As I walked out the door, I noticed the cabin I woke up in was at the end of a short hallway about 25-30ish feet long with a large lounge/galley area with a pair of strange, empty tubes like small elevator shafts at the other end of it. I was curious about them, so I asked Elli, “hey what are those tubes over here El?” she responds over the PA after a few seconds, “oh those are grav-lifts, they are the main form of moving between my decks, I have three by the way. You are currently on the third deck, the living space for crew. For now, I want to explain a few things, so please help yourself to anything in the galley, then take a seat.”

I walked over to the galley and checked out the appliances and foodstuffs there. I was surprised that I actually recognized most of what I saw appliance-wise. I queried Elli on this development, and she responded “of course, this ship was designed for long-term deep-space missions. This means that the crew would have been aboard for months or years at a time, with shore-leaves being few and far between. The builders decided in order to maintain morale, true home-cooked meals would be invaluable and kitchen tech hasn’t really developed any further than what earth has either; thus, this galley/lounge space replaced what would have been a simple mess hall. At the same time, they also added a gymnasium workout area on the bottom deck at the expense of almost a quarter of the cargo hold.”

I asked her if there was anything like coffee onboard and was directed to the relevant machine. Once I was caffeinated, I dropped onto one of the couches in the lounge area and asked Ellyallia, “ok I’m as good as I’m gunna get, so please, what the FUCK is going on here. What are you, and what do you want from me?” Elli was more than two minutes in responding, when she did it was very hesitantly. “Ok, so TL: DR is essentially I am an alloy/polymer-based parasite that latches onto starships as they pass through my species’ spawning grounds. We are known as the Velmak, we are very powerful but extremely fragile in our natural forms. Our nature is to seek out strong shells to house ourselves and ships tend to be built out of the very alloys and polymers we feed on grow, thus we have developed the ability to actually assimilate into the very ship we have latched onto and use the hulls as a sort of combination endo-exo skeleton hermit crab shell deal. The original ship had spaces for engines, reactors, fuel tanks, maintenance crawlspaces, etc.; now that I am this vessel, these areas no longer exist, although the reactors still do, they’re simply subsumed by my flesh.” She pauses to allow me a few minutes to digest this information.

I was unsurprisingly, speechless. I was wearing an alien robe, drinking alien coffee, lounging on an alien couch, onboard an alien ship turned actual alien! “uhm……. okay…… I think I understand what you are now, but what does this have to do with me?” I questioned Ellyallia, “Does this have to do with what you said earlier about us sharing minds from now on or something?” Elli responded immediately, “well, yes. It does actually; the Velmak are one of the most psionically powerful species to ever exist, thus we are subjected to vast amounts of corruption from the veil between the physical universe and the astral plane where our powers originate. Like most psionically awakened races and beings, we require a soul-bond with another being with a compatible soul, which is unimaginably rare, to anchor ourselves into the real world and protect ourselves from the veils’ corruptive energies. Without this bond, we become rabid monsters whose only purpose is to destroy and devour all life in the universe.”

I was, again, dumbstruck. This living spaceship/woman was saying what essentially amounted to: magic is real; I am a wizard; if we don’t chain our souls together, I’ll eat the universe. It was obviously a lot to take in, so as I sat there mulling over what I’d been told, I thought about my life on earth. No home, no friends, no future, no hope, no love. There really was not very much holding me here, but Elli here was constantly proclaiming her love for me, and she needed me to be her spiritual rock, so speak; and unlike everyone else in my life, SHE seems to need me. On the other hand, this whole soul-bond situation sounds pretty damned permanent and very close to what may essentially be magical marriage; what if we didn’t work out as a couple? “hey, Elli, what is this whole thing supposed to be for each of us? What would I get out of this? What would you expect from me in our daily lives? Is this just a do the bond then go our separate ways, or is this more of a till death do us part?” I queried Ellyallia.

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She responded with “well, it could be either one depending on what you want if we go through with it. On that note, if it helps you decide, I can create a temporary mind-bridge between us that will allow us to spend a few moments fused together all at the speed of thought. That means we would be spending a few eternal moments and be able to see one another in our entirety.” She sounds nervous while speaking of this, so I figured she must have done something like already while I was out. But even though I woke up with her in my head, she hadn’t done anything other than drag my eyes to the robe I was wearing now; on top of that, the instant I demanded she leave my mind, she did so without complaint. So…. well…. *sigh* this is a lot more difficult to decide what I wanted to do about all this than I realized.

Eventually, after almost three hours of quiet contemplation, I finally made a choice. “alright Ellyallia, you said we could share minds, temporarily right? Id like to try it and see what happens.” After a few seconds, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes!Yes!Yes!Yes! let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” Ellyallia squeals. She directs me toward the med-bay on the main deck, and once I arrived, she had me climb into one of the med-pods lined up against the back wall. “Ok, so I will be using the pod’s systems to connect our minds, once its finished, we can speak again about the future.” As Elli speaks, the pod begins to close, and I begin to fade to black. The next thing I know, life is pain. For what feels like an eternity, I feel nothing but pain until something, shifts, and I feel an overwhelming presence begin to smother the outer edges of my perception.

Naturally, I started to panic, not knowing what that whatever it was, was. As this happened the presence suddenly stopped its advance and held unnaturally still. Suddenly I realized that the unknown entity was simply how my mind was interpreting Elli’s mental presence. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I immediately started calming down significantly, and her mind continued to envelop and swallow mine, but this time instead of feeling an instinctual terror, I was welcoming to her touch. As we mingled in this timeless moment, I began to feel something I had never felt before in my life: the acceptance another person. This brought about another new sensation, I had never felt anything like it, but if I had to explain it, I would’ve said it was like a soft heat began suffusing my entire being and it was completely directed towards that endless, unfathomable mental entity subsuming my mind into itself.

I was starting to understand what it was to accept another in their entirety for who and what they were no matter the concerns or opinions of others, and that was when I understood; with our minds entwined as they currently are, we were ‘experiencing’ the existential truths of each other’s beings. Nothing I could’ve said at that moment never would have been good enough, so I simply ‘moved’ my mental being and burrowed deep into Ellyallia’s mind and pushed out as much of this wonderful, accepting warmth I was experiencing towards as much of her presence as possible. She responded by infusing herself deep in my mental being, and I knew, somehow, that she had just converted the temporary connection into a permanent bond between the two of us and was preparing to begin the ritual or whatever that would combine our souls together; and I was perfectly content with it. I had no idea why I was okay, let alone happy, with this but the truth was, I was actually eager for this.