The first time someone had thrown me off of an alien tree, I had a group of ET's friends standing by to help me. At the tree of my enemy, I couldn't hope to have such luck again.

In a moment of calm, pondering what Roger Moore would do in my situation, I wished for a parachute, then, as I thought about it a second more, I came to the sudden realization that Norenio had actually shown me a parachute like feature on my outfit.

I pulled the rings and the glider cape popped out. Unfortunately, being untrained in the art of skydiving, it caused me to go into a tailspin, flipping my body end over and end like a quarter. I threw up in my mouth a little.

I somersaulted, struck the roof of a hut. Not the comfortable thatched grass you'd expect.

I rolled, fell through a glass roof.

Below me lay one of those jacuzzi things that Qulpari love so much. Steam and weird musky scents filled the humid air, streams of condensation dripping down the walls into the thick sod flooring.

I flipped over again, splashing down in oozing glop the color and consistency of pea soup.

I struggled to the surface, trying not to think about the squirming caviar like...objects beneath my feet.

I snatched air, the slime burning my eyes when I opened them.

Once my vision cleared, I found my nose practically touching the face of a Qulpari with a mouthful of eggs.

Worse, I recognized him, he was my zookeeper, the one who had examined me during my imprisonment. Well, I suppose he deserved this.

I bet he would have yelled at me had his mouth not been busy with baby making activities. Presently, he could only sputter a little and glare at me. I think he swallowed an egg or two.

His companions, though...

The Qulpari that had captured me in a bubble when I first arrived on Jufuceri...she was growling and yelling about how I were more disgusting than what she'd heard, you know, from our visit to the Nisweku registration place.

Little wonder how she got that news, Izrigma the yernar representative was the third person in their sogwuba. I raised a pair of sticky hands, apologizing profusely as I accidentally crushed a few of their eggs beneath my feet. "I'm really sorry. It wasn't my idea, I didn't mean to interrupt, sorry."

I quickly scrambled out of their egg tub, dripping slime into the grass flooring. As the aliens continued to voice their upset, I thought about Meazquad and broke into sobs.

None of the aliens knew what to do with that. If I'd merely been apologetic, or angry, or laughing at the situation, they probably would have kept yelling, but crying? I think they couldn't decide whether to feel sorry for me or dismiss me as a weird kid being petulant about them not including me in their little bath party.

In a hurry to save myself some embarrassment, I flung open the nearest door, but it turned out to be a storage closet containing pool cleaning supplies, egg warming pads and the type of mystifying bedroom objects I'd seen in paintings at the Nisweku center. I opened another door, but it was like a bad dream, the room it lead to didn't take me outside, just a bedroom where the goose like lab helper from the zoo dozed in the corner, head nuzzled in its downy chest. Its eyes opened drowsily as I crept in for a fruitless search for an exit, then crept back out. The aliens, still very much upset, pointed to a third door, and that one actually led somewhere.

The first thing I noticed when I came outside was a smiling one eyed winged porpoise flitting past the balcony, which clicked at me, darting off on its merry way.

Although overgrown with ivy, the place looked nicer than ET's neighborhood. I stood on a balcony decorated with ornate stained glass and pillars. Even the ivy seemed like an accent. Over the rail, I could see a strange building that reminded me of something out of Mister Roger's puppet land. It had a design like a stereo, with a circular rotating piece resembling the Jefferson memorial, lit by changing colored lights.

In search of a way back to my friends, I followed the balcony to my left, wandering along for several yards until I spotted a section of the tree. Seeing it made me think I'd neared the flying machines. I quickened my pace.

"Elliott!" a voice hissed.

I looked up and saw a wriggling piscine shape flying down from a section higher on the tree. I rushed to meet him. "Charlie!"

It seems I was too loud. I saw him visibly cringe, and a moment after I cried out his name, a flood of black water came pouring down the bark of the tree, then gallons of foul smelling clumpy liquid the consistency of pancake syrup.

The substance moved quickly, in a way that hinted at intelligence. And then tentacles and worm like...lifeforms came reaching for me.

"Run, Elliott!" Charlie yelled.

I did what he said.

A few backwards glances told me our fears were not unjustified. The black ooze quickly consolidated into a large, Qulpari shaped figure that slurmed along with surprising speed.

As you can probably guess, my winged costume, with the additional weight of um, alien pea soup, provided a lot of drag. I tried to cinch the thing back up, but that only slowed me down further, gave the abominable thing behind me opportunity to close the gap between us.

...Whatever it was, it had flesh cow splotched a solid black and sickly gray, and wore a large mushroom-like 'Coolie hat' that would have been comical, had the monstrosity possessed actual eyes in its dripping eye sockets. Although slightly winded, I forced myself to run faster.

I raced past the hut with the broken skylight, nearly trampling Izrigma in my haste to escape. The thing wasn't after him, it was after me. I kept going.

I paused to catch my breath, having gained a fair distance on the monster, but then I heard a low growling sound, and that motorcycle thing from Sovirox's prison came rumbling down through the air after me, spouting clouds of smog so thick and oily that my eyes watered and I couldn't breathe without coughing.

I ran away from the thing and its malevolent, zombie like pilot, but of course that's when the 'mushroom man' came for me.

I froze in the middle of the balcony, stared out at the rotating Jefferson memorial, mentally prepared myself to jump off the side.

The moment I climbed up on the rail, I saw Sovirox slowly descending from above like Superman, but radiating an unfriendly red glow.

Before I could make any attempt to defend myself, the floating Qulpari waved his hands, and the red energy yanked me forcefully off the edge.

I went sailing toward him, hovered before his face in the air as he drained the energy out of me.

The alien's glow burned brighter and brighter, like charcoal on a fire, but I only felt weak, like a vampire were sucking all the strength and vitality out of my soul.

Once Sovirox had weakened me to the point of passing out, he used his power to hurl me back into the balcony, smashing through stained glass, into the waiting arms of the fungus creature. The nasty black and white thing reached out to me with its tendrils, slowly engulfing me. It felt like my skin was rotting away.

The last thing I saw before completely blacking out was a giant bird leg stomping down in front of me, flattening broken bits of balcony railing beneath its massive scaly claw.

I awoke to the wind blowing through my hair, and downy feathers tickling my face. Someone had slung me, like a sack of potatoes, over the back of an enormous bird, something with broad pig's ears and a wattle like a turkey.

"No-ey baby, you are a bird ninja, and a chef. I'm glad I decided to marry you!"

I lay sprawled along the thing's neck, above the horn of a saddle, a strange two seater construct that looked like it belonged on a motorcycle, but fit around bird wings. Roy took the secondary seat because Norenio had the reigns, and me.

I gasped in horror. The ground lay hundreds of feet below us, only the bird's huge wings keeping us up in the air. I fixed my eyes on the fuzzy down. "Gertie," I groaned.

"She's...safe," Roy muttered, his tone of voice hinting that all was not well.

I would have probed deeper, but this wasn't a great time for full conversation. "Where are we going?"

Roy glanced over his shoulder. "Away from those things. You need a doctor to check you out. I think you've got some broken bones, and I don't like what Mister Funguy did to your skin."

"Elliott!" Charlie flitted down and nuzzled me in the face.

"Careful, Charlie," Roy warned. "He might have something contagious, we're going to see a doctor."

"Hmm," the flying Qulpari replied.

"Lori..." I moaned.

"She's fine. Colgate took her somewhere safe."

"What about those things? Are we far enough away from them yet?"

Roy glanced back again. "Sort of. There's sort of an anemone forest-"

I sucked in my breath as a mass of anemone the thickness of tree branches battered us on all sides like brushes in an automatic car wash. I nearly fell off the bird as it shoved its way through. I felt like a clownfish. I probably would have enjoyed the dazzling rainbow of blues reds and purples, had they not been slapping against me, trying to throw me from my ride.

These 'anemone trees' made music when their limbs brushed each other, in the same way wind chimes make music-just barely. They sounded like violins, but only did three notes: low C, D and E. In other words, `Frere jaque, jaque ere fre, jaque Frere.' I got struck again, came dangerously close to sliding off.

"You might want to sit up on Vadful's neck," Roy suggested. "The anemone below us might soften your fall, but it might not."

"Gee, thanks for the pep talk!" I grumbled, shakily adjusting my position. The bird mooed in protest, acting like it wanted to shake me off, but Norenio spoke to it in soothing tones until it calmed down.

The macrodactyla gave way to regular looking forests, well, regular-ish, again, they were huge trees with buildings on them, and the trees smelled strongly of new car interiors, some kind of unusual chemicals secreted by the trees and their leaves, like a pine tree does. Large clusters of lianas hung down from some of the boughs, reminding me of Sovirox's prison.

We approached a structure resembling half a seahorse stuck to an upside down chandelier. "What's that place?"

"It's like a hospital. Your sister's there, but I want you to get a checkup before you go to visit. That mold stuff doesn't look very good for your health."

Noting how our 'winged steed' was currently foaming at the mouth, I remarked, "Maybe Vadful should get a checkup too. She looks sick."

"It's a he, Elliott. And that's how it sweats. He's, well, healthy as a horse."

The bird flapped down on the hospital grounds, shaking its feathers and wiggling its crocodile tail.

As Roy and Norenio helped me to the ground, the creature barked like a dog, prompting Norenio to give it bits of fruit and squeezes from a water bottle. It licked her in the face.

"Cmon, kid," Roy urged, leading me toward the building.

For a moment, I felt secure in my footing, and Roy let me walk ahead.

I expected a crowd around this `hospital' comparable to the one at the Nisweku center, but it seemed Qulpari were very efficient with their medical procedures. For one thing, their ability to levitate objects came in handy when transporting the injured. They didn't need a special emergency entrance, they just floated the stretcher over the other Qulpari's heads. `Rubbernecking' also appeared to be a human custom. Instead of standing around and getting in the way, the Qulpari either helped out or respectfully moved to the side whenever faced with an inbound victim.

According to Roy, something called `triage' was different, too. On earth you had a `triage nurse' that decided which patients in an emergency room got treated first, gunshot wounds and other gruesome stuff generally at the top of the list, hypochondriacs, people who fake illnesses for sympathy, at the bottom. The Qulpari still did that, of course, but they also had a little counseling center they referred the malingerers to. The triage nurse would press their fingers to the patient's head, sensing the kind of pain they felt, and they'd just point to the counseling center if there weren't any real injuries or illnesses to treat. Sometimes a counselor would stroll over and say hi before they even got to that point. I even saw them doing this outside in the `parking lot.' Roy said this saved their hospitals lots of money, especially when it came to drug related problems. On earth, these situations couldn't be managed and sometimes patients would even steal supplies or engineer ways to get more drugs because nobody helped them emotionally.

Also, they had `satellite' buildings around the main complex that served the function of `family practice' or `local practitioner' that kept people from using the emergency room as a catch-all for things that a hospital shouldn't be wasting its time treating, like the common cold.

And then, of course, a lot of surgeries and such weren't even necessary because of mystical powers like I used to have. In fact, it made their system of triage go in a different order, the real issue was keeping the wounded, bleeding, and seriously ill stabilized until the healers recovered their energy for another round.

Another thing that helped: Nobody was coming in pregnant. The Qulpari and Abreyas both laid eggs, no umbilical cords, none of that tricky stuff that normally caused babies and mothers to die during a procedure. I heard they still occasionally had a dud egg, or couldn't make eggs, sometimes the egg got trapped inside their bodies, or the baby might have birth defects that needed to be treated, but in general, they didn't need any help getting the baby out. I imagine that made for lighter street traffic too.

This was, of course, a lot of word of mouth, since I hadn't even reached the interior yet.

I could see now that the 'arms' of the 'chandelier' were actually towers covered in windows. That's the last real thing I noticed before I fainted and fell on the pavement.

I didn't get to see the lobby or anything. I awoke naked in a sort of tanning bed, with an IV stuck in my arm. Well, not exactly stuck, they somehow had a method of giving me fluids intravenously without breaking the skin with needles. They also didn't need IV stands to drip things in, a small device next to me pumped it in. It would have worked in zero gravity.

Someone had coated me in foaming chemicals, probably the same kind of stuff they put in athlete's foot spray.

"How much longer will he have to be in there?" Roy was asking someone.

"It could be a few hours," came the reply. "The fungus has to dry out of his system." By 'it' the doctor meant me. "The infection went very deep. If the heat and wixrigar does its job correctly, he should come to a quick recovery and leave in the morning. I expect it will be very thirsty when it gets out."

I glanced down and discovered they were drying me out in more ways than one. I had equipment attached so I could...'evacuate' without making a mess.

I slept because there wasn't anything else for me to do in there. When I awoke again, I was parched and had to lay like that for about a half hour before the 'tanning bed' opened up.

To my surprise, I saw Lori leaning over me, and looking rather happy to see me.

"Lori!" I cried. "You're all right!"

"Yeah," she stammered. "Glad to see you're okay." She shoved a cup of water into my hands. "Here. Drink this." With a look of embarrassment, quickly turned her back to me. I thought I saw her chest glowing. Colzest, who watched nearby, grinned at us. I think both he and Charlie were pleased that I'd made a fair recovery.

"I was worried about you," Lori said. "I seriously thought you died."

The water kinda tasted like lime Gatorade with broccoli and celery in it. Not the most delicious thing in the world, but I was thirsty, so I guzzled it. "How'd you get away from those guys? They almost killed me."

"I'm good at hiding. It sounds like Soversocks and his buddies were too busy trying to kill you to bother about me." She sighed. "I'm sorry, I probably should've tried to help you. I guess I'm just a big chicken."

"Better than being a big jerk," I said. "I don't blame you, considering how I've been acting. I wish I could blame it all on Sovirox. I mean, he was messing with my mind, but I don't know..."

Still not looking at me, she passed my clothes back to me, now seeming to have been washed and dry cleaned. "Put these on. They've been sterilized."

"Thanks..." I frowned at the toilet equipment. "So I'm done? I can get out?"

"Yeah. I think so. Get dressed."

The IV thing had been removed, so I did what she said. As I zipped up my outfit, she remarked, "You look nice with a tan. You needed some color."

My face colored a little at her comment.

Assuming we were done, I climbed out of the machine.

The place resembled a home rather than a hospital ward. The room was round, held a bunch of jamassi ( jellyfish beds).

I stumbled, nearly pitched onto the floor, but Lori caught me.

Somehow I ended up awkwardly in a swooning pose like a woman would do during the Tango. She giggled a little, helping me to walk.

"Let's find my sister," I sighed.

We found Gertie, but she didn't look good at all. The parts of her body that weren't badly scarred looked pale, rotten with mold, or had an unusually greenish cast. Her breathing was shallow, her pupils milky white.

She lay on a translucent jamassi, IV tubes feeding her nutrients and medication. A secondary system performed a sort of dialysis. The healers around her looked at us apologetically. The expressions on their faces told us there was nothing more they could do.

ET looked at me sadly from one side of the bed.

"Like I said, kid," Roy muttered behind me. "She's safe. Wish I had better news than that."

My sister shivered, and it wasn't even cold in there. "Elliott, is that you?"

I felt so emotional, I could barely get the words out.

She reached out to me with a shaking pale green hand, gave me a faint smile. I noticed she still wore that stupid Ridvucha bracelet. "I saved you."

"Y-yes you did."

My sister closed her eyes, her face going slack. Her arm dropped limply to her side.

I clutched her hand. "Gertie!"

She didn't respond.

"Gertie! Speak to me!"

She didn't.

A light suddenly flashed on her bracelet.

She'd actually found someone.

Sadly, she wouldn't be able to enjoy the company.