UnEarthing Toroid

Part 7

When Natalie woke up the next morning, she had completely forgotten about the aliens in her house. She sat up in bed, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and thought: Was I supposed to do something this morning...? But the bleariness of sleep refused to leave her head, so she just shrugged, resolved to think of it later, and hopped out of bed.

She put her feet in dainty silk slippers, throwing on a gauzy robe over her thin pajamas. It was an oddly mature look for a girl her age, like she was trying to imitate someone much older. But it did look nice on her, in its' own way.

She moved to turn on the light, yawning and rubbing her face. Natalie had never been a morning person. She always stayed up too late with her friends, got up too early to get ready for school, and never quite recovered enough on the weekends. 

Her blurry eyes alighted on her 'fashion board' – a corkboard hung on the wall, smattered with magazine clippings, sketches, and pictures of her out with her friends. I wonder if Marie's awake. We should go to the mall. She checked her phone, but saw nothing except two good-morning texts from her parents. Which she ignored, because parents weren't as important as friends. Oh well, I guess I can just work on—

But Natalie's thoughts were interrupted by the clanging of metal from downstairs. She startled, jumping a bit and clutching her hands to her chest. But then it all flew back to her at once: the aliens, the hot guys, the weird fainting girl...

"Oh shoot. That wasn't a dream...?" She murmured to herself out loud, then quickly bounced over to the stairs to see what was going on.

On her way down, she stopped to smooth down her hair and pinch color into her lips. She didn't want to run into them looking like she just woke up! Besides, she wasn't worried that anything was really going wrong. Because bad things just didn't happen to her, or people like her.

And she was proved right, when she went into the kitchen.

The weird fainting girl—the one called Ettine—was stretching up on her tip-toes, reaching to put a pot back into one of the cabinets. That must have been the clanging sound. At some point in the night, Ettine had taken off her frilly dress, and was wearing a long white slip with puffy sleeves. It looked more like a nightgown than an undergarment. Her pale feet were shrouded in fuzzy white socks.

Natalie was disappointed that it wasn't one of the hot guys, but oh well. Got all prettified for nothing. She took a seat on the kitchen table and waved casually. "Hey."

"Oh!" Ettine looked back over her shoulder, quickly shoving the pot into the cabinet before turning around. Her white curls bounced. She said something that Natalie didn't understand.

Oh, that's right. They can't talk. Natalie recalled, quickly pulling out her phone and getting a translator. "Sorry, say that again?"

"I was just looking around for something to eat. I thought that would be alright." Ettine smiled with naïve certainty, as if there was no possible way she had overstepped a boundary. "No one was awake, and I was hungry. I thought I might boil some eggs."

Isn't that like, rude? Aren't you supposed to ask someone before you cook in their house? Natalie raised an eyebrow, but she didn't really care. She wasn't an adult yet, so she had no stakes in all of that 'propriety' stuff. "Boil some eggs? We can do better than that. Let me call Uber Eats. What are you in the mood for? Oh—Glad to see you didn't like, die, by the way." She pulled up the Uber Eats app on her phone.

"Last night?" Ettine's face creased with a puzzled and embarrassed expression. "Did I faint? I thought I might. I shouldn't have sang and danced so much. I told you that it happens sometimes...Even with my medicine. I may get much worse without it."