One of the werewolves hauled himself hand-over-hand to one end, opening a control panel. He pressed a button and a huge parabolic reflector unfurled itself like a shining, metal flower. The other werewolf floated around the reflector, inspecting it for any hitches. He poked one of the metal petals that had not snapped into place, popping it into position.
The werewolf at the control panel touched another button and the wings of solar panels slid smoothly from the cylinder’s sides, deploying themselves as delicate obsidian extensions of the cylinder. The other werewolf floated along the extended panels, inspecting them. Again, he reached out and ever-so-gently tugged one of the joints that had not fully snapped into place.
Finally, he gave a thumbs up, and the werewolf at the control panel touched a large red button, triggering an array of indicator lights to glow on the control panel and faint vibrations signaling that the cylinder was coming to life. The werewolves pushed off to waft slowly away from the activated station. They watched the cylinder use its own jets to automatically skew it around to aim the huge reflector toward the planet surface and angle the solar panels to catch the energy from the planet’s sun.
The werewolves floated back through the wormhole—their thirty-fourth deployment successful. Once back through the airlock, they used a secure communication line to report their success to their superiors—that the million-volt pulse generator they had deployed had begun charging its capacitor. They reported that all indications were that it would be operational shortly, capable of bombarding the continent with devastating blasts of electromagnetic waves.
They left the elves to the wormhole’s controls, going to celebrate their progress toward deploying three hundred generators around the planet, capable of obliterating its technology.
• • •
Steve the troll grunted with the effort, as he hauled his squat body up onto the table of the hotel conference room so the reporters could see him. He plunked down, dangling his bow legs, and peered myopically through beady eyes out at the sparse crowd. With stubby fingers, he scratched his bulbous head, populated by its sparse crop of unkempt white hair. He started to pick his potato nose, but stopped, realizing he was being video recorded.
He grumbled, “You’d rather see the damn fairy, the angel . . . yeah, I know. You don’t think trolls are as interesting.”
“Well, you live under bridges, right?” asked a junior reporter from one magazine.
“Yeah, because we built the damn bridges long time ago. We build stuff, invent stuff, that’s what we do. We invented the suits.”
“What suits?” asked the restaurant critic, disappointed to have lost out in the choice of Mythicals to write about.
“Watch this.” The troll pulled a metal canister onto the table and extracted out a flabby, wet mass of flesh-colored material. Shaking it dry, he poked his stubby legs into the mass, hauling what seemed to be some kind of skin up over his shoulders. He reached back and flipped up a mask that hung down the back. He tugged it down over his face, shifting it around until the mask was centered, its long, blond hair hanging down his back in damp strings. He pressed his chest, and the flesh tightened onto his body, the legs stretching out to make him taller. The face shaped itself, to transform the troll into an amply endowed, attractive, naked young woman.
“This suit is why we can live among you,” said the troll, now in a breathy feminine voice.
“Oh, dear God!” exclaimed a male voice in the back of the room. “Sandy!” The young cameraman for a local television station dropped his camera in horror and bolted out the door, gagging.
• • •
Robin the fairy flitted gracefully around the ballroom, her wings a fluttering blur, her silver hair flowing behind her, making the crystal chandeliers tinkle with the breeze of her passing. She was perfectly amenable to giving flying demonstrations for the cameras.
She came to rest lightly on the stage, folding her wings back and spreading her delicate hands to invite questions from the throng of reporters.
“We thought you were all myths,” said a reporter. “How did you ever keep your secret?”
Her sapphire eyes narrowed in amusement. “It wasn’t as difficult as you might think. You see, centuries ago, there weren’t any cameras, so we were the stuff of people’s tales. Today, we wear the flesh-suits that make us blend. And even when there are sightings, media dismiss them. And everybody’s too busy with crimes and celebrity scandals to pay attention to some crank who claims to have seen a weird creature.
“You are naked, and—” began a reporter.
“Yes I am,” she interrupted. “We love our bodies. And we love sex.”
“Fairies have sex?” he asked.
“Beautiful sex, lovely, aerial sex. We even have competitions on our home world. Like dance competitions. Frankly, to us, your sex looks like a couple of water balloons bumping together.”
• • •
“Wanna see my balls?” asked Mike the ogre.
A shocked chorus of “No!” greeted the question—at first.
But then, the reporters realized that such a display would rocket their stories to the top of the news.
So, the consensus reversed to “Yes!” and the ogre happily obliged, grinning, showing stubby tusks.
He proudly thrust his crotch forward. His bulbous scrotum was dyed light blue and gaily decorated with jewels, and with hanging pendants on gold chains. He switched on two lights strapped to his legs, strategically aimed to illuminate the glittering testicles.
A multitude of still cameras strobed the scene, and video cameras zoomed in for close-ups.
“Why do you do that?” asked a reporter.
The ogre looked puzzled. “Because the balls are where life comes from. We don’t understand why your species hides their balls. Or the other life-parts.”
“It looks painful, all the jewelry and stuff.”
“No more painful than what you pierce and decorate.”
“Um . . . you seem to have . . . well . . . a somewhat . . . uh . . . small penis,” diplomatically commented the reporter from Medical Day.
Mike looked down at the nub barely sticking out of his crotch. “Yes, isn’t it excellent?” He grinned, once more showing his tusks.
“You don’t want a large penis?”
“Oh, no! It overshadows the balls. I feel badly for your males with their great overhanging things. But it’s sufficient when it expands for mating.”
“How sufficient?” asked the reporter.
The ogre held up a massive foot. “Well, it gets as long as this.”
A gasp rose from the male reporters and a chortle from the females. An abashed reporter from Business Weekly quickly changed the subject. “Do you have a name in your language?”
“Yes, it’s . . .” With that, the ogre issued forth a deep-throated gargling sound. The reporters paused in their writing. Then many scribbled down a random succession of r’s, g’s, l’s, and a few k’s.
Asked another reporter, “Are ogres aggressive? I mean you’re quite . . . um . . . imposing.”
“Nobody argues with us. Not even the werewolves. That’s why we’re the managers.”
“What do you manage?”
“Transport. The wormholes. Supplies. Whatever needs to be managed. Like I said, nobody messes with us. Wanna see the backside of my scrotum?”
• • •
Wendy the angel extended her wings, majestically stretching them out and fluffing their feathers before folding them against her body.
“Are you a messenger of God?” asked the writer for Religion Reporter.
“I am a messenger for my species,” said Wendy sweetly. “We are just another intelligent species like you. We just have . . . well . . . a different form.”
“But do you believe in God?”
“We believe in GOO.”
“GOO?”
“Great Overarching Organism. There exists in the universe an intelligence so vast and unknowable that few species can hope
to grasp it. There was one super-intelligent race that we encountered that does understand GOO. But they are so advanced, they couldn’t really explain it in terms we could understand.”
“Was our Messiah an alien?”
Wendy cocked her head and made a puzzled expression. “Well, he was on your planet before we arrived. He may have been. He does seem to have been someone other than your species. But then, as your religions believe, he may well have been the son of God.”
“Or the son of GOO?”
“Or the son of GOO.” Wendy nodded, agreeing.
• • •
Ryan the elf emitted an unpleasant creaking squawk like a rusty hinge, as he waved his spindly arms at the reporters assembled in the meeting hall. He donned his light-amplifying goggles so he could see in what to him was a dimly lit room.
Standing beside him, Sam translated, the cameras riveted on her: “He wishes you to understand that it is physically difficult for him to speak in the low register of your language. He understands you, though. Ask your questions, and I will translate his answers.”
“Who are you?” asked the male reporter from National News Network, directing the cameraman to focus on Sam.
“I am a pixie. My name is Sam. But I don’t wish to answer questions.” Sam wore a modest pants suit, to avoid totally mesmerizing the males, and some of the females. Nevertheless, due to the pheromones emanating from her, the males—and some of the females—would not recall that there had been an elf in the room. They would sit staring longingly at Sam the entire time. Their editors would be furious at their lapse in reporting.
Almost all the questions directed at the elf came from women.
“What is the elf’s name?” asked the female reporter from The National Times.
Ryan skreaked an answer.
“Well, his name here is Ryan,” translated Sam. “But his real elvish name is Cvjmgrowfjhvvglehjhiiorddvmgtohq.”
“Uh . . . how do you spell that?”
“Like it sounds,” said Sam.
“You’re kidding.”
“Just call him Ryan,” she said.
“How did you all get here?” asked the reporter from Discovering Science.
Ryan screeched at length, and Sam translated, “We have all formed a network of wormholes among our planets . . . transdimensional apertures that we elves pilot by guiding them using magnetic fields. The holes are not affected by gravity, so we can easily travel wherever we wish in your universe.”
“The lights in the sky that people have seen. Are those wormholes?”
“Yes. But very, very rarely,” translated Sam. “Sometimes we leave the lights on when we land at night. But very, very rarely. We are very careful. We are master pilots. And artists.”
“Artists?” asked the reporter.
“We like to make art on your land.”
“What does that mean?”
“Whenever we have time, and we’re over farmland, we draw in the crops,” translated Sam.
“You make the crop circles!” exclaimed a female reporter from the Alien Contact website.
“More than that. We can create a spinning plasma vortex with the magnetic field that guides the wormhole. We make very nice designs.”
“Have you ever crashed?” asked the reporter. “We have this big meteor crater in the desert.”
After a long bout of elfin screeching and skittering, Sam translated, “That was an elderly elf pilot. We once used landing craft and kept the wormholes outside the atmosphere. The old elf mistook the accelerator for the brakes. He crashed. He made that crater. Actually, we removed the ship debris and put some meteor pieces in it, to fool you.”
“You look like the traditional aliens,” commented the female reporter from the National Investigator. “Gray skin, big heads, little bodies, skinny arms and legs. Are you the aliens people have seen?”
More peevish screeching from the elf, then Sam’s translation, “Yes, we are the beings so often reported by your race. But we have perfectly normal heads and limbs. You have tiny skulls, big monster limbs. Ugly!”
“Did your crashes ever result in bodies?” asked the reporter.
“Once. But it was the ogres’ fault that the bodies were found. They didn’t retrieve them. Your military did autopsies.”
“There have been reports of abductions. Do you do anal probing?”
The elf drew himself up to his full diminutive height and indignantly shrieked and skrittered at considerable length.
Sam smiled and translated. “Yes, for very good reason. We needed intestinal samples. The exiles were having severe digestive problems, and we wanted to analyze your intestinal bacteria. But we only probed a little way.”
“Sam, do you have a phone number?” asked the enamored male reporter from Athletics magazine. He would be among the reporters who didn’t remember an elf in the room.
• • •
“You don’t really look like a vampire,” commented a reporter, straining to see Vladimir in the low light he had specified for the room. The television crews had even tried infrared cameras to capture his image. But those didn’t work well, because the vampire’s body emitted no heat.
“Ah, you mean this disgusting flesh color,” Vlad gestured at his face. “Well, I will show you lovely skin. He stripped off his black suit to reveal a dead-white, faintly luminous body.
“Do you . . . uh . . . drink blood?” asked a timorous voice from the back of the hall.
“No, no, no! It’s a myth that arose from one unfortunate soul, your planet’s vampire of legend.”
“How?”
“Ah, yes. Poor fellow. He wasn’t evil. He just suffered bad luck about seven hundred years ago, and it ruined life for all of us. Back when he was serving his sentence as an exile, he took up with his rather delectable young girl of your species. They were . . . cuddling, you might say. Well, she sneezes and jerks her head back. His fangs just happen to nick her neck. He apologizes. They continue their cuddling. She goes home. Her father sees the marks and questions her. She doesn’t want to admit she’s been with a male. So she tells her father that the vampire was trying to drink her blood. Bam! We vampires become unfairly known as bloodsuckers!”
“And you don’t turn into bats?”
The vampire laughed ruefully.
“Oh, that nonsense,” he declared. “One of our kind was out one night enjoying the darkness, and he feels the urge—”
“To kill?” asked a reporter.
“—to defecate. We have to eliminate waste, same as you. Anyway, he finds a toilet. A boy sees him go in the door of the toilet. So, he is sitting there evacuating, and he looks up and sees a bat hanging from the rafters. He pushes open the door and shoos the bat out. Well, the boy, he runs to his house and tells everybody that a vampire turned into a bat! And there you are! The myth that we become bats!”
• • •
“Would you elaborate on your assertion that we are a ‘terminal species’?” asked a reporter from the Federal Broadcasting Corporation.
“No,” said the werewolf Flaktuckmetang, a.k.a. Senator Warren F. Lee. He stood glaring disdainfully at the crowd of reporters.
“You’ll say nothing?” asked the reporter.
“No,” said the werewolf, folding his thickly furred arms. “You are supposedly an intelligent species. You can figure it out for yourselves. Or, maybe not. I don’t care.”
“Shouldn’t you resign from your Senate seat?” asked the reporter from the Capital Post. “You aren’t one of us.”
“Nowhere in the rules does it say a senator has to be any particular species . . . just intelligent. In fact, I suspect many of my colleagues would not meet an intelligence requirement.”
“Well, then, you weren’t born in this country.”
“I have a birth certificate that says I was.”
“It can’t be real.”
“Prove it.”
“Do you transform into a werewolf when the moon is full?” interjected a reporter from The
Daily Star.
“No, I wear a flesh-suit just like other Mythicals.”
“But do you go out when the moon is full?”
“Yes, of course, because that’s when I can see well enough not to run into trees.”
The broadcast reporter returned relentlessly to his first question. “So do you really think we are a terminal species?”
“I’ll put it this way. Among our race, your planet is known as Krokatpof Topafog.”
“What does that mean?”
“Roughly translated, Planet of the Morons.”
“This is great!” exclaimed Jack, as he sat in his apartment with Sam, going through the video feeds on the screen showing the massive coverage of the Mythicals’ debut. The news channels had launched around-the-clock coverage documenting the historic events. Mythicals were interviewed, scientists were interviewed, religious scholars were interviewed—anyone who had even the slightest expertise was interviewed.
And the impact was global. Jack had visited channels he didn’t even realize existed. All of the international channels showed interviews with their local Mythicals. Speaking the country’s languages, fairies, ogres, and other Mythicals were interviewed about their species and their lives as exiles.
Sam’s expression was stoic, as she watched the global coverage. She remained as Jack had found her in his apartment, folded into an armchair like a small, nesting bird. He didn’t ask how she had managed to get into his apartment. He was too glad to see her.
“Wish I could tell what they’re saying,” said Jack as he proceeded through the channels.
Sam uncurled, sat up, and answered quietly. “Well, on this channel, the reporter asked the fairy about alien technology. The ogre was telling another station about their family structure. And the angel was explaining to a religious station how she is not a supernatural being.”
“You speak those languages?”
“Mythicals know most languages. Some of our exile sentences are so long that we move from country to country, just to stay occupied.”
“You don’t look happy. Everybody loves the Mythicals. They’re fascinated by you.”
Mythicals Page 12
