Weeks passed. Thank god I still had my watch, though the time-zones were probably shot to hell now that I wasn't on Earth anymore. Ah, well, it's not like the universe runs on Greenwich Mean Time anyway.
Not like there were any other time zones to set it to. Besides, I heard once that length of days varies on rotation speed and distance from the local sun. Fat lot of good my sci-fi books do me now.
Anyway, the rest of the voyage passed with little other event. The door would open, I would be handed a plate of food, and left alone again. The food was some sort of nutrient substance thing. Whatever. I was hungry, so I ate it. Didn't have my backpack, so I simply daydreamed or fell asleep. Tried investigating the larva things, but they didn't really respond to anything I did.
Finally, after about 6 days as counted by my watch's little one-to-thirty-one counter, the grey dude came in again and announced that we had arrived.
"Oh yeah?" I asked, gazing into his eyes for lack of anywhere else to settle. "Where're we at?"
"The home world of a race known as the Kelfiirians," he replied. "You will be sold there. Come."
"Terse guy…" I muttered to myself, stretching slightly and ambling after him.
This was the first time I had seen the rest of the ship. My impression was right, the rest of it was curvy and iPod-esque, too. Almost like that white ship in the original Star Wars movie, but more rounded and plushier-looking. Lots more of the cocoon things were around, but some of them were open. Crawling around were, I kid you not, gigantic freaking beetles or something. They looked like huge insects, with fourteen sets of legs and six sets of antennae. Again, I was disappointed in the lack of alien creativity.
A hatch lay at one side of what was presumably the bridge, through which I was roughly thrust. For being so short, their guards sure had a lot of muscle. It's not like I was terribly keen to stay in the ship anyway.
A blast of sunlight hit me! I squinted and shaded my eyes, waiting for them to adjust And when they did…
No…freakin…way… My jaw dropped.
Stretching before my dumbfounded eyes was a vast, sprawling, bustling hive of movement. Dark cloud cover obscured most of the sky overhead, and dusky-red dirt crunched under my tennis shoes. I stood at the edge of a large dirt clearing into which the alien ship had landed. Seething throngs of aliens scurried to and fro, some bent under huge weights, others apparently conversing.
Hundreds…thousands…too many to count. This place was seriously huge. You think Time's Square on New Year's 2000 was a lot of people? That was nothing. This place could have Times Square for breakfast. It could fit 9 Times Squares inside it and have room for more. Ships of every shape, size, design and configuration zoomed overhead and bustled here and there. It was just an overwhelming sight.
One of the aliens trotted out to greet us, and I got my first good clear look at these guys. Wow. This guy was massive. Huge. Stood at something like seven feet tall. Powerful reverse-jointed legs that looked capable of gigantic bounds and lethal kicks in combat. Dusky-red scales. An almost-human torso, except for a weird sort of bony plate on the upper portion. Thick arms, ending in long three-fingered hands that were toughened like a carpenter's. A head that was unmistakably not-human, between the glowing green eyes to the almost elfin ears to the mouthless face to the four nostrils. Two more eyes floated on tentacles above its head, which twisted and writhed idly in a constant environment-check. There was a big sort of cranial skull cap, extending from where a human nose would be, along the back of the head and neck, where it merged with the collarbone. His slit-pupiled eyes literally glowed, a creepy sort of luminescent green. And last, but definitely not least, was the tail. A positively massive tail, thick and sinewy, probably as long as he was tall, writhed behind him with a triangular blade capping it like a one-sided mushroom. One look at that tail and you know that these guys aren't all cuddly. That thing could do some serious damage.
I drank in every detail of its appearance, mentally in awe. Now THIS, I thought to myself, is something that evolved on an alien world. One look and you just knew he wasn't from around anywhere we knew.
The alien jabbed a bulbous finger at my and looked at my grey-skinned captors. They spoke to it in a weird sort of fluting language that I couldn't even begin to comprehend, and negotiations seemed to be one-sided. The new red alien guy wasn't saying anything, and I wondered how it even talked at all, if it had no mouth.
They appeared to reach a conclusion of some sort, and the red guy handed what was obviously some kind of money over to my captors. They took it and just trooped back into their ship.
I looked at my captor with trepidation as the saucer sailed off into the sky. The enormity of my situation hit me all at once. I was stranded on an alien planet. This was for real, and it wasn't going to be over any time soon. I probably wouldn't see Earth, or anything on Earth ever again. No more Mom or Dad. No more school. No more garlic pasta. No more Nintendo games.
That last thought distressed me greatly. But I didn't have time to dwell on my situation any further, as my new master beckoned me to follow him. I sighed to myself and followed, having little alternative. My bridges were well and truly burnt.
As I spent time with my captors, it became clear to me that they spoke in a weird sort of telepathy, their words sort of appearing in your mind's native language without actually translating into sound waves. Weird, and it was a little hard to get used to at first, since, to my ears, a bustling marketplace was completely and totally silent, but to my mind it was chaos.
I was given little, menial chores that all required dexterity of one sort or another, like tying knots or repairing minute doodads. It didn't matter. As the days turned into weeks, then months, by my watch's count, I lost any hope of going back to Earth. It looked fully as though I was to spend my life on this desert planet, and I might as well get used to it.
I got to know my captor well, at least. His name was Sekpidar Xiloscient, and seemed a little nonplussed by the small pink creature in his home. He worked to produce tiny machines that liked a bit like gyroscopes, but seemed to have some other function entirely. It was to this task that my human hands were put to work.
Yet, there were already hundreds of the devices that had already been made, and Sek appeared to live alone. So if he had made them, then I must not be that important. Why, then, was I wanted? It was a mystery, but as long as I had shelter and essentially free room and board, I didn't complain.
Food came in the form of weird nutrient-tablet things. The Kelfiirians seemed to absorb these through their fingers, while I munched mine like a candy bar. No idea what was in them, but they worked just fine as food, so there were no problems.
For some reason, Sek seemed to disappear every couple of hours. I assumed he was hitting the can, but I actually hadn't seen any restrooms anywhere, though. Once I had communicated my own need to Sek, he allowed me to construct a makeshift outhouse thing. It did the job, so whatever. Yet his disappearances were another big question mark that I didn't find out about for a long time.