TWENTY-SEVEN: Boater

They took their lunch break during what felt like early afternoon to Alden. Sophie said the way humans sat around a table and ate food other people had slaughtered for them was disturbing, and she wouldn’t come with him to the dining area.

<<Tonight while you are sleeping I will be in the jungle, hunting and butchering my own meals because I’m not a child.>>

“I just eat plants these days, so there’s not much opportunity for butchering.”

The grivek snorted.

Joe was skipping, too. He was busy playing with all the devices the examinees had made, trying to decide which were worthy of a passing score. The lucky few would come back for a brief session this afternoon to perfect their contraptions with his guidance.

“Pick up a to-go basket for me, though!” he said. “I want one of everything. And plenty of napkins.”

Alden assumed he wanted the food wrapped so he could add it to his pocket hoard.

The System provided Alden with a helpful map to the designated lunch spot, and the long walk from the basement lab by himself was a relief. It was the first time he had been alone since he’d affixed his skill. It gave him enough space, finally, to process a few of his new experiences without being interrupted.

He strode down the hallway, his footsteps echoing off the concrete walls, and tried to sort himself out. The first thing he realized was that he was emotionally scrambled. He’d been jumping from one bizarre event to the next so fast, he didn’t know what he felt about it all.

He was in a high-stakes setting full of total strangers, and he’d been reacting to everything without really thinking it through. He needed to ground himself, so he started by trying to address the problem that freaked him out the most.

Knowing he couldn’t refuse to follow quest-related orders was bothering him way more than he’d ever imagined it would.

Nobody had even given him a command he would have objected to yet, with the possible exception of the instructions to take the various pills. But he still felt trapped. The very fact that people like Joe and Bti-qwol could control him made it hard for him to behave normally around them.

Or maybe his personal normal in this situation was vastly different than he’d assumed it would be.

I didn’t expect to be scared of them.

It wasn’t just nerves, though he’d tried to tell himself so several times.

It was fear, and it had made him hesitate to seriously argue with Bti-qwol when she shoved him onto the medical team. The fear was also why he had passively handed the frog over for execution when he probably didn’t need to.

The professor was better, but even there, the relationship was tilted. Alden had been so hyper-alert during the lab session that he felt exhausted now, and his vigilance had less to do with the students potentially creating clouds of toxic gas than it did with the fact that he was trying to anticipate Joe’s every random word and frenetic action.

He sighed and placed his palm against the activation panel for the elevator. I don’t like this version of myself.

How was he supposed to be a superhero when he couldn’t even have a heated discussion with one overzealous personnel manager?

Well…maybe it isn’t that bad. I could deal with her now, couldn’t I?

He was pretty sure he couldn’t convince Bti-qwol to see reason if she appeared right this second, but he did think he could talk to her more naturally.

And he could tamp down at least some of the unwanted fear by reminding himself of all the reasons he hadn’t felt it before.

Getting summoned was something most Avowed looked forward to. He would have been, too, if he’d had just a few days to settle into his new powers first.

You had to do the work, but the work wasn’t terrible. The contract didn’t recommend you for jobs you were completely incapable of, and the Earth-Artona agreement included all kinds of concessions to human morality.

Alden wouldn’t be subjected to dangerous experimentation or deprived of the things he needed to survive. Nobody could harvest his organs or beat him or force him into their bed. Almost everything that most humans would have a serious problem with was covered.

The most obvious exception was that he could be asked to fight and die to protect citizens of the Triplanets. It was called the Interdimensional Warrior’s Contract for a reason, after all.

The Artonans’ mother planet, Artona I, and some of the resource worlds had a demon problem. It was contained-ish according to the rare bits of info that filtered down to regular people like Alden. But sometimes there were disasters, and Avowed got thrown in front of them.

That was most likely what had happened to Hannah.

The scariest thing about being summoned was the possibility of being taken to a battlefield. And that wasn’t something that many B-ranks should expect. Especially not teenage Rabbits who didn’t even have a grip on their skills.

So he could dismiss that concern. And beyond that…

What’s the most horrible thing that Joe could possibly ask me to do? Clean an alien toilet?

Might fall under hazardous waste disposal. Sounds like an honest day’s work.

Hold a bomb? Already did it.

Hold an even worse bomb that’s only a nanosecond away from exploding?

Well, yeah. That’d be bad. How would I offload the thing into the teleportation alcove without dying?

So that was the worst case scenario, and even then, the Artonans would presumably try to keep him from going boom. Dead humans couldn’t be a good look for LeafSong University.

By the time he’d made it to the upper floors, Alden was feeling more settled. And he’d talked himself out of several of his most pressing discomforts by simply calming down and thinking.

The sleeping pill thing, for example, was really obvious when he finally remembered that the days here on Artona III were a different length than they were on Earth. They should be a bit over twenty-six hours long, and the Artonans who lived here measured time in increments that were not quite half hours…there were 54 of them in a day, weren’t there?

Curious and with no clocks in sight, he decided to talk to the System.

“Hey, what’s the local time? Approximately. And what time is it back home?”

[Approximate local time is 28 o’clock.

The time in Chicago, Illinois is 1:43 PM.]

Now he knew that good old Chicago was currently pretty well synched with Artona III time, though that was just a coincidence, and it would shift as the twenty-six hour day rolled over.

Of course everyone is cool with the sleeping pills. I’m probably going to love them, too, if they do something to mitigate perpetual planetlag.

He wondered if he could do with less sleep now that he was an Avowed. He doubted it based on his stats. Maybe if he had been able to add more to stamina and processing….

It was only twelve days, so he assumed the pills would hold him together and then he’d crash once he made it home.

He entered the same room where the welcome breakfast had been held this morning. It looked like it was usually a study space. Large windows overlooked the forested hillside and the campus below them. There were armchairs in the corners and low tables surrounded by plush cushions in the middle of the room. A pair of beautifully carved drafting tables with tall stools stood against one wall.

A dozen people, half of them humans, were eating their lunches.

The humans were all sitting together at the same low table. They stopped talking when he entered, but there was no blatant hostility as far as he could tell. And the medical team was absent, so he wouldn’t have to deal with the asshole who’d called him “pet.”

He thought it was a perfect opportunity to show he hoped to get along with everyone, so he made sure to smile and give a small wave toward the assortment of adults.

A woman with red streaks in her dark hair waved back, and an old guy in glasses nodded.

One in three isn’t great odds, he thought. But it’s better than nothing.

He only had thirty-two minutes left for this lunch break. There was an annoying semi-transparent timer hovering just above the center of his vision as a reminder. He decided he’d use the time to at least try to learn everybody’s name and job.

He headed over to the food.

It was confined to a single table, and it was a much simpler spread than the remains of the breakfast feast he’d seen that morning. Small rectangular baskets stood in a neat row at the back. He grabbed one for Joe and almost dropped it in surprise when he felt the minuscule mental strain that meant his skill had activated.

When he failed to take a step, the skill faded, so he started pacing. The professor was still targeted; Alden could see a white dot to indicate his general direction at the bottom left corner of his vision. And the last thing he’d said was that Alden should grab him a to-go basket. But that was several minutes ago, and Joe was all the way down in the basement.

This is great! Alden thought. The fact that he could be entrusted with something that wasn’t even in the same area as his target was amazing. There had to be some limit, didn’t there? He couldn’t just have someone tell him to pick things up through a phone call from miles and miles away probably. But this was much further than he’d imagined.

Could I have picked up any basket I found on my way here? Or only these, since Joe must have had these ones in mind specifically? And do I have to be near Joe when he tells me to take it?

Walking around anytime he had something in his hands was rapidly becoming a habit, so he barely noticed he was striding back and forth in front of the food table over and over until someone said, “New kid, there are treadmills in the gym if you have that much extra energy.”

It was the woman with the red streaks.

Alden stopped. His coworkers were staring at him. He was grinning like an idiot and carrying an empty basket around the room.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m still figuring out my skill.”

“We thought you looked really young,” she said, tucking a strand of red-streaked hair behind an ear. “I’m used to being the baby in the group, and here you come along.”

“You’re at least a decade older than him, Naya,” said a woman in an apron sitting across the table from her. “Nobody here thinks of you as the baby of the group.”

“Shut up. I’m twenty-five in my heart.”

Alden blinked. “That would still be a decade older than me.”

Naya had a hand to her chest as if he’d delivered a blow. Her friend in the apron raised an eyebrow and turned around on her cushion to look at him. “You’re fifteen?”

“I’ll be sixteen in a month.”

<<You’re not an S, are you?>> asked a balding man sitting on the cushion beside Naya. He was speaking Spanish.

“No. I’m a B.”

They all exchanged glances.

Alden had no idea why his rank even mattered. “I’m Alden, by the way,” he said as he started double wrapping food in napkins for the professor. “It’s good to meet you all.”

“Yeah, you too,” said Naya. “B is higher than the rest of us. We’re mostly D’s. Some C’s.”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Sophie is a B…I think,” said Alden.

“Who?”

“The grivek I’m working with. The professor in charge of labs decided I should call her Sophie, and she seems cool with it.”

“How can you tell through the helmet?” one of them muttered.

All the foods on the table had helpful identification cards with little stick characters on them to indicate what species they were safe for. Most included a small human/Artonan shape, but thanks to Gorgon’s little gift hard-passing on every other thing he touched, Alden’s choices for his own lunch were limited.

He grabbed a giant mushroom cap stuffed with salad and a couple of egg roll lookalikes. There was a dispenser of steaming wevvi, of course, but he ignored it in favor of a cooler full of drinks from Earth.

He’d never been happier to see a bottle of orange juice in his life.

“Manon brings those with her every year,” Naya said, watching Alden grab the juice. “They’ll be gone by the end of the week.”

“Oh. Is it all right for me to have one?” He’d just assumed they were provided by the aliens.

“Sure. Manon brings them to share. But if you try to steal from her coffee pot in the dorm, you’re a dead man.”

“Noted.”

Alden resisted the urge to go sit by himself and headed for their table. The old man with the glasses and the woman in the apron scooted over their cushions to make room for him.

“Manon’s a Rabbit,” said the apron lady, staring at him a little too intently for his comfort.

“Is she the woman with the all black clothes? I saw her at the orientation.”