02 – Fear few.

Lispy and vile with a vafrous flair, it's voice dared out to blare “Halratu.”

The seemingly sickly and scared pasty pongid there then stared unawares of the knifes its tongue spat towards her ears.

A horrid hand of a palm too wide containing fingers numbering far too many directed but a single one to the narrow bridge of its tiny nose.

“Halratu,” it said once more. A name. As if she at all should care. This new, mundane hunk of weak and pale, ersatz flesh and torpid steel held enough gall to announce itself. And of all times, it chose then.

Fangs twitching, her eyes squinted. She swallowed venom.

Honor the promise to spite the premise...

Irrespective of the torments scratched across once-polished scales, she felt restraint was to be maintained. She vowed to herself that – at least for now – this worth-aught beast ought not be slaughtered; her problems being hers and hers alone, none to make known nor to be shared with the alien.

Onto her tongue she snapped and swallowed, mixing blood with far more venom for the needed spur to decamp the corner – into wretched rays casting from the machine looming equidistant all the walls.

Each set of her inner eyelids were forced to fall low as numerous luminous ails assailed her; wishing once more to be covered in a sheet of shadowed, brane-blurred black. Within such unfocused light there fired photons in foul colors; dancing like raindrops, flickering and glimmering as would dying cinders in the wind. However, the blinding and pessimal effulgence remained far from the worst sensation.

Dilatory steps brought her closer, and again the alien said, “Hal...ra...tu.”

“Halratu,” she echoed, unsure of what else to do.

The creature pestiferously grinned from behind the mask, seeming to signal that her response met its expectation. But that mouth. That grin. That joy-filled, pearl-toothed, derisory, melena-fressing grin... She nary liked the look, having nothing for it but unbridled scunner and odium.

Desires in blinder's ires, she thought, staring into the armored creature's eyes.

Her ghoulish hands tensed more than normal, and with talons at the ready a savagery implored her for crazed lashings. The talkative alien had a strange softness to its skin, one which seemed particularly edible. To cut into its cheeks and tear the jaw from its skull, or to pry out its teeth one by one, knowing that to hear and feel the gums rending would rouse that special something. The thought alone was nympholeptic.

To feel her cold fingers warmed with a fresh body's blood, to pull skin from muscle and muscle from bone, breaking to sieges on imaginings held by the shackles of her mind came like incursive cravings. But that was her problem, and not one to share with the alien.

All her urges abided their barrings, and in silence, cogitations swarmed the 'Halratu' standing before her.

From the sight of its coughs and the apparatus used to end them, she supposed the air was unfavorable to its kind. But therein merited few thoughts of worth. Above all, it seemed to call for solidarity. Alas, the symbols scribbled on the wall had no meaning to her. At all.

“A L R E N O.”

She forced herself to commit each letter to memory, whilst being sure that what 'Halratu' wanted was perfectly pellucid.

To all fours she fell low and crawled close, dragging her scarred palms across the floor, lathering ash upon them. She then scrawled beside Halratu's name, and mirroring the alien in as many respects worth the effort, she pulled her robe further back to show her head entirely. The last display of 'lizard-see, lizard-do' was her mimicking of its gesture and a brief oratory with a talon drifting queerly around her eyes.

“Rhöt Yòhélm'Oñci Xi'fatëír,” she said, returning the introduction.

“... Pardon?” Alreno raised an eyebrow, scratched his head and panned around the room, beginning to slowly process what he'd heard. All of the joy from his expression had drained, and thankfully, the grin was gone.

“Rat?” Alreno asked. “Raat? Reet?”

Thrice hearing verbal stumblings and butchered barks, she opted to repeat, “Rhöt Yòhélm'Oñci Xi'fatëír.”

“Rot? Wrote..? Reat? Raet?” Four more noises, all short, all confused. Over and over he attempted to say it, but each time he tried he felt a need to try again, doubting himself to the fullest.

“Rhöt,” she said again with infinite patience, regretting the choice and wondering how well she'd pronounced the armored alien's name herself.

“Rheet? Rhot? Rot? Wrote? Whret? Rat? Ret? Rrrhet? Raat?”

The aesthesis of sesquipedalian-induced confusion in 'Halratu' was all that Rhöt gave any attention to. The armored alien made no attempts at wagging its tongue to anything beyond the first piece of her name, so that the longer assibilations went unspoken. For the best, perhaps, what with having drastically different perceptions of sound. To reach any understanding, there were bridges to cross that seemed too far, if yet built at all.

Words bilked him as he looked upon the lizard's uncovered head, every small detail seeming stranger each moment his mentation gripped what few commonalities they had. Each of their species evolved a form of eye, surmising neither hailed from worlds destitute of light; but hers were large and red with blacks instead of whites, glowing brightly whilst his were small, orange and non-emissive. His teeth were square. Hers were daggers. His tongue was silver. Hers was forked.

Whatever environment wrought Rhöt's ilk favored the predacious. Unlike the thick, dark-gray majority of her skin and scales, the rough and leathery black skin surrounding her eye sockets reminded Alreno of a dog's nose, and her face was filthy all over – powdered with dust, splashed with blood and dirt.

He took a special interest in her cranium, trying to guess if she had a large brain for complex thinking or a thick skull for headbutting, or perhaps to withstand tremors and shocks from biting large prey.

Alreno then noticed the alien had started inspecting him as well. Though unsure why, the look felt... wrong. So he broke the silence yet again.

“Raat?” he asked with a very slow, very clear voice.

“Ălrėno,” she replied; although to her ears, his pale face would forever be Halratu.

Though Alreno became relieved and gratified that they were officially introduced to one another, she thought nearly nothing of it. Nevertheless, by efforts and ashes, there now stood a basal system of communication. Having first names exchanged between beings theretofore unknown to each other was no small feat, both met amidst a war sited far from the embrace of their connatural spiral arms.

Complicated questions ran through him in abundance, but that twisted, long, forlorn, lizardish face looking back at him brought forth a number of basic queries. He began to wonder things he could not once recall having to ask any other alien in his life. Most non-humans he'd come in contact with spoke some language already known, and he had never met a creature that he hadn't read about beforehand.

What raison d'être beckoned? he wondered. Why domicile the city? Why remain in wake of war? Why save me..? He hadn't the scintilla of a clue.

Alreno viewed Rhöt's blinks as unbearably slow, maybe three every five minutes, if not less. The pauses between them were so long that his own eyes watered watching, whilst hers always returned to a thousand-Au stare. Such an empty gaze on neither corpse nor soldier could have been so affecting, but with his savior's head now in better view, she looked like a child to him – one far from good condition. Scars speckled her scales like stars in the night. Some were far too severe for anyone with a sense of conscious to inflict upon the young.

It took him a moment longer to then notice that what he'd previously thought of as ratty black hair sitting atop her head wasn't even hair. Black spindles with sharp ends protruded from her skull like curved spikes. He gathered that they could be moved at will, and he was right; having then witnessed flexes from them.

Alreno wished to wait and watch the alien's actions in the hope of learning more, but he could only liken speculations to determining the features, age and sex of an animal without asking the owner or looking under its tail; an obviously bad idea if ever he'd had one.

“Rot... Raat...” he mumbled.

Keeping the exchange as simple as possible, Alreno grabbed another handful of ash and scratched and scrawled and wiped and smeared it across the wall until announcing, “There we are!” with a loud and misplaced enthusiasm. He stepped aside to give Rhöt a view of what he had made. Something about trying to teach her made him happy, and he wasn't sure why.

She looked upon the two drawings for a moment, but then back to Alreno for elaboration. It seemed all he would give were more gestures towards the scribbles though, so she looked at the wall again, unsure if they were really what they appeared to be. Oddly enough... they were.

For reasons she could not readily grasp, the tall, silver-haired, pastel-skinned pongid had crudely drawn two sets of legs, and between them were different genitalia. They were of ugly and misshapen make, those prone to animals; but that was the alien's problem, and not one she would have liked him to have shared with her.

Rhöt took her time to think of what the reply ought to be, and it was time well spent. Among social mistakes she'd made, the worst often sprang from acts of misjudgment, leading to slips of her senses involving premature impartations of a non sequitur.

She let the silence linger, and with it there crept worries all throughout Alreno's mind. He was made to ponder over what customs, formalities and depictions were deemed acceptable to the alien, and he got nowhere, being without a point of reference. His biggest concern regarding the question's clarity struck last and hardest: The idea of the alien taking his inquiry as a sexual statement or proposition.

Yet some luck remained with him. The lizard's mind had no room for conclusions predicated on any series of unconnected guesses like the maladroit, hypothetical horrors he had mulled. Rhöt lethargically looked at him and his drawings, studying them for their meanings. Nothing came to mind. Not until Alreno panicked and pointed to his male scribble and then to the armor over his own crotch, that is.

Among mattering matters...

Once Rhöt understood what the snow-skinned man was doing she couldn't help but think herself a fool for not figuring it out sooner, or rather, immediately. She alleviated his ignorance with another mimicking of his gesture, pointing to the twisted scribbling of a woman's legs; which she thought (and hoped) didn't do her or anything justice.

Nodding like a madman, Alreno stepped closer and pointed at the female sketch as well, all the while pointing a finger directly at Rhöt and looking at her inquisitively. To him, she did not look manly, womanly, boyish or girly in any way. Try as he might, his eyes saw no more than fauna, much more genderless than androgynous; not that he'd be found as some svelte swain to swoon over in anyone's sane sweven.

Incredulity meant nothing to her, though. Offense was there to take, not to give, and Alreno's thoughts were hardly worth reaching towards. They were different species, but even she knew that it was her flag and hers alone that fluttered atop the highest peak of Mount Epicene. Hoping to remove all doubt, Rhöt lowered her right hand and pointed at the drawing again with her left. He sighed in minor relief, knowing he'd no longer make the impersonal mistake of mentally referring to her as an it, but still, his other thoughts remained in jumbles.

He didn't bother making any age guesses, since he had a more important question: What is she?

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It was so simple a thing to ask that he didn't really know how to do it. By no means was Rhöt dressed, armed or armored as soldiers were, but death was near her like a close friend who did ofttimes beg favors as insane as they were inane; though still it seemed she granted them.

Creepily – as far as humans could be – he stared at her in silence, trying to wrap his head around what she was. Even as Rhöt lay down to relax, he tried to take note of how she moved, unaware that her pain screeched a constant tune.

Not a solitary nociceptor sat quiet within her, screaming out the anguish of wounds both recent and long-endured. The only sleep to come was involuntary unconsciousness; an inevitable mental burnout. She felt it in her bones, but continuing as she'd done for months, she fought off slumber's call with a physical fear for what an absence of waking would let occur, and for fear of what future memories could slip back through and mingle with nightmare.

Alreno was pacing around the room, thinking of what to draw next. He had to hold whatever interest Rhöt seemed to have for his crude, kindergarten methods for as long as possible, but he had to inquire about her health however he could. Something was obviously wrong with the little alien, but he couldn't know what. Not without seeing a tear shed, a sorrow frowned, a scream let out or a grimace made. All she did was quiver like an animal in the cold.

More, he thought. There's to be more.

Rhöt's fatigue was execrable, draining her of life and purpose. Small trickles of dark-black blood seeped from her eyes, and from beneath several scales all across her body. Her limbs all shaking, skin bleating agony, body colder than should be and senses slowed to crawls far lower than even bugs could manage. But she was far from uninterested, contrary to Alreno's worries and observations.

Once not too long ago, she'd thought that he and his little machine were somehow one in the same. Perhaps both part of a robotic scouting team responding to one set of orders or procedurally generated actions. That theory was shot down when she saw his face, though. There were different types of armor that the invaders used, and there was no shortage of robots, but to distinguish between suit and automation amidst the variations couldn't be done. Not by her. It was that which brought about a more-than-mild surprise once she'd placed her eyes upon a pasty primate encased within the armor. To yet more surprise, Alreno's pursuit of knowledge went straight from names to genitals. Along with his own doubts, he did indeed hold her attention.

Once ceasing the gait that drove his roving thoughts, he was able to decide his next course, turning to the wall to scribble again. He made not merely one or two or six, but over twenty little limnings. At first glance Rhöt did not know what to think of them, since the next question was not about her. Not directly, as it were.

He further smirched and defaced the ashen wall with partially detailed ships and stick-figure people, knowing even whilst he drew them that more detail would be needed to convey their meaning. With a change here and an extra circle there it all eventually started to become clear.

Quasi-qabalistic drawings of giant ships and armored bipeds with round ears near the top of the wall could have only signified Alreno's own species, while the people drawn lower all had rodent-esque physiques, pointed ears, slanted eyes and rugged waves near their hairlines; the staserian.

“Hu... man.” Alreno pointed towards the higher group of people and their little ships. “Human,” he said again, pointing at himself.

Understanding him was easier once he'd made the changes, but from his words and kinesics, Rhöt syllogized that this would be a language near-impossible to learn. Picking herself up from the floor and awkwardly mimicking his pointing movement – unaccustomed to the gesture as she was – Rhöt intelligibly croaked, “Uůæt 'Humän', Ălrėno.”

She wasn't stupid. She could tell that he was slowing his pronunciation needlessly; her ears, after all, were far better than his. He gestured at the aliens drawn lower, and on his face was a simple curiosity.

The Sol Conglomerate bestowed their newest enemies with the title of 'staserian,' named for the largest nebula ever discovered where their cultures first clashed. All his drawings were to ask was by what name they called themselves. Behind it, however, he also hoped that 'Raat' would speak the name of her own species; but he didn't want to ask directly and risk undoing the 'casual' nature he imagined their exchanges to be.

Solid reasoning stood. This was not her home. She was not a staserian. She was something else, something out of place; familiar to the planet whilst most likely not a civilian nor native wildlife.

Sporadic visitor? Ambassador ensnared in crossfire? Lone alien tourist? He could only wonder.

In response, Rhöt stood and approached the wall once more, crouching to slide and sink her talons into the ash. Alreno remained unaware of it, but his shoddy drawings doubled as questions and answers.

He had to ask the name of his own enemies, showing just how little his people knew, how little they cared, and how ready they were to engage in warfare. An admirable trait, but a question was still a question, so she drew three 'staserian' of her own.

He watched agog as she practically painted the same person three different times with different sets of highly detailed features. The first one she drew, as Alreno had correctly guessed before, was a depiction of the most common breed among the species. Pointed ears, a nose somehow both long and pug, a wrinkled and ridged forehead with a far receded hairline.

He had seen – and shot – the second breed as well. Shorter, yet still pointed ears, skin adorned with dots, pocks, birthmarks and milium, a more humanoid nose and eyes spaced further apart. The third, however, he had never seen. Rhöt had drawn it with slightly rounder ears and a short nose with wide nostrils. From first to last, she tried to make herself accustom to pointing as she once again awkwardly mimicked him.

“Wuaqua... Sahpvata... Velra...”

One by one she named the main breeds; of which sub-variations branched.

“Wu-aqua, Shop-vata, and Vel-ra... Wu-aqua, Shop-vata, Vel-ra... Wu-aqua...” Alreno got the names by rote. She did not draw her own species, however, and the names were easier to repeat. They were clearly not of the same language in which she'd spoken to him before.

She then rudely ruined Alreno's impromptu art class by hitting the floor with a disturbingly loud 'thud,' her whole body falling limp. Alreno let out a pathetic yelp from the sound of her head striking the ground.

“What happened?” he asked, surveying the surroundings with a sense of panic.

“Abrupt horizontality,” the drone plainly stated.

“Move,” he demanded, simultaneously pushing the machine aside.

Alreno knelt in front of Rhöt and looked her over, doing what little he could to make medical observations. He was no doctor, but he was a soldier of the Sol, meaning that a full year of his training had been dedicated to learning insectoid, avianoid, and of course, humanoid emergency first-aid. Yet there was nothing the Sol had to teach of reptiles... or whatever she was.

He started where he had to: At the basics. Following procedure, he watched her and waited for her to exhale, and as soon as she did Alreno counted both the passing seconds and the breaths she took. When he reached thirty seconds, he multiplied Rhöt's breaths by two... and got a grand total of two breaths per minute.

“Not a fuckin' chance...” he mumbled.

Thinking that he had to have made some mistake, Alreno counted again, only to get the same result.

The robe, he thought.

As slowly and non-threatening as possible, he raised a hand and waved it back and forth, keeping his arm from going out-stretched, staying much closer to his face than to hers. It was well within her field of vision, so she didn't care to directly follow it with her eyes, seeing as how she had no reason to; not without knowing what it would mean to him.

“Raat...?” Alreno kept whispering to her. “Raat?” he asked again. To his dismay, she did not (bother to) respond. Her eyes were open, but apart from her occasional blink, she did not move.

“Okay...” he whispered. “Raat? Raaaaat? Help's needed for the helping. Where's the pain? Here?”

Alreno pointed all over his own body, asking, “Here?” over and over again, wishing for any kind of answer; but he only succeeded in confusing her.

She thought he was naming body parts at first, but then she came to realize one of two things were true. Either she hadn't the faintest clue as to what he was doing, or his race was so stupid that they called everything on their bodies by the same name for the sake of simplicity. After all, not every species has braincells to devote towards the subject of anatomy.

In her short time knowing him, Alreno did not come across as intrinsically violent, so she didn't spend the energy to move away from him, even though he reeked like an aromatic plant. The very thought of standing hurt, and parts of her danced between being completely numb and in a haze of total agony.

He wanted to help, but not to prematurely put his hands on an alien. It was dangerous just being near her without his helmet on. The multitude of antibiotics and immunization stimulators running through his blood could fend off the known staserian pathogens, but the chances of her cells having been sampled for anti-infection purposes were exactly zero. There could be no telling how one affected the other, and for all he knew, Rhöt was sick from being near him when he removed his helmet and coughed out some random microbe. The inference was soul-shearing.

In a haste as purposeful as it was panicked, he left the building and stripped the first corpse he came across, taking a full haversack for the supplies. After returning to her side he opened a medical kit, taking out cleaning wipes and a few rolls of bandages along with a bottle of water, lying them in front of her so she could see them. To keep from creating any more problems for himself, he made a special effort to leave all the stitches, alcoholic sprays, needles and ointments from straying into Rhöt's sight; not wanting to alarm her with odd colored chemicals and sharp objects.

“Move or make a noise and this'll end,” Alreno whispered in a soft, oddly caring tone.

He edgily reached down and grabbed her robe, ready to pull away at the first sign of trouble. With one hand gently touching the thick fabric, he fought off more of his fears. It was with great restraint that he managed to apply no pressure to her body directly as he started taking the robe off of her. Fold by fold he pulled it back and figured out half-way that it wasn't a robe at all. She wore a heavy and quite dirty blanket, one that was supposed to be brown, but had become too stained with filth and blood to retain much of the original color. How thick it was surprised him. He slowly undid the last wrap and lifted it like a tarp.

“Daaa...! Shit!” he exclaimed, completely failing to contain himself.

As much as he didn't want to make any sudden movements or loud noises, Alreno couldn't help but to flinch away. He stood up while instinctively trying to clasp a hand over his face, but he only smacked and dislocated his mask, breathing in more of the foul air.

Against delirium, his senses reengaged, and Alreno mustered what he could and collected himself to return to her side yet again, hoping that his eyes were lying – whilst knowing they were not.

“How ar-... arghh!” He tried to expel his anger and adjust his tone. “How are you alive?”

If there was anything else to say, it didn't come to him, and only three plausible options were open. He could try to focus on helping her, leave her alone, or succumb to tears. All seemed impossible. She was nothing but a display of thin muscles with her bones outlined by the curving of her scales, and all she wore beneath the blanket were pieces of alien clothing, torn and tied together. These 'undergarments' were wrapped not to conceal her body, but to stop her bleeding.

If someone somewhere at sometime had told him that she'd clawed her way out of a mass grave, there would be no means to disbelieve it.

Even considering her horrifying state, she was somewhat lucky. If the fall from the rubble pile had landed her onto her back instead of her side, she would have suffered fatal spinal damage.

Alreno couldn't quite tell what they were made of, but running down her spine and tail were numerous black spikes; all thick and sharp, with the hook at the tip of her tail being the most intimidating. Anatomically, it would be impossible for her to lie supine or even sit down, in the human sense. Even her elbows had long, black, hook-like ends clearly attached to the pronounced bones.

He could hardly believe how many times she'd been cut and bruised. In his mind, Alreno was sure that Rhöt couldn't weigh much more than a fourth of his armor. She looked broken. He wanted to ask her what happened, but he lacked the means to do so.

Alreno slowly poured water onto a cloth rag and squeezed it out over Rhöt's neck, probing her for a reaction. She still didn't move much more than her eyes, but was certainly more confused than before. After the first pusillanimous dabs, cleaning her came across as being safe enough, but he had no recollection of having to be so consciously gentle. He could make a circle with his thumb and middle finger and fit any part of her arms inside of the loop, except for her elbows and wrists. Fearing that he could fracture a bone with one blunt move, he took his time.

Upon her back was a particularly gruesome wound encrusted with blood and scab-like growths that had sprouted from where a scale had been fully removed, reinforcing her hardened skin until it could grow back.

Alreno squinted, looked her over and then raised a silver eyebrow. A confusion caught hold of him. He hadn't seen it before; having been distracted by her appearance. There was an alien rifle that she'd been keeping concealed within the blanket, and for all the damage he knew this creature could do, he wasn't aware that she was armed.

Sedated and immersed within the numbing pain, Rhöt remained motionless throughout her unsolicited rag-bath. She knew he was being as soft as he was able, but every cut he cleaned burned with such pain that old wounds felt new again. It was obvious that he wanted to help her get through the agony, but it was even more obvious that her body made him uneasy.

Alreno was fine cleaning her arms and shoulders, but he moved slowly and even began to shake when he wiped her face, talons, spindles, legs and chest; and he entirely avoided her hips, thighs and the base of her tail.

The more he wiped her down the more he thought of her skin as one large scale, broken in places with purple-black muscles and jet-black blood underneath it. She looked like a corpse.

When he'd finished mending what he deemed decent to mend on a stranger, Alreno grasped a white roll of meshed cloth and started to apply the bandages. As he did, Rhöt began to move. She grabbed the damp rag, cleaning the wounds on her thighs and tail that he would not.

Alreno lowered his head and looked away, but he continued wrapping her arms, then her shoulders, then her chest and abdomen. When it donned on him that he gave far more thought of her being nude than she did, he chose to finish the job and continued wrapping her as completely as he could, hoping the bandages could hold down her scales long enough to halt the bleeding beneath them.

Rhöt looked the part of a demonic mummy when he had finished; a somber, sharp-clawed, twig-limbed mess of fragile bones. He had tried, but he could not get any bandages around her face or ears. She didn't let him subvert her hearing in the slightest, and the thick black spindles were as unwieldy as they looked, shredding through the bandages that covered her back. She wasn't as tightly wrapped as he'd have liked, but it would have to do.

The look's suiting, Alreno thought with mild amusement, gazing into the burning reds of her eyes and thinking of pictures and paintings he'd seen depicting mythical beings. As much as he hated ancient myths, he couldn't deny that she looked like a demon, or the shell of a once-living thing forced to linger long past her time.

No noticeable shame, embarrassment, care, fear or awareness to pain showed on her face. It seemed that only her ears could be bothered, and if her eyes had no red glow and if she did not shake from grievous nerve damage, Alreno would see nothing more than a dead body. The sights of many war victims plagued his thoughts like waking nightmares, but even most of them looked more lively than did the quivering lizard.

She went from standing on her 'feet' to down on all fours, slowly walking around the room to grow accustom to the bandages. Afterwords, she got on her stomach and lie down upon the blanket with her eyes still open.

Alreno sat down across from her, digging through the new haversack until he found a ration.

“Raat...” he mumbled, as if to remember a name he'd never forget.