Title: Homecoming: the Mexican Tango. Part 4e
Author: Chris Kenworthy
E-mail: chris@chriskweb.net
Homepage: http://www.fanficarchive.net/
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own the Roswell characters, though if I did I'd treat them better than Jason Katims.
Category: Sci-fi drama. Canon couples romance leading to UC pairings in later part.
Spoilers: Up to 'ask not'
Part 4e: South of the border
"Sometimes I can't believe we really pulled that first show off," Maria laughed as they sat around the DeLuca living room, sharing a moment of nostalgia before moving on to the next house. "We had, what, two and a half practice sessions and we totally *killed*!"
"Yeah, you were great, babe," Michael agreed with a soft chuckle. "I can't believe I actually dragged us all off to Mexico so soon."
"There were *some* of us who didn't need too much convincing," Maria laughed.
* * * * *
(Wednesday morning, November 27th 2000)
"You are now entering Dona Ana county," Isabel read off the sign as they approached it on the highway.
"Yeah," Liz agreed softly, keeping an eye on the Jeep, further down the road. "Just, what, five hundred more miles to go??"
"Closer to four hundred and fifty, I figure," Max corrected. Liz shot him a sideways look and forced a smile. "Relax, sweetie, you're doing great."
It was no secret that whatever Liz Parker's many talents might be, a great driver she wasn't, despite having had her full license for about a year - lack of practice. But everyone was so excited about Liz's new wheels from her quote unquote 'anonymous benefactor' that Max and Michael, among others, had insisted she christen the Sedan by driving it off on the gang's latest harebrained scheme.
Max wanted to ride with his sweetheart, of course, so Michael and Maria were driving the Jeep down. Valenti was bringing up the rear of the convoy, along with Kyle and Tess.
"Umm... not quite sure about bringing this up," Liz said softly, still keeping her eyes fiercely on the road, "but is anyone else a little... worried about this whole trip?"
Max, Isabel, and Alex all managed to share a look. "Umm... worried how, exactly?" Isabel probed.
"Well..." Liz sighed, trying to put her thoughts in order without taking too much of her attention away from the driving. "You found out about this professor guy, Max, and that's great. I hope we learn a lot from him. But... well, we don't even know what we want to find out or how we're going to go about it. There's a lot of the 'book' that's still untranslated and avenues of investigation back home that have gone unfollowed - like those other marking points on the map. You guys..." Liz made a vague motion that pointed to Max and Isabel, forward to Michael and back to Tess, "have mentioned ideas for new ways to use your powers, but you haven't gotten any opportunity to practice them. Given all of that, doesn't it seem like this might not be the best time to go and investigate a top Special Unit official in a foreign country? We don't have any idea what we're going to find waiting for us in Puerto Penasco." Liz sighed, realizing how much she had rambled. "Sorry."
"It's okay," Max whispered. "The same thing's occured to me." Alex and Isabel were nodding in agreement too. "But this was Michael's idea, and I guess I didn't want to squelch him again. Plus... ready or not, this is probably the best chance we'll have to take a jaunt like this until spring break, and that isn't for another three months."
"I'm not sure if that's a good enough reason to put our lives in danger," Alex said half-jokingly. "It'll be too much of a hassle to do it later."
"Look, no-one said you had to come along, Alex," Max shot back, a little annoyance in his voice. "But we've got a deadline to meet here, and killer aliens coming at us whether we're taking risks or not. I would think you of all people could..."
"Okay, okay, that's enough!" Isabel called out, throwing herself forward in between Max and Alex as well as she could and stretching a hand out in either direction. "We do *not* need to start bickering about this. Whatever our reservations, we've made the decision and put a reasonable amount of effort into planning this trip, so let's just make the best of it, all right?"
Alex smiled slightly. "Yeah, okay." He looked Max right in the eyes. "Sorry man, I was only joking."
"And I kinda over-reacted, didn't I?" Max admitted. "My apologies, Alex."
"No need." For a little while they carried on down the highway in silence. "Hope we can find a little time to enjoy ourselves too."
* * * * *
"A lot depends on good recon," Michael was saying as he drove the Jeep west down I-10. "We won't have any ideas what the true risk factors are until we arrive and take a good look around. Carefully, of course. I mean yeah, taking off all of a sudden like this is a little foolhardy - I'll cop to that. But this guy is a retired government functionary -- There's no particular reason to expect a threat attached to him. If there is, considering all we've been through so far it won't be anything we can't handle, and I think we'd all feel pretty foolish waiting for months if when we finally make it down, there's no danger."
Maria sighed. Michael had been going on like this since five miles past the Roswell city limits, and she *hated* listening to him talk strategy. Not that it reminded her of his past self, the alien soldier, princes Isabel's fiancee and all that. Not at all -- it's just that about a month and a half ago, she realized that strategy was deeply boring stuff. True heroism, showing up in the nick of time to save the day, 'oh, my knight in shining armor,' yeah, that kinda stuff she could get behind. But if strategy was what it took to get to that point... **Well, work out your strategy, just so long as I don't have to hear about it.**
Maria knew that this attitude was pretty hypocritical of her... there were so many things that weren't Michael's cup of snapple that she had asked him to throw himself into for her sake... and this was so obviously the kind of thing Michael LIVED for. That was why she hadn't said anything so far. And yet, Maria couldn't quit squeeze this topic into the 'He's my darling spaceboy, so I forebear,' category. It was *bugging* her, it was *grating* on her, and she wasn't sure how much more of it she could take!!
Suddenly pushed into action, Maria leaned over, stroked Michael's right leg near the knee with her right hand, and teasingly kissed him on the ear. "...need to make sure we're not over-confident, but WHOA!!" Michael's ramble came to a belated halt as the stimulation of Maria's actions kicked in. "Umm... what're you doing there, 'Ria?"
"Why... can't you tell?" Maria whispered, moving the kiss down along Michael's jaw line and her hand up his thigh. "And, more importantly... don't you like it??"
"Um, yeah, I like, I like," Michael mumbled. "I like so much that I might end up driving Max's jeep into a ditch, and therein lies the problem." Indeed, their course down the road was starting to veer this way and that, and behind them Max had probably already noticed and started to worry. He tended to get a little bit anal about his wheels sometimes. Weighing the cons against the few fun and naughty pros, Maria pouted and retreated back to her own side of the car. "This isn't exactly like you, Maria," Michael said, straightening the car and some of his hair that Maria had ruffled along the way. "What's up??"
"No... I guess it isn't," the young girl agreed. "I guess... I was bored of listening to Michael the soldier ramble on and on and wanted to see if Michael the irresponsible boyfriend could come out to play. Pretty stupid, huh??"
"Umm... not really," Michael agreed. "I mean... I know that I tend to get a little over-obsessed about this sort of thing... I'd hate to see something happen to you or one of the rest of the gang on these madcap capers -- but I have to admit it really isn't going to make a difference if I'm going over counter-offensives right this second. So... do you want to talk about something else while I drive??"
"Yeah. Uh, let's see..." Maria thought for a second, then something occured to her. "'Ria??! We have *got* to get you a better pet name to call me, spaceboy!"
Michael's groan seemed to echo across the desert plain.
* * * * *
At a rest stop somewhere between Tucson and the Mexican border, all three cars pulled off the highway for an early dinner and a stretch break (not to mention another chance to answer the call of nature.) Maria watched from the queue as Max and Isabel left the food stand with their burritos, and Michael with a couple of tacos.
"You know... I don't think there's going to be any shortage of Mexican food once we actually GET to Mexico," she deadpanned with a smile.
"What was that?" Tess asked, following behind Michael. She had an enchilada.
Soon they were all set with their food and sitting around a couple of tables out near the parking lot. As she started in on her slice of pineapple pizza, Maria started conversation again. "Can anybody switch over to the Jeep?? Michael drives me crazy with passenger-seat driving every time *I* get behind the wheel, so he's been driving for like seven hours straight."
The other kids exchanged glances. "Umm... well, I'm good staying with Liz," Max said apologetically.
"Surprise, surprise," Tess mumbled under her breath.
"I guess we could take turns driving the Jeep, hmm?" Isabel said, smiling as she looked over at Alex.
"Sure," Alex agreed. His grin was looking so broad these days that it almost might pop right off of his face.
"I've got a proposal," Kyle piped up. "Speaking on behalf of the Valenti contingent, we'll trade you Tess for Maria."
"Hey!!" Maria, Tess, and Jim Valenti called out in unison.
"C'mon!" Kyle focused his persuasive efforts on Maria. "The three hybrids can get in some quality bonding time... and mister Whitman here with the weird disk memories fried into his brain is kinda half little green man himself these days, so he won't mind, will you Alex??" Kyle took a deep breath. "Just for a few hours, I'd like to be in a homo sapiens only zone. Please??" Kyle's expression was sincere and apologetic as he shot a smile over at Tess.
"Okay, okay," Maria finally agreed. "So that's you, me, and your dad in his car, Alex Isabel Michael and Tess in the Jeep, and Max and Liz get to be all alone."
"Any idea when you figure we'll make Puerto Penasco, Mister Valenti?" Alex piped up.
Jim checked his watch. "If we don't spend too much time eating our dinners... about seven thirty in the evening?"
"Just about enough time to check in, get unpacked, and go to sleep," Kyle groused. "Boy, what a fun first day of vacation."
"All right, Kyle, just what is your problem??" Tess snapped. "You've been like this all day. No-one *made* you come."
"That's not true, he did!!" Kyle's accusing finger pointed straight at Michael, who jumped slightly. "Well, maybe not as such, but it had to be a 'whole gang thing,'" Kyle mocked. "And my dad has to chaperone all week, so I couldn't possibly stay home in Roswell alone, could I?? No-one even asked me if there was someone I'd like to bring along, though I guess that makes sense - god forbid I hang out with someone who isn't 'in on the secret', and everybody who IS in is pretty much sitting around this table."
There was a stunned silence as Kyle's outburst hung in the air. Then Liz repeated slowly, "Like to bring along... Kyle, are you dating someone??"
Kyle paused a second, then nodded slowly. "I didn't *think* you had noticed."
"Who??" Maria blurted out.
"Courtney Banks." At the various expressions of surprise around the table, (though none came from Tess or Kyle's dad, Maria noticed,) Kyle apparently felt he had to defend his choice. "Well... we've kinda been bonding - both of us got dragged into this 'aliens among us' thing kicking and screaming, as you might have noticed. Don't worry, I didn't tell her the real deal about you guys, I know you'd want to break that news in your own time and your own way." He took a deep breath, then continued on. "We've only been on two real dates, but I was hoping to be able to hang out with her over the holiday break, you know?? Get to know each other a little better."
The silence was pregnant. "Man..." Michael finally exclaimed. "You know, you could have said something, man."
"I know," Kyle agreed. "But hey... what's done is done, right? Courtney will be back in Roswell when I get home, and a week's winter vacation in a beach town in Mexico - well, there are worse tortures to inflict on a guy, am I right??"
"Okay," Max cut in on the general soft laughter that followed. "I hate to be the group nag, but precious time's a-wasting, you know? Let's finish our food, anyone who really needs to, hit the head, and let's see how quickly we can get back on the road, huh??"
* * * * *
(Late that evening.)
Max wandered around the motel grounds, trying to relax. It had been quite a day.
The twilight had been fading back when they first got to Puerto Penasco, after more than twelve hours on the road. First checking in to the motel, and figuring out who stayed in each room (two for the girls, Liz and Maria staying together, Isabel with Tess; Kyle hadn't wanted to be in the same room as his father so he was bunking with Michael, leaving Max with Alex and the sherriff in the largest motel room...) then out to find some place to have dinner on their first night in Mexico, then back to the motel to settle in. Max knew he needed to rest, to prepare for the silent campaign that would begin tomorrow, but he felt too keyed up and jumpy. Thus why he had told Jim Valenti that he needed to take a walk.
As he walked around a corner of the building, Max saw floodlights shining down on blue water and belatedly realized that he had stumbled on the motel pool. And that wasn't all he had stumbled upon... he could see a petite, feminine figure floating happily in the water, eyes closed. Max almost turned around and hurried away, not wanting to intrude on another motel guest, but there was something familiar about the cloud of dark brown hair streaming out along the surface. "Liz??" Max called out somewhat doubtfully.
The girl in the pool started in surprise, standing up, and then Max could tell that it was *definitely* Liz, and he felt a little foolish for his uncertainty. "Max? What are you doing here?" She laughed a little and continued in that teasing tone that drove Max wild, "... Or should I guess??"
Max laughed too, and walked up to the edge of the water. "I was just out taking a walk. Can't seem to relax and go to sleep."
Liz Parker's laugh rang out like a soft and beautiful bell. "Me too!! Driving is *hard* work, when you're not used to it." Although Liz had allowed herself to be spotted from time to time by Max and Alex, she had insisted on driving the majority of the way down in her new car, and Max didn't doubt that it had been nerve-taxing. "The pool was a great idea though - SO relaxing." She smiled impishly. "You should try it!"
Max was deeply tempted. "Our respectable chaperone may come looking for me."
Liz giggled. "So?"
He thought about it. "Well, it's almost cliche to say it, but I don't have a swim suit."
"Are you wearing boxer shorts??" Caught by surprise, Max could only nod. "Same difference."
Something inside Max wanted to call the whole thing off, but Liz's eyes were locked onto him, silently daring him to go through with it. Slowly he pulled off his t-shirt, kicked away the new sneakers, pulled off his socks, and took a deep breath before letting his jeans drop to the deck.
Max could see Liz swallow hard and blush a little as her gaze swept across his chest and down his muscular legs, and he couldn't help but smile a little at the confirmation that this incredible girl found him as attractive as he knew she was to him. Wearing only the black boxer shorts that Liz had referred to, he stepped entirely out of his jeans and dove lightly into the water.
As he surfaced and stood up, Max saw Liz walking slowly toward him through the water. Now that he was down in the water himself, he could see that she was wearing a cute one-piece bathing suit in a dark purple that set off her creamy skin and deep brown eyes ravishingly. As soon as she was within striking range, Max darted forward and pulled her into his arms, kissing her tenderly.
"Oh, Max," Liz whispered around their lip-lock. "I love you so much. Promise you'll never leave me."
Then the kiss was over, and Max stared deep into Liz's eyes. "I promise." As soon as he said the words, Liz grinned mischievously, plunging under the water, and pulling Max along with her, Underneath the surface, her lips found his in a second kiss, and the sensation was incredible. It was like their essences were touching as they floated...
*Floated*...
All of a sudden, a flash hit Max, so intensely that he would have staggered if he had had his feet on solid ground, or gasped if his face hadn't been under water. He was still floating... or at least, something that was the center of his awareness was floating, though it would take a quantum leap for Max to be able to reconcile that something with how he felt of himself at the moment.
That something was small... tiny, incredibly tiny, and yet alive, he realized. An embryo. And it was floating in one of the pods. In the next pod over, Max realized as his awareness spread outwards from the embryo, was another embryo, even smaller, younger, less fully formed. Down in another pod... another something living, though this one was so small and formless that Max wasn't even sure if it could be called an embryo... just a cluster of cells that he knew would nevertheless become a person. A hybrid person, probably.
The fourth pod was empty. Max sent his awareness out further - it expanded in a concentric sphere, beyond the four pods, into -- a spaceship. A small spaceship. Mechanical constructs - robots of some description - buzzed about its cramped interior. Three living beings watched the robots calmly, while a fourth was monitoring the controls of the spacecraft.
Max focused on the robots - there seemed to be a knot of them concentrating on something near the pods. As his awareness converged again, he could tell that the subject of all this activity was cells... a collection of cells on which the robots were performing microsurgery. Extract a chromosome here, an mitochondrion from there, inject them carefully into cell C and then...
It was done. A robot carefully carried cell "C" over to the fourth pod and used a mechanism to transfer it into the nutritive fluid. That cell divided into two, and then each of those two cells divided, until they were quickly multiplying into a lump of...
"Max?! MAX!!!" Liz's voice brought Max back to reality, and he realized that he had zoned out into his vision. His lungs ached, and he instinctively exhaled... accidentally spraying a mouthful of water all over Liz. "Hey!!"
After taking in a breath of fresh air, Max couldn't help but laugh. "Sorry. I... I had a flash," he explained.
"Yeah, I kinda figured," Liz agreed. "Though from my experience, flashes are usually QUICK."
"Okay, then, not *quite* a flash," Max sighed. He fell back and sank into the water up to his neck, trying to keep the feeling of 'floating' around him for the moment. "I... I saw the ship in space, I think. Where the four of us were being... conceived. Re-conceived."
Liz caught the point, as she started floating herself and turned around so that Max could wrap his arms around her and spoon in the water, Liz laying her head onto his bare shoulder. "When you were being... being made into hyrbids, you mean??"
"Yes. I was the oldest... two of the others were already in the pods too. The last one was just being finished... his cells being spliced together from, from four or five different cell sources. One wasn't like the others... that was probably the sample of alien genes from the homeworld." Max thought a moment. "MICHAEL's genes... they were male cells, I know that somehow. There were at least three samples of human DNA that were being used to... different chromosomes or parts of chromosomes, selected for I-don't-know-what."
"Maybe the best human genes they could find," Liz speculated aloud, "or the ones that would fit best with your alien DNA."
"Robots were doing the specialist work," Max continued. "But there were living beings there... the four guardians. Oh, my god, Liz... it seemed so REAL!!"
"Wow..." was all that Liz could say for a moment... and then a new voice intruded on them.
"Max??"
"Oh, my god..." Liz breathed. "It's Valenti."
"Yeah, I know..." Max agreed, just starting to dimly realize something.
"Uh-oh... this does *not* look good," Liz sighed, waving at Max's clothing strewn over the deck. "If he finds us here, he's gonna make us go up to bed, and we're not doing anything wrong, are we??"
"Liz..." Max breathed, stunned by something. "I can *see* Valenti."
"What??" For a second, Liz was silent in confusion. "But... he's not here, Max. From what I can tell he's around the corner that way." She waved in the other direction than Max had come.
"I know, but... I can SEE him," Max repeated. "It's like... I dunno, like a new power or something, triggered by that vision. God, I feel like I could *touch* him if I reached out hard enough."
Liz twisted her neck to look up at Max, her brown eyes shining brightly with the reflected floodlights. "Could you... could you 'connect' with him, Max??"
"What??" The suggestion caught Max off guard.
"Like you did with me. If you feel like you can touch him from here... could you connect with Valenti's body, from here??"
"Um, I dunno," Max mumbled. "Why would I want to??"
"You could make him feel sleepy, Max," Liz suggested, a wild daredevil alive in her eyes. "No real harm, just a few simple adjustments... nudge the blood sugar and the nervous activity down. If he's sleepy enough he'll forget about looking for you and go back to his room to bed."
A part of Max was hooked on the idea. It was like nothing he'd ever done with his powers before, but that was part of the appeal. And then there was the way Liz was looking at him.
Max focused on the image of Valenti he could see inside his mind, and suddenly he was connected. A few images flashed into his mind... a dark-haired young woman James Valenti had known when he was reasonably young himself... holding Kyle in his arms in the UFO center... Max accepted the images without committing to them, and moved deeper into the connection. It took only a second to know that the change was done. Valenti yawned, looked around one last time, and traipsed off to the stairs that led up to the second floor of the motel.
"Oh, my god..." Max muttered. "It worked. That is so cool."
"Yeah," Liz agreed. "You're like a wizard." And she kissed him again, and they floated there in each other's arms.
Half an hour later, when Max and Liz finally crept back to their separate rooms, they found Alex, Maria, and Jim all asleep. They dried off carefully and hung the towels back up, hoping that over the night they would dry off enough to still seem fresh in the morning.
* * * * *
(December 28th 2000)
All nine of them went for breakfast to a coffee shop around the corner from the motel. "So, what's the battle plan, Maxwell??" Michael whispered as he started into his first croissant.
"No battle plans for today," Max answered in an equally low voice, spreading a little jam on his crumpet. "Remember, we don't know what we might be getting into - or who might be watching for us here."
"Why would somebody be watching for us *here*, Max??" Tess asked. But Max didn't reply to her.
"So here's the plan. For today, we're just teenage kids here from New Mexico for christmas break... and their chaperone, of course." Max nodded to Valenti. "One of us," he tapped his chest quietly, "will find a way to do some recon *discretely* and report back. We'll do war council tonight at the motel, along with the usual parlour games club meeting." He smiled at the group. "Sound cool??"
Alex nodded. "Okay with me."
Isabel visibly re-counted the circle, and smiled feebly when she saw that everyone had been watching her do it. "Nine of us... three groups of three, does that make sense?" Enough people nodded that she felt confident going on. "Well... I noticed that they have a place out on the beach where you can rent windsurfers and take them out. Sounds like fun to me."
"I'm in for that," Alex chimed in.
"Yeah, I'll tag along with you guys, if that's okay?" Tess said tentatively. It was no secret that Tess wasn't comfortable spending much time with Liz or Tess in small groups... and didn't want either of them thinking she was spending too much time with Max. So it made sense that she was interested in joining a group without any of the three of them, and that was alright by Alex.
"Yeah, that'd be good," Isabel said with an encouraging smile.
"Well, I'm for just staking out a place on the beach, vegging out and catching some rays," Maria laughed. "You're with me, spaceboy," she patted Michael's shoulder.
"Me?? But I..." Maria gave him the puppy-dog eyes, and Michael was a goner. "Oh, okay, chilling out on the beach. I guess I can dig that. Who's our third??"
Kyle looked around, noticed that his father in particular was not about to volunteer, and raised his hand. "Okay, I'll go with you guys."
"I guess that leaves us with mister Valenti," Liz said slowly, then looked at the sherriff and forced a sunny smile. "What should we do??"
"I was thinking of doing the *sightseeing* thing," Max said. "There's gotta be something worth taking a picture of in this town." He patted the digital camera his parents had given him for christmas meaningfully.
"Oh, yeah, gotcha." Liz agreed. "Sound cool, Mister Valenti?"
"Yeah, yeah, that sounds fine with me," Valenti agreed.
There was a lingering silence as they finished their breakfasts. "So... uh, how about this Mexico weather??" Alex tried vaguely. No-one replied.
* * * * *
About three quarters of an hour later, Alex Whitman was standing in a small changing room on pier nine. "On vacation in sunny Puerto Penasco," he mused to himself, hardly loud enough to qualify as 'whispering.' "About to head out windsurfing with two hot hybrid babes. Sometimes life just DOESN'T suck."
Although he was only in love with Isabel, of course, Alex would have to admit that Tess Harding was also quite attractive. As far as himself... well, as Alex looked at his reflection in the mirror, he supposed he cut a decent figure in his navy blue swimming trunks. He was too skinny, of course, but some kind of genetic accident from his mother's side had given him a subtly muscular physique without much maintenance. His worst feature, the deal-breaker, was the goofy ears of course, but Isabel said she thought they were cute.
"Hey, come on Whitman, we're missing the wind!!" The call brought him back to the moment and he headed out, his clothes and belongings already arranged in the lock-box he had tied the key to around his neck. (NOT including the washer of course, that was around his neck too - it never left him these days. He had mentioned it to Isabel, and she agreed that while they were risking the possibility of the little thing getting loose and sinking to the bottom of the pacific shore, that wasn't too likely and if he 'checked' it they'd be worrying about skins blasting the lockers apart to get at it.)
"Took you long enough," Tess teased as Alex handed his lock-box over to the attendant behind the counter. "Guys always complain about the time it gets girls to get ready, but we were both changed before you." Tess was wearing a one-piece lycra-type bathing suit in a light powder blue. It wasn't particularly concealing, though, with a cutout below her breasts giving a peek at the upper part of her trim stomach and what looked like two other small vents at the side, reaching down to Tess' waist.
"Uhh... well, what can I say. You can't look *this* good quickly," Alex joked back, striking an over-the-top male model pose.
Tess rolled her eyes. "COME on... like I said, we're losing the wind out to sea." She grabbed his hand and hurried him further down the pier to where Isabel and a lifeguard-looking guy who worked for the rental company. Alex's girlfriend was clad in a stunning orange two-piece bikini that wasn't much more revealing than Tess' suit... though that was quite sexy enough! What skin the top concealed or the bottom refused to reveal was just made more intriguing for the lack of total exposure.
"...guys stick together and you should be fine, even without much experience," the lifeguard guy was saying. "There won't be much tidal activity until late this afternoon, but that'll just make it easier to enjoy a relaxing sail. I'll give one of you a warning flag just in case..." Isabel waved a hand and the flag was passed over. "There'll be a spot to keep that in next to your mast. Don't unroll it outside of a truly serious situation. Oh... the marine weather forecast said there might be a calm today."
"Uh... what does that mean?" Alex said, feeling slightly foolish asking it.
"It means no wind, stupid," Tess supplied unhelpfully.
"That's right," lifeguard-guy agreed, missing the sarcasm. "If the wind dies down, you aren't going to be able to get much of anywhere short of paddling if you're too far out for the tide to push you in. If that happens, just sit tight and wait for something to blow back up again. A calm never lasts too long hereabouts. So... any other questions??"
"No, I think we're good," Isabel told him politely. "Where are our 'surfers??"
For answer, the guy led the way down a ladder off the pier to a kind of a floating hanger. "You got 26, 27, and 28, right down there. Enjoy your sail!!"
Alex noticed the guy staring at Isabel as they walked away, but he wasn't jealous - in fact he felt a odd kind of pride about it. Isabel *was* hot, hot enough to make guys' mouths drop open and *he* was her boyfriend.
Um... okay," he muttered out loud as he stepped on to his windsurfer and clutched the bar tightly. "How do you start this thing??"
(Approaching noon. Dec 28th 2000)
"So... we just lay here??" Michael looked out across the crowded beach, then over to his friends... or his girlfriend and conspiracy-mate, or whatever.
Maria cracked open one eye to reveal a pissed expression. "I can't veg out properly if you keep asking that," she informed him.
Michael sighed, lay back on his lounge chair, and tried to get into the vegging out spirit. He couldnt' keep his eyes closed any longer, so he kept looking around... and his gaze kept lingering on Maria, which didn't help relax him. She had come out of the motel this morning, after breakfast, wearing a tiny little string bikini, some kind of khaki color that, to be honest, didn't look a whole lot different from her bare skin. He had appreciated the view, at first, but it wasn't something that exactly made him want to lie back on his own lounge chair and do nothing.
To make it worse, he had noticed a number of other guys, apparently both tourists and mexican locals, checking Maria out since they got to the beach. Watching strangers lust after *your* girlfriend sounded fine in theory, but Michael had quickly realized that it wasn't as much fun as it was cracked up to be. He didn't intentionally show off in front of strange girls like this... so why did MARIA have to?
"Come on," Michael groaned suddenly, sitting back up. "Vegging out is one thing, but we don't have to do *nothing.* We could..." He looked around, trying to come up with some sort of an idea, and ended up staring at the table between all their chairs, with Kyle's empty glass and Maria's purse sitting on it. "We could play quarters."
Maria sat up and stared at him. "What the heck is that?"
"You take turns trying to bounce a coin off the table and get it into the glass," Michael explained. "Not playstation, I know, but this'd be *kinda* fun at least, wouldn't it??"
"The boring kind of fun, maybe," Maria joked, and then sighed when she caught the look on Michael's face. "Okay, okay, I'll play if Kyle will. What about it, silent 'K'? You in?"
Kyle looked up, apparently none too impressed with the nickname, which Michael actually thought was pretty clever. "Sure, I'll play, whatever."
As they got the lounge chairs organized closer to the table, Maria warned in a low whisper, "And none of that czechoslovakian telekinesis to get your quarter into the glass, Michael, right??"
"Of course," Michael agreed. "That would be totally against the point." Not to mention that if he tried it, he'd probably end up with a broken glass. Hmm... maybe something like this would be a good exercise for fine-tuning his powers. **Well, look into that later.**
* * * * *
"Flowers for the beautiful lady, senor??" There was no denying that the word was out on the grapevine.
Liz's arms were already full of flowers from nearly a dozen Puerto Penasco 'street enterpreneurs.' Irises, stargazer lilies, carnations, snapdragons, birds of paradise, a few that Max couldn't remember the name of and roses -- pink, white, purple, and of course red roses. The stream of street hucksters looking to make a buck off an american teenager's romantic ego had trickled off to nothing after the first three sales... as if they were expecting the well to run dry soon. But a couple brave young gamin had proved them wrong and paved the way for even more salesmen.
Max didn't mind. He had plenty of spending money and didn't want anything to ruin this afternoon. On the other hand, he didn't want to embarass Liz by going overboard. "Whatcha think?" he asked the girl of his dreams, shooting her a meaningful look.
Liz gave the matter a moment's weighty consideration. "They do look lovely," she allowed finally. "But this is the last batch, understood, Mister Evans?? Maria may die of jealousy from only half this many."
With that settled, Max turned back to the dusky young man. "How much?"
"For half a dozen... ten dollares," he replied with a strong accent.
I thought about haggling, but handed over the cash without a word. As soon as it had changed hands Liz asked "What kind of flowers are they??"
"They are called... 'Alstroemeria'." He counted out six stems to hand to Max as he spoke, and as soon as they were passed to him Max gallantly gave them to Liz, who managed to add it to the armful. The flower seller took off, hopefully to spread the word that the limit had been reached.
Liz smiled at him, looked around, and noticed something new. "Oh, Max, you've got to get a picture of that!" She pointed behind him, and Max turned around to see the mural that Liz was pointing at... a wide, fantastic landscape that seemed somewhat Tolkien-inspired to Max. He grinned and whipped the digital camera out of his pocket.
"Do... do you wanna get in the scene, sweetie?" he asked, squinting into the viewfinder. 21 pictures left, the digital readout overlaid onto the mural scene reminded him. Quite enough.
"Yeah!!" Liz walked over to stand in front of the mural wall, turned back to face him, flowers still in her arms, and posed. "How's this?"
"A little to the right," Max suggested. "No, I meant my right. You were blocking the fight between the wizard and the demon."
"Cheese!!" Liz grinned. Once the megapixels were all safely recorded and Liz was walking back, Max noticed Jim Valenti hovering silently. He hadn't said a word for about five crowded blocks, Max noticed. "You okay?" he asked the older man softly. "I hope we're not boring you."
"Not at all," Valenti whispered back. "By now, I've found that you can learn a lot if you just keep your mouth shut and listen... and keep your eyes open." The sherriff touched his face briefly in an enigmatic gesture, and then turned away.
"Hey," Liz snuck into his arms and stole a kiss, but Max's mind was whirling too fast to appreciate the nearnessof his dearest beloved. What had Valenti learned. Something he had heard, or seen, since they had started sightseeing, that he felt he couldn't talk openly about??
Should they cancel the reconnoiter at the professor's place, then? No, Max was sure that Valenti could have devised a stronger warning if he thought that such a serious reaction were called for. This seemed like a milder warning... be on your guard. Give nothing away.
Now that he had come to a decision, Max wrapped Liz Parker up in his arms and kissed her, but he made sure to whisper in her ear, as if it were a secret endearment, "Careful. We may be under observation."
It was only a few minutes more before they got to the Professor's place, each of the three of them 'getting into character' by acting as innocuous, as stereotypically 'normal' as they could: Valenti telling the teenagers what not to do, Liz gigging and skipping from one thing that caught her attention to the next, and Max 'snapping photos' of everything in sight (though he didn't actually save many of those pictures.) Finally they were there. Max pointed the building out to the others as unobtrusively as he could.
"Oh, that's a cute house, Maxxie!" Liz exclaimed, running towards it in full ditz mode, and giving the rest of them an excuse to examine the premises. "What do you think? Wouldn't it be amazing to just leave the real world back home and move in to the edge of paradise, here?"
"Sounds great to me, Liz. But how would we pay for a house like this... or the grocery bill, for that matter."
"Reality has no place in this fantasy. mister," Liz scolded, shooting him a dark look, and then let her 'mood' lighten again. "Take a picture of me with the house, Max!"
Max obligingly swung the digital camera in the direction of her voice and snapped off a pic. He had already been acquiring as many relevant pictures of the premises as he could. **Liz looks so pretty right there,** he thought, admiring her through the viewfinder. **Wait a minute...**
He could see most of an arm through the open window. Leaving caution to one side, Max dashed to the side, trying to find the right angle for the face that was attached to that arm. No, wrong way, though he snapped a pic of the hand holding a book, just in case. So...
"Max..." Valenti's voice came.
"Just a second." There it was... a face reading glasses, middle-aged, obviously concentrating on whatever he was reading. Max had never seen a picture of the 'professor' they were looking for, but this guy seemed to fit the cliche. Not to mention that he was the only one supposed to be living in that house.
"Max!!" Valenti called again. "We need to get back to the motel, your friends will be waiting for us." *No, they won't,** Max thought in confusion for a second. None of the three groups were supposed to get back to the motel from the day's activities for more than an hour and a half yet. And then, it hit him.
**This is it. This is the abort-mission warning I was thinking about earlier.** Max couldn't resist taking the picture of the professor's face, but he turned away from the home immediately after, trusting the sheriff's judgement. "C'mon Liz." But she was already waiting for him with Valenti.
* * * * *
"Whoooo!! Oh, MAN!" Alex exulted as he swooshed in a graceful arc past the girls. After some tips from Isabel, (who used to windsurf on the lake at the summer camp she used to go to, it turned out,) Alex was definitely getting the hang of the windsurfer. It was an incredible feeling... as if he were catching the wind with his bare arms and standing upon the waves with his bare feet, instead of depending on a sail and a floating board.
"Go you, Alex!!" Isabel called out, grinning.
"You're a nut, Whitman, you know that, right?" was Tess's response. But she was smiling too. Alex took one hand off the bar to waggle them up behind his head like alien antennae and suddenly Tess was angling her 'surfer towards him, arranging her sail so as to get the best possible speed. Alex tried to take evasive action, but she zeroed in on him like a homing missile, laughing the whole time.
Just as she was closing in on him, though, something changed and with a faint jerk she started falling behind. Alex chuckled and was about to make a victory whoop when his surfer started slowing down too. They drifted to a stop about fifteen feet away from each other, buffeted back and forth slightly by the mild waves. "What the cripes?" Alex muttered even as he remembered the answer.
"Calm rolling in," Tess pointed out. "Nothing for it but to hunker down. We'd better meet up with Isabel again, tho, she's the one with the emergency... oh." Tess looked back the way she had come, where Alex was pointing to draw her attention. Isabel was already paddling over in their direction, sitting down on the board of her surfer and pushing the water back with her bare hands to get forward momentum - a slow process, obviously, but they had time. Alex and Tess also sat down and set about figuring how to turn their 'surfers around so they could go meet her part-way.
Once they had all assembled together and it was established that each of the three was okay to wait it out until the wind picked up enough to get back to the pier, an awkward silence settled in.
"Soo....." Tess sighed. "Heard any good evil alien schemes lately??" That got a brief laugh. "Actually, Isabel, there's something I've been meaning to ask you about, but it might be awkward. You know, in front of Alex. Though his perspective might help, too."
Alex thought about it a minute. "Well, it's not like we have anything else to talk about, obviously. Set a course for 'awkward.'"
"Okay." Tess closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Isabel, how did you... know??"
"Ummm..." Isabel tried for a few seconds to decipher that with sheer will-power, and then gave up. "Know what??"
"That... well, that you loved Alex. Instead of... oh, I'll just come out and say it. Michael."
Boom. There it was. Isabel wheezed for a bit in surprise, and then got her breathing system back under control. "Well, first off... I do love Michael, very much. But it's totally different -- he's like a second brother to me, and I'm not sure that anything's ever going to change that. But Alex... well, his love set me free." She shot him a tender look across the water. "It was the first thing to ever make me really feel safe in the human world. I couldn't help but love him back for it." She paused for a moment. "You're still having a hard time dealing with the Max and Liz thing, aren't you Tess??"
"'Hard time' is an underst..." Tess broke off, then started laughing sardonically. "Actually, 'hard time' is just about right. Some days I feel like I'm in a prison or something." She stifled a sigh. "I love Max so much... but I know he doesn't feel the same way about me. Everything was perfect for Max and Liz that year until I showed up, and I know that both of them still resent me a little for that."
"Well... wait a second!" Alex shook his head. "'Everything perfect'? Where did you get that notion??"
"Umm... I'm not sure," Tess muttered, frowning in concentration. "Why??"
Alex exchanged a knowing look with Isabel, who stepped in to take her turn. "Things were far from perfect with Max and Liz for most of that time. They both had problems opening up to each other right after the shooting, and Max backed out for a lot of months... thinking that it wouldn't be safe for Liz to get romantically involved with an alien. They had actually only really gotten things on track when you moved to town, which probably made it all the harder."
"Oh." Tess was silent for a little bit. "I don't know what to do with that." She sighed. "You know, we could just *push* ourselves in, and take you with us Alex."
"No," Isabel sighed. "No using powers. I know that it's not likely that anyone would notice anything weird, but it's always a possibility."
"Yeah." Alex looked around, trying to see any indication that the wind was coming in. "Anyone up for hand-war??"
Tess stared at him. "What the heck is hand-war??"
Alex smiled. "Have you heard of rock-paper-scissors??"
"Well, yeah, of course."
"Around my old grade school, there were a few variant symbols floating around... dynamite," he demonstrated a hand clenched together with a thumb sticking up, "which can only be beaten by snipping off the fuse with the scissors," and he mimed that with the other hand. "And water, which defeats even dynamite, but can for whatever symbolic reason be beaten by splashing a rock into it." He made the symbol for water, a hand with palm down and fingers spread out.
"Okay, with you so far, I guess," Tess agreed.
"Now, really all that does is replace some of the old symbols. You're left with rock, water, and dynamite, basically. Paper and scissors become sucker bets because in any given situation, water will be an equal or better play than scissors, and dynamite will be an equal or better play than paper. When I was in grade five, I actually worked out a variant with five different symbols, none of them obsolete." He quickly sketched out the essentials of his system.
"So, invasion is beaten by trade, (since the people who sell the weapons always come up on top,) but trade is beaten by politics (since politicians can levy taxes,) and politics is beaten by invasion. All three of them together are the mortal pursuits, and are all beaten by sorcery, which is beaten by religion, which in turn is beaten by the mortal pursuits."
"You had way too much time on your hands as a ten-year-old, Alex," Tess informed him. "But it might be decently amusing in so boring a situation as this. What do you say Isabel??"
Iz smiled, she had known she would have to play as soon as Alex started talking about it, and actually she was kind of proud that he was so brainy. "I'm in."
* * * * *
(That evening.)
"Hi, welcome to the club," Max said, taking Liz and Maria's coats with a smile. Their two guy rooms at the motel had been hastily converted for the 'parlour games club' meeting, with borrowed card tables and chairs brought in and one game board set up on Jim Valenti's immaculately made bed. "We've got a new diversion to try this evening."
"Oh, gawd, what is it with new games today?" Tess complained lightheartedly as she approached the open door. Max shot her a confused look.
"Just something Alex showed us while we were stuck out in the calm," Isabel explained. "So, what's the challenge tonight? Something with dice??"
"Nope," Michael explained as he set down a tray of cola cans down on an end table. "Turn chess." Several dubious looks. "It's like regular chess, except it isn't each piece moving is one complete turn. Each player goes back and forth moving as many pieces as they want to in a go, and once any given piece has moved it can't go again until you start the turn over." He explained the rules a little more and play began.
Max showed his pictures of the professor's house to a few people over the course of the evening, particularly Isabel. She agreed that she would be able to dreamwalk him using the tiny little snapshot that included his face, and that it sounded like a smart way to gather some more information safely.
Valenti's hushed news was more sobering. He had noticed a young man in the vicinity of that house who seemed to be doing guard duty - not noticeably so to anyone without Valenti's kind of training, but he was watching the people who came into that block and on guard for any that might cause a certain manner of trouble.
"Just one guy?" Michael asked.
"That was all I saw," Valenti agreed. "But we have no way to know if he has any backup or relief."
"We can try," Michael argued. "I can go into that area really early tomorrow morning and look for anyone like that. Kyle could try at another time of day. We can be careful not to arouse suspicion."
"Okay," Jim conceded. "I got Max to take a snapshot that should have this guy in it, though I couldn't tell him why." A look of dawning comprehension was coming over Max's face as he presumably remembered the incident.
"So, what else can we do?" Maria asked.
There was a pause. "Nothing I can think of, someone else may have notions,"
But no-one really did. Aside from Isabel dreamwalking the professor, Michael and maybe someones else who hadn't been in the Max/Liz/Jim team scouting out the professor's premises at different times of day, no-one had any better suggestions than enjoying the attractions of Puerto Penasco and doing everything to seem as much like normal american tourists as possible. Maria smiled and started planning her shopping trip.
The 'turn chess' games had a tendency to either be over fairly quickly or last a long time, including a drag-down rematch between Michael and the sheriff that went on for almost three hours. Jim had a lot of practice with conventional chess and an analytical mind that adapted quickly to this new variant, while Michael had a little experience with turn chess and a lot of practice coming up with innovative strategy on the fly. Finally Michael managed to pick off the sheriff's defences and pin his king to the wall.
* * * * *
(Friday, December 29th, 2000)
"...and what happened next?"
"Well... he went over to the picture on the wall, of the dog in the forest, right? He slid the whole painting aside and there was a wall safe behind it... this really high-tech looking wall safe with a number keypad and a fingerprint reader. He put his left index finger into the reader and punched in a series of numbers into the reader. I couldn't tell which numbers they were, and when they came up on the little LED screen above the keypad, they weren't numbers, but letters. I remember the sequence of letters.
Still more than half asleep, Maria felt the words flow past her, wondering vaguely who was talking and about what.
"Really!? What were they??"
"T... B, O, N, T, B, T, I, T, Q, W, T, N. That's it."
"Okay, and what after that??"
"The safe door opened inward, on a hinge at its bottom, so that it sank away into a hidden cavity. From inside the safe, some kind of smoke started to billow out. He was trying to find something inside the smoke, but that was the end. He woke up."
"Weird." Maria was a little bit more awake now, and she struggled to sit up.
"Isabel... what are you talking about and why are you in our room?"
Liz was sitting up in her own bed, the covers still spread over her legs and her lap. Isabel was sitting on the edge of Liz's bed, her hair pinned up and wearing a dressing gown that went down past her knees, so Maria could just get a glimps of the cuffs of her pajamas around her ankles.
"She dreamwalked the professor," Liz whispered, "and needed someone to listen to her talk about what she'd seen. Guess I'm the designated sounding board.
"Hmmm..." Maria thought about that. "Why didn't you pick Alex? Or Max, for that matter??"
"Both in Valenti's room," Isabel confessed cutely. "I don't think our august chaperone would take a bright view of me slipping into a boys' room first thing in the morning... especially not one that happened to contain my boyfriend."
"Good point," Maria agreed, sitting a little bit further up and blinking the sleep from her eyes. "So, catch me up. What did you get, aside from a freaky booby-trapped safe??"
"Not sure," Isabel sighed, turning herself slightly so as to better include both Maria and Liz in the conversation. "I'm not sure. There was some really weird stuff in there... with ugly little trolls and blue sun-umbrellas and mcdonald's fish sandwhiches. Plus, I think he's got a thing for... oh, what's her name? Sophia Loren."
"Man's got some taste, at least," Maria allowed. "Okay, well, there's got to be a lot going on inside this guy's head that's not really relevant to what we're doing here. Was there anything you saw in the dream that you know is relevant??"
"A few bits and hints," Isabel allowed, and picked up one of those small note pads from Liz's bedside table. "Let's see... something about being watched. That guy that Valenti talked about? I think that the professor knows about him, and also... maybe, that there's only the one guy. Or at least, only one guy at a time for a stretch that is at least weeks or months long. But don't hold me to that."
"Sounds promising," Maria agreed. "Anything else??"
"Something about a..." Isabel sighed. "I don't know how to describe it. Some kind of an alien... a vehicle, maybe? Somewhat sled-like... open-air, not very big. Definitely alien in origin. And if his dream is right... he's keeping it in his house, right here in Puerto Penasco."
"Wow," Maria muttered. "Think it came from your guys' ship??"
"Probably," Liz put in. Apparently she and Isabel had already been over some of this before Maria woke up. "We've been assuming that everything from the crash that Nasedo didn't rescue ended up with the special unit."
"But still... I can imagine walking off with office supplies when your company gets disbanded, but an alien vehicle?" Maria wise-cracked. "What about the rest of the special unit stuff you guys were hoping to find with this guy? 'Where the bodies are buried,' and so forth??"
"Ummm..." Isabel blushed. "I actually might know where some of the special unit bodies are buried... but they would be real bodies. As in decomposing people. Not..."
"...exactly what we're hoping for," Liz and Maria finished in unison with Isabel. "Well, maybe you should try a different dream," Liz continued. "It would be too much to expect to get everything you want out of one."
"Yeah... but I think we may need a better source of information than dreams, too." Isabel smiled briefly. "I've been working on learning a technique from the Book that might help. Memory transfer... basically taking a download from the guy's brain. I could do with a guinea pig or two, actually. Don't worry... it won't hurt or anything. I'm pretty sure."
"Does brain damage fall in the 'or anything' category?" Liz joked.
"How does it work?" Maria asked. "Are we talking like mind meld on star tre... Sorry. My bad."
"No, it's okay," Iz assured her. "Well, it's kinda like. I have to touch someone to trigger the connection... ideally firm contact on the head area. We'll probably have to figure out some way to sneak in while he's asleep. Trained practicioners can absorb the memory transfer as it comes in, but I'm sure I won't be able to learn that in time. I'd have to route it somewhere else... like into another person's brain. Then, later, I can decode that message."
"So, basically you'd just be the human network cable??" Maria joked. "Or hybrid network cable, something, I dunno."
"It's getting on for seven," Liz pointed out. "Why don't we get dressed and head out for breakfast or something??"
Isabel stood up. "Works for me. Meet you in the hallway in five."
* * * * *
(That afternoon)
Liz looked around at the small-town scenery, a market district on the edge of Puerto Penasco, and with a start realized that she recognized the young man sitting on a bench across the street, working weith a pencil and a medium-size sketch pad, frowning and erasing something.
"Wow, Kyle," she said as she walked up to him. "Sketching??"
Kyle looked up and smiled at her briefly. "Yeah, it's something I'm trying." He seemed to be well on his way to a quite passable rendition of a very pretty building down the way. "So, where's your siamese twin??"
"Max?" Liz sat down in the empty space on the other end of the bench from Kyle, not wanting to crowd him while he was working. "Oh, he's off looking for a little surprise for me, or something." There was a short uncomfortable silence. "So... you and Courtney, huh??"
"Yep... kinda."
"What's she like?" Liz blurted out. "I mean... our paths have crossed quite a few times, but I guess I've never really taken a chance to get to know her. What do you like about her?"
"Oh god, is this going to be *that* conversation?" Kyle joked.
"I'm not sure... can you answer the question, please?" Liz shot back. Kyle finished a wall, examined it critically, and then put the sketch book down.
"Courtney... let's see. She's really funny in this perfect, sarcastic way... and she thinks I'm funny too. She feels like she has to put up this tough cookie facade, especially since she found out about what happened to her brother, but every so often I can see this little glimpse of sweetness, or sensitivity, or tenderness, and it just makes me melt a little inside. And we're so in sync... last week I was just about to get on the phone and give her a call, I hear the doorbell, and it's her."
Liz was smiling. "When we get back to Roswell, we have to go on a double-date or something. Me and Max, you and Courtney. I mean... if that wouldn't be too weird or anything."
"Compared with some of the weird stuff you've put me through, Parker," Kyle whispered, "I think I'll be just fine." He chuckled.
"What are we laughing about?" a familiar voice asked. Liz looked up, startled that she had gotten so engrossed in her conversation with Kyle that she hadn't noticed Max arriving. She got up and stepped into his arms for a quick hug.
"Never mind, I'll tell you about it later," she whispered. "So... should we head back to the motel?"
"We've got a little time," Max assured her. "Here, open it." He passed her a small bundle made of soft cloth.
Liz unwrapped the makeshift package, and a sigh of approval escaped her lips when a hint of honey-colored metal peeked out.
"It's not real gold," Max quickly disclaimed as Liz uncovered the rest of the charm bracelet. "But it was beautiful, and I thought you'd like it."
"I do, very much." Liz brought Max's head down to meet hers for a quick kiss, then went back to examining her prize. The bracelet was almost empty, only a few 'starter' charms on it, but that was part of the fun, of filling it up. "Thank you."
As the three of them strolled quietly down the streets, Kyle sketching bits and pieces of things that caught his eye, Max whispered to them quietly, his voice so low that no-one could overhear them in the open, noisy spaces. Michael had gone to scout out the professor's home around 4:30 that morning and seen no sign of the guard. Alex had tried around quarter to ten and seen him, thus the assumption that he was on a reasonably normal sleep cycle.
Isabel had gotten into another dream, and decided she was as ready as she'd ever be.
"Tomorrow morning at 3:30 am," Max murmured to them almost silently. "We make our move.
TO BE CONTINUED!
Author: Chris Kenworthy
E-mail: chris@chriskweb.net
Homepage: http://www.fanficarchive.net/
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own the Roswell characters, though if I did I'd treat them better than Jason Katims.
Category: Sci-fi drama. Canon couples romance leading to UC pairings in later part.
Spoilers: Up to 'ask not'
Part 4e: South of the border
"Sometimes I can't believe we really pulled that first show off," Maria laughed as they sat around the DeLuca living room, sharing a moment of nostalgia before moving on to the next house. "We had, what, two and a half practice sessions and we totally *killed*!"
"Yeah, you were great, babe," Michael agreed with a soft chuckle. "I can't believe I actually dragged us all off to Mexico so soon."
"There were *some* of us who didn't need too much convincing," Maria laughed.
* * * * *
(Wednesday morning, November 27th 2000)
"You are now entering Dona Ana county," Isabel read off the sign as they approached it on the highway.
"Yeah," Liz agreed softly, keeping an eye on the Jeep, further down the road. "Just, what, five hundred more miles to go??"
"Closer to four hundred and fifty, I figure," Max corrected. Liz shot him a sideways look and forced a smile. "Relax, sweetie, you're doing great."
It was no secret that whatever Liz Parker's many talents might be, a great driver she wasn't, despite having had her full license for about a year - lack of practice. But everyone was so excited about Liz's new wheels from her quote unquote 'anonymous benefactor' that Max and Michael, among others, had insisted she christen the Sedan by driving it off on the gang's latest harebrained scheme.
Max wanted to ride with his sweetheart, of course, so Michael and Maria were driving the Jeep down. Valenti was bringing up the rear of the convoy, along with Kyle and Tess.
"Umm... not quite sure about bringing this up," Liz said softly, still keeping her eyes fiercely on the road, "but is anyone else a little... worried about this whole trip?"
Max, Isabel, and Alex all managed to share a look. "Umm... worried how, exactly?" Isabel probed.
"Well..." Liz sighed, trying to put her thoughts in order without taking too much of her attention away from the driving. "You found out about this professor guy, Max, and that's great. I hope we learn a lot from him. But... well, we don't even know what we want to find out or how we're going to go about it. There's a lot of the 'book' that's still untranslated and avenues of investigation back home that have gone unfollowed - like those other marking points on the map. You guys..." Liz made a vague motion that pointed to Max and Isabel, forward to Michael and back to Tess, "have mentioned ideas for new ways to use your powers, but you haven't gotten any opportunity to practice them. Given all of that, doesn't it seem like this might not be the best time to go and investigate a top Special Unit official in a foreign country? We don't have any idea what we're going to find waiting for us in Puerto Penasco." Liz sighed, realizing how much she had rambled. "Sorry."
"It's okay," Max whispered. "The same thing's occured to me." Alex and Isabel were nodding in agreement too. "But this was Michael's idea, and I guess I didn't want to squelch him again. Plus... ready or not, this is probably the best chance we'll have to take a jaunt like this until spring break, and that isn't for another three months."
"I'm not sure if that's a good enough reason to put our lives in danger," Alex said half-jokingly. "It'll be too much of a hassle to do it later."
"Look, no-one said you had to come along, Alex," Max shot back, a little annoyance in his voice. "But we've got a deadline to meet here, and killer aliens coming at us whether we're taking risks or not. I would think you of all people could..."
"Okay, okay, that's enough!" Isabel called out, throwing herself forward in between Max and Alex as well as she could and stretching a hand out in either direction. "We do *not* need to start bickering about this. Whatever our reservations, we've made the decision and put a reasonable amount of effort into planning this trip, so let's just make the best of it, all right?"
Alex smiled slightly. "Yeah, okay." He looked Max right in the eyes. "Sorry man, I was only joking."
"And I kinda over-reacted, didn't I?" Max admitted. "My apologies, Alex."
"No need." For a little while they carried on down the highway in silence. "Hope we can find a little time to enjoy ourselves too."
* * * * *
"A lot depends on good recon," Michael was saying as he drove the Jeep west down I-10. "We won't have any ideas what the true risk factors are until we arrive and take a good look around. Carefully, of course. I mean yeah, taking off all of a sudden like this is a little foolhardy - I'll cop to that. But this guy is a retired government functionary -- There's no particular reason to expect a threat attached to him. If there is, considering all we've been through so far it won't be anything we can't handle, and I think we'd all feel pretty foolish waiting for months if when we finally make it down, there's no danger."
Maria sighed. Michael had been going on like this since five miles past the Roswell city limits, and she *hated* listening to him talk strategy. Not that it reminded her of his past self, the alien soldier, princes Isabel's fiancee and all that. Not at all -- it's just that about a month and a half ago, she realized that strategy was deeply boring stuff. True heroism, showing up in the nick of time to save the day, 'oh, my knight in shining armor,' yeah, that kinda stuff she could get behind. But if strategy was what it took to get to that point... **Well, work out your strategy, just so long as I don't have to hear about it.**
Maria knew that this attitude was pretty hypocritical of her... there were so many things that weren't Michael's cup of snapple that she had asked him to throw himself into for her sake... and this was so obviously the kind of thing Michael LIVED for. That was why she hadn't said anything so far. And yet, Maria couldn't quit squeeze this topic into the 'He's my darling spaceboy, so I forebear,' category. It was *bugging* her, it was *grating* on her, and she wasn't sure how much more of it she could take!!
Suddenly pushed into action, Maria leaned over, stroked Michael's right leg near the knee with her right hand, and teasingly kissed him on the ear. "...need to make sure we're not over-confident, but WHOA!!" Michael's ramble came to a belated halt as the stimulation of Maria's actions kicked in. "Umm... what're you doing there, 'Ria?"
"Why... can't you tell?" Maria whispered, moving the kiss down along Michael's jaw line and her hand up his thigh. "And, more importantly... don't you like it??"
"Um, yeah, I like, I like," Michael mumbled. "I like so much that I might end up driving Max's jeep into a ditch, and therein lies the problem." Indeed, their course down the road was starting to veer this way and that, and behind them Max had probably already noticed and started to worry. He tended to get a little bit anal about his wheels sometimes. Weighing the cons against the few fun and naughty pros, Maria pouted and retreated back to her own side of the car. "This isn't exactly like you, Maria," Michael said, straightening the car and some of his hair that Maria had ruffled along the way. "What's up??"
"No... I guess it isn't," the young girl agreed. "I guess... I was bored of listening to Michael the soldier ramble on and on and wanted to see if Michael the irresponsible boyfriend could come out to play. Pretty stupid, huh??"
"Umm... not really," Michael agreed. "I mean... I know that I tend to get a little over-obsessed about this sort of thing... I'd hate to see something happen to you or one of the rest of the gang on these madcap capers -- but I have to admit it really isn't going to make a difference if I'm going over counter-offensives right this second. So... do you want to talk about something else while I drive??"
"Yeah. Uh, let's see..." Maria thought for a second, then something occured to her. "'Ria??! We have *got* to get you a better pet name to call me, spaceboy!"
Michael's groan seemed to echo across the desert plain.
* * * * *
At a rest stop somewhere between Tucson and the Mexican border, all three cars pulled off the highway for an early dinner and a stretch break (not to mention another chance to answer the call of nature.) Maria watched from the queue as Max and Isabel left the food stand with their burritos, and Michael with a couple of tacos.
"You know... I don't think there's going to be any shortage of Mexican food once we actually GET to Mexico," she deadpanned with a smile.
"What was that?" Tess asked, following behind Michael. She had an enchilada.
Soon they were all set with their food and sitting around a couple of tables out near the parking lot. As she started in on her slice of pineapple pizza, Maria started conversation again. "Can anybody switch over to the Jeep?? Michael drives me crazy with passenger-seat driving every time *I* get behind the wheel, so he's been driving for like seven hours straight."
The other kids exchanged glances. "Umm... well, I'm good staying with Liz," Max said apologetically.
"Surprise, surprise," Tess mumbled under her breath.
"I guess we could take turns driving the Jeep, hmm?" Isabel said, smiling as she looked over at Alex.
"Sure," Alex agreed. His grin was looking so broad these days that it almost might pop right off of his face.
"I've got a proposal," Kyle piped up. "Speaking on behalf of the Valenti contingent, we'll trade you Tess for Maria."
"Hey!!" Maria, Tess, and Jim Valenti called out in unison.
"C'mon!" Kyle focused his persuasive efforts on Maria. "The three hybrids can get in some quality bonding time... and mister Whitman here with the weird disk memories fried into his brain is kinda half little green man himself these days, so he won't mind, will you Alex??" Kyle took a deep breath. "Just for a few hours, I'd like to be in a homo sapiens only zone. Please??" Kyle's expression was sincere and apologetic as he shot a smile over at Tess.
"Okay, okay," Maria finally agreed. "So that's you, me, and your dad in his car, Alex Isabel Michael and Tess in the Jeep, and Max and Liz get to be all alone."
"Any idea when you figure we'll make Puerto Penasco, Mister Valenti?" Alex piped up.
Jim checked his watch. "If we don't spend too much time eating our dinners... about seven thirty in the evening?"
"Just about enough time to check in, get unpacked, and go to sleep," Kyle groused. "Boy, what a fun first day of vacation."
"All right, Kyle, just what is your problem??" Tess snapped. "You've been like this all day. No-one *made* you come."
"That's not true, he did!!" Kyle's accusing finger pointed straight at Michael, who jumped slightly. "Well, maybe not as such, but it had to be a 'whole gang thing,'" Kyle mocked. "And my dad has to chaperone all week, so I couldn't possibly stay home in Roswell alone, could I?? No-one even asked me if there was someone I'd like to bring along, though I guess that makes sense - god forbid I hang out with someone who isn't 'in on the secret', and everybody who IS in is pretty much sitting around this table."
There was a stunned silence as Kyle's outburst hung in the air. Then Liz repeated slowly, "Like to bring along... Kyle, are you dating someone??"
Kyle paused a second, then nodded slowly. "I didn't *think* you had noticed."
"Who??" Maria blurted out.
"Courtney Banks." At the various expressions of surprise around the table, (though none came from Tess or Kyle's dad, Maria noticed,) Kyle apparently felt he had to defend his choice. "Well... we've kinda been bonding - both of us got dragged into this 'aliens among us' thing kicking and screaming, as you might have noticed. Don't worry, I didn't tell her the real deal about you guys, I know you'd want to break that news in your own time and your own way." He took a deep breath, then continued on. "We've only been on two real dates, but I was hoping to be able to hang out with her over the holiday break, you know?? Get to know each other a little better."
The silence was pregnant. "Man..." Michael finally exclaimed. "You know, you could have said something, man."
"I know," Kyle agreed. "But hey... what's done is done, right? Courtney will be back in Roswell when I get home, and a week's winter vacation in a beach town in Mexico - well, there are worse tortures to inflict on a guy, am I right??"
"Okay," Max cut in on the general soft laughter that followed. "I hate to be the group nag, but precious time's a-wasting, you know? Let's finish our food, anyone who really needs to, hit the head, and let's see how quickly we can get back on the road, huh??"
* * * * *
(Late that evening.)
Max wandered around the motel grounds, trying to relax. It had been quite a day.
The twilight had been fading back when they first got to Puerto Penasco, after more than twelve hours on the road. First checking in to the motel, and figuring out who stayed in each room (two for the girls, Liz and Maria staying together, Isabel with Tess; Kyle hadn't wanted to be in the same room as his father so he was bunking with Michael, leaving Max with Alex and the sherriff in the largest motel room...) then out to find some place to have dinner on their first night in Mexico, then back to the motel to settle in. Max knew he needed to rest, to prepare for the silent campaign that would begin tomorrow, but he felt too keyed up and jumpy. Thus why he had told Jim Valenti that he needed to take a walk.
As he walked around a corner of the building, Max saw floodlights shining down on blue water and belatedly realized that he had stumbled on the motel pool. And that wasn't all he had stumbled upon... he could see a petite, feminine figure floating happily in the water, eyes closed. Max almost turned around and hurried away, not wanting to intrude on another motel guest, but there was something familiar about the cloud of dark brown hair streaming out along the surface. "Liz??" Max called out somewhat doubtfully.
The girl in the pool started in surprise, standing up, and then Max could tell that it was *definitely* Liz, and he felt a little foolish for his uncertainty. "Max? What are you doing here?" She laughed a little and continued in that teasing tone that drove Max wild, "... Or should I guess??"
Max laughed too, and walked up to the edge of the water. "I was just out taking a walk. Can't seem to relax and go to sleep."
Liz Parker's laugh rang out like a soft and beautiful bell. "Me too!! Driving is *hard* work, when you're not used to it." Although Liz had allowed herself to be spotted from time to time by Max and Alex, she had insisted on driving the majority of the way down in her new car, and Max didn't doubt that it had been nerve-taxing. "The pool was a great idea though - SO relaxing." She smiled impishly. "You should try it!"
Max was deeply tempted. "Our respectable chaperone may come looking for me."
Liz giggled. "So?"
He thought about it. "Well, it's almost cliche to say it, but I don't have a swim suit."
"Are you wearing boxer shorts??" Caught by surprise, Max could only nod. "Same difference."
Something inside Max wanted to call the whole thing off, but Liz's eyes were locked onto him, silently daring him to go through with it. Slowly he pulled off his t-shirt, kicked away the new sneakers, pulled off his socks, and took a deep breath before letting his jeans drop to the deck.
Max could see Liz swallow hard and blush a little as her gaze swept across his chest and down his muscular legs, and he couldn't help but smile a little at the confirmation that this incredible girl found him as attractive as he knew she was to him. Wearing only the black boxer shorts that Liz had referred to, he stepped entirely out of his jeans and dove lightly into the water.
As he surfaced and stood up, Max saw Liz walking slowly toward him through the water. Now that he was down in the water himself, he could see that she was wearing a cute one-piece bathing suit in a dark purple that set off her creamy skin and deep brown eyes ravishingly. As soon as she was within striking range, Max darted forward and pulled her into his arms, kissing her tenderly.
"Oh, Max," Liz whispered around their lip-lock. "I love you so much. Promise you'll never leave me."
Then the kiss was over, and Max stared deep into Liz's eyes. "I promise." As soon as he said the words, Liz grinned mischievously, plunging under the water, and pulling Max along with her, Underneath the surface, her lips found his in a second kiss, and the sensation was incredible. It was like their essences were touching as they floated...
*Floated*...
All of a sudden, a flash hit Max, so intensely that he would have staggered if he had had his feet on solid ground, or gasped if his face hadn't been under water. He was still floating... or at least, something that was the center of his awareness was floating, though it would take a quantum leap for Max to be able to reconcile that something with how he felt of himself at the moment.
That something was small... tiny, incredibly tiny, and yet alive, he realized. An embryo. And it was floating in one of the pods. In the next pod over, Max realized as his awareness spread outwards from the embryo, was another embryo, even smaller, younger, less fully formed. Down in another pod... another something living, though this one was so small and formless that Max wasn't even sure if it could be called an embryo... just a cluster of cells that he knew would nevertheless become a person. A hybrid person, probably.
The fourth pod was empty. Max sent his awareness out further - it expanded in a concentric sphere, beyond the four pods, into -- a spaceship. A small spaceship. Mechanical constructs - robots of some description - buzzed about its cramped interior. Three living beings watched the robots calmly, while a fourth was monitoring the controls of the spacecraft.
Max focused on the robots - there seemed to be a knot of them concentrating on something near the pods. As his awareness converged again, he could tell that the subject of all this activity was cells... a collection of cells on which the robots were performing microsurgery. Extract a chromosome here, an mitochondrion from there, inject them carefully into cell C and then...
It was done. A robot carefully carried cell "C" over to the fourth pod and used a mechanism to transfer it into the nutritive fluid. That cell divided into two, and then each of those two cells divided, until they were quickly multiplying into a lump of...
"Max?! MAX!!!" Liz's voice brought Max back to reality, and he realized that he had zoned out into his vision. His lungs ached, and he instinctively exhaled... accidentally spraying a mouthful of water all over Liz. "Hey!!"
After taking in a breath of fresh air, Max couldn't help but laugh. "Sorry. I... I had a flash," he explained.
"Yeah, I kinda figured," Liz agreed. "Though from my experience, flashes are usually QUICK."
"Okay, then, not *quite* a flash," Max sighed. He fell back and sank into the water up to his neck, trying to keep the feeling of 'floating' around him for the moment. "I... I saw the ship in space, I think. Where the four of us were being... conceived. Re-conceived."
Liz caught the point, as she started floating herself and turned around so that Max could wrap his arms around her and spoon in the water, Liz laying her head onto his bare shoulder. "When you were being... being made into hyrbids, you mean??"
"Yes. I was the oldest... two of the others were already in the pods too. The last one was just being finished... his cells being spliced together from, from four or five different cell sources. One wasn't like the others... that was probably the sample of alien genes from the homeworld." Max thought a moment. "MICHAEL's genes... they were male cells, I know that somehow. There were at least three samples of human DNA that were being used to... different chromosomes or parts of chromosomes, selected for I-don't-know-what."
"Maybe the best human genes they could find," Liz speculated aloud, "or the ones that would fit best with your alien DNA."
"Robots were doing the specialist work," Max continued. "But there were living beings there... the four guardians. Oh, my god, Liz... it seemed so REAL!!"
"Wow..." was all that Liz could say for a moment... and then a new voice intruded on them.
"Max??"
"Oh, my god..." Liz breathed. "It's Valenti."
"Yeah, I know..." Max agreed, just starting to dimly realize something.
"Uh-oh... this does *not* look good," Liz sighed, waving at Max's clothing strewn over the deck. "If he finds us here, he's gonna make us go up to bed, and we're not doing anything wrong, are we??"
"Liz..." Max breathed, stunned by something. "I can *see* Valenti."
"What??" For a second, Liz was silent in confusion. "But... he's not here, Max. From what I can tell he's around the corner that way." She waved in the other direction than Max had come.
"I know, but... I can SEE him," Max repeated. "It's like... I dunno, like a new power or something, triggered by that vision. God, I feel like I could *touch* him if I reached out hard enough."
Liz twisted her neck to look up at Max, her brown eyes shining brightly with the reflected floodlights. "Could you... could you 'connect' with him, Max??"
"What??" The suggestion caught Max off guard.
"Like you did with me. If you feel like you can touch him from here... could you connect with Valenti's body, from here??"
"Um, I dunno," Max mumbled. "Why would I want to??"
"You could make him feel sleepy, Max," Liz suggested, a wild daredevil alive in her eyes. "No real harm, just a few simple adjustments... nudge the blood sugar and the nervous activity down. If he's sleepy enough he'll forget about looking for you and go back to his room to bed."
A part of Max was hooked on the idea. It was like nothing he'd ever done with his powers before, but that was part of the appeal. And then there was the way Liz was looking at him.
Max focused on the image of Valenti he could see inside his mind, and suddenly he was connected. A few images flashed into his mind... a dark-haired young woman James Valenti had known when he was reasonably young himself... holding Kyle in his arms in the UFO center... Max accepted the images without committing to them, and moved deeper into the connection. It took only a second to know that the change was done. Valenti yawned, looked around one last time, and traipsed off to the stairs that led up to the second floor of the motel.
"Oh, my god..." Max muttered. "It worked. That is so cool."
"Yeah," Liz agreed. "You're like a wizard." And she kissed him again, and they floated there in each other's arms.
Half an hour later, when Max and Liz finally crept back to their separate rooms, they found Alex, Maria, and Jim all asleep. They dried off carefully and hung the towels back up, hoping that over the night they would dry off enough to still seem fresh in the morning.
* * * * *
(December 28th 2000)
All nine of them went for breakfast to a coffee shop around the corner from the motel. "So, what's the battle plan, Maxwell??" Michael whispered as he started into his first croissant.
"No battle plans for today," Max answered in an equally low voice, spreading a little jam on his crumpet. "Remember, we don't know what we might be getting into - or who might be watching for us here."
"Why would somebody be watching for us *here*, Max??" Tess asked. But Max didn't reply to her.
"So here's the plan. For today, we're just teenage kids here from New Mexico for christmas break... and their chaperone, of course." Max nodded to Valenti. "One of us," he tapped his chest quietly, "will find a way to do some recon *discretely* and report back. We'll do war council tonight at the motel, along with the usual parlour games club meeting." He smiled at the group. "Sound cool??"
Alex nodded. "Okay with me."
Isabel visibly re-counted the circle, and smiled feebly when she saw that everyone had been watching her do it. "Nine of us... three groups of three, does that make sense?" Enough people nodded that she felt confident going on. "Well... I noticed that they have a place out on the beach where you can rent windsurfers and take them out. Sounds like fun to me."
"I'm in for that," Alex chimed in.
"Yeah, I'll tag along with you guys, if that's okay?" Tess said tentatively. It was no secret that Tess wasn't comfortable spending much time with Liz or Tess in small groups... and didn't want either of them thinking she was spending too much time with Max. So it made sense that she was interested in joining a group without any of the three of them, and that was alright by Alex.
"Yeah, that'd be good," Isabel said with an encouraging smile.
"Well, I'm for just staking out a place on the beach, vegging out and catching some rays," Maria laughed. "You're with me, spaceboy," she patted Michael's shoulder.
"Me?? But I..." Maria gave him the puppy-dog eyes, and Michael was a goner. "Oh, okay, chilling out on the beach. I guess I can dig that. Who's our third??"
Kyle looked around, noticed that his father in particular was not about to volunteer, and raised his hand. "Okay, I'll go with you guys."
"I guess that leaves us with mister Valenti," Liz said slowly, then looked at the sherriff and forced a sunny smile. "What should we do??"
"I was thinking of doing the *sightseeing* thing," Max said. "There's gotta be something worth taking a picture of in this town." He patted the digital camera his parents had given him for christmas meaningfully.
"Oh, yeah, gotcha." Liz agreed. "Sound cool, Mister Valenti?"
"Yeah, yeah, that sounds fine with me," Valenti agreed.
There was a lingering silence as they finished their breakfasts. "So... uh, how about this Mexico weather??" Alex tried vaguely. No-one replied.
* * * * *
About three quarters of an hour later, Alex Whitman was standing in a small changing room on pier nine. "On vacation in sunny Puerto Penasco," he mused to himself, hardly loud enough to qualify as 'whispering.' "About to head out windsurfing with two hot hybrid babes. Sometimes life just DOESN'T suck."
Although he was only in love with Isabel, of course, Alex would have to admit that Tess Harding was also quite attractive. As far as himself... well, as Alex looked at his reflection in the mirror, he supposed he cut a decent figure in his navy blue swimming trunks. He was too skinny, of course, but some kind of genetic accident from his mother's side had given him a subtly muscular physique without much maintenance. His worst feature, the deal-breaker, was the goofy ears of course, but Isabel said she thought they were cute.
"Hey, come on Whitman, we're missing the wind!!" The call brought him back to the moment and he headed out, his clothes and belongings already arranged in the lock-box he had tied the key to around his neck. (NOT including the washer of course, that was around his neck too - it never left him these days. He had mentioned it to Isabel, and she agreed that while they were risking the possibility of the little thing getting loose and sinking to the bottom of the pacific shore, that wasn't too likely and if he 'checked' it they'd be worrying about skins blasting the lockers apart to get at it.)
"Took you long enough," Tess teased as Alex handed his lock-box over to the attendant behind the counter. "Guys always complain about the time it gets girls to get ready, but we were both changed before you." Tess was wearing a one-piece lycra-type bathing suit in a light powder blue. It wasn't particularly concealing, though, with a cutout below her breasts giving a peek at the upper part of her trim stomach and what looked like two other small vents at the side, reaching down to Tess' waist.
"Uhh... well, what can I say. You can't look *this* good quickly," Alex joked back, striking an over-the-top male model pose.
Tess rolled her eyes. "COME on... like I said, we're losing the wind out to sea." She grabbed his hand and hurried him further down the pier to where Isabel and a lifeguard-looking guy who worked for the rental company. Alex's girlfriend was clad in a stunning orange two-piece bikini that wasn't much more revealing than Tess' suit... though that was quite sexy enough! What skin the top concealed or the bottom refused to reveal was just made more intriguing for the lack of total exposure.
"...guys stick together and you should be fine, even without much experience," the lifeguard guy was saying. "There won't be much tidal activity until late this afternoon, but that'll just make it easier to enjoy a relaxing sail. I'll give one of you a warning flag just in case..." Isabel waved a hand and the flag was passed over. "There'll be a spot to keep that in next to your mast. Don't unroll it outside of a truly serious situation. Oh... the marine weather forecast said there might be a calm today."
"Uh... what does that mean?" Alex said, feeling slightly foolish asking it.
"It means no wind, stupid," Tess supplied unhelpfully.
"That's right," lifeguard-guy agreed, missing the sarcasm. "If the wind dies down, you aren't going to be able to get much of anywhere short of paddling if you're too far out for the tide to push you in. If that happens, just sit tight and wait for something to blow back up again. A calm never lasts too long hereabouts. So... any other questions??"
"No, I think we're good," Isabel told him politely. "Where are our 'surfers??"
For answer, the guy led the way down a ladder off the pier to a kind of a floating hanger. "You got 26, 27, and 28, right down there. Enjoy your sail!!"
Alex noticed the guy staring at Isabel as they walked away, but he wasn't jealous - in fact he felt a odd kind of pride about it. Isabel *was* hot, hot enough to make guys' mouths drop open and *he* was her boyfriend.
Um... okay," he muttered out loud as he stepped on to his windsurfer and clutched the bar tightly. "How do you start this thing??"
(Approaching noon. Dec 28th 2000)
"So... we just lay here??" Michael looked out across the crowded beach, then over to his friends... or his girlfriend and conspiracy-mate, or whatever.
Maria cracked open one eye to reveal a pissed expression. "I can't veg out properly if you keep asking that," she informed him.
Michael sighed, lay back on his lounge chair, and tried to get into the vegging out spirit. He couldnt' keep his eyes closed any longer, so he kept looking around... and his gaze kept lingering on Maria, which didn't help relax him. She had come out of the motel this morning, after breakfast, wearing a tiny little string bikini, some kind of khaki color that, to be honest, didn't look a whole lot different from her bare skin. He had appreciated the view, at first, but it wasn't something that exactly made him want to lie back on his own lounge chair and do nothing.
To make it worse, he had noticed a number of other guys, apparently both tourists and mexican locals, checking Maria out since they got to the beach. Watching strangers lust after *your* girlfriend sounded fine in theory, but Michael had quickly realized that it wasn't as much fun as it was cracked up to be. He didn't intentionally show off in front of strange girls like this... so why did MARIA have to?
"Come on," Michael groaned suddenly, sitting back up. "Vegging out is one thing, but we don't have to do *nothing.* We could..." He looked around, trying to come up with some sort of an idea, and ended up staring at the table between all their chairs, with Kyle's empty glass and Maria's purse sitting on it. "We could play quarters."
Maria sat up and stared at him. "What the heck is that?"
"You take turns trying to bounce a coin off the table and get it into the glass," Michael explained. "Not playstation, I know, but this'd be *kinda* fun at least, wouldn't it??"
"The boring kind of fun, maybe," Maria joked, and then sighed when she caught the look on Michael's face. "Okay, okay, I'll play if Kyle will. What about it, silent 'K'? You in?"
Kyle looked up, apparently none too impressed with the nickname, which Michael actually thought was pretty clever. "Sure, I'll play, whatever."
As they got the lounge chairs organized closer to the table, Maria warned in a low whisper, "And none of that czechoslovakian telekinesis to get your quarter into the glass, Michael, right??"
"Of course," Michael agreed. "That would be totally against the point." Not to mention that if he tried it, he'd probably end up with a broken glass. Hmm... maybe something like this would be a good exercise for fine-tuning his powers. **Well, look into that later.**
* * * * *
"Flowers for the beautiful lady, senor??" There was no denying that the word was out on the grapevine.
Liz's arms were already full of flowers from nearly a dozen Puerto Penasco 'street enterpreneurs.' Irises, stargazer lilies, carnations, snapdragons, birds of paradise, a few that Max couldn't remember the name of and roses -- pink, white, purple, and of course red roses. The stream of street hucksters looking to make a buck off an american teenager's romantic ego had trickled off to nothing after the first three sales... as if they were expecting the well to run dry soon. But a couple brave young gamin had proved them wrong and paved the way for even more salesmen.
Max didn't mind. He had plenty of spending money and didn't want anything to ruin this afternoon. On the other hand, he didn't want to embarass Liz by going overboard. "Whatcha think?" he asked the girl of his dreams, shooting her a meaningful look.
Liz gave the matter a moment's weighty consideration. "They do look lovely," she allowed finally. "But this is the last batch, understood, Mister Evans?? Maria may die of jealousy from only half this many."
With that settled, Max turned back to the dusky young man. "How much?"
"For half a dozen... ten dollares," he replied with a strong accent.
I thought about haggling, but handed over the cash without a word. As soon as it had changed hands Liz asked "What kind of flowers are they??"
"They are called... 'Alstroemeria'." He counted out six stems to hand to Max as he spoke, and as soon as they were passed to him Max gallantly gave them to Liz, who managed to add it to the armful. The flower seller took off, hopefully to spread the word that the limit had been reached.
Liz smiled at him, looked around, and noticed something new. "Oh, Max, you've got to get a picture of that!" She pointed behind him, and Max turned around to see the mural that Liz was pointing at... a wide, fantastic landscape that seemed somewhat Tolkien-inspired to Max. He grinned and whipped the digital camera out of his pocket.
"Do... do you wanna get in the scene, sweetie?" he asked, squinting into the viewfinder. 21 pictures left, the digital readout overlaid onto the mural scene reminded him. Quite enough.
"Yeah!!" Liz walked over to stand in front of the mural wall, turned back to face him, flowers still in her arms, and posed. "How's this?"
"A little to the right," Max suggested. "No, I meant my right. You were blocking the fight between the wizard and the demon."
"Cheese!!" Liz grinned. Once the megapixels were all safely recorded and Liz was walking back, Max noticed Jim Valenti hovering silently. He hadn't said a word for about five crowded blocks, Max noticed. "You okay?" he asked the older man softly. "I hope we're not boring you."
"Not at all," Valenti whispered back. "By now, I've found that you can learn a lot if you just keep your mouth shut and listen... and keep your eyes open." The sherriff touched his face briefly in an enigmatic gesture, and then turned away.
"Hey," Liz snuck into his arms and stole a kiss, but Max's mind was whirling too fast to appreciate the nearnessof his dearest beloved. What had Valenti learned. Something he had heard, or seen, since they had started sightseeing, that he felt he couldn't talk openly about??
Should they cancel the reconnoiter at the professor's place, then? No, Max was sure that Valenti could have devised a stronger warning if he thought that such a serious reaction were called for. This seemed like a milder warning... be on your guard. Give nothing away.
Now that he had come to a decision, Max wrapped Liz Parker up in his arms and kissed her, but he made sure to whisper in her ear, as if it were a secret endearment, "Careful. We may be under observation."
It was only a few minutes more before they got to the Professor's place, each of the three of them 'getting into character' by acting as innocuous, as stereotypically 'normal' as they could: Valenti telling the teenagers what not to do, Liz gigging and skipping from one thing that caught her attention to the next, and Max 'snapping photos' of everything in sight (though he didn't actually save many of those pictures.) Finally they were there. Max pointed the building out to the others as unobtrusively as he could.
"Oh, that's a cute house, Maxxie!" Liz exclaimed, running towards it in full ditz mode, and giving the rest of them an excuse to examine the premises. "What do you think? Wouldn't it be amazing to just leave the real world back home and move in to the edge of paradise, here?"
"Sounds great to me, Liz. But how would we pay for a house like this... or the grocery bill, for that matter."
"Reality has no place in this fantasy. mister," Liz scolded, shooting him a dark look, and then let her 'mood' lighten again. "Take a picture of me with the house, Max!"
Max obligingly swung the digital camera in the direction of her voice and snapped off a pic. He had already been acquiring as many relevant pictures of the premises as he could. **Liz looks so pretty right there,** he thought, admiring her through the viewfinder. **Wait a minute...**
He could see most of an arm through the open window. Leaving caution to one side, Max dashed to the side, trying to find the right angle for the face that was attached to that arm. No, wrong way, though he snapped a pic of the hand holding a book, just in case. So...
"Max..." Valenti's voice came.
"Just a second." There it was... a face reading glasses, middle-aged, obviously concentrating on whatever he was reading. Max had never seen a picture of the 'professor' they were looking for, but this guy seemed to fit the cliche. Not to mention that he was the only one supposed to be living in that house.
"Max!!" Valenti called again. "We need to get back to the motel, your friends will be waiting for us." *No, they won't,** Max thought in confusion for a second. None of the three groups were supposed to get back to the motel from the day's activities for more than an hour and a half yet. And then, it hit him.
**This is it. This is the abort-mission warning I was thinking about earlier.** Max couldn't resist taking the picture of the professor's face, but he turned away from the home immediately after, trusting the sheriff's judgement. "C'mon Liz." But she was already waiting for him with Valenti.
* * * * *
"Whoooo!! Oh, MAN!" Alex exulted as he swooshed in a graceful arc past the girls. After some tips from Isabel, (who used to windsurf on the lake at the summer camp she used to go to, it turned out,) Alex was definitely getting the hang of the windsurfer. It was an incredible feeling... as if he were catching the wind with his bare arms and standing upon the waves with his bare feet, instead of depending on a sail and a floating board.
"Go you, Alex!!" Isabel called out, grinning.
"You're a nut, Whitman, you know that, right?" was Tess's response. But she was smiling too. Alex took one hand off the bar to waggle them up behind his head like alien antennae and suddenly Tess was angling her 'surfer towards him, arranging her sail so as to get the best possible speed. Alex tried to take evasive action, but she zeroed in on him like a homing missile, laughing the whole time.
Just as she was closing in on him, though, something changed and with a faint jerk she started falling behind. Alex chuckled and was about to make a victory whoop when his surfer started slowing down too. They drifted to a stop about fifteen feet away from each other, buffeted back and forth slightly by the mild waves. "What the cripes?" Alex muttered even as he remembered the answer.
"Calm rolling in," Tess pointed out. "Nothing for it but to hunker down. We'd better meet up with Isabel again, tho, she's the one with the emergency... oh." Tess looked back the way she had come, where Alex was pointing to draw her attention. Isabel was already paddling over in their direction, sitting down on the board of her surfer and pushing the water back with her bare hands to get forward momentum - a slow process, obviously, but they had time. Alex and Tess also sat down and set about figuring how to turn their 'surfers around so they could go meet her part-way.
Once they had all assembled together and it was established that each of the three was okay to wait it out until the wind picked up enough to get back to the pier, an awkward silence settled in.
"Soo....." Tess sighed. "Heard any good evil alien schemes lately??" That got a brief laugh. "Actually, Isabel, there's something I've been meaning to ask you about, but it might be awkward. You know, in front of Alex. Though his perspective might help, too."
Alex thought about it a minute. "Well, it's not like we have anything else to talk about, obviously. Set a course for 'awkward.'"
"Okay." Tess closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Isabel, how did you... know??"
"Ummm..." Isabel tried for a few seconds to decipher that with sheer will-power, and then gave up. "Know what??"
"That... well, that you loved Alex. Instead of... oh, I'll just come out and say it. Michael."
Boom. There it was. Isabel wheezed for a bit in surprise, and then got her breathing system back under control. "Well, first off... I do love Michael, very much. But it's totally different -- he's like a second brother to me, and I'm not sure that anything's ever going to change that. But Alex... well, his love set me free." She shot him a tender look across the water. "It was the first thing to ever make me really feel safe in the human world. I couldn't help but love him back for it." She paused for a moment. "You're still having a hard time dealing with the Max and Liz thing, aren't you Tess??"
"'Hard time' is an underst..." Tess broke off, then started laughing sardonically. "Actually, 'hard time' is just about right. Some days I feel like I'm in a prison or something." She stifled a sigh. "I love Max so much... but I know he doesn't feel the same way about me. Everything was perfect for Max and Liz that year until I showed up, and I know that both of them still resent me a little for that."
"Well... wait a second!" Alex shook his head. "'Everything perfect'? Where did you get that notion??"
"Umm... I'm not sure," Tess muttered, frowning in concentration. "Why??"
Alex exchanged a knowing look with Isabel, who stepped in to take her turn. "Things were far from perfect with Max and Liz for most of that time. They both had problems opening up to each other right after the shooting, and Max backed out for a lot of months... thinking that it wouldn't be safe for Liz to get romantically involved with an alien. They had actually only really gotten things on track when you moved to town, which probably made it all the harder."
"Oh." Tess was silent for a little bit. "I don't know what to do with that." She sighed. "You know, we could just *push* ourselves in, and take you with us Alex."
"No," Isabel sighed. "No using powers. I know that it's not likely that anyone would notice anything weird, but it's always a possibility."
"Yeah." Alex looked around, trying to see any indication that the wind was coming in. "Anyone up for hand-war??"
Tess stared at him. "What the heck is hand-war??"
Alex smiled. "Have you heard of rock-paper-scissors??"
"Well, yeah, of course."
"Around my old grade school, there were a few variant symbols floating around... dynamite," he demonstrated a hand clenched together with a thumb sticking up, "which can only be beaten by snipping off the fuse with the scissors," and he mimed that with the other hand. "And water, which defeats even dynamite, but can for whatever symbolic reason be beaten by splashing a rock into it." He made the symbol for water, a hand with palm down and fingers spread out.
"Okay, with you so far, I guess," Tess agreed.
"Now, really all that does is replace some of the old symbols. You're left with rock, water, and dynamite, basically. Paper and scissors become sucker bets because in any given situation, water will be an equal or better play than scissors, and dynamite will be an equal or better play than paper. When I was in grade five, I actually worked out a variant with five different symbols, none of them obsolete." He quickly sketched out the essentials of his system.
"So, invasion is beaten by trade, (since the people who sell the weapons always come up on top,) but trade is beaten by politics (since politicians can levy taxes,) and politics is beaten by invasion. All three of them together are the mortal pursuits, and are all beaten by sorcery, which is beaten by religion, which in turn is beaten by the mortal pursuits."
"You had way too much time on your hands as a ten-year-old, Alex," Tess informed him. "But it might be decently amusing in so boring a situation as this. What do you say Isabel??"
Iz smiled, she had known she would have to play as soon as Alex started talking about it, and actually she was kind of proud that he was so brainy. "I'm in."
* * * * *
(That evening.)
"Hi, welcome to the club," Max said, taking Liz and Maria's coats with a smile. Their two guy rooms at the motel had been hastily converted for the 'parlour games club' meeting, with borrowed card tables and chairs brought in and one game board set up on Jim Valenti's immaculately made bed. "We've got a new diversion to try this evening."
"Oh, gawd, what is it with new games today?" Tess complained lightheartedly as she approached the open door. Max shot her a confused look.
"Just something Alex showed us while we were stuck out in the calm," Isabel explained. "So, what's the challenge tonight? Something with dice??"
"Nope," Michael explained as he set down a tray of cola cans down on an end table. "Turn chess." Several dubious looks. "It's like regular chess, except it isn't each piece moving is one complete turn. Each player goes back and forth moving as many pieces as they want to in a go, and once any given piece has moved it can't go again until you start the turn over." He explained the rules a little more and play began.
Max showed his pictures of the professor's house to a few people over the course of the evening, particularly Isabel. She agreed that she would be able to dreamwalk him using the tiny little snapshot that included his face, and that it sounded like a smart way to gather some more information safely.
Valenti's hushed news was more sobering. He had noticed a young man in the vicinity of that house who seemed to be doing guard duty - not noticeably so to anyone without Valenti's kind of training, but he was watching the people who came into that block and on guard for any that might cause a certain manner of trouble.
"Just one guy?" Michael asked.
"That was all I saw," Valenti agreed. "But we have no way to know if he has any backup or relief."
"We can try," Michael argued. "I can go into that area really early tomorrow morning and look for anyone like that. Kyle could try at another time of day. We can be careful not to arouse suspicion."
"Okay," Jim conceded. "I got Max to take a snapshot that should have this guy in it, though I couldn't tell him why." A look of dawning comprehension was coming over Max's face as he presumably remembered the incident.
"So, what else can we do?" Maria asked.
There was a pause. "Nothing I can think of, someone else may have notions,"
But no-one really did. Aside from Isabel dreamwalking the professor, Michael and maybe someones else who hadn't been in the Max/Liz/Jim team scouting out the professor's premises at different times of day, no-one had any better suggestions than enjoying the attractions of Puerto Penasco and doing everything to seem as much like normal american tourists as possible. Maria smiled and started planning her shopping trip.
The 'turn chess' games had a tendency to either be over fairly quickly or last a long time, including a drag-down rematch between Michael and the sheriff that went on for almost three hours. Jim had a lot of practice with conventional chess and an analytical mind that adapted quickly to this new variant, while Michael had a little experience with turn chess and a lot of practice coming up with innovative strategy on the fly. Finally Michael managed to pick off the sheriff's defences and pin his king to the wall.
* * * * *
(Friday, December 29th, 2000)
"...and what happened next?"
"Well... he went over to the picture on the wall, of the dog in the forest, right? He slid the whole painting aside and there was a wall safe behind it... this really high-tech looking wall safe with a number keypad and a fingerprint reader. He put his left index finger into the reader and punched in a series of numbers into the reader. I couldn't tell which numbers they were, and when they came up on the little LED screen above the keypad, they weren't numbers, but letters. I remember the sequence of letters.
Still more than half asleep, Maria felt the words flow past her, wondering vaguely who was talking and about what.
"Really!? What were they??"
"T... B, O, N, T, B, T, I, T, Q, W, T, N. That's it."
"Okay, and what after that??"
"The safe door opened inward, on a hinge at its bottom, so that it sank away into a hidden cavity. From inside the safe, some kind of smoke started to billow out. He was trying to find something inside the smoke, but that was the end. He woke up."
"Weird." Maria was a little bit more awake now, and she struggled to sit up.
"Isabel... what are you talking about and why are you in our room?"
Liz was sitting up in her own bed, the covers still spread over her legs and her lap. Isabel was sitting on the edge of Liz's bed, her hair pinned up and wearing a dressing gown that went down past her knees, so Maria could just get a glimps of the cuffs of her pajamas around her ankles.
"She dreamwalked the professor," Liz whispered, "and needed someone to listen to her talk about what she'd seen. Guess I'm the designated sounding board.
"Hmmm..." Maria thought about that. "Why didn't you pick Alex? Or Max, for that matter??"
"Both in Valenti's room," Isabel confessed cutely. "I don't think our august chaperone would take a bright view of me slipping into a boys' room first thing in the morning... especially not one that happened to contain my boyfriend."
"Good point," Maria agreed, sitting a little bit further up and blinking the sleep from her eyes. "So, catch me up. What did you get, aside from a freaky booby-trapped safe??"
"Not sure," Isabel sighed, turning herself slightly so as to better include both Maria and Liz in the conversation. "I'm not sure. There was some really weird stuff in there... with ugly little trolls and blue sun-umbrellas and mcdonald's fish sandwhiches. Plus, I think he's got a thing for... oh, what's her name? Sophia Loren."
"Man's got some taste, at least," Maria allowed. "Okay, well, there's got to be a lot going on inside this guy's head that's not really relevant to what we're doing here. Was there anything you saw in the dream that you know is relevant??"
"A few bits and hints," Isabel allowed, and picked up one of those small note pads from Liz's bedside table. "Let's see... something about being watched. That guy that Valenti talked about? I think that the professor knows about him, and also... maybe, that there's only the one guy. Or at least, only one guy at a time for a stretch that is at least weeks or months long. But don't hold me to that."
"Sounds promising," Maria agreed. "Anything else??"
"Something about a..." Isabel sighed. "I don't know how to describe it. Some kind of an alien... a vehicle, maybe? Somewhat sled-like... open-air, not very big. Definitely alien in origin. And if his dream is right... he's keeping it in his house, right here in Puerto Penasco."
"Wow," Maria muttered. "Think it came from your guys' ship??"
"Probably," Liz put in. Apparently she and Isabel had already been over some of this before Maria woke up. "We've been assuming that everything from the crash that Nasedo didn't rescue ended up with the special unit."
"But still... I can imagine walking off with office supplies when your company gets disbanded, but an alien vehicle?" Maria wise-cracked. "What about the rest of the special unit stuff you guys were hoping to find with this guy? 'Where the bodies are buried,' and so forth??"
"Ummm..." Isabel blushed. "I actually might know where some of the special unit bodies are buried... but they would be real bodies. As in decomposing people. Not..."
"...exactly what we're hoping for," Liz and Maria finished in unison with Isabel. "Well, maybe you should try a different dream," Liz continued. "It would be too much to expect to get everything you want out of one."
"Yeah... but I think we may need a better source of information than dreams, too." Isabel smiled briefly. "I've been working on learning a technique from the Book that might help. Memory transfer... basically taking a download from the guy's brain. I could do with a guinea pig or two, actually. Don't worry... it won't hurt or anything. I'm pretty sure."
"Does brain damage fall in the 'or anything' category?" Liz joked.
"How does it work?" Maria asked. "Are we talking like mind meld on star tre... Sorry. My bad."
"No, it's okay," Iz assured her. "Well, it's kinda like. I have to touch someone to trigger the connection... ideally firm contact on the head area. We'll probably have to figure out some way to sneak in while he's asleep. Trained practicioners can absorb the memory transfer as it comes in, but I'm sure I won't be able to learn that in time. I'd have to route it somewhere else... like into another person's brain. Then, later, I can decode that message."
"So, basically you'd just be the human network cable??" Maria joked. "Or hybrid network cable, something, I dunno."
"It's getting on for seven," Liz pointed out. "Why don't we get dressed and head out for breakfast or something??"
Isabel stood up. "Works for me. Meet you in the hallway in five."
* * * * *
(That afternoon)
Liz looked around at the small-town scenery, a market district on the edge of Puerto Penasco, and with a start realized that she recognized the young man sitting on a bench across the street, working weith a pencil and a medium-size sketch pad, frowning and erasing something.
"Wow, Kyle," she said as she walked up to him. "Sketching??"
Kyle looked up and smiled at her briefly. "Yeah, it's something I'm trying." He seemed to be well on his way to a quite passable rendition of a very pretty building down the way. "So, where's your siamese twin??"
"Max?" Liz sat down in the empty space on the other end of the bench from Kyle, not wanting to crowd him while he was working. "Oh, he's off looking for a little surprise for me, or something." There was a short uncomfortable silence. "So... you and Courtney, huh??"
"Yep... kinda."
"What's she like?" Liz blurted out. "I mean... our paths have crossed quite a few times, but I guess I've never really taken a chance to get to know her. What do you like about her?"
"Oh god, is this going to be *that* conversation?" Kyle joked.
"I'm not sure... can you answer the question, please?" Liz shot back. Kyle finished a wall, examined it critically, and then put the sketch book down.
"Courtney... let's see. She's really funny in this perfect, sarcastic way... and she thinks I'm funny too. She feels like she has to put up this tough cookie facade, especially since she found out about what happened to her brother, but every so often I can see this little glimpse of sweetness, or sensitivity, or tenderness, and it just makes me melt a little inside. And we're so in sync... last week I was just about to get on the phone and give her a call, I hear the doorbell, and it's her."
Liz was smiling. "When we get back to Roswell, we have to go on a double-date or something. Me and Max, you and Courtney. I mean... if that wouldn't be too weird or anything."
"Compared with some of the weird stuff you've put me through, Parker," Kyle whispered, "I think I'll be just fine." He chuckled.
"What are we laughing about?" a familiar voice asked. Liz looked up, startled that she had gotten so engrossed in her conversation with Kyle that she hadn't noticed Max arriving. She got up and stepped into his arms for a quick hug.
"Never mind, I'll tell you about it later," she whispered. "So... should we head back to the motel?"
"We've got a little time," Max assured her. "Here, open it." He passed her a small bundle made of soft cloth.
Liz unwrapped the makeshift package, and a sigh of approval escaped her lips when a hint of honey-colored metal peeked out.
"It's not real gold," Max quickly disclaimed as Liz uncovered the rest of the charm bracelet. "But it was beautiful, and I thought you'd like it."
"I do, very much." Liz brought Max's head down to meet hers for a quick kiss, then went back to examining her prize. The bracelet was almost empty, only a few 'starter' charms on it, but that was part of the fun, of filling it up. "Thank you."
As the three of them strolled quietly down the streets, Kyle sketching bits and pieces of things that caught his eye, Max whispered to them quietly, his voice so low that no-one could overhear them in the open, noisy spaces. Michael had gone to scout out the professor's home around 4:30 that morning and seen no sign of the guard. Alex had tried around quarter to ten and seen him, thus the assumption that he was on a reasonably normal sleep cycle.
Isabel had gotten into another dream, and decided she was as ready as she'd ever be.
"Tomorrow morning at 3:30 am," Max murmured to them almost silently. "We make our move.
TO BE CONTINUED!