Leape

In which Penn abandons Lethia for tourism

4

Penn felt himself... change. It wasn't like, oh no, I'm going through puberty, or anything. It was more like he, himself, was changing, internally. Instead of feeling bored all the time, he found himself getting excited by... weird things. For example, the lure of seal hunting... excited him. Back home, it wouldn't've at all– he would've preferred reading, or just staring and watching paint dry. Even watching grass grow would've been better back home.

But here, in this new, weird, world, he found himself wanting to go seal hunting. Of course, he was expected to, as he and Lethia had been told very sternly that they had to help. And so, Penn did.

Looking out over the white-washed plane of ice and snow, there wasn't anything that was terribly remarkable; mainly it was sheets of pure white that reflected the (albeit limited) , but Penn thought– and was pretty sure– that he'd seen a few polar bear cubs playing before their mother, who was large, even from a distance, pulled them into their snow-and-ice-created den.

"Let's go," said the Commander from the night before, whose name turned out to be Horace, which seemed an odd name for a commander that lived on a frozen planet, but that worked.

"Where?" Penn asked immediately, standing up from where he had been sitting, turning his gaze from the rugged landscape to Horace.

The man looked down at him from his vantage point of six feet, icy eyes matching the tundra. "Seal hunting."

There it was again. A thrill at the idea of seal hunting. I don't even like seals! He thought, brows furrowing together.

"Here," said Horace, half-throwing, half-handing a thick, winter coat to Penn. "Put this on. You'll meet up with Cayto soon enough."

A picture flashed before Penn's eyes, only lasting a second while he had been blinking, but clear as day.

Out on the ice sat a boy, maybe fourteen, a dingy fishing rod in his hand, obviously homemade, staring at the ice hole dejectedly. Dark hair fell into his eyes, looking something like a bowl cut, almost, but not quite, with plenty of hair grown out underneath where the bowl would be. It was hard to tell, however, because of the hood that covered his head which sheltered him from the wind and the snow... but also from anyone else.

He looked peaceful, in part, because of the peaceful landscape, and as he stared down at the ice hole, Penn couldn't help but wonder why exactly he was fishing like that—everything else in that particular "realm", as Lethia had called it, was relatively high-tech—when he could be seal catching or even something else.

Penn was snapped out of his thoughts about the fourteen-year-old by a hand waving in his face.

"Hey! I'm talking to you, ice kid!"

It was Horace. Penn looked up at him again, putting the heavy coat on. He blinked innocently up at the Commander. "What?"

"Let's go. It's well past dawn." The sky was still dark, stars glittering above the windswept landscape where the polar bears had been minutes ago.

"It's dark outside—?"

"It's dark outside because of that seal-forsaken sun! There's winter months, when we don't even see a minute of daylight, and then there's the summer months, when the planet floods."

"I'm sorry, the planet floods?"

Horace ignored his question. "We've wasted enough time, let's go," said Horace gruffly, leading the way out of the camp.

It was ringed with igloos, something Penn wouldn't've guessed would happen on Earth, but then again, there wasn't a planet that flooded completely in the summer, either.