He had been enormous, 7 foot at least, maybe even 8! And thin too, as if his limbs had been stretched like taffy. With a long, hard featured face and broad aquiline nose and forehead he had cut a queer figure, at least to her mind, especially decked in a toga of all things. But strange as he was, and by god was he strange, Elizabeth had far more important things on her mind. Namely the fact that Earth, her home, had been destroyed.

“What do you mean corrupted!” She roared into the empty space, more whimpered loudly, at least to her ears, you would, however, never catch her telling a soul that. A roar it most definitely was.

“Corruption, a natural phenomena in which the un-guarded minds of a sentient species leak out psychic energies over long periods of time at which point they begin to contaminate the surrounding area.”

“What do you mean unguarded? And why does that mean you have to destroy the whole planet?!” Tears were beginning to flow again, gushing themselves out of wells she had thought long since dry at this point.

“Please ask one question at a time for answering.” It spoke with that offensively inoffensive, robotic voice which plagued the speakers of GPS’s, online dictionaries and text to speech.

She answered its request by roaring once more into the ether of her sterile, white room before throwing the bedding and mattress over the space of the cell in a futile and impotent gesture of rage and frustration universal in dealings with automated systems.

“Woah, cool ya jets hot stuff you’re about to start a fire.” Boomed the projected voice like that of a stage actor from all around her in that disconcerting and disorienting way in which the tall one had spoke as if a cloud of invisible mouths were speaking from everywhere.

She whirled around, fists raised once more and face wrought with an expression both fearful of the potential hand to hand combat with aliens and excited at the prospects of having an outlet for rage marginally less impotent than destroying her own sleeping quarters. Except there was no-one there, just the large, nearly wall encompassing mirror and the currently closed door the other one had come in from. Sterilising the ship my ass, I’m imprisoned here aren’t I. Her eyes darted all across the surfaces, waiting for the invisible intruder to unveil himself.

“Impressive isn’t it, how I can both speak and not be present in the room! Cower at my strength!” He boomed and once more the mirror on the side far from her began shuddering slightly in its frame. And cower she almost did, remembering how only hours before it had felt as reality itself had developed schizophrenia, it was then she had first begun wondering at the other powers of her jailors. Only almost however, she caught herself before her mutinous legs could give out under her once more, Liz Hayfer didn’t cower, at least not when she could help it.

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“Where are you, and why are you yelling!” She said instead whilst rubbing her temples, desperately trying to mute the pain of the tear induced headache currently pounding her head like a drum.

“Ha, exactly what I came to ask you my dear, but my pain is due to having had to have caught a moon, what’s your excuse?” She blushed slightly realising that her racket may have been audible from the rest of the ship before remembering that these people had not only destroyed earth but also kidnapped her and could deal with a bit of noise. Wait, did what to the moon?!

“Fucking what?!” She asked as her wide, saucer dish eyes scoured the room in an attempt to make eye contact with this invisible intruder.

“Hm, suppose you’re right it was all three of us, but the ship doesn’t care and after what he pulled Titus can deal with a bit of stolen valour.”

“Titus, is he the tall one?” She said choosing to, for now, ignore the comment about the moon for the sake of her dangerously fraying sanity.

“Comparatively to you I suppose but in the grand scale of things not so much. See that’s the problem with you folk, always blind to the grander scale of creation.” He said the latter part with a tonal flourish of eccentricity, it was not enough to distract from the earlier insinuation.

“Wait so he is human?!” She asked with a slight twang of disbelief audible in her voice, wondering at how the lanky spider like man could have come from earth.

“Of a sorts, definitely not from around here though, far to pretty a place to produce a character that bland and pernickety.” The insinuation was once more, after a period of stunned silence, caught.

“There are people outside of earth?” She asked, eyes staring off into space as if searching for these forgotten pockets of humanity.

“Sure, why wouldn’t there be.” He said as if it were the simplest revelation the world had to offer. “Regardless you have once more derailed my brain’s locomotion and I must inform you that your mental hijacking has not gone unnoticed and is also not a mark in your favour. Regardless I am pleased to inform you that your inoculations were a success and you haven’t seemed to have developed Kashak Parasites, a good thing I assure you, regardless I am to let you free to wander the ship.” He said, his speech punctuated by the mechanical hiss of the door on the far side of the room opening.

“Inoculations?” She said after a pause, eyes once more, yet now more slowly and far more warily, scouring the room.

“Yes! Gaseous ones, an ingenious invention actually, easy and quick to administer. Only took us two weeks and with a comparatively low fatality rate to earlier methods.”

“Two weeks is quick to you! And fatalities?! Wait is that why I was unconscious, so you could drug me?!” Liz looked down at her hands and then scanned the rest of her body for any signs she could imagine would hint at an alien disease. Really didn’t imagine I would get roofied by aliens, always thought it would be a football player, or my boss.

“See this is why I let Titus deal with primitives, you lot always overreact.” Spoken with a psychic sneer of derision.

“Primitives?” She asked, mildly miffed both at her lack of understanding and the perceived slight.

“My god, this is what I mean, political correctness has gone from an innocent idea to downright insidious these days. This is why I let Titus deal with ‘Non-Member Species’’.” He said the last three words with an over pronounced, aristocratic drawl as if to mock the very requisite sounds used to form the speech. “Regardless I am about to have a well-deserved nap and have you out of my hair while I do so. If you wish to bother someone else with your constant assault on the normal flow of conversation with your subject changes and thin skin than seek out Titus, lord knows he needs the punishment.” With that the slight psychic chittering which had proceeded unabated throughout the exchange departed and Liz assumed that she was once more alone. She stayed that way for a bit, silently sitting and stewing on the titbits of lore she had gained from that bipolar back and forth of joviality to hostility before she decided to take the voice up on its advice. Not that she usually thought her conversation was a punishment, it was going to be however, she had a lanky, kidnap happy, oddly vague and disconcertingly voiced alien to yell at.