Tevun-Krus #11 - Holiday Extravaganza

If I had a Wish...

If I Had a Wish ...
By Shawn Jackson

Jalin sighed as he stuffed a jacket into his knapsack and pulled the drawstring closed.  Then he sagged against the wall to stare off into space, thoughts spinning.

It had been almost eight years since he had been home.  Eight years since he had seen his family.  This was supposed to be the year he'd finally get home for the holidays, finally see his mom and dad, the twins and his baby sister.  This year, damn it!

Yet, here he was, nearly a hundred thousand light years away in a different part of the galaxy, with no possible chance of getting home in time.  As Star Trek's Scotty used to say: 'ya cannae break the laws of physics!' and despite it being hundreds of years since that old sci-fi program was on the airwaves and new laws getting discovered in the meantime, those laws still said it was impossible to cross a hundred thousand light years in less than three days.

As he thought about it a bit longer, Jalin could feel hot tears making their way into his eyes; tears of frustration and emotional pain.

"Something wrong, kid?" a quiet voice asked in slightly accented Common Tongue.

Savagely wiping away the nascent tears before they could blur his vision, Jalin twisted towards the voice's owner.  In doing so, found himself looking at a relatively short, slender individual, nearly hidden beneath a heavy cloak and hood of dark gray and purple.

"Hey," the voice said from the shadowy depths of the hood.  "I know you.  You're Jalin, that new bio-engineer working on the Tolston Project, the human."

"Yeah, that's me," Jalin said a bit more gruffly than he originally intended.  Clearing his throat, he straightened up.  "And you're the energy field specialist, um, ... Krundle, Kranky, ..."

"Kringle," the diminutive person supplied and Jalin nodded.

"Right.  Kringle."  He rubbed tiredly at his face for a moment.  "No, there's nothing wrong.  Why do you ask?"

The small person cocked his head to the side as if listening to something.  Then he was speaking and Jalin swore he could hear a smile in the guy's voice.

"No reason, kid," he said in that quiet voice of his.  "I see you're packing up your stuff.  Heading somewhere?  Maybe home?  I hear it's a holiday on one of the human worlds, what was it called again?  Dirt, Stone, Soil, ..."

"Earth," Jalin smiled wryly as this time it was him supplying the name.  "Yeah, it's Christmas in a couple days."

"Christmas," Kringle repeated almost musingly.  "A non-universal Earth human holiday with a faint nod to certain religious sects as a day of importance.  More often it's used an excuse to take time off work, eat ridiculous amounts of food and give outrageous gifts to each other as tokens of respect and admiration."

Jalin stared at the diminutive alien for a long moment before his voice caught up to his stunned thoughts.

"Uh yeah, something like that," he managed.  "You seem to know alot about it."

Kringle shrugged.

"I like to know a thing or two about alien cultures, especially what they do in their recreational time," he said.  "Bit of a hobby, really.  Tells me what is truly important to them."

"You ... can get all that from their holidays?" Jalin asked, clearly puzzled.  Kringle nodded.

"It's logic, Jalin.  What do you do when you have spare time?  I don't want specifics, just a general notion."