Chapter Ten
The Nik-Niks Won’t hurt you
The alien rituals were over. I sat up and twisted this way and that experimentally. Not a trace of the pain left.
“Wow! You have healed me! I can’t believe it!”
Princess Ranaloxa smiled her dignified smile, but I could tell she was smugly pleased with herself as she helped me down from the table. I didn’t want to think of it as an altar anymore.
“Chloe,” the Princess called with her pure, bell-like voice so at odds with her wild hairdo.
A dark-haired human-looking female looked up from her low conversation with a group of several other students at Princess Ranaloxa’s call.
She excused herself and flitted lightly across the floor like some dark-haired fairy. She was tiny with elfin features and tip-tilted leaf-brown eyes. In contrast to Princess Ranaloxa’s hair, Chloe’s black cap of hair was so short her ears showed, adding to her air of being a life-size pixie.
Her broad and friendly smile revealed the whitest set of teeth I have ever seen. Her mouth, a little too wide to be perfect, fit in with her high cheekbones and pert nose.
“Storm!” She skidded to a stop and gazed up at me with a puppy dog, eager to please, expression in her eyes. “I so hope we can be friends,” she bounced on her toes, too excited to be still. Her sheer exuberance was too much for me after everything else that had happened today—or at least I thought it was still today--my never-ending birthday.
“Chloe,” Princess Ranaloxa interrupted. “Could you take Storm down to the decontamination pool?”
“Sure!” Chloe said, grabbing my arm enthusiastically.
“Careful, Chloe,” the princess warned her before I could. “The ribs, remember.”
“We’ll be careful, won’t we, Storm. You’ll love the pool.”
Chloe tugged on my sleeve, to get me going with her, causing the hood to fall down over my face. I pulled it back with trepidition. They were deliberately herding me out of the room, which made me reluctant to leave.
I looked back at Princess Ranaloxa hopefully, but she just mouthed, “Bye,” and waved her delicate, blue hand at me. I hadn’t even gotten the chance to thank her for healing me.
Almost against my will, Chloe led me from the dusty-smelling room out into the daylight. The brilliant flash of lavender sunlight made me flinch after the gloom inside.
I’ll never get used to looking up at such an alien sky, I thought despondantly, still trying to wrap my mind around this altered reality me and my family had fallen into. I’m on an alien planet, I said to myself, as if saying it would make it real, but no--it still seemed like a bad dream. A very bad dream.
And, these beings; I would have to keep reminding myself, no matter how human looking, were Not. They were not human. They were not from earth. Inside the monastery, it had been easy to forget that.
While I stood there trying to get a grip, Chloe skipped merrily ahead of me down a flight of cool, damp stairs. The stairway twisted down and around a corner, ending at a stone-arched doorway. Chloe stood waiting impatiently for me to catch up with her when I reached the last step. She had one hand propped against the doorway, the other on her hip.
I could have found her blindfolded. She had been chatting like a magpie the entire time she descended the stairs. I had blocked most of it out. She chirped away in her lilting, bird-song voice. It was hard to keep up with her monologue for long.
I didn’t have the energy for that kind of concentration after nearly twenty-four hours (the best that I could figure) without sleep, let alone everything else that had happened in that same time-period. It didn’t seem to bother her that I wasn’t contributing anything to the conversation.
She filled my head with trivia about the monastery that made little sense. I did try to pay attention, just to be polite, but most of the information went over my head.
I did understand the monastery didn’t start out as a monastery at all. Although who the Masters were that had built the edifice to begin with, and why they needed it for their own personal housing unit, I had no idea.
I tuned back into her conversation just as she said, “--Oh, eons ago, when they still ran the planet and everyone else were still slaves,” Chloe chatted merrily, unaware of my defection.
“They actually lived here,” she said in an awed voice, holding out her hands out to include everything—as if it meant something to me. It didn’t.
“Leon. My father. Dr. Spinner, to you, of course. And my brother, Julius--they turned the monastery into a school,” Chloe continued, slipping through the doorway the minute my feet cleared the last step onto ground level. “Oh, years before I came into the family.”
“Wait,” I said following her into the underground grotto. “You mean you are Dr. Spinner’s daughter, and Julius’s sister?”
The end of my sentence reverberated hollowly in the dark cavarn.
The sweet smell of water, and green, growing things rose up to meet me as I began another descent down a second set of steps. The scent of moist earth infused the moisture-laden air with an achingly familiar smell of a Lakahatchee riverbank; causing a pang of homesickness to lance across my stomach.
I could hear the quiet flow of water over stones ahead of us. It grew louder the further down the steps we went. Thesteps ended at a wide stone floor. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dimness, but still uncomfortable with the low light, I stayed close to Chloe’s side.
“Wave your arms, Storm,” Chloe laughed, stepping away from me. She began jumping up and down while wind-milling her arms with the carefree abandon of a child. Her laughter floated back down to us in resounding echos from high over our heads somewhere. I couldn’t see the roof at all.
At first, I thought she was just being goofy, until I noticed a lightening of the dimness. Out of the darkness, a few globes of the same fairylight I had noticed in the other room upstairs, winked to life.
“Twirl you arms,” Chloe encouraged. “The lights are phosphorescent. Movement awakens them.”
I was all about light, so I began swinging my arms, as hard as I could. I tried to imitate Chloe’s enthusiasm, but my ribs were just too tender.
However, Chloe danced and twirled around enough for both of us. Finally, her enthusiasm waned when she realized I hadn’t really joined her.
“Oh, all right,” she pouted, pulling a crooked twig from her waistband. She aimed it at the light and commanded, “Luminosius!”
Almost miraculously, the little globes of fairylight grew stronger, many of them twinkling on by themselves all over the place.
“How did you do that?” I asked, astonished.
Chloe let out an impatient breath. “Oh, Storm. It is the first spell every child learns here on Dardara. Didn’t they have any humans on your planet who could cast spells?”
“Only in fairytales,” I answered thoughtfully, wondering for the first time in my life about the origins of those timeless stories every child learned in their mother’s arms.
Overhead, the fairy lights continued to wink into existance across the vast expanse of the dark cavern. I gasped when those same fairy lights winked on under the water as well, revealing a pool that stretched away like an underground lake.
Iridescent Jelly fish pulsed below the surface of the aqua water. Tiny purple fish darted here and there across the bottom of the pool. Streamers of sapphire-blue seaweed twisted and turned lazily in a slow current comming from under the floor at our feet. I watched it flow across the distance of the pool before disappearing silently under the other end.
Chloe slipped uninhibitedly out of her robe and pants then dove into the water. She swam about half the length of the pool with the gracefulness of an otter, and then popped her head out of the water, laughing with the sheer joy of living.
“Come on in, Storm.” She squealed with delight. “Don’t be afraid of the nik-niks. They won’t hurt you.”
“This is the decontamination pool?” I asked incredulously, still stunned by the pool’s otherworldy beauty.
“Of course, silly!”
Chloe rolled over, presenting me with a full view of her naked backside as she kicked up off the floor of the pool and swam away towards the dark end of the pool.
Back on earth, I had gone over the side of the shrimp boat in the buff more times than one. I was usually comfortable with my own nudity. Somehow, this was entirely different. Too many unknowns for me to just strip down to the skin without the protection of clothing.
“Are you afraid?” Chloe asked from the shadows at the other end of the pool. Her voice resonated unnaturally loud across the water.
“Not really afraid, I don’t think,” I answered honestly. “It’s just that I, I, uh--” I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly made me so uncomfortable.
“Oh no!” Chloe cried alarmed, “I’m so sorry.” She plunged back into the water and popped her head out long enough to say, “I’m coming. Wait.” She continued her one way conversation with me in snatches whenever she bobbed up for breath, making her way back across the lake—I couldn’t think of something so big being called a pool. “I didn’t realize . . . you didn’t know how . . . to swim.” She breathed deeply while talking, swapping stale air for a fresh.
“It’s not that, Chloe.” I yelled across to her, but she couldn’t hear me above her own splashing.
I groaned and stripped off my own robe and earth clothes beneath them. There was only one way to clear up this misunderstanding. I dove headfirst into the pool before Chloe had a chance to reach me.
Chloe screamed, “No, Storm! Not headfirst,” too late for me to stop myself plunging into the cool depths of the pool.
Before my head could clear the surface of the water to take a breath, millions of tiny purple fish swarmed out of nowhere, and totally engulfed my body. I made it to the surface long enough to scream before I went under again.
The fish were all over me, picking frantically at my skin, hair, eyes, between my toes, and fingers, a horde of miniature piranhas.
A flashback of the horror of my falling into the shrimp tank paralyzed me for a moment. I forgot how to swim and sank to the bottom of the pool under the sheer weight of that devouring swarm.
***
Chloe probably saved my life. She dove under and grabbed me by the arm. Despite the weight of those fish, she managed to pull my head above the water.
Chloe started babbling apologies before I could take my first breath. Then she was crying, too. Hugging me to her and trying to explain, but I was past reasoning.
Crying unashamedly, I fought my way back to the edge of the pool. The school of Satan’s spawn trailed behind me like a purple veil.
“Storm, please listen,” Chloe cried, swimming alongside me in the water. “They won’t hurt you. They’re nik-niks. Storm. Listen.”
I shoved her away from me viciously; concentrating my energy to swinging one leg over the edge of the pool without the weight of the fish in my hair pulling me back under water.
I left trails of wet, flopping purple fish all over the flagstones at the edge of the pool in my useless attempts to get out of the pool. The sheer weight of their numbers pulled me back into the pool, which frightened me even more. Each time I fell back in and went under, the real fear of drowning loomed over me.
I had made my way to the edge of the pool, choking on water and tears, screaming my head off, when I was snatched weightlessly from the water and into a pair of strong maculine arms.
“Chloe! What in the name of Azul is going on here?” Julius demanded in a thunderous voice.