The Old Kind

I could hardly believe my eyes when the alien fell to his knees. We all glanced at each other, not quite sure what to do now that we'd achieved that previously unattainable goal. The rock had hit the right spot. He sank down slowly, his face finally resting on grass that was stained purple from his blood. A few seconds silence was followed by a quiet celebration that we had finally captured one of them. We still called them aliens, even now, after three centuries of colonization by the Raffians. This one had probably been born here but it would always be an alien to us. Of course, born was a broad term, their process was nothing like our methods of reproduction.

I approached the alien's lifeless form. He was alive; I knew that of course, they couldn't die. But he seemed less than alive there on the ground. I knelt beside him; it was the closest I had ever come to a real Raffian. I had been well sheltered in our hiding place. Born and reared there. There were few of us left, small groups all hiding in secret places scattered around the world. Doing anything to avoid them. The aliens. The ones who had come to our world with promises of peace and favours only to take us and dump us on planets they wished to harvest. Dumped our kind there to see if we could survive the atmosphere firstly, then forced us to work. I grew up knowing I would rather die than see that happen. Those they took were given the same concoctions they used themselves, the ones that preserved their spirits forever. Suicide was not an option in that case.

With angry thoughts growing in my mind, I rolled the creature over, rougher than I had originally intended. I wondered how many of us they had enslaved, with their weapons and armour and superiority although I had to admit that this one was completely stripped of any sort of protection. Its rough skin felt strange under my fingers, it appeared to be almost iridescent despite its texture. I noticed tiny pulses of purple swirl under the surface. Its arms were bare so I could plainly see its lean muscle and inky black tattoos. The tattoos were almost beautiful, designs so unusual to my eyes that I couldn't bring myself to look away. I had never seen the like of it before. I was beginning to trace the curves of the ink in childlike wonder when my father pushed me out of the way. He and another carried the Raffian into our shelter and he bade me to watch over the alien while they celebrated. I was the youngest so I was tasked with the most boring job. Besides, as a teenage girl, I was the lowest ranking human around.

They took the alien into the smallest portion of our underground home. There had been caves there once upon a time but over the years our group and those who lived before us had worked hard to go deeper underground. To keep away from the aliens who did not like the darkness under the earth. I often wondered why this was so and what would happen to one who was taken underground. All I had to go on were the stories passed on through the generations by word of mouth. I had heard them all so many times and yet I had never learned much about how the Raffians lived. I had lots of questions.

When the Raffian had been tied up tightly, they left me to keep watch. I wanted to know why he had come. How he had spotted our patches of vegetables and grains. Never before had a Raffian come so close to us. We only managed to capture him through sheer luck and the element of surprise. We were lucky, next time we might not be. We needed answers to protect ourselves. Noisy sounds of unrestrained happiness echoed through the shelter from outside so I knew that they would all celebrate late into the night, leaving me completely alone with the alien. I was grateful when my mother brought me some food and water to keep me going. I was surprised she had remembered me.

I yawned in boredom soon after. I wasn't yet hungry and had nothing to do. So I studied the face of the alien with interest. He didn't look so different from us up close. He wasn't as ugly as I had expected. His skin was strange but not repulsively so, in fact I found myself comparing my arm to his in envy. My skin was light brown like all humans and never changing while his seemed to ebb and flow right before my eyes. It had an unsettling affect. His ears were tiny and his nose slim and almost pointed. Raffians had no hair or fingernails and their heads were a slightly different shape to ours. His lips were full and dark purple.