Chapter 4: Many Meetings
The first terrifying aspect the villagers noticed of the monster that hovered high above the ground was his huge size: it towered over their tallest houses by several meters, dwarfing all around it. Crackling purple energy danced and dazzled between the tips of its huge segmented tentacles, setting fire to all that it caressed. Its piercing eyes withered all beneath its gaze. Some tried to run, but the majority stood as still as a sheep in a cart's headlights. Where was there to run to? They'd heard tales of this creature from bedraggled, dead-eyed refugees from the cities the monster had reaped. They knew its capabilities, and knew that there was very little use running if it were already this close. Lovers held each other close, and families huddled together at the monster's mercy.
The second terrifying aspect that some of the more perceptive villagers noticed was the crude balls grasped in his tentacles.
"Greetings, simple humans. I am known as Vel'Koz."
He spoke down to the villagers. He had seen this was the way they introduced themselves to one another on their first meeting, and so he decided to emulate this to allay suspicion.
Some of the people exchanged glances. None of them had ever heard that it could talk before, much less had a name. If anything, that made the situation even more horrifying: That it was intelligent meant that it was not a savage beast killing for food or self-defence. It knew what it was doing, and had slaughtered countless towns by conscious choice.
Alot of the children were crying. A few of the men and women were, too.
Vel'Koz chose to assume that this was because his appearance was different to theirs, and made them uneasy. He therefore decided that his greeting had not had the desired effect, and subsequently determined that he must ingratiate himself with the locals quickly by performing his routine, else the operation may not be salvagable.
"I have observed your existences, and understand that you enjoy entertainment. I have devised such a routine specifically developed for maximum enjoyment. Observe."
The task was easy enough to do, so it only required one of his secondary eyes to make sure it was done correctly. His other eyes were used to guage the human's reactions. As the balls travelled over from one limb to the other, blackened with soot by his innate void energy, the villagers eyed each other nervously. Was it toying with them? They expected terrible, burning agony, huge purple lasers that heralded horrible mutilation and death to all that it touched. Not… whatever this was.
Somehow, this was worse.
Vel'Koz noted their suspicion had been anything but assuaged: if anything, it had been intensified. He had been sure his demonstration of coordination would win the minds of the villagers to his cause. Had his attempts had failed? It was possible. He was not ready to give up yet, however. He believed that there was still a chance of integrating himself into their lives and studying their behaviours up close.
As he was pondering this, one of his secondary eyes caught a female human figure striding through the crowd from the centre of the town. Vel'Koz noted she showed no signs of fear: she walked with serene grace, and wore a garment of red and white cloth. She drew the eyes of the humans in the crowd, and was plainly seen as one with great aesthetic merit, but these traits were nothing that he had not found before. However, he was intrigued by the addition of a tail and ears that Vel'Koz would usually have associated with what the humans called a "fox". He felt a growing sense of eagerness over the knowledge this one's body would contain, as he'd never seen anything like it; but he was still attempting to integrate himself into the locals and learn their ways, so he refrained from disintegrating her there and then.
Besides, he reasoned, he could always do it later, if she was still around.
"These villagers are under my protection", the female purred softly as she stroked her own tail and looked up at him under hooded eyes, "And I do not take kindly to your intrusion."
Vel'Koz, continuing to entertain the village who were watching their exchange, leaned down until his primary eye was less than a meter from the female's face. He made sure to look into her eyes for a prolonged period of time, for he had observed that eye contact between humans built trust and friendship. This one seemed more interested in him than the rest, though her eyes betrayed a small amount of fear that had, at first, been masked by her confident stance. Maybe he could become her "friend", and hence allow her to connect him to the rest of the village and find his new purpose in life.
"Greetings, strange human. I am known as Vel'Ko-"
Before he could finish his greeting, the unusual human did something queer with her facial features, and placed her open palm beneath her chin. As she blew out a gust of air from her lungs, a bolt of pink energy in the shape of a blood-pumping organ hit Vel'Koz directly into his eye. He instantly analysed the composition of the spell that was attempted on him, determining its intent; she meant to render him immobilized with what the humans called "lust" for her, and hence make him unable to fight back. He assumed that the female would then have tried to kill him. Thankfully, Vel'Koz was exceedingly large so the spell effects were less concentrated and, being void-native, had a stronger will than the creatures that this female would usually have used this spell on, and could ignore its effects.
He couldn't completely ignore it, however.
In the blink of an eye, he dropped the entertainment routine. The subduing of this female was a higher priority. He drew his tentacles swiftly around her limbs and lifted her bodily into the air. The female gasped as she was suspended above the ground in front of his face. She struggled, for a time. After a while of trying to wriggle her way out of his grasp, and succeeding in only causing the abrasion of her limbs on his rough-textured tentacles, the female stopped and hung her head.
"Alright, alright, you win. Please, don't f… do anything… to the villagers. You can… uh… take me."
The female muttered as she looked up at him, locks of fine black hair hanging in front of her slitted eyes like "curtains", as the humans called them. Looking into her face and at her body splayed out in front of him, Vel'Koz felt some alien urges that had never occurred to him before. However, he brushed them off as the aftereffects of the spell the female had cast on him. It would wear off in time.
"Take you where? I wish to learn the ways of the humans. I needed to restrain you so you would not continue to give me resistance. Is there a place that we must go to learn these things? A shrine of teaching? Tell me."
The female raised her head and cocked it to one side, eyes half closed in what Vel'Koz recognized as a sign of confusion.
"So you're not going to…?"
The female blushed and looked away. Was it just him, or did she look slightly…
Disappointed?
The female gave his body another appraising glance from underneath those long, dark eyelashes. She seemed particularly interested in his tentacles.
"It's just… I've heard so many stories about what you did in the towns that you destroyed. What you did to the… to the women, in particular."
Vel'Koz did not understand what the female was trying to tell him. Maybe he did not understand this communication after all. It was exhilarating to know that there were some nuances and hidden meanings that he must learn.
"I assimilated them for information, just as I did with the males."
The female muttered something under her breath about her 'knowing that it wasn't true'. She then looked back at him, staring straight into his primary eye.
"So… wait. You want to learn how to act like a human? It might be a bit difficult when you look like that. So, are you stopping the whole disintegrating thing?"
"Indeed. I require a new purpose in life. Whilst I still seek knowledge, I have decided to apply a different method of doing so. I wish to understand deeper than physical biology: I wish to perceive the nature of these humans and their relationships with each other. Disintegration cannot detect these things."
"So, wait. You learn about things by deconstructing them? So all those people were only killed so you could learn about them?"
The female looked at him in revulsion. She clearly did not approve of his methods. He thought it would be best to placate her a bit.
"I thought it a necessary sacrifice. However, it matters not: I am no longer using such methods of information extraction."
He left out the fact that he was still willing to acquire information from her the usual way, considering she was a biological anomaly and would yield large amounts of knowledge.
"Instead, I require a mentor to teach me. Could you assist me?"
Vel'Koz looked to the female in anticipation. As he waited for her response, in his secondary eyes, he noted that the villagers, having heard their exchange and no longer being awed by his entertainment routine, had gone back to their homes. Not that they weren't still suspicious of him; many still stared out their windows as if expecting him to destroy them for no obvious reason. He found it rather absurd. Whilst a majoirty of them still seemed to be scared of his presence, a few foolhardy children, ignoring their parents' scolding, took turns daring each other to touch some of Vel'Koz' tentacles. He zapped them idly to scare them off, accidentally killing one of them for no apparent reason, before returning his attention to the female as the other children ran off screaming. Thankfully, the female was too busy thinking on his proposal to notice this slight blunder.
"I… I guess I could help you. It's not like I have a choice or anything, is there?" She forced a smile up at him. For whatever reason, she had clearly overcome her distaste for his extraction methods.
Vel'Koz noted that, whilst she did have a choice to not help him, her alternative option involved her immediate destruction. Considering that she appeared to be in a more docile state than when he first arrived, he opted not to mention this, knowing that it would only make her more agitated, and as a show of what the humans called "trust", he lowered her slowly to the ground and released her from his grasp.
The female shivered as the tentacles untangled themselves from around her legs, and brushed herself off quickly, pushing her hair out of her face and back down on her head, her ears twitching back into place as her perfect hands ran over them. She still seemed to be glancing uneasily at his tentacles.
Or was it longingly? He could not discern her facial expression well enough to know.
"I guess I should introduce myself, considering you've already done so. I'm Ahri."
She held out her hand in front of her, palm outstretched and facing to the side, the slight breeze in the air causing her garment to billow to one side and hug her arm's supple shape on the other.
Vel'Koz looked down at Ahri's hand and its perfectly painted nails, unsure of what she was doing. He had never come across this ritual before. Noticing his apparent confusion, Ahri giggled to herself before playfully stating:
"It's a human custom to shake a person's hand when they first meet, you know. We may as well start our lessons straight away."
Wordlessly nodding, Vel'Koz slid one of his appendages round and wrapped the tip of it round Ahri's hand a few times, and also a way up her arm to make sure of a stable grip. Her eyes widened at the soft feel slithering over her skin: whilst his tentacles had a barbed texture near his body, at the end meter or so they had a smooth, almost slimy consistency, so as to channel the void energies through his tips with minimum resistance. He noticed Ahri perspiring slightly as he shook her hand up and down lightly for a couple of seconds, and then waited for further instruction, tentacle still wrapped tight around her limb.
"All right… You… You can let go now, p-please." Ahri stuttered. She appeared slightly panicked about something, sweat glistening from her forehead, drops sliding down her perfectly formed cheeks, and Vel'Koz found the alien thoughts returning unbidden once again, whispering encouragement for some rather primal actions that had no real reproductive use, considering how biologically different their bodies were.
He really needed to get her to reverse the effects of that spell.
But that could wait. For now, he did as he was told, and carefully unwound his grip from her hand. He felt like she would trust him more if he followed her instructions. She bit her lip as he did so, and Vel'Koz picked up a quiet moan that she seemed to be trying her hardest to withhold. After the tentacle had withdrawn, she turned away to the side for a second and drew a deep breath, her chest rising and falling captivatingly. Her head moved from side to side, noticing the people watching through their windows. She seemed uneasy.
"If you want to learn how humans behave, come with me. We're leaving. I don't like drawing this much… attention."
"As you wish." Vel'Koz croaked in response, voice echoing between the houses. He was feeling elated that he'd finally started on his way to learning about how humans interacted, and curious as to how much more he couldn't discover by simply disintegrating it. He would have to put his mind to it.
Ahri tottered off away from the village with decidedly less grace than she'd first arrived with, and glanced back every few seconds to make sure the huge void monster was following. The villagers watched from behind their windows and door frames as the tentacled nightmare drifted out the town, humming to himself softly.