(9) solace

Rui absentmindedly threw and caught something blue as Rex and Marcy carefully examined the crate of fruit some kids had brought in. The blue article Rui just so happened to be throwing up and down was some of the fruit previously residing in the crate.

“I think it’s a pear.” The girl said, pausing in her methodical exercise.

Rex frowned at her. “It’s blue.”

“I think it’s a pear.” Rui repeated in a manner that suggested she wasn’t budging in her judgement.

“Are you sure it’s just not an overgrown blueberry?” Marcy suggested.

“Nah.” Rui shook her head with a rather blasé look. “It has that weird pear lump, see? It’s a pear.”

Rex took something orange and apple-like from the crate and leaned backwards until he came to a sitting position upon the ground. A fall breeze blew through the trees around them, bringing with it the warning of colder weather that was soon to come. Sounds of cooking came from the lodge besides them.

“How come the fruit’s even like this, anyway? I expected all the nature, but how come the food decided to mutate?” Rex inquired.

Rui shrugged. Marcy continued to examine the crate, even going as far to sniff some of it out of curiosity.

“Maybe it had something to do with the Change?” Rui offered. “We still don’t know what full effect it had on the land, after all.”

Marcy muttered, “The presence of otherworldly creatures drove the entire world completely batshit.”

“How’s it going?” A voice called from the lodge, Steve emerging from the garage door. Amraphel wandered after him. Her face immediately grew into a grin when she saw the fruit crate.

“We were wondering how funny it would be if we made Will eat this stuff.” Rui announced loudly.

“Do you think the food’s toxic or something?” Steve frowned.

“Nah, I just think it would be hilarious, is all.” Rui shrugged.

Marcy added, “It’d be like a new age Green Eggs and Ham.” She offered some of the fruit to Amraphel, who sat besides her. “Check out these weird bananas.”

“Oh, God.” Steve blanched. “I think they’re all pretty weird.”

“Think they’re safe to eat?” Rex asked.

“I-” Steve made the second person to sniff the fruit since it was brought back, “Maybe? Wow, I don’t know.”

Out of curiosity, Amraphel broke one of the strange bananas in half, rather than peeling it. Almost instantly, something green oozed out of it. Though the girl didn’t drop the fruit, her casual gaze turned into one of horror, a shiver visibly traveling up her spine.

Marcy slid back from with a disgusted look. “Ooooh, gosh.”

Rex was frozen, looking at the banana like it had insulted his mother. Steve said nothing while Rui poked it.

The banana continued to ooze strange liquid.

“...Let’s get fruit from some other universe.” Steve said after awhile.

Everyone agreed.

A few hours later, a shout of horror rang through the base as Will took a bite of a suspicious pear by mistake. This delighted Rui and Marcy to no end, because they didn’t even have to force feed it to the boy. He screwed up all on his own.

It was Will’s insistence, in the end, to go get more ‘normal fruit’ right that bloody instance.

---

fun fact, the overall title for the story universe these kids are from is ‘Foolproof.’

I just didn’t add it to the titles of these one shots b/c it was messing with the minimalist feel of everything. That’s seriously my only reason.

ALSO this plotline continues in part 16, b/c i could only squeeze out half of that and i want MOVE ON for a little bit.

(8) newbie

He was incredibly young when it happened, so logically almost no memory was retained.

He remembers his mom, and the way she dropped him off at daycare with a tired gaze. She had barely left when the world started to quake and fall out from beneath everyone.

The daycare was only on the distant outskirts of the city, so they weren’t directly in a center that got attacked. Everyone still felt it, though. The terrifying minute where the world stood still and for some reason every single member of their species was frozen in fear.

Something entered their world that hadn’t in a very long time.

Like everything else, the daycare became chaotic once the world span back into action. Parents that hadn’t yet left grabbed their kids and ran, but those children who were left were herded into a back room with the door barricaded shut.

There was something in the air.

The second the roof caved in, he jumped.

Landing in a desert, a kind old man found him. Told him where he was, and how incredibly peculiar it was for a toddler to be wandering the desert during the off season.

The off season, he came to learn, was much more dangerous than it was named.

Six years he lingered on Yerine. Six years he lived on a planet where he felt he didn’t belong.

When he left, of course he didn’t have any understanding of his species’ physiology. He was four, for God’s sake. Yet on Yerine, living with the man who found him, he came to the understanding that he was not the same.

Those who lived on Yerine were thankfully close to humans, all for quirks. Used to the more demanding conditions of the desert, they were able to walk for miles and miles without need for water. They thrived off of sunlight.

He, on the other hand, did not share those traits. He thrived in the dark, and required water much more regularly. He was much stronger than most natives, and seemed mesmerized with space.

The planet Yerine as a whole preferred to stay on the ground, where they thought it was safe and predictable. Very few even had the guts to travel over water.

He found this largely ridiculous, mostly because a majority of their planet was covered in water. “It’s better than the desert,” his argument would go.

It was his 10th birthday when another person fell out of the sky. Her hair shone like gold, and her eyes instantly narrowed when she noticed him staring at her so intently.

She told him to close his mouth or it’d get stuck like that.

Her name was Gloss and to him, she was a goddess.

The one time he called her that, she smacked him with his own shoe.

It was through her that he found out what happened. She was like him, she said. She notified him that their planet was still functional, if a bit deserted. Their species was slowly crawling back to populate it, but millions had yet to be found.

She was with a group that had taken up residence in a North American mountain range, and there were other settlements popping up across the globe.

Six years and it’d taken this long to get society going again.

When he told her that it was such a relief to meet another human after so long, she laughed. She then brashly announced that “Sorry, buddy, but we were never human.”

His entire world stopped once more… or so it seemed. Gloss later informed him that he had just passed out. He did it again, too, when she told him that they were part of a species called the ‘Cattlayans.’

So they were the aliens all along?

He preferred to ignore that stunning turn of events. And the fact that Gloss was a little too blunt for her own good.

Instead, he asked to go home.

Six years later, he breathed his first breath of mountain air. Gloss lead him up to a building that may have been a ski lodge a long time ago, but was now their base of operations. At that moment there were roughly 10 people present, but it still felt incredible.

Then Gloss pushed him into the pool.

It still felt incredible.