An Orbiting Dilemma: excerpt

An Orbiting Dilemma sample

She was halfway up the hill by the time Yurri came to himself from pondering his good fortune shaking his head. He frowned at the pile of picnic gear wondering how he would carry it all. He had the bad habit of always over preparing for things. He had even brought a humungous picnic umbrella. He looked up the short but steep climb of the hill rethinking on whether or not to bring that with him. The young man decided to leave the umbrella in the hover car and carefully wrapped up all other picnic items in the picnic blanket his girlfriend and him would be lying on while having their meal.

Yurri was about as average as a person could get but still, he thought he had a decent figure for carrying heavy things. With brown hair and brown eyes there was nothing overly identifying about his looks. He could easily get lost in a crowd. Usually he wore clothing that had extra pockets in them and habitually carried an odd assortment of random items he generally found a use for at odd times. His clothes were loose, a dull brown on his shirt, with black pants, and they had a comfortable fit on him. The shoes on this young man wore were dark brown sturdy but worn lace up work shoes.

The young man slung the picnic bag over his shoulder and made the short but steep trip up the hill. He found his girlfriend in a clearing by a grove of trees; it was those red singing trees. The leaves of this peculiar plant were shaped in a way that they made an odd musical whistling sound when the wind blew through them. There was a crap load of mythological stories about this very tree also, but the young man never really listened to much history about this planet since he got here a couple years ago. He considered it weird that these types of trees had some mythological lore to them at all. This planet didn't have its own residential sentient species so how could they get their own mythological stories? This planet wasn't that old with people living on it.

Another one of Yurri's bad habits was not taking in any information about the place he was currently living at right now. It took him years to get comfortable with a new place before he started to know how to get around properly. At first, he thought he would be here for only a couple months while his parents dealt with a problem at home, but things didn't seem to be getting settled back there so he was stuck here.

As he came to the top of the hill, with picnic items slung over his shoulder, he saw his girlfriend frolicking, playing, and singing with some of the local fauna of this area. Birds were tweeting in tune with the sad song of a forced and arranged marriage, an unwanted marriage apparently, that Janice was singing about. As she was singing some squirrel type rodents were dancing in step with her. Yurri only shook his head when he saw this. He found it wasn't worth the energy to be surprised around this girl anymore. If a girl this beautiful, with a few exceptionally weird quirks, wanted to date a remarkably normal guy like him who was he to make a fuss over something as minor as being able to communicate with animals? No matter how creepy that was...

"Hey Jan, where do you want to set this up?" he called out. His girlfriend's small animal friends scattered at his shout.

"Why don't we settle down over where we last had this picnic of ours?" Janice said pointing while adjusting her clothes and hair picking up her purse and their picnic basket.

She picked a spot on top of the hill they were on that had a spectacular view of the city placing their basket on the ground. The young man quickly unpacked his burden and laid it all out almost methodically. Yurri was cheap --Who could blame him for the meager salary he made?-- and they had done this same thing multiple times. Janice never complained though. Probably because his family had some connections here on this planet and he could get them low priced or free tickets too to many of the cultural events on this planet. Janice had a kind of fetish for anything that was labeled as art or an innovating cultural event. Especially when it involved some sort of clothing or hair style.