To Hell and Back (Hellworlder pirates)

Ch14 Partnership

Partnership

"Complete blindness?" Bachir gaped.

Terry sent a message to Alice and the others and had escorted me back to the ship, and I felt more than saw as Terry faded away and the Bosun came out the moment he set foot on the expansive and usually empty deck. He stood there and radiated waves of aggression and violence as a set of tired drunken steps approached the ship. She still couldn't see, but the tangy metallic scent that tinged the air told her that they were covered in blood.

"They dead?" the bosun rumbled softly, a shiver had gone down her spine when she heard the menace and rage implicit in his words.

"Yes" Alice answered firmly.

"Bodies?"

"None to be found, Sir"

Mirth entered his frame "Den hos 'off, ye smell o' cowards blood"

He left down the passageway and Alice rushed up to engulf Alwen in a suspiciously sticky hug, and laughed as she told Alice about how she got lost.

The next day Allen's head pounded and her vision had mostly returned while doctor Bachir spent most of their morning interrogating her about last night's adventure. Now she was trying to explain why she had lost vision.

"It has something to do with how alcohol interrupts the signals being sent by the optic nerves. And the way it inhibits my brain doesn't help either."

"That last part is something we share, its part of alcohol's allure. But a disturbance specifically centered in optic nerve is something new. Terran eyesight is effected by alcohol, but not to the point regular but temporary blindness." He mused "What can you tell me about your eyes?"

She thought for a moment, Terran eyes and Torweni worked in very similar ways, but accomplished the task differently from each other. "Tri-chromatic vision, with less cases of color blindness than Terrans. Similar night vision and pupil functions. The main difference is in our light filtration ability's. Terrans absorb any and all light, and simply shrink the range when necessary, we do the same but with one extra feature. Something in our eyes change to modulate distorted light which lets us see very clearly underwater, and our tear ducts release a fluid to protect our eyes underwater."

"Why all the water-based adaptions?"

"Unlike humans whose ancestors left the trees for plains and became bipedal persistence hunters we left our trees for coastal scavenging. Our ancestors evolved in a time when there was much more land mass to support their populations, but the end of the third ice age flooded lots of the lowlands where our ancestors evolved. It slowly took away our forests and replaced them with lots of low coastal areas. We adapted eating invertebrates and crustaceans, and its believed that the protein and enzymes we got from them allowed for us to begin evolving our brains. We got good at swimming and eventually lost our fur, and developed bipedal locomotion because it made us better swimmers without becoming true marine mammals like a lot of other species."

He looked at her intensely "How long can you hold your breath"

"Six to seven Terran minutes comfortably, I think the world record is close to twenty."

"Do you sweat."

"Yes but not as efficiently as humans."

"Why are you purple?"