I woke up strapped to a vertical table, from my neck down to my ankles. The eye loomed ahead of me, its tentacles writhing methodically. Among the twisting mass were a pair of metallic fangs gleaming in the light, and its red tongue dangled out, almost touching the floor.
Panic started to set in, and my heart thumped louder by the moment. My mouth felt dry as a desert. What Ivy had told me earlier sprung back to memory. I darted my eyes from side to side, quickly taking in the room.
The first thing I noticed were the multitude of glass canisters, spaced around the vast chamber. Each one held creatures, or perhaps parts of creatures, suspended in bubbling liquid. Wires and tubes hung down from the ceiling, and criss-crossed the walls. One snaked all the way to my arm, and was embedded in what I assumed to be my vein. Other wires were attached to my face, shifting as I moved my head from side to side.
What in the bloody hell?
Finally, I rested my sight back on the eldritch horror occupying a large part of the room. Even as I focused in on the grotesque sight, it still took me a minute to realize what it was doing.
Just below the humongous eye, what I’d thought were its fangs, were a pair of long, metal spikes held by the tentacles, producing methodic clicking, one against another. And what I’d thought was its tongue, was in fact a bright red, woolen scarf, in the process of being made. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Was it … knitting?!
More details of my situation came into focus, including the subtle aroma of oatmeal raisin cookies. Stranger still, an old song was playing, much like one my grandmother would listen to. The eldritch horror was humming along, its body bobbing from side to side as it floated in the air.
Nearby, my armor and weapons laid neatly stacked off to the side, looking cleaner than when I had worn them last. Also, I was covered by a blanket with patterns of sunflowers on black. The status screen said it was three in the morning.
“Oh, you’re awake, dear?” The horror said, sounding distinctly grandmotherly. “I hope you forgive me for the circumstances, but I couldn’t have you running off and getting hurt. Also, setting the place on fire -- I do live here after all,” she said, like a mother scolding a child.
I gulped, “Hi?”
I tried to move, yet the restraints seemed to tighten the more I struggled, keeping me locked in place.
The eye set aside its knitting project and moved closer. “Don’t move dear, you’ll just hurt yourself,” she said in a soothing voice. “I’ll free you shortly just as soon as I explain what happened.”
I blinked, trying to absorb the odd juxtaposition of her demeanor and the bodypart chop shop ambience around me.
“My name is Khexamilu,” she continued. “But you may call me Milu. And you .. you must be Dromar.”
“Uhm, …” I wondered if I should be correcting someone like her. “No, that’s not quite right. It’s .. it’s Kevin.”
She whirled her body about to face a large screen hanging down from a ceiling, one of many, and in various colors too.
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“Is that right?” She flicked at the screen with her tentacle, scrolling from page to page, none of it legible to me. “Oh! I see what happened, dear. Kevin it is then.”
I filed away the name ‘Dromar.’ Maybe it had a connection to the Drakon’s hoard, seeing how the name sounded similar.
“W-Where am I?” I asked.
“This is Ark, dearie, a galactic-class starship,” she spoke warmly as one of her massive tentacles gestured gracefully in an arc. Despite her alien appearance, her tone was comforting, calm and steady.
“A starship?” I raised an eyebrow. “And what’s it doing here, on a planet? Shouldn’t it be out in space or something?”
“You’d think so, sweetheart, wouldn’t you?” She let out a long, deep sigh, her tentacles curling in what seemed like exasperation. “But no, unfortunately, we ran out of fuel.” She rolled her eye. “Idiots.”
That explained the futuristic tech, but not why it was sitting on its side. “Did it crash land?”
“Regretfully so, I’m afraid.”
“I see.” I really didn’t. How does a high-tech futuristic starship, and of the inter-galactic sort, simply run out of fuel? It would be like failing to fuel NASA’s space shuttle before a mission. But that didn’t matter so much to me -- it wasn’t my problem. I had a pressing situation right this moment.
“W-What are you planning to do with me?” I asked. “Why am I strapped in like this?”
“As I already said, dear, I’ll free you shortly, just as soon as I explain how you had arrived here in the first place.”
I nodded, as best as I could, given the wires connected to my face.
“We picked you up, along with a few others from planet M9852,” Milu continued, her tone almost apologetic as she gently wrapped a tentacle around a console to pull up information. Her massive, unblinking eye swiveled toward me. “You were a bit on the… roasted side, I’m afraid.”
“Huh?”
“You were in terrible shape,” Milu said. “Scorched, poor thing.”
I winced, recalling the fire at the chemical plant. To say roasted may have been putting it mildly.
“Did I … did I die?”
She glanced back at the screen before answering, a couple of her tentacles doing a shrug. “Maybe?”
“I see. And what did that planet look like?” I asked, wanting to be sure about her story.
“Hold on, sweetie,” Milu hummed softly as her tentacles danced across the control panel with surprising grace. “Let me show you.”
A holographic image flickered to life before me, and I immediately recognized the familiar shapes of the continents.
“Yeah, that’s Earth. And when did that happen by the way?”
One of her tentacles pointed to a date on the screen. “This says 108,090.53, my dear.”
I squinted. “What does that even mean?”
“Oh, that’s the date.”
“Right, right,” I said, deciding to drop that line of inquiry for a much more important one. “Why?”
“For Ark’s collection, of course,” she said, then quickly followed up with, “It’s a zoo,” in anticipation of my next question, as if that made everything abundantly clear.
“A zoo?” I repeated in disbelief, and dumbfounded.
“Correct,” Milu said with a little nod. “An intergalactic zoo.”
“Oh,” was all I could muster, then I realized something. “This wasn’t how I looked. What happened to me?”
“Ahh, in the process of putting you back together, I had to make a few tiny adjustments to keep you cozy,” Milu said with a reassuring pat of her tentacle on my shoulder. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of the creatures from our grandiose collection have run amok -- the dangerous sort. I had to make sure you’d survive, sweetie. And you did.”
“But why?”
She hesitated, her eye darting to the floor. "Well, I… I was lonely," she confessed, wringing her tentacles. "So, I thought I’d try to make some friends."
This close to me, I could see her more clearly. Just above the huge eye, and almost covered by what looked like a woolen rug hanging over her body, I saw a familiar parasite.
And he was looking right back at me.