Dry grass rustled gently, brushing against the sleepy eyes of a young female Irken. Her long, black antennae spread out behind her in a curled pattern. She sighed and wrapped her arms around her sleeping mate, the post-coital glow still fading out of her limbs.
A warm, dry wind blew across the empty training field, blowing dust and grass seeds onto her bare chest as she lay on the packed soil, her eyes turned upward to stars that were hidden by the lights of the nearby city.
On the top of the dry wind a crunching noise reached antennae, causing them to twitch lightly as she sat up. Clutching the red and pink standard-issue military uniform to her chest, she squinted into the darkness.
"Don't come over here!" she called threateningly. The incoming boot thuds hesitated, then stopped all together. Whoever it was seemed to be contemplating whether they were going to take that as a command or a challenge.
Her mate sat up, his dark blue eyes blinking against the light. "Honey? What's wrong?"
She opened her mouth to answer when a blur of black, all muscles and claws, shot out of the grass at high speed. Iron-tasting blood flew from her mouth as the heavy thing slammed into her chest, throwing her body back a good five feet.
From her spread eagle position on the ground she looked up into two glowing red ovular headlights, her mouth working frantically but not a single scream consenting to come out. Her mate, equally tongue-tied, thrust his hands into the pockets of his discarded pants, digging frantically for his laser.
A black, oily tentacle slammed across the male's throat, throwing him to the hard-packed ground. He barely cried out as he impacted, too filled with shock to notice the sound of his ribs snapping. The black creature, now looming at least three times the young lover's size, cranked its neck back to look at the female.
She bit her hand and cried. "Please don't eat me!" she wept. "I'm pregnant!"
A ruffle ran down the creature, similar to the ripples on a lake caused by an insect landing. With one swift movement the monster returned its attention to the wounded male, swept him up, and disappeared into the night of the grass with him.
The female, forgetting her modesty, chased after the trail of the black thing. "Please, bring him back! Bring him back!" she wept, running until her ankles gave out and she fell to the ground, wailing to gods who failed to answer.
Once clear of the sound of her hysterical shrieks, the creature began to slow his gallop. Deadly claws, impaled through the young male's chest, began to retract. Glowing red eyes faded to a dull raspberry color, antennae distinguished themselves from a mass of nothingness.
Sitting down, the newly escaped young monster studied his pray. The male was awake and looking about, but too terrified to seemingly act. He curled on his side, protecting his soft innards and his genitals as he whimpered.
A long, muscular arm reached down and rendered the male's left arm from his body. The male finally made a sound, screaming in anguish as his fresh blood spurted out and stained the grasses. The monster kicked him in the side, not wanting to deal with anyone who should unfortunately happen to investigate the noise.
With the crunch of fangs against bone, he bit into the arm and began tearing muscle and sinew from the bloody bones. The male, holding his torn shoulder, rolled to his side and began crawling away, biting back his tears.
The monster dropped one swift smack to the back of his head, sending the male face first into the soil. The sound of his neck snapping echoed through the air as nearby birds took flight in fear. Then, there was nothing but the sound of a feather falling from the heavens.
Leaving behind a glaze-eyed head and the remains of a torso, the young male wiped the blood from his face and strode through the dry grasses. His name… no, the name he'd been given… was Jared. He was certain that wasn't his "real," name, the one his mother had given him. But he could hardly remember her, let alone what she might or might not have called him.
He'd come to Devastus to hunt down the man who had first called him Jared, the man who had been responsible for so much of his pain. That man's every breath burned in the young half-Irken's lungs, filling him with the same rage that would flush through his body whenever he was about to seize pray. It was the same feeling that made his normally dark eyes begin to glow.
The man's mansion, he'd learned, was on one of the moons of Devastus. A very important man in the scientific field, he'd been given a military-owned mansion overlooking the training planet. The only way to get to that moon was to take a transfer on the surface of Devastus. Jared had some free time between landing and the transfer, and the trip had left him hungry, so he'd decided to go get some take-out.
Entering the gates to the Devastus spaceport, he checked to make sure he wasn't trailing blood on his shoes or dripping intestines down his shirt. Such things were sure to get him stuck in customs, and he was traveling with a stolen pack in the first place. After all, if security scanned his real pack, sucked deep inside his gelatinous body, he'd be on his way back to a lab prison cell.
He cleared security easily, never once slipping and giving up his "real" name. He smiled to himself. Security, ha! He'd seen tighter security in shopping malls, or at least, he felt he would have if he'd ever been allowed to see the inside of a shopping mall. Regardless to say, when one is a flesh-eating monster, normal teen activities are generally out of the picture.
His boots thudded against the metal of the platform as he approached his transfer, his eyes set on the goal. Soon he'd be at the home of his tormentor, tasting blood on his fingers. That man lived in a mansion built on pain, blood, and tears. Jared's antennae twitched excitedly in anticipation of taking every life in that mansion, from the scientist's sleeping mate and children down to the very last cockroach.
So engrossed in his own thoughts was he that he didn't hear the female voice screaming "Look out!" from behind him. He had barely begun to turn around to see what the commotion was when a thin body slammed into his back and rebounded off of him, landing in a heap and surrounded by a halo of objects scattered from her bag.
She sat up, rubbing her antennae and chattering in pain. Looking up, her face blushed a deep emerald green. "My apologies, my apologies!" she cried, bowing so quickly to him that her long antennae flipped over the top of her head and dangled in her eyes.
"It's… okay…," he said as she brushed them back.
"No, it's my fault! I shouldn't have been running on a waxed floor," she apologized, her mouth moving a mile a minute, as she began throwing scattered items back into her tan leather carry-on bag.
"Let me help you…" Jared said hesitantly, kneeling down. His thin green fingers wrapped around a tattered, stuffed Irken with only one red eye. The girl looked up at him, blushed deeper, and snatched the stuffed creature from his hand.
"It's a stupid good luck charm," she muttered as she shoved it in her bag. "That looks like I've got everything…"
"Let me help you up," Jared offered, putting his hands under her armpits and lifting her in one swift movement back up and into the air, cautiously, he lowered her until her slightly heeled boots touched the ground again.
"Wow, you're a regular he-Irk!" she smiled, adjusting the bag on her shoulder. "Ack! I'm going to miss my flight! I knew I shouldn't have stopped to eat!" she cried, running off in the same direction Jared was going. His antennae twitched again, but this time from confusion. His heart was thudding in his chest, and he hadn't done anything to work up a sweat…
He caught up with the girl again on board the ship. Looking around, he frowned and then peered down at her seat. "Do you mind if I sit next to you? The ship looks pretty full…"
She dropped her bag to the ground. "Sure, go right ahead…"
He sat down. Squishing into the red plastic seats, he allowed an awkward silence to ensue. "I… thought your good luck charm… was really cute," he said, wondering why in the seven hells he would feel so awkward around a female stranger who couldn't possibly know his secret.
She looked away. "I feel silly about it… some of the other girls tease me…" she looked up at him. "Are you here for the Hover-Hit tournament, too?"
"Hover… hit… tournament…?"
She nodded, her violet eyes shinning with more energy than Jared had ever seen in one place at one time before. "Mmm, I'm playing in the mixed championships! I can't STAND playing girl's Hover Hit. They complain if you mess up their uniforms!"
Jared frowned. He didn't know what Hover Hit was, but he felt like he should. The girl certainly seemed to assume that it was common knowledge, whether it was or not. Well, it had to be something you compete at if she were going to a tournament. Perhaps a game or a sport?
"If we're going to talk further, perhaps we should introduce ourselves. I'm Jared."
She blinked, her eyes blank, before she sat back in her chair. "I'm Dee, Invader in training Dee, Irken Elite Soldier. What are you?"
Jared froze. "I'm… a… scientific… research… proj… person… in training."
"So you're one of those stuffy intellectuals?" she asked. Damn, Jared thought, this girl has too much caffeine in her system.
"I'd hardly say stuff…"
"I was kidding!" she smiled, kicking her boots off and crossing her legs up onto the seat.
"So…" Jared said, trying to quickly change the subject. "What are the rules of Hover Hit? I've never quite understood them…"
"That's because the only major rule is that you have to get the ball through the goal, without killing your opponent and hopefully without putting them in tract, that is."
"That sounds… interesting." Jared wasn't sure he could actually play any sort of game that didn't involve killing his opponent, even if he didn't want to kill them. He had a problem with not knowing his own strength like that.
"Mmm, I like it because the ball is alive! I think chasing after a rubber or plastic ball is horribly boring, like we had to do in the kiddie leagues." She rubbed her antennae. "I hope I don't get kicked in the face this time, I hate bruising up." She stretched out and yawned, her lean body twisting as she tried to get comfortable in her seat.
Jared turned his face away from the young female, feeling the blood rush into his cheeks. He'd never really… felt… such emotions around anyone before, let alone a young female of approximately his own age. He knew from magazines that had been thrown into his cell through the air lock that teenage Irkens began to get… feelings… for one another. Were these such feelings? Having never been exposed to a pretty girl of his own kind and age so closely before, or being allowed to talk to one so casually, he didn't know.
He found himself making polite, if awkward, conversation with the strange young female who went by the name of Dee on the forty-minute trip from Devastus to the moon. She was bright, and didn't seem to care that his understanding of casual and slang language wasn't exactly up to par. She had enough to say by herself that there weren't any pauses in the conversation anyway. Sometimes Jared got irritated with not being able to get a word in edgewise, but he liked the sound of her voice so it all evened out in the end.
When the time came to part ways, she reached into her bag and pulled out a thin, wrinkled ticket. "Here, I just remembered that I had a guest pass leftover. You'll come see me at the tournament tomorrow, right?"
Jared looked awkwardly down at the ticket in his hands, and then stuck it in his pocket. He'd almost sucked it inside his body for safekeeping like he usually did, then realized that wouldn't exactly be a "normal" thing to do, and he'd come so far without giving himself away that he didn't want to make the pretty girl scream at the last moment.
"Thanks," he smiled. "I will…"
"Bye-bye, then," she called, waving and running down the exiting platform, despite her earlier admonitions that she should stop running on potentially waxed metal surfaces. Jared found himself staring after where she'd vanished in the crowd, a strange feeling his chest and head telling him that he wanted to see her again. He wondered how she'd look naked…
He shook out his head violently, grunting in irritation at himself. How could he think such things, especially about a female he'd just met? And especially about a girl who seemed like such a bubblehead? If he WERE going to like a female, it should be a quiet intellectual, he decided.
Jared studied the date on the ticket once he were out of the crowd and could lurk in a convenient black shadow. Two days until the tournament. That gave him plenty of time to finish his mission, and still keep his promise to the girl to come see her. Not that he expected anything to come of it, she'd probably be too busy to even talk to him again. Still, he didn't want to seem impolite by saying he'd come and then not showing…
That night, Jared did some research on the strange girl. It was almost like she'd bewitched him; nothing he did could get her out of his mind! Not even gleefully planning the death of his former captors took away her smile, her chime of a laugh, or the way the lights of the transfer shuttle had reflected stars in her violet eyes.
He leaned back in his chair, practically breathless at what the computer terminal showed him. She was the daughter of one of the two ultimate heads of genetic engineering! It had to be fate; it just HAD to be. Genetic engineering had hurt him so much over the years, ignored him, and laughed at the pain of those like him.
It fit so perfectly in with his revenge plans. The girl was tall, the current tallest of her particular group of girls. She was beautiful, amazingly and unforgettably so. Her antennae and her eyelashes were sensual, the marks of desirability for a female Irken. He didn't know if she was particularly smart. She seemed sharp enough street-wise, but still a little spacey at times and overly talkative. She was strong, too, as he saw that she was listed as a two-time women's Hover Hit Championships finalist.
In other words, she was the perfect woman to bear his offspring. He'd rip her from her pedestal, tear her down from the world of bright lights and into his darkness, where he'd take her as his wife. With all the genetics department had done to him, the female lead's attractive daughter was a good beginning towards Jared's twisted idea of just compensation.
Just as soon as his first mission of revenge was complete, he would return to claim his chosen bride. And when he held his first son or daughter in his arms, he would no longer be alone…