UnEarthing Toroid

Part 5

When Hazel woke up the next morning, the first thing she noticed was her pounding headache. Nothing unusual there; that was how she woke up nearly every morning. But it definitely made her decide to roll over and sleep for another two hours maybe... Until she remembered the aliens.

 She jolted out of bed, hopping to her feet and flicking on the lights all in one snapping movement that made her headache throb even harder. But as she clutched her forehead and looked around... Everything was fine. 

At least, everything looked fine. Her door was still closed and locked, no sign of tampering. No fire, no screaming, she hadn't woken up missing one of her kidneys. Had letting strangers stay in her house overnight really not backfired on her? 

Still in her pajamas, she moved over towards the door and quietly poked her head out. Nothing. The house was still. No noise. No lights. Not even so much as quiet voices whispering in some alien language. Maybe I imagined them. Hazel thought to herself, stepping out into the hallway. But no, she hadn't been that drunk last night, and she'd never had dreams that vivid. They were definitely real. So, either they were still asleep, or they were just too scared to leave their rooms before their hostess was awake.

Either way, the end result was the same. Hazel still had a house full of strangers claiming to be aliens. 

It took her only a second to decide what to do.

With an air of jaded nonchalance, she made her way down the stairs, through the hall, and into the kitchen. She didn't try to be especially quiet or anything, but she didn't need to. She was so small and light that her bare-feet footsteps didn't even make a sound, except for a creak on the floorboards here and there. When she got into the kitchen, she opened the fridge and immediately took a swig from a bottle of cold vodka. That would cure her headache for sure. Then she pulled out a full package of bacon, a bag of coffee grounds, a loaf of bread, and a carton of eggs. Which was her usual routine. She ate this for breakfast almost every morning. Bacon was her favorite food. That was all. Taking one more gulp from the vodka bottle, she grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the cupboards and turned on the stove.

About 15 minutes later, Jierro cautiously poked his head in the kitchen. He had been awake for a couple hours now, used to rising before dawn, but he'd felt it impolite to roam around another person's house without permission.

But then he'd heard the noises of cooking coming from the kitchen, and he'd smelled it too. It smelled like bacon and coffee and toast and eggs, which was a very common breakfast that he had on the ranch. Not only did many ranch hands cook it during the work season, but even his employers often had it every day during the winter. The idea of a comfortable, familiar, and filling breakfast, the morning after such a stressful ordeal as being stranded on an alien planet—it was too good to resist. He would just go see who was cooking, that was all. And maybe they would be willing to share a bit with him. 

He was relieved when he saw it was Hazel. That meant he could actually be awake now. "Hello, good morning." He said congenially in Common, without thinking about it.

"Oh." Hazel glanced over her shoulder, looking away from the sizzling pan of bacon in front of her. She raised an eyebrow, then tossed Jierro her phone to translate. "Hey. What's up? You want breakfast?" She nodded at the array of ingredients before her. She didn't acknowledge that somehow, before anyone else had even woken up, she'd already started cooking way more food than she could've possibly eaten herself.

"You'd share? Thank you, I'd love some." He said in his best customer-service voice, the polite tones he used around his employers, not the rough-and-tumble way he spoke to the other ranch hands. Hazel was obviously much better off than him, and she lived in a giant rustic cabin, which only reminded Jierro of his employers even more. "It's nice of you to offer."