Lost amongst the stars: chapter 4

Chapter 4: family

'Wartwood. Slow to accept, even slower to respect.'

"Pleasant," grinned Sasha.

Marcy was still confused as heck. "But what are the odds that the atmosphere is the exact same?!"

"Look, i prefer not to think about it," joked Anne, as they walked into the settlement. Inside were various habitats made of metal, with amphibian-like creatures walking between them. They seemed to all be one pure colour each, with no variation in saturation or shade.

One looked at them and recoiled. "Oh, my! They're hideous!" It proceeded to walk away.

"Wow, what a warm welcome," Sasha mumbled.

"Ah, you get used to it."

They turned around to see a pink one, quite small, only reaching up to their upper legs.

"Hey there, little guy. You missing your parents?"

It frowned. "Dude, i'm ten. And… what do you mean parents?"

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They were walking around the small asteroid, which apparently had an extremely dense core. Marcy was particularly enjoying the effect it had, being a small enough asteroid that you could see the curve when walking around it but it had similar enough gravity to the moon.

The boy, who had introduced himself as sprig, showed them all how the infrastructure in the area had been adapted to this, allowing them to make large frog-like leaps into the air. The trio quickly picked up on it.

"And welcome to my home!" He said proudly, showing off a building.

Marcy cooed. It was awesome. A home built into a protruding rock, with a homely atmosphere.

An orange one of the species walked out.

"Sprig, what did i tell ya about leaving before yer chores are-" and he stopped when he saw the three. "Sprig, who are these?"

"They're my new friends!" He said smiling.

"B-but- how did you get here?"

"…we just kinda came here?" Anne said.

"But this place is seriously out of the way! You would have had to work hard to find here, and get past the Belt Eels!"

"Well, we weren't going anywhere in particular really. And the belt eels? Blind as fuck as soon as you turn the comms off," marcy said simply.

Sasha turned to marcy with unbelieving Eyes. "You SWEAR?"

She chuckled. "You should see me playing forknife," she smiled deviously.

The old man looked troubled, and was about to say something but then Anne's stomach rumbled. Embarrassed, she shrugged and made a face almost saying 'whatcha gonna do?'

"I better bring you in for some food."

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They sat down around a table, and he slid a plate of a gelatinous substance to them each. "Eat up." Anne started eating, and the others followed her lead.

"My name is Hopediah. You three are?"

"I'm Marcy, and these two are Anne and Sasha. Me and Sasha are humans, and Anne here is…" Marcy didn't finish after realising she had never asked for the species name of Anne.

"I'm a truncoid," Anne stated. Hop-pop nodded.

"So, what brings you around here? We haven't had a visitor in about 130 years," said Hop-pop, with a look on his face.

"Well, we're trying to get Marcy and Sasha back to their home world, Earth, and we've just been sort of cruising in the meantime," said Anne. "If i'm gonna be honest i've never really been good at directions, and this is my first time in interstellar space. I've always stayed in my home system."

"Well," hop-pop said, "welcome to wartwood. Around these parts you'll only find my kind- vitali."

Suddenly a tiny purple member of their species came down the stairs.

"Hey hop-pop, who are these freakazoids?"

"Polly, these three are Anne, Sasha and Marcy, and they're… well, they're visitors."

"Visitors?" Polly was shocked. "Nobody but you have seen them in this town!""Wait, how old are you?" Asked Sasha."207 years old," he said casually.

Sasha spat some food out. "207?"

"What, never seen an isocogenarian before?"

"Never heard the term isocogenarian before," Anne mumbled.

"It means a person of 200 years, in the same way that an octogenarian means a person of 80 years," Marcy said as if it was common knowledge.

"Thank yeh, marcy," Hop-pop said.

There was an awkward silence.

"…so, sprig was confused when I mentioned parents. Why?" Sasha asked.

"What's a parent?" The old frog replied.

Oh, god, this was gonna be awkward, Sasha thought, as marcy pulled a whiteboard from nowhere.

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"And that's how our species repopulates!" She finished.

"Awesome!" Polly chuckled.

"Gross!" Sprig said.

"Well, i can explain now," hop-pop said. "Ya see, our kind are… interesting. We are called Vitali. We are interesting in the way that we are completely made of one kind of tissue, with no organs, excluding the system of neurons around our body. We also have extremely good regeneration."

"Well, that's nice," marcy said.

"Ah, but here's the catch. Our minds haven't evolved to fit this yet. They can't deal with both the physical or psychological trauma of a situation that would kill any other species, and when our bodies are busy repairing that amount of damage… our minds reset."

"…so you lose all your memories?" Sasha asked.

"Yes," hop-pop said gravely. "We wake up with the mind of a baby. and with no parents, our numbers are finite. We cannot reproduce. This means we come back into the world as babies, with nobody to protect us or teach us how to survive. Many don't make it past the age of one and we reset again."

Anne looked quite sad. "It must be hard."

"Yeah," hop-pop said. "I'm lucky i've lived this long. So that's why i took in these two!" And he gestured to polly, giving them a stink eye, and sprig, sticking out his tongue.

"Polly i found in a wrecked settlement, on a nearby asteroid. She's one of the tiniest vitali i've ever seen. She wouldn't have survived a week if I hadn't found her. Sprig, i found in a crater. We think he might have been hit by a piece of space debris, the clumsy little guy."

"What can i say, i have bad luck."

"Well," Anne said, standing up, "thanks for the meal, sir. But we really best be getting back to the ship. These guys have a sleep cycle of 24 hours and it's nap-time for them."

"Hey, we told you to stop calling it nap time!" Shouted Sasha.

"Oh, no need!" Said hop-pop, gesturing for them to stay inside. "We have some spare rooms if you want to spend the night!"

Anne smiled. "Thank you, Hopediah."

"Please, call me hop-pop."

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The three were in a room with mattresses. Marcy was already going to bed.

Anne looked over to Sasha. She was smiling… sort of?

"Hey, Sash, you ok?"

Sasha looked around in shock, then looked angry, then calmed down.

"You good?" Asked Anne, confused at the anger.

"Yeah… it's just, only one person called me Sash."

Anne realised she had crossed a line. "Sorry," she said, putting her hands up. "It just felt… right?"

"It's ok," Sasha chuckled. "She's gone anyway…" and she turned towards a window, looking out into space.

Anne looked sympathetic. "So, what was troubling you before? You seemed down."

Sasha turned back to her. "It's just that all this family talk reminded me of back home."

"Ah," Anne said. "You wanna talk about it?"

"Well, my parents… don't get along. They divorced a long time ago. When i was like, six, or something." Seeing Anne's confused face, she continued, "divorce is basically when a couple legally breaks up."

"Oh." She stayed silent for a second. "Is it difficult?"

"Hell yeah," laughed Sasha. "They both seem to enjoy pretending that the other never existed. It's a pain trying to not stay on either one's side or the other gets offended."

"Do you wish they never split up?"

She laughed even harder. "Fuck no. As annoying as it may be, there's a reason they broke up, and I don't wanna mess with that. They… weren't made for each other. Media on my world often portrays divorce as this horrible thing and that couples should just stay together, but people don't realise that's just wrong. Sometimes people just are better off apart, and they just don't realise it at first."

Anne smiled. "That's nice."

Wiping away a tear of laughter, Sasha asked, "what about you? Your family?"

Anne froze. Of course this was coming.

"Well, as you know, my Dad went missing a few months ago and i was given command of his frigate. My mom is… nice."

She paused.

"If i'm gonna be honest, i don't think about them much."

Sasha was confused. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Anne began, "I don't really talk to them much. I can't remember the last time i properly spoke to either of them. In fact, I couldn't name a single conversation i've had with either of them. I have snippets of memories with them, but not much else."

She laughed but it didn't reach her eyes.

"It's genuinely like they just don't really exist in my life. But at the same time… i know they love me, and I love them. You get me?"

Before Anne could even turn around, Sasha had pulled her in for a hug.

A few minutes later, they all crawled into their matresses. Anne turned off her disguise bracelet and turned back into her natural coily tentacle form, and went to sleep.

Marcy smiled at them from her matress.

Hey!

So i hope you enjoyed this chapter. I tried to make it more of a story-like episode and not much action, but there should be some soon. I bet you already forgot that Anne's actual form is basically just the equivalent of tangled wires.

And yeah, the new species! I tried to come up with an interesting gimmick and, well, it might actually make since for later! I mean Leif is basically Identical to sprig, right? Also hop pop is OLD.

Hope you enjoyed!