future would be to keep his mouth shut and never let anyone know, or attempt explaining this to… who, his mom? His dads?

No. He needed better evidence.

Rees pried open the window and climbed out onto the roof. Gys, what am I doing? He muttered in his head, but he nevertheless inched himself over the lip of the roof and lowered himself to the ground. The air outside was cold, and he wished momentarily he’d taken his jacket, but he didn’t want to miss his opportunity.

The Shiny Egg didn’t seem to notice as he approached, save that Rees’s distorted muzzle spread out over the shiny black surface, and something about the way it hovered prompted Rees’s fur to stand up slightly, like when he sat near a TV or computer monitor that’d been running too long. Carefully, he touched the surface, finding it impossibly smooth, but also in no way acknowledging him. The entire surface had no texture or gaps to dig his claws into and pry a piece off.

The egg’s bottom had remained wide open, and the claw at Rees’s paws started to drill silently into the soil. Rees ducked under the lip and peeked into the cavity, finding it hard to even see anything—no shiny blinking lights, nothing.

He tested touching the cable in front of him, and again, no response. Sensing he had very little time, he reached his paws up into the cavity, expecting to find the same inert response as he ran his pads across jutting metallic features. He twisted and pried at several, trying to find something that could come loose.

He ran his paw into a deeper recess, and his finger brushed over a large switch. Suddenly, a rubber seal inflated clamped down around his wrist.

“H-hey!” He exclaimed, trying desperately to pull his paw free. The Shiny Egg chirped quietly, and the claw retreated back into the depths. Then the cavity mouth slowly closed.

Rees panicked. He tried pulling his arm harder, but his wrist was caught so firmly he risked dislocating it, or tearing it off altogether. Having no idea what else to do, Rees instead grabbed onto the cable with his other paw and pulled himself inside the gap, tail and all, just before the closing iris sealed around where his waist had been. He had no idea if the machine had a failsafe to stop from pinching him in half, or if his lower body would be stuck flailing out the bottom end of wherever the Shiny Egg went next, but he figured being entirely inside the machine was the safest bet.

Well, until this went wherever it was going. He was so startled by the sudden turn of events, he wasn’t even sure he was afraid. There was just enough room inside the Shiny Egg to sit comfortably, or as comfortable as he could with his paw stuck in an alcove.

“Someone?” He called out. “Hey, if someone is operating this thing, you caught me by mistake! Can you hear me? Can anyone hear me?”

Oh Goddess, this isn’t happening, this is some kind of vivid dream I’m having right now, right? I’ve had dreams like this before! Given, I usually wake up the moment I realize it, but…

The bubble shifted slightly, like a moving elevator, but he could not tell if the egg has really moved or if it was just adjusting to his weight. Rees redoubled his efforts at removing his paw, and with a bit of extra prying from his free fingers, managed to slip out of the tight cuff, though certain he popped or broke something on the way out. Wincing, he rubbed his wrist several times because turning over and trying to find the opening at the bottom of the egg.

There didn’t seem to be anything there. Rees tried to breathe steadily to keep himself calm, but it wasn’t working. His heart was fluttering, and he felt sick to his stomach. His mom was going to kill him this time and he wasn’t even sure if that was figurative!

CLACK. Not five minutes after he’d entered the thing, it rumbled slightly and stopped. The bottom still didn’t open up, but Rees pressed his ear to one of the bare walls to see if he could get any idea of what might have happened outside.

He heard… voices? More like a bunch of deflating tires, but something approximating speech nonetheless.

“Hey!” He called again. “Hey! I’m in here, someone let me out! I didn’t mean to stumble into your secret government spy project, I’m sorry!”

No response.

“Somebody, please!” Rees’s voice took on a higher pitch and cracked. “I’m sorry, I just got scared, I didn’t mean to mess with your egg thing! I’m sorry! Please let me out!”

Shit. Rees suddenly felt very foolish for thinking he just needed to bring his mom some physical proof. What was he thinking? He knew better than to poke around strange objects. Something about it had fascinated him, like he couldn’t just discard this opportunity, because he neededthis.

Well, now he was likely going to get himself killed, or worse… in trouble.

Rees, fuming, reared back and kicked at the side of the machine. It wobbled, but not much, given he was literally pushing back against the opposite wall from where he kicked. He kept trying to push and shove and somehow shift the egg, and only ended up succeeding in banging his head against the ceiling, at which point he simply curled into a ball and held onto his ringing skull.

“Dammit…” he muttered. “Damn it all and damn me…”

Maybe his mom was right. He didn’t need to go on adventures, she’d told him it was dangerous, that he needed to be a good and obedient male, and he didn’t listen.  The weight of what’d happened, where he was, was finally starting to sink in, and he didn’t like it. He was tired and confused and now probably gave himself a welt between his ears. He shouldn’t have, but the fear of just being lost and separated from his home all of the sudden…

Rees was suddenly awake. He didn’t realize just how tired he’d been, or how much time had passed, but he was still inside the tiny, dark, enclosed space, only now this time there was a slight blue glow around the base. He blinked, and before he could refocus his mind to figure out where he was, the bottom of the egg opened up again.

“Ow!” Rees’s tailbase struck the floor first. He scrambled out of the way across a strangely textured floor, smooth and firm like glass but with lots of tight ridges like a noseprint. The Shiny Egg continued on, being pulled by some overhead claw all the way to a blue-glowing pedestal on the other end of the dark hallway, where it lowered itself on top like it was being impaled.

Rees looked around. The place didn’t look at all familiar—black-colored walls with blue recessed lighting, bowed out wide, and along those walls rails holding more and more of the Shiny Eggs. He wasn’t at all sure what he was even looking at, even as he stood and observed all the strange, round, dark shapes that dominated every inch of the long, long room. He’d never seen anything like it, not even in the movies.

Could it be aliens? He allowed himself to think for the first time in a while. He’d been hesitant to admit to it; he’d been told over and over again, Ar was the only planet in the universe blessed by the Goddess to hold life, despite what some scientists had thought for over a century now. And while some followers of the Goddess had considered that the Book of Life hadn’t entirely ruled out extraterrestrials, his mom had always and constantly told him such hypothesizing was trivial and pointless, that he needed to keep his head in the real world where the Goddess had placed him.

Though if this was a government facility, well, maybe it’d be a smart idea to defect to them, instead.

Rees carefully crept through the long hallway, plenty wide enough to hold him. He jumped at the machines whirrings and the eggs shifting as they each took turns to be impaled on the obelisk on the far side of the room. It wasn’t as cold here as all the metal and darkness would have implied; it was instead like a slightly-too-warm summer day.

He turned the corner that branched off into another hallway. Tall, bright monitors as big as movie theater screens lined walls on the far end of a room. Nobody was inside to observe them. None of the computer consoles had chairs in front of them, despite how far off the ground the buttons were from the floor. An unknown language flashed across the screens, looking something like radio code except it was marked in three different colors.

Backing away, barely even noticing his jaw was hanging open, Rees’s back bumped into another large device jutting out of the ground, which he hadn’t noticed at first. It projected into the enormous empty space of the room a three-dimensional sphere, slowly rotating, with more of those radio marks floating all around, pointing to various parts of the globe.

It was a globe. Rees’s heart dropped into his chest as he scanned over the surface of the map—the Tannic Coalition was right in front of his eyes, with a large floating triangle with some unknown symbol flashing in the middle—warning sign? What was that sign—targeting, perhaps? The more he looked, the more he found the red flashing sign all over the place.

Then he realized, scanning over the surface on a third pass: the red marks hovered specifically over major cities and world capitals.

Rees squeaked, clasping his paws over his mouth. He’d refrained from thinking too hard about it, still trying to tell himself not to believe he was on an alien spacecraft. But if he was, if that’s what all of thiswas… well that could only mean one thing.

A rush of air sounded from behind. Rees pivoted, only to see a large frame he’d though was just some kind of fancy science fiction texture over the wall was in fact a door, now open, as an enormous gray beast slithered through. It had a head and arms, but didn’t seem to have any legs at all, instead gliding forward on its tail, its black eyes seeming preoccupied with an impossibly thin computer in its fingers. No fur, either, just a lot of thick shiny scales covering it like armor.

The monster suddenly looked up, and the green glow peeking through its black eyes met with Rees’s. It stopped suddenly, large mouth hanging open, and the computer it held dropped and clattered against the floor.