Homeward

1 - Hotel Flora

I don't know how long I was in space.

But I do know exactly how long I was in the tree.

 Three days, judging by the bigger of the two suns.

I still don't know what happened to the pod. Maybe it burnt up in the atmosphere. But how would I have survived? I guess it probably fell to the ground somewhere in the area, and I simply never found it. But that doesn't make much sense, either. Dangling there, I had a good long while to look around, and I didn't see any of the tell-tale signs of destruction that having an escape pod falling through a forest canopy would have left behind. Only Ehta knows for sure.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

There I was, hanging upside down by my boot, which was caught in a thorny vine. I was several hundred meters in the air, held aloft in a gargantuan tree. Weirdly, I didn't feel many ill effects from being the wrong way up. Maybe it's this planet's lower-than-average gravity. Maybe it's my charming personality.

You might be asking yourself: How did you survive up there for three days? Luckily, the berries of the vines growing there proved to be quite fortifying. Now I know to call them zam berries. Blueish green and about the size and texture of fried tofu balls, they kept me happily hydrated and calorically satisfied during my stay in Hotel Flora. My only complaint was the pain in my ankle from there the vine was tight. Don't ask me how I relieved myself.

"I guess this beats liquification," I said to myself, unconvincingly. I was starting to run out of berries within reach and I began to wonder if my seemingly miraculous escape from the Death Tube was more curse than blessing.

At one point, I made a little friend. A creature that looked like a cross between a chameleon and a macaque was slowly making its way toward me along a branch. It would stop occasionally along its path to bite off one of the zam berries. The berries would go down whole -- it didn't seem to have any teeth -- and so the creature's neck would bulge out with the volume of three or four berries at once, making its skin stretch thin like shiny paper. It would wiggle its torso around like it was chewing cud but with its whole body, and the berry bulges would disappear one by one. Then, it would resume slowly walk-climbing its way toward me again, unperturbed. 

"Hey little guy," I said to it, but really to myself. "Any chance you got a pocket knife?"

He rolled one of his individually pivotable eyes at me dismissively, but kept stepping his way toward me along a branch, sometimes plucking berries off of their stems with a bifurcated, mitten-like hand.

It was nice to have company.

"You know, Talson," I said to the creature. I had once had a friend named Talson. Poor Talson. Hanging there from the vine, I was spinning slowly.

"Talson," I said, "I've been thinking. Where are we? Is this your homeworld? I still haven't figured out how I got here. If I was ejected into space in that little pod, there's no way I travelled through interplanetary space to arrive on a new planet. Couldn't happen. I shoulda just fallen to Stevtak III. But this isn't that shithole!"

Stevtak III was a desert. Which makes the gooeyness of the Shared Mind that much more remarkable. They protected themselves from the dryness by living exclusively in artificially humid bio-domes both on the planet's surface, below its mantle, and in space satellites like the one I was ejected out of.

Talson yawned the kind of yawn that looks like someone's head is going to split in half. It was impressive!

"You're right. Not much use wondering about that at the moment." My foot had started to feel numb, finally. "Get out of the tree, Prim."

That's my name. Poor Prim.

A few hours passed. Talson sunned himself on a branch nearby, and I vomited once or twice. The effects of being upside down for so long were setting in, despite the apparently low gravity, or whatever it was that had kept me relatively intact all this time. I'd started to more mindfully ration berries to myself, and I'd had to keep Talson from snacking on a few bunches that were still within my reach. I'd shoo him away with a bunch of leaves on the end of a branch I'd successfully snapped off of one of the smaller limbs in my immediate vicinity.

The larger of the two suns was beginning to set. This had happened before, no big deal. But something was different this time. Everything was quieter, stiller, more tense. Talson's bulbous eyes shot all around in a more frenetic way than they had before, and he seemed perched on the branch in a more muscular way, I guess, than before. Like he was about to leap away if something spooked him.

I tried to gulp, but my mouth was too dry. Time to eat one of the few berries remaining. I'd gotten pretty good at the trapeze act required to grab the berries at the furthest extremity of my reach: I'd heave-ho a bit to build up momentum and then swing over to the berries, grabbing the berries one at a time, since that seemed to ensure I would drop fewer of them.

I heaved and I ho'd, swinging back and forth through the air on the vine.

This time, when I reached out to grab a berry, that's when I saw it. A man-sized creature crouched there on a limb--no, on a twig! it was impossibly balanced on a branch no bigger than the one Talson was perched on!--there was a set of three eyes staring right at me. More importantly, there was an open, blue-green mouth just waiting for me to stick my hand inside it as I grasped for the zam berry.

The first gralnat I ever saw, and it had decided that I was its dinner.

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Author's Note: Hi! This is my first work on Wattpad and so I'd really appreciate it if you voted and commented if you're enjoying the story! Thanks for reading! -Gabriel