The Substitutes: Contract

Prepare an Execution, Execute Proper Planning

The feeling of satisfaction lasted right up until six hours later when he had to achingly wake up for what had felt like the longest day of school he'd endured in his whole life. If his parents noticed the damage to the garden they aired no comments one way or the other, not even when he took up a sudden interest in gardening and fence repair. But after that tiring disruption there was nothing bizarre for the rest of the month, an oddity in and of itself given that he'd been expecting similar encounters from week to week. Kyu explained that away with one pointed sentence.

"You are aware of the time scale involved in space travel, right? I myself spent a week in transit waiting for the exit, and that was on a journey exceeding the speed of light, albeit one without a set location in mind. Terratsar has no such advantage and is too stupid to reverse-engineer our teleporters. While it's highly likely they were able to trace my path and obtain the coordinates for the Milky Way, they'll have to make their way here by analogue methods, if you would. I give it about half an Earth year before we have to worry about another encounter."

While Sam didn't want to doubt the alien's judgement, telling him not to worry just made him worry harder, especially as Sara continued to wear the Gift about her neck. And so he added learning about the particulars of space travel to his daily routine. Unfortunately, all this did was lead to an increase to the list of words he didn't understand, as any material that got in-depth into the subject just left him reeling from paragraphs of digital text that all blended together the longer he read. In the end, he left the subject drop, safe in the knowledge that if anyone he knew was going to be up-to-date on the science involved, it would be his current squatter.

On the brighter side of things, his physical training was progressing splendidly. As the day after the fight against the Ranthe had proven, he had sorely neglected to use his muscles for anything other than day-to-day mundanities. Ignoring the issue of exhaustion, if he was going to continue battling in Sara's place he would need to have more strength and endurance than none whatsoever. With that in mind, the first and most sensible thing to do was cut his morning bus rides were cut in half, jogging the rest of the way to school. Or rather, jogging a quarter and limping for the last few streets, aching muscles burning with questions regarding their sudden usage after years of mild exercise at most. It was bad enough that doubling the effort he normally gave in P.E. was unthinkable until the third Monday of his efforts, when he arrived at the gates only slightly out of breath. But despite his self-imposed hurdles, it was easy to forget why he was training in the first place. Other than the introduction of an unwanted quest who was supposedly 'monitoring the situation' from his borrowed laptop and occasionally winding his sister up, life was quiet. Right up until insect swarms began blotting out the sky.

The phenomenon sprung up overnight, starting with small local news stories about unseasonal bursts of butterflies taking flight, an unexpected sight in February to be sure. They were not the first to emerge, and soon the dying days of winter resembled a chillier version of summer. While no damage was reported other than a notable increase in people swallowing bugs mid-conversation, the school felt the matter serious enough to keep windows barred and the students inside, a command that went over about as well as could be expected, with bets frequently thrown about as to who could sneak out first. It didn't take long for that betting pool to dry up, all wagers cancelled upon the discovery of a dry remains of a local cat that had lived near the school grounds; its body drained of all fluids. Coincidentally, this was about the time Kyu 'clarified' the arrival of another alien over breakfast.

***

"I can't very well go flying off the handle every time something out of the ordinary happens, now can I? I'm still working through the data I downloaded from the internet and as such am not fully caught up with how things work here on Earth. Frankly, the variance in habitats alone means you're lucky I'm not dismayed at a lack of panda bears around these parts."