A/N: That was no cliffhanger! Shameful. Also, last chapter was really short.... if you want to call it a chapter. Better to imagine this as all coming together when I let TLZ put it up. But now.... more will be revealed!
Also, part of this chapter has been storyboarded. Isn't that awesome?
(Note: If this fanfic doesn't make any sense, don't worry. That wasn't what I was aiming for.)
~
Scene 2
The window was frosted with blue ice, and the view outside was just about as interesting as the frozen crystals. The darkness in the room was not unbearable; conserving the energy here wasn't hard when you didn't have to eat, breathe, or use much electricity. He'd be in trouble when his minion and prisoner arrived, they needed the valuable resources that were hard to come by here.
Ah, well, he'd get rid of one of them and make a few changes to the other. Then, world domination would be imminent.
~
Leela found herself staring at a grey ceiling, unable to understand how long she had been. She felt sick, like she was going to throw up. After several more moments of silent confusion, she tried to get up. Everything was working like normal, but she felt a bit banged-up and sore. She even saw a bruise on one of her arms, which was odd. Then it came to her – she wasn't in her apartment!
She felt an adrenaline rush, and began to really study the room she was in. It was a small room, lit by a single lighting panel in the center of the room, with an uncomfortable bed, a dresser attached to the wall, and a small door that was open to reveal a bathroom. Leela felt cramped, and she was freezing as well. She noted that she was in the same undergarments she had been in when the stranger entered her apartment and knocked her out.
Maybe he'd been kind enough to leave her some clothes to wear.
She walked over to the dresser, each step across the cold floor burning her feet. She opened the top drawer, but found nothing. She was lucky with the next drawer; several pairs of all of her clothing were neatly folded in there. She hastily put on a shirt and a pair of pants, though they did almost nothing to protect her from the freezing atmosphere of the room.
She spotted the door release, and hurried over to it with bare feet. Her boots seemed to be missing, but it didn't matter. The door hissed open almost silently. Leaning her head out into the dark hallway, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. She tentatively put a foot out, and when she felt safe enough, exited the room.
The whole ship she was on seemed foreboding and dreamlike. She didn't open any of the doors in case her kidnapper lurked behind one, ready to do something terrible to her. Finally, she came to the end of the hallway, and found the starship's bridge.
There was nobody in it when she entered. The whole place was darkened, and the only light came from a computer screen that was built into the pilot's control station, a little behind the steering mechanism. The blue glow was sharp contrast to the dreary nighttime onboard. Leela edged to the pilot's seat and sat down, admiring the view out of the front of the ship. The chair was stiff, but it was better than laying awake in that bed wondering what would happen next.
For what seemed like hours, Leela watched as the ship slowly orbited a gaseous blue planet, almost forgetting how very cold it was in the room. The light of a sun 'rising' from behind it made the frost on the outside of the window glitter and sparkle, and left her feeling slightly less homesick than she was before.
Finally, she turned her eye on the screen in front of her. There was nothing on the screen but a map of the surrounding planets, and the one they were above in the center. None of the names on the map looked familiar, or even in English. Small white letters at the bottom seemed to proclaim an urgent message in a strange language that Leela had never seen before. As she attempted to read it, she heard someone enter the room. The lights came on and momentarily blinded her, and by then the person was standing right behind her, a warm, human hand resting on her shoulder.
~
Fry could finally understand that something weird was happening. The thick green water, doubled with the wires, made escape somewhat impossible. He tried to reach out in front of him, but his fingers hit solid glass. His mind began to race, just as something spoke to him from outside the liquid prison, a distorted voice.
"He's made a complete recovery."
~
Later on, in the dining hall of the ship, Leela and her captor ate a meal in a very cold silence.
He'd found her, all right; he gave her such a shock that she had nearly screamed when he grabbed her shoulder like that. Forcing her away from the computer, he had led her back to her quarters, and this time guarded the door after putting her inside. She'd sulked for a while, but he opened it later and told her that the meal was ready.
The kidnapped chewed his food, each time the rectangular metal plate that went from under the left eye to his lip shifted. His entire left eye was a robotic one, with an odd, square target-like pupil, and other plating around it, probably to hold it in place. The other eye stared mournfully ahead, glossy and slightly clouded. The eyelid drooped over it as though dead, and too right that entire thing was. The rest of the kidnapper seemed shrouded in shadow, as he wore a baggy hooded robe of some kind, trying to mask most of himself. The other parts that could be seen were his hands; one perfectly normal right hand, and one robotic left one.
Leela stared at him the entire time, trying to get eye contact. Once in a while, she saw his robotic eye briefly lock on her own, then look away again as though nothing happened. So desperate was she to try and get a reaction, she was holding her spoon in the air for a while just staring, until finally, the kidnapper couldn't stand it any more.
"Why don't you put your fork down while you're eating? You don't seem to know any proper table manners," he chided, half-jokingly.
"Am I supposed to show respect to a man who's just dragged me god-only-knows-how-many light years from my own home?"
"A good point... but you still need to show good etiquette. You should be glad I didn't do any more damage to you than handle you a little too roughly when I brought you down to the ship. And I'm sorry for that."
Leela mumbled something about disrespect at the offender, all the while keeping an eye on him.
"Look, Leela. You and I may be stuck on board this ship for a while, so let me tell you some things." He leaned on his robotic arm, and gestured the human one at her. "Don't stick that nose of yours anywhere you know it shouldn't be, don't mess with me when I'm not in a friendly mood, and drop the innocence act. You're not fooling anyone."
"Innocence act?" Leela guffawed. "I deserve to know a few things. Namely, where are we, why did you kidnap me... and what is your name, or at least the name you're called by?"
He looked away, as though she'd struck him. In a quiet voice, he admitted, "I don't have one."
"People had to call you something," Leela pointed out, giving him an odd look.
There was another lapse of silence, in which Leela increased her staring pressure. Finally, the captor started to crack under it and, grumbling, explained what he could of his past.
"I suppose at one point I had a name. I'll be damned if I could remember it now, or for that matter, anything about my past. It's all just... not there. Like I have it, but can't see it. I get a flash of déjà vu here and there, and sometimes even a brief sliver of memory, but nothing so big as to give me any hints about myself." He paused, the silence almost loud as his voice dropped away. "Happy now?"
"To an extent." Her expression softened as she imagined what it was like to have no past, no sense of self. A shadow of a person... "Tell me what you can remember about your past."
He looked away, the cold blue planet reflecting off his dead right eye. "I'm not ready to talk about it."