[December 31, 2042]

“Tell it again from the beginning,” said the alien, eye widened in concern. “We must be sure when transcribing to be accurate with details.”

The alien, from what Cal could tell, was a shovel — or shaped like a shovel, a long tail that terminated into a wide, sharply sculpted end — a curiously shaped organic compound pinkish in color, with a single eye placed in the center of the shovel’s “head”, wide and green. It didn’t appear to have any legs or means of moving around, but, from what Cal could discern from the alien’s image captured upon the floating screen of light above the astro-phemenologicalator, it seemed to be floating in place gently, as if buoyed by the air.

It was somewhat hard to tell anything for sure — the texture of the alien’s skin or the mechanics of its ridiculously shaped body. Ellie had turned back on the LED lights with a breathy command, the glare of which made the details of the image harder to make out, like the screen of a television set in a brightly lit room.

Ellie, meanwhile, had gotten her breathing under control, had wiped her cheeks dry, and now addressed the alien with shining eyes fueled by her newly raised excitement. Before beginning, she cast an apologetic look at Cal, who was now sitting on the mattress and observing the scene unfolding before him with an incredulous expression. Bear with me a little longer, Ellie's look seemed to say.

“Of course, I can do that,” Ellie said, leaning forward eagerly towards the screen of light with her palms against the astro-phemenologicalator. “Before that, however, can I ask your title? You’re a Flunaaci, correct? From the Gergen nebula? I just want to know who picked up my signal, because seriously, dude, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t received it. You’ve seriously saved my life here.”

The alien nodded, or at the very least seemed to tilt its body forward slightly, as it replied in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. “I am called Knal-Pleiades, operator for the Teething Scouts of the Fourth Civilization Cluster. It’s a pleasure to meet and assist you, Ellinova Mercury. Welcome to the universe.”

Ellie looked for a moment like she would burst into tears again at these repeated words, but she restrained her quivering lip and nodded forcefully. “It’s… good to be back, Knal-Pleiades.” She took a deep breath. “As you know from my call ID and parlay code, I’m from a junior cosmonaut squad that was exploring the Outer Firmament… um… it was around N10,000, going off True Coordinates.”

“I see,” There was a sound of shuffling and clicking from the other end of the screen. The alien’s eye seemed to be concentrating on or confirming something out-of-sight on its end, but Cal didn’t understand how it could be doing either when it didn’t appear to have any arms or legs. “Okay, yes, we have it here in our systems, confirmed at the space-time point. That would make your origin, by the calendar of human beings… come from a margin era of about three millennia?”

Ellie nodded. “That amount of time exactly. I’m from the year 5042.”

Knal-Pleiades turned its eye in Cal’s direction for the first time. “Is it alright to discuss this matter in the presence of someone native to this time period? I do not know your species’ laws concerning this.”

“Oh,” Ellie bit her lip and glanced back at Cal, who was looking at her with a raised eyebrow. “Not specifically, but it should be okay when I explain to Control. I needed his help to get in contact with you, so it couldn’t be helped. Someone had to regulate the signal strength and terminus point.”

She was talking very quickly, using words and allusions that Cal didn’t understand. She seemed quite different to him at this juncture. They had known each other for months, yet here she was behaving in a much different manner than usual — like she had suddenly turned on another gear when before she had always been relaxed and at rest. He wondered if this was closer to her true personality.

Cal sighed and nodded to Knal-Pleiades, and the alien repeated the inclining motion of its body in response. “Uh, hi. My name is Pascal Clermont. Um, I’m a human from this time period. I don’t know entirely what’s going on here, but you don’t have to worry about me. I can kind of piece together the details as we go.”

Knal-Pleiades looked between Cal’s emotionless face and Ellie’s pleading one, then closed its eye in resignation. “Oh, well, it likely won’t matter too much for such a minor infringement. As long as the Fourth-Dimensional-Task-Force doesn't come into contact.”

Ellie beamed. “Thank you Knal!”

The eye blinked, its green pupil staring at her. “I am Knal-Pleiades. My species does not engage in the human tradition of nicknames, Ellinova Mercury.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ellie winced ruefully. “Anyway, the story is… well, it’s my fault, to be honest. I got dumb, I got excited. I went really far from my fellow cosmonauts and stretched the tether as far as it would go from the group. I thought I saw a star-sling and… well, you know how it is in the Outer Firmament. One of the invisible wormholes got me, sucked me right in. I had my suit properly situated, thank heavens, so I survived the space-time fluctuation, but it was super disorientating and scary, let me tell you! I got spat out in the year 2042, on Landhome of all places, and — dude! — I had nothing, no communicator, no supplies, my suit was basically destroyed after what it endured. It was all I could do to refund the scrap and tech into making compatible ID and digital footprints for the era. Admittedly, I had to hack the ATMs for cash — oh, that’s where the currency of this era is kept, which let me load them onto the cards — thank the stars I didn’t go back a few decades before, I would have been screwed if they were still using physical money. So I hedged up at a local university for cover, and remember, I had no astro-phemenologicalator, I couldn’t navigate or send space-time signals, so I’ve been spending months rebuilding one from nothing. I thought I would go crazy from cabin fever. Have you ever spent so much time in just one place, on just one planet-”

As she enthusiastically continued her monologue, Cal found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on her words. He felt strangely sluggish and disinterested in what was happening around him, and he let the noise in the room become increasingly indistinct. He didn’t know how long Ellie spoke for, the minutes blurred together as he stared at the ceiling, waiting patiently. He was only brought back to the present by the interruption of Knal-Pleiades.

“Pardon me, Ellinova Mercury,” said the alien, a little forcefully, breaking into Ellie’s explanation about how she acquired the filaments for the astro-phemenologicalator. “The signal from your end is beginning to waver. But do not worry, we have logged the situation on our end and will prepare a report for the appropriate retrieval services. We will get a ship to your location as soon as possible.”

Ellie’s smile, which had grown wider as she talked on and on, faded. “Oh… alright, I see.” Her fingers tangled into the depths of her jacket. “Is it… not possible for us to speak for a little longer?”

There was a long pause. The green eye seemed to grow tender in its expression. “I am sorry, Ellinova Mercury, but the astral storm appears to be intensifying. Maintaining a connection will be soon impossible. It would be better to disconnect now.”

Ellie nodded slowly. The wind was out of her sails. “Okay. That’s fine… that’s fine, I understand. May I call back, whenever I can get the chance to rebuild a connection? Just to talk to someone… up there?”

The eye blinked. “That would be acceptable.”

“Good.” Ellie swallowed. “And how long will I need to wait for a retrieval ship to pick me up?”

“Time.”

“How long is ‘time’? Days or weeks? …Months?”

“Time. I can not give a better estimate from where I am situated. I am sorry.”

Ellie’s voice was uncharacteristically small. “Okay. Goodbye, Knal-Pleiades.”

“Farewell, Ellinova Mercury.”

The colored light vanished and the image with it. Ellie was left in a quiet room, her palms still outstretched on the device in front of her in an inclined posture, as if she was attempting to push some heavy object. She bent her head, pressing the crown of it against the cool surface of the convex glass, the long braids of her hair tumbling down around her vision. She wanted to yell aloud, both in frustration and exaltation.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Then she remembered there was someone else in the room. Without moving the position of her body, she looked behind her, at the young man sitting on the mattress in the corner of the room. Watching her with those dark, strange eyes of his, eyes she had found unnerving yet attractive ever since she had met him for the first time, in the kitchen of Otter Manor.

“Hey, Pascal,” she said, tasting his name with her throat.

“Hey, Ellinova,” he replied, emphasizing the “va”. “Is that a popular name in the year 5042?”

Ellie grimaced. “It’s… not common. My dad got it from some old thirty-fourth-century poem, but my family had a few Ellinova’s already. The speaker in the poem is talking to his muse: Ellinova, ‘his jewel in the sky.’ We think it evolved from the Germanic name ‘Elenova.’ My family did an ancestry check once, with the Atemporal Research Society. My family’s roots in Landhome are German immigrants who came over from Namibia. But I still go by Ellie, where I’m from.”

“That being three thousand years in the future.”

“Yes,” said Ellie, though the tone of Cal’s voice made it difficult to determine where he had asked a question or proclaimed a statement.

There was a long, pregnant silence. Ellie felt restless in a way she couldn’t describe, but she wanted to dispel this strange atmosphere that had accumulated. She wondered if she should explain more about her situation — yet, somehow, that didn’t seem like the right move. The expression on Cal’s face wasn’t one of confusion, rather, it was a more melancholic emotion that didn’t seem appropriate for what had transpired over the last few hours.

Ellie sighed and sat on the mattress next to Cal, their arms brushing up against one another. She had taken off her jacket and her thin yet muscular arms were in full view. She wore only a black tank top underneath, which framed her chest still heaving with the emotions of the night.

“Are you okay?” she said, looking at Cal as she fixed her braids with an elastic, tying them into a ponytail.

He turned his face towards hers. They were close. “I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie leaned back, sinking her palms into the mattress for support, and nudged his shoulder with her own. “You seem a little out of it. Lethargic? Are you tired? I know it’s sort of late.”

“I can be honest right?” Cal said. He turned his head away from her, suddenly not wanting to look Ellie in her playful, intelligent eyes. “I’m a little disappointed.”

She chuckled, nudging his shoulder again. He could feel her soft skin. “Disappointed, boss? What, was the dramatic reveal of my backstory not satisfying enough for you?”

He didn’t smile at her joke and instead continued to look blankly ahead at the wall. “No, I don’t mean that, I mean…” He clicked his tongue in self-annoyance. “Before I came here — to Otter Manor — what I wanted… I wanted a normal life. An average life…”

He trailed off, but Ellie didn’t say anything, waiting for him to finish. The mattress creaked under the weight of her palms.

Cal began again. “The tenants of Otter Manor are a little unusual, as you know. We get along but they are all some flavor of extraordinary. Except for you. You were easy-going and athletic and smart. A normal person.” He rubbed his fingers together, like he was feeling a pebble or rheum. “It was a lie, of course. I knew there was something special about you, ever since you built that bottle rocket. But it was nice to pretend and never ask. It was nice to pretend there was somebody like that…”

He felt her hand on his arm, more gentle in its grip than it had been earlier.

“I get what you mean, I think. That’s what you crave, isn’t it? Normality. Or what you interpret as normality — the same reason you never raise your voice, or ever rock the boat.” Ellie spoke softly. Because of the way their bodies were positioned it was almost as if she were whispering in his ear. “But… I guess from my perspective, I am a normal person. I mean, I’m good with my hands, and know a lot about space, and I like to eat delicious food, but that doesn’t make me the same as a princess, or a ghost, or any of the other girls. They’re nutcases, as far as I’m concerned. I'm just a little ahead in the calendar.”

Cal smiled softly at that, and she went on, now with more confidence. “So… in my opinion, you don’t have to think of me any differently than before. I’m still the same person. So continue to make delicious food for me, okay? Continue to scold me when I’m annoying, or don’t take down the dishes from my room. Continue to be as you were before, okay Cal? I’ve been lonely, stuck in this place. I’m not exactly a 'feelings-girl,' like Mel. And I’m not super articulate like Bridget. But I’ve been relying on you more than it seems.”

He held her hand. “Okay.”

They sat together on the mattress, in the singular light of the LED, not speaking. About ten minutes passed that way. It wasn’t uncomfortable, only odd. It was like time was passing slowly and would only resume when either of them dared to make a move.

“Are you tired?” Ellie asked again, breathing so slowly that Cal could count her individual breaths. “It’s kind of late.”

“Yes, a little,” Cal admitted. “It’s probably after nine, at least.”

“Yeah, me too,” Ellie said. “I’ve been pulling a lot of all-nighters recently. You’ve already guessed that this is where I am when I’m not at the manor, haven’t you? I was so close to finishing the astro-phemenologicalator that I couldn’t stand it. My heart was beating so fast. It was like… I thought I would get to see my parents again when I finished it, when I got the signal working. But I guess that’s a long way off. Now it’s done, and it works, I’m just all over the place.”

The mattress creaked again as she shifted restlessly. Her hand was on his chest. “We can stay here tonight, if you want. For a few hours, at least, and rest.”

Something irregular was happening. Ellie’s breathing sounded strange.

Now Cal’s back was against the mattress at the suggestion of the push of Ellie’s black, smooth hand against his chest, and he was looking up at the white ceiling of room 209. She was on top of him, her chest pressing against his own, her long legs dangling off the side of the mattress. Her other hand was lower, on his inner thigh.

The only thought Cal had was that, up close, Ellie’s breasts were slightly bigger than he had realized — though not as large as Bridget's or Ram's. He didn’t think about anything else, not even about what was happening to him.

Ellie’s face was above him, very close, ponytail hanging carelessly over her shoulder. Her dark eyes studied his face, like she was searching for something in particular. She looked at his lips, then his neck, then his eyes.

Then Ellie let out a heavy sigh, and the tension left her body. She rolled over onto her back next to Cal, staring up at the ceiling, her chest going up and down with deep breaths.

“Sorry,” she said after a while, “I think I’m just… I don’t know. My emotions are all over the place. I want to stay still and I want to take action. But doing that… neither of us want to, do we?”

Then she added, without elaboration: “It’s not how we are.”

Cal didn’t answer. He was still looking at the ceiling — but his eyes were somewhere else, in another time or another place. It appeared to him it was darker in the small space of 209 than it actually was, as if the LED hanging above had been covered by a veil. His throat constricted and he began to concentrate on breathing.

Ellie let out a sigh and straightened up on the bed. “Were you just going to let me do it, if I hadn’t stopped?”

The edge in her voice brought Cal back to the present. “What?”

“If I hadn’t stopped, were you just going to let me do it and pathetically go along with it?” Ellie said, her eyes narrow and somewhat stern. “Like when you let that Roxy girl kiss you?”

Cal considered this, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t know.”

‘You don’t know?!” Ellie repeated this with an anger that surprised even herself, but it vanished when she saw that Cal hadn’t reacted at all to the outburst of her emotions, that he still had a vacant look on his face. “I mean… you know, I consider you to be a pretty self-willed person. You act. You push back against things you find rude or unjust. I guess I could say you’re conscientious. But this…”

She raised her palms helplessly in the air. “You’re a rabbit that freezes when it gets caught in an animal’s jaws. I mean, for heaven’s sake, dude… you could have done or said something, I would have…”

Ellie stopped, seemingly coming to the realization that elaboration on this topic would be unfruitful, at least for tonight. She clicked her tongue, and jumped to her feet, her long dreads bouncing as she jerked her head. “Come on. Let’s go. It’ll be late by the time we get home. Besides, there are probably some more things I should explain to you on the way.”

Cal straightened up on the bed and looked at her with eyes she didn’t recognize — they were gentle, tender, almost naïve, not anything like their usual neutral coldness.

“Am I allowed to leave?”

Cal spoke so softly that Ellie could barely hear the bizarre words.

He was looking at the door across from them as if seeing it for the first time. It must have been a trick of the brazen LED light shining in Ellie's eyes, but Cal’s shadow cast along the wall above the bed seemed to fluctuate for a moment, almost as if glitching before returning to normal.

Ellie gaped at Cal, mouth wide open in shock, unsure what to possibly say. Something was wrong with him.

Then she took a deep breath. Gently — like she was an adult guiding a child — she took Cal’s wrist and pulled him to his feet, a movement he followed slowly but willingly.

“Yeah, you’re allowed to leave.” Ellie squeezed his arm. “Come on, let’s leave together. Are you dehydrated? Come on, let’s start walking. You’ll feel better, dude, I promise. The cold air will feel good.”

Ellie led Cal out the door, practically tugging on his arm. The astro-phemenologicalator lay in the center of the room, forgotten, as she used the key fob to lock the door behind them.

Out of notice of Ellie, Cal's shadow twisted again.