The Substitutes: Contract

The Proudest Warrior

As Kyu so often boosted, his pride and honour in representing a model of his species was absolute. So when Sam told him to leave, he went and stayed gone. Sam's most optimistic view had been that he would keep dropping in 'coincidentally', either to inquire about the Gift or try once more to convince Sara to take up arms. But in the two weeks since they had parted, there had been neither hide or hair of the alien, and if he was hanging around the house, he was doing a spectacular job of masking his presence, because with how quiet the Bellamy household had become in his absence, Sam was almost missing his high-handed speeches and long bouts of technobabble. 

Two weeks had passed since the dismembering and repair of Chester and Sara had yet to speak a single word to him that didn't involve some sort of command, desires for food chief amongst them. They'd been forced to apologise under the stern court of their mother who considered the matter wrapped up, and yet the only thing that had changed was the temperature of Sara's cold shoulder dropping down to an absolute zero that could be felt throughout the house despite her staying locked up in her bedroom at any hours she wasn't required to go to school. Sam had ventured twice to open communications in the chance moments they passed each other by, but both attempts had been rebuffed by dead-eyed stares and requests for him to leave. As he predicted, the only way to restore warmth was to wait out Sara's cold anger and find something else to do with his time that didn't involve one-sided gaming marathons or having the plots of lengthy cartoon series explained to him. As it happened, he had two perfect projects to work on that he could do in tandem.

While Sam was sure that Kyu would come crawling back at the first hint of trouble, that didn't mean he was happy to let the next invader have free reign while his informant was sulking. His phone might have been an outdated model, but it could still receive radio news reports. With some legally questionable tuning, he was also able to hone it to pick up local police chatter as well. Regardless of source, every unusual story was jotted down in a notebook for future research. He wasn't about to go chasing after every fledgling rumour, but it would be unseemly to appear inattentive to what might have been going on the world. The last thing he wanted was for Kyu to return and immediately reinflate his ego at the expense of Sam's ignorance.

The thought produced a scowl as he doubled down on the blueprint he was working on. Why did he care so much about what Kyu thought of him anyway? The progress he'd made on his main project was on a reasonable enough pace that soon enough he wasn't going to have to ask Kyu to build another thing for him, and he'd done it all himself, without some smug know-it-all hanging over his shoulder telling him how much better some self-named technique might have improved his efficiency by 0.001% in the art of making a sharpened stick.

The Abductor might have been the one to drive a wedge between him, his sister and their benefactor, but after splitting the disk open Sam had found more than enough mysteries to fill the void of time, each one introducing a new headache into his life. Where once his bedroom had been bare of anything but necessities, hand-scratched drawings could be found spilling out of his desk and onto the floor as he picked through the crumpled shell to replicate the machinations within to paper. By luck or by design of the craft, the attack that had put it out of commission had done little to damage the factory under the glass, but this only served to highlight the annoyance of having to fiddle around with what was essentially a toy model. With a magnifying glass and torch to hand, identifying the nature of the miniature parts he'd once walked through had been simple enough. But the cutting lasers that had left him sprinting for his life were now flimsy twigs, liable to snap if pressed on slightly with a pencil, let alone allow him to open one up to see how exactly the beam was generated, and the waves of wires that connected them to the batteries were so tightly integrated into the power sources that he didn't dare even attempt to move them too harshly for fear of damaging a part he couldn't repair and rendering the entire project worthless. And as the other machinery wasn't going to lead him down the path of owning a laser gun of his own, they were placed on the backburner in favour of figuring out the more important (and cooler, in his opinion) parts.