by Ramy Vance
The members of Boundless were beyond excited to visit Alex’s realm. They were joking and talking about it loudly as they prepared their dragons for the trip.
Alex watched them from afar. She was excited to go home, but her conversation with Myrddin had left her anxious. The wizard was running all this. To see him at a loss for what to do or think worried her. On top of that, they still weren’t certain when the Dark One’s reinforcements would arrive. Myrddin might be sending Boundless to Earth in the middle of a siege.
In any other situation, Alex would have been ecstatic to go back to Earth, even if it was for a mission. Something felt off about this, though. She didn’t know why she shouldn’t trust Vardis, other than Myrddin’s mistrust.
Jim noticed Alex standing on the upper level, looking down at the rest of the team. “Hey, you going to join us anytime soon?” he called, “We’re going home, dude!”
Alex jumped down and walked over to him. “Yeah, I know,” she said, “I’m super excited.”
Jollies fluttered over to Alex, gushing, “I can’t wait to see what your realm is like! I’ve never seen a lot of humans up close.”
Brath groaned as he dragged the augments he had removed off Furi. “Why would you want to see a bunch of humans? Just imagine Alex and Jim and think about more of them. Though I doubt they’ll be as—you know, what, never mind.”
Gill grabbed Brath’s beard as the gnome walked by. “Were you about to compliment Jim and Alex?” he asked.
Brath slapped Gill’s hand away. “Not even. I was going to say the humans will probably be more annoying than Alex and Jim. Damn. And I’ve told you before, don’t grab my beard. It takes a lot of time to get it looking this good.”
Gill and Jim cracked up as they watched Brath hobble off, huffing and puffing and muttering under his breath. When Jim saw that Alex wasn’t laughing, he came up to her and took her hand. “You okay?”
Alex squeezed Jim’s hand, but she was aware she was doing it more for Jim than herself. “Yeah, everything’s cool. Can’t wait to take you guys to my favorite pizza spot.”
Before Alex could say anything else, the comm interrupted her. “Team Boundless, please report to the hadron collider immediately for teleportation.”
Alex took a deep breath as she tried to smile at the rest of the team. This was it; they were heading back to Earth. This wasn’t how she was expecting her return to Earth to be, but she was with Boundless. It couldn’t possibly be too bad.
Author Notes Ramy Vance
April 17, 2020
I couldn’t make this up. I wish I could. I’d be a million, billion, trillionaire if could, but my mind simply couldn’t conceive of such scenarios. And as such, I have been outdone by the greatest storyteller of all: Life.
At the peak of the Coronavirus crisis, my family got … lice.
“How?” you might ask. “Weren’t you self-isolating?” you might ask. “Was someone cheating?” you might ask. Well, I can assure you that no one in the Vance household was sneaking away to have nefarious playdates, revelry and/or non-social distancing activities. We were diligent in our efforts to ‘not see anyone.’
“But how did you get lice?”
The answer, I’m sad to say to say, was that my son must have picked it up on one of his last days of nursery – two weeks ago before we discovered it!
But we didn’t detect it due to a hodgepodge of circumstances that were so coincidental I sometimes feel like a bit player in some farcical production.
Grandpa didn’t get it. His lack of hair made his scalp a veritable nuclear wasteland for our dear lice friends.
I didn’t get it. It seems that my hair is so thick that lice find my scalp the equivalent of a dense, deadly jungle ala ‘Heart of Darkness’ style.
As for the other three – they all got it. But my son seems impervious to discomfort. I once caught him running into a wall over and over again because – and I quote – “I see funny little lights when I hit my head hard enough.”
As for grandma … her excuse was that her scalp always itched. “I’m old. Things are constantly breaking down, aching, itching, creaking. If I complained about it all, I’d never do anything else.”
And as for my wife … she just had surgery and was put on blood pressure medication that has numerous side effect. Number 2 most common side effect: An itchy scalp (I’m not kidding).
Ultimately it was CoVid-19 that was the reason it took us 2 weeks to detect it. Four adults and two kids cooped up in a single household was a pressure cooker of discontent even when we can go outside at will. But with the quarantine in effect, you can imagine we all wanted to be on our best behaviour.
No one complained … much. We knew these were extreme circumstances and we tended to keep our bitching to things we could change. As a result … the three infected just kept it to themselves until one day the itching grew to an unbearable frenzy.
Shaving our heads was a blast. It’s been awhile since I laughed so hard … and as memorable as I’m sure CoVid-19 will be, it will forever be overshadowed by the time we got lice and, as a family, shaved our heads.
Peace fellow humans. No doubt this situation is terrible. But just because it’s terrible, doesn’t mean it has to suck. (And if you’re reading this when Coronavirus is a distant memory … well, I hope my plight of lice put a smile on your face!)
Before
After
Author Notes Michael Anderle
April 17, 2020
THANK YOU for reading our story!
We have a few of these planned, but we don’t know if we should continue writing and publishing without your input.
Options include leaving a review, reaching out on Facebook to let us know and smoke signals.
Frankly, smoke signals might get misconstrued as low hanging clouds so you might want to nix that idea…
I don’t cut hair… (And I’ve never had lice, so don’t know anything about that.)
I used to have long hair when I was in college. It was that ‘you aren’t in your parents’ home, I can have long hair and an earring’ time during the 1980’s. I shared this rejection of authority by growing my hair long, using hair bands while riding motorcycles.
Yes, I listened to heavy metal and had a Kawasaki EX500… They called it a sport-tourer, I called it fun and thankfully not the death of me.
It was the closest thing to sexy I ever had in my notoriously geek life. Except for something recently in the last five years, but that doesn’t count.
I’m married. Owning sexy stuff while married takes the sexy out of it. I’ve lived through the young-family-has-a-van-to-drive days and now I’m in the older-life-kids-out-of-the-house-can-afford-more-expensive-toys days.
Back in the 80’s, my hair got long enough that when I rode, I had to use a hair band or rubber band (which HURTS like an SOB trying to get it out of the hair) or spend twenty minutes cussing as I tried to pull a hairbrush through the tangles if I forgot.
I still flinch to this day thinking about pulling the hairbrush through my hair. I am empathetic to any dogs when you have to comb them and they have tangles. I try my best to keep away any pain.
Today I like to wear my hair much shorter because it takes less time to dry.
With the Pandemic, and not haircutting barbershops or anything available, I am trying new ways to style it.
Not very successfully mind you. I’m married, I only have one person to impress and she is usually looking at me strange. This would be a typical discussion.
Wife: “What is that hairstyle called?”
Me: “Keep it the @#%@# out of my face.”
Wife: “… looks nice.”
Well, she SAID looks nice. Her rolling eyes proclaimed she meant something else.
Ad Aeternitatem,
Michael Anderle
Dragons in Space
Dragon Approved™ Book Ten
Chapter One
The skies of Earth have an understated beauty. It’s as if when they took
form, they wished to be seen as ordinary. They are the sort of skies that open up to you. They are human skies.
In the nine realms, there are skies that are filled with stars throughout the day and the night, skies that boast two suns or three moons, and skies that hold hosts of floating whales and creatures made from the stuff of myths. Yet whenever an elf or gnome steps onto Earth for the first time and is greeted with the accepting blue skies peppered with clouds that look soft enough to sleep on, they stop and stare. There is a beauty in the simplicity of Earth’s sky, one that cannot be easily understood or replicated.
It was this sky that Alex and the rest of Team Boundless tore into. A portal with a two-mile radius opened over the Big Sky state of Montana.
The portal was from the hadron collider at the Wasps Nest, one of the older models. It was Myrddin’s first attempt to find a way for humans to move throughout the realms without spells cast by magi or the use of a familiar. This collider wasn’t as precise as the newer models, and it tended to make oversized portals that could easily be noticed by many different kinds of technology.
A metallic warship roughly the size of a Navy aircraft carrier floated out of the portal. It buckled for a moment before it adjusted to the gravity of the planet, firing its thrusters to even out and remain in the air.
The ship was running a skeleton crew, just enough to keep it operational. Myrddin didn’t have enough recruits or officers to spare, so they were making do with what was available. The crew was in the main viewing area of the craft.
And because most of them had never been to Earth before, all duties were put on hold as they crowded around the windows.
Manny, a Beholder who headed up the recruitment process for the dragonriders and just about any other group that had to deal with the human realm, was one of the few passengers who didn’t seem interested in the view. Instead, his many eyes were poring over a collection of paper and digital dossiers.
The other person seemingly uninterested in the ship’s descent through Earth’s skies was Alex, the leader of Team Boundless. As the rest of her team clambered to the viewing ports, Alex sat near Manny, reading a book on the theories behind human integration of draconic fluids. She yawned loudly as she read. The book was far from interesting.
Manny looked up from his work, one of his eyes narrowing as he watched Alex reading. “Would’ve thought you’d be more interested in being home,” Manny murmured under his breath but loud enough for Alex to hear, then even louder, “Some people would kill for this kind of shore leave.”
She tried to ignore Manny, concentrating on her book’s text. It was difficult. She was having a hard enough time paying attention to what she was reading, but it was better than trying to crowd around with everyone and pretend to be excited.
Manny was right; most people would have been excited about the chance to go home. Alex wasn’t one of them, though. Nervous wasn’t the word. She was more stressed than she’d ever been, and that was saying a lot since her life had devolved into a series of tense battles and events.
Alex looked down at her robotic hand. She’d left in such a rush, she hadn’t been able to head to the med bay and see if they had anything to make her arm any less noticeable. She wasn’t looking forward to explaining how she had lost her arm to her parents.
There was going to be a lot of yelling and crying, and that wasn’t the way to spend her first day home.
Alex glanced at the rest of the crew, who were losing their minds over the Montana skies. She was glad they were all enjoying themselves. She had even heard Brath, the perpetually grouchy gnome who seemed to despise human culture, gasp in awe when the ship had exited the collider portal.
It was probably better to give the team some space and let them take everything in on their own without risking raining on their parade. That was all she was able to do. There was too much on her mind to be social right now. Thoughts ran through her head faster than her dragon Chine could fly.
Before Alex left the Nest, she had spoken with Myrddin about the alien Vardis, who had come to Middang3ard with the promise of a weapon that could destroy the Dark One. From the get-go, Myrddin didn’t seem to want Vardis’ help.
The wizard had disclosed his fears to Alex before she and the team had left. He didn’t trust the alien. There were many different factors going into Myrddin’s opinion, and he didn’t know where he stood on the situation. It was an odd thing for a wizard who had been managing the war efforts for so long to be so indecisive.
Alex still didn’t know what she thought of the situation. On the one hand, it would make sense for Myrddin to be mistrustful of an unknown variable such as Vardis. The wizard knew what was going on in the nine realms, and anything outside his sphere of influence would seem untrustworthy.
On the other hand, he had brought up a couple of points that had embarrassed Alex but that she couldn’t disagree with. Vardis would only speak with Alex. At first, she had taken it as an insult that Myrddin thought this was a reason to be suspicious.
Alex had led three missions against all odds and had come out alive. She was steadily growing a reputation in the Nest as one of the best dragonriders in the Corps. That was what made Myrddin’s words so hard to swallow, but he was right.
Alex was only a kid, one who was still piecing together what was going on in the war and who didn’t have nearly as good an understanding of the war effort as Myrddin. If Vardis talked to anyone, it should have been Myrddin. Alex could see that now.
Needless to say, all this made going home for a dinner with her family more than a little troubling.
Manny cleared his throat loudly, catching Alex’s attention. “Are you planning on ignoring me for this entire ride? I haven’t seen you in weeks, and then it was hardly any more than a curt hello. You humans never cease to puzzle me.”
Alex sighed as she closed her book and placed it on the table next to her. “Sorry, Manny, I just have a lot on my mind. And you seem to be very busy.”
“Part of my job is looking out for your well-being when I’m around, and you don’t look like you’re doing very well, if I may say. All that stuff on your mind dragging you down?”
“It’s just…well, how much do you trust Myrddin?”
Manny put down his dossier, all of his eyes focusing on Alex. “What do you mean?”
Alex threw her hands up. “Not like that. I know he’s trustworthy. I just mean, do you think he’s always right? Do you ever doubt him?”
“Rarely,” the Beholder said, “but sometimes, yes. He’s not infallible. He’s human. An old human but a human nonetheless.”
“When was the last time you thought he was making a mistake?”
Manny smiled as he turned back to his work. “When he suggested recruiting a blind human to be a dragonrider. We both saw how that turned out, didn’t we?”
Alex slouched back in her chair and groaned. “Manny, I’m not trying to fish for reassurance, I’m being serious.”
Manny didn’t bother looking up from his work this time. “I am being serious. Humans are notorious for not having quick enough reflexes to be dragonriders. It’s the whole reason we have mech riders. And from what I understood of humans, being able to see was pretty important to riding. On paper, it all looked like a terrible idea. Yet here we are.”
Alex felt like Manny was trying to guilt her into blindly accepting Myrddin’s wisdom. True, she hadn’t seen any reason not to, but it still seemed like a bad idea to blindly follow anyone. “I’m not saying I don’t appreciate what—”
Manny interrupted. “Neither am I. Just saying I have my doubts too. I usually hope Myrddin is right.”
Alex wished Manny had heard what the wizard had told her about Vardis. There was nothing Alex wanted more than for Myrddin to be wrong about that one. She hoped this was as straightforward as Vardis having a weapon that worked. Then they could put an end to this damn war.
Jollies, a pixie with skin that flashed different colors depending on her mood, flew over to Alex.
The pixie was about as long as Alex’s hand and often stood on her palm to talk. This time she zipped over and landed on the human’s shoulder. “You never told me Earth was so beautiful.”
Alex sighed and stood up. She wasn’t going to be able to sit this one out. Her roommate had come over to talk to her, so she either couldn’t take a hint or didn’t care. “Okay, okay, I’ll come check out the view with you.”
Most of Team Boundless were gathered at the same viewing portal. They were passengers on this one, though, their dragons traveling on a separate carrier heading toward an Earth base with an appropriate setup.
Alex squeezed in next to Jim, another human who was part of their team. Jim wasn’t a dragonrider but was one of the mech riders, a group of humans and elves who piloted dragon mechs.
As she took her spot, Jim reached down and quickly squeezed her hand. “How does it feel to be back home?”
Alex forced a smile as she avoided his eyes, looking out the viewing window and watching the clouds roll by. “Good,” she lied. “I can hardly believe I’m back here. Visiting has been all I’ve been able to think about.”
Jim watched Alex closely as if he wasn’t sure what to make of her words. “Yeah, same here, I guess,” he finally replied. “It’s going to be great to see my folks. Still can’t believe we’re here. Honestly, I forgot Earth existed for a little while. This is a good reminder.”
Next to Jim stood Brath, the red-headed gnome. Alex didn’t ever miss a chance to give him a hard time, and now was as good a time as any. Brath seemed to be genuinely in awe of the sky. “Hey, Brath, you gonna pick your jaw up off the ground anytime soon?” she quipped.
