We were told that the place itself was maintained by aquarists, who also work to ensure that some of these fishes didn't go extinct using good captive husbandry so they could breed in captivity. I really didn't want to get too strictly ethical over it. For now, I just wanted to forget all of that and enjoyed the trip.
Allecra smiled when she saw the look of amazement on my face. We saw dolphins, sea turtles and even killer sharks, but what intrigued me the most was the whales. As we stood there before the enormous window, one of the whales sailed across the gigantic tank like some kind of submarine. I could see its belly and fins and the tail the size of a big ship's masts. Never in my life had I seen any living things this huge and this close.
"Wow," I breathed. "I can't believe such a giant thing exist in the world!"
"I like to come here once in a while because it reminds me of home," she told me. I turned to look at Allecra.
"They have an aquarium like this over there?" I asked.
"No, in fact, Arzuria is much like a giant aquarium in itself. It's just that there is only one continent there," she said to my total surprise.
"One continent?" I said.
"Yes." She smiled. "The land has coral-like trees with whatever shapes and colors imaginable. Some even glow at night. They also produce oxygen and yield fruits — some edible, some poisonous."
"It sounds familiar but still different," I said.
"Earth is not the only Water Planet in the Milky Way. The ocean in Arzuria is three times bigger than the Pacific. What do your people say—that only ten percent of your seas have been discovered? Try the oceans there! Many strange fishes, and of course, there are big ones just like the whales here, but the evolution had made them evolve so much that they grow wings and can fly across lands."
My jaw just dropped.
"You're not kidding, right?"
Allecra chuckled and shook her head. She seemed to enjoy my awe-struck face.
"The whales would migrate to other seas every season, and when that happens, you could see them sail like some flock of flying ships in the sky."
I guessed you couldn't find anywhere in the universe that had four moons and flying fishes like where Allecra came from.
"Are you sure you're not from Wonderland?" I asked with astonishment. She laughed melodiously. My heart perked up at the fact that I could amuse her.
"There are a lot of places here that are beautiful and strange," she said. "You just haven't seen them yet, Nina."
"You are right," I said with a nod of agreement. "It occurs to me now that what we see before us is just one tiny part of the world — just the surface or the skin. People get used to thinking, this is the world, but it's not true. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than what we see every day. I suddenly feel too small and my problems seemed insignificant."
Allecra looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. As we strolled around the aquarium, I felt like the child in me was showing up more and more. I would point to this and that and gasp in joy at what I found. Once in a while, I would catch an amused smile on Allecra's lips. She followed me around with her hands jammed into the pockets of her jacket like that glamorous fashion model, but for some reason, it seemed like she was just trying to keep them to herself. I felt a bit disappointed that she didn't try to touch me again. I could imagine the rush and thrill every time our bodies made contact. The thought sent a shivery jolt to all the secret places in my being. I tried to shake the feeling off my head.
It wasn’t crowded as it was a weekday. We went through a special display of jellyfish. They were from all parts of the world. We watched them floating in their tanks, from a tiny cotton puff to monster size.
"Isn't it amazing?" I exclaimed. "They just keep wobbling along like this until they've been to every ocean!"
Allecra smiled and nodded back. Then we went to see the star-fishes and the sea horses. They were my favorite oceanic species.
"Look at those strange chessman-like guys!" I said, still gazing through the tank filled with colorful seaweed and coral. "Did you know, Allecra, seahorses stay in a long-term monogamous partnership and tend to mate under full moons? They even make musical sounds while doing it!"
"Well, I'm jealous. I can't make any musical sounds during sex," Allecra said. I turned and gave her a look.
"You don't need to tell me that," I said, fighting back the blush that threatened to form on my face.
She shrugged and grinned playfully at me.
"Just in case, you have any unusual expectation of me."
"Why would I expect that from you?" I said with a glare. "Are you a sea horse?"
Allecra laughed. I had to bite my lips from laughing, too, but I didn't succeed.
Afterward, we went to see a video of male seahorses giving birth. Of course, male seahorses are the ones to become pregnant. They're not only carrying but fertilizing and nourishing the developing eggs with their fluid secretions.
It was mind-blowing how their babies were born. A turbid liquid burst forth from the brood pouch, and like magic, minuscule but fully formed sea horses appear out of the cloud. I was amazed at how nature could come up with something like this.
"Isn't it wonderful?!" I said to Allecra, who was just as fascinated by the process. The light that came from the tank intensified her turquoise eyes even more, and they were sparkling with a kind of amazement bordering on longing.
As if forgetting herself, she came to wrap her arms around my waist from behind and pulled my back against her front. Her chest was soft and comforting. I ignored the heat on my face and leaned myself into her. I wondered how the universe could come up with Allecra.
"You know, I wish we were like seahorses," she whispered into my hair.
"Why?"
"So that I could carry babies for you instead."
In that moment, I understood the longing in her voice. I could feel her heart beating against her chest. It made me sad. I turned around in her arms and stared at her face. Then I pulled her down by the front her jacket and kissed her. She melted into my mouth, and we kissed like that in front of the glowing light of the aquarium.
~*~
After that day, Allecra and I had realized something for the first time. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two hormonal teenagers like an electric shock when they first fall in love, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meeting became more frequent, I felt not so much as I had met someone new but as I had chanced upon a dear old friend.
She would ask me relentlessly about every trivial detail of my existence — even something as small as what popcorn flavor I preferred.
At first, I thought she was just trying to know me as a person, but then it seemed she was genuinely curious about whatever I thought and felt. She also wanted to know the world as I saw it. I had told her about my childhood, my father, my aunt, my favorite music, and the books I had read. I told her about Klara, who was the first person to keep a reality check on me if she sensed that I had drifted too far from the real world. Allecra didn't find it odd at all with the ways I perceived things. I had always been insecure about expressing myself to other people. I didn't think they could understand me or even care. Now it was a new kind of feeling of having someone who was truly absorbed in whatever that was on my mind.
With Allecra, endless thoughts and ideas that were kept buried inside my head came streaming out like rivers. Sometimes, I tried to stop something I was saying, thinking it was boring or unimportant, but Allecra wouldn't allow me to.
"No, no, please, just go on," she would encourage me, and when she turned those beautiful brilliant eyes on you, you felt as if her whole purpose in life was just to sit there and listen to you and you alone. I could even talk about the craziest things I had never voiced to anyone for fear of being made fun of or judged, like how starry the night sky would have been a thousand years ago
without light pollution or how come sloths didn't go extinct, even though they are so damn slow and why do humans have five fingers instead of three or six???
Suddenly, it hit me like a spark of lightning. I realized then that no one, not even my best friend, could make me feel unafraid of being completely honest with myself.
I discovered more about Allecra as well, like she was inhumanly intelligent. Of course, she didn't tell me that, but the day I insisted on ditching school and we went to the aquarium, I had missed my math test. The teacher gave me extra work to make up for it, but it was something I had to study before I could solve the problems. In the science lab, Allecra caught me doing math assignment and with just a glance at the page, she said, "How did you get a 'negative one'? It's not correct."
I wanted to snap at her for shunning my mathematical ability, but it turned out, she was right. The most shocking thing was that Allecra never learned a thing about math.
"Then how do you know all these?" I had asked and she just shrugged back.
"I don't know the answers. I see them," she replied.
"How?" I asked again. She seemed to think for a second before she tried to explain it to me in the simplest way I could follow. She picked up three pens and dropped them onto the table and asked me how many.
"Three?" I said with a curious frown at her. Then Allecra smiled and grabbed a box full of matches from the lab table drawer before spilling the matches slowly out of the box. This time, she asked the same question, but I couldn't answer it and just looked back like she was insane.
"It's seventy-nine matches in total," she told me.
"What? How could you possibly know that?" I gasped.
"Like I said, I didn't know, I just saw," she said. "You also saw seventy-nine matches the same way you saw three pens, but your brain couldn't grasp it all like the way mine did. It's the same to me with everything else. The shadow of a tree, the shape of a box, the curve of a blackberry bush. I see it in more precise dimensions and accuracy. It might sound crazy to you, but when I looked at your math work, it was as if the numbers and symbols and stuff jumped out at me. I just saw the answer. I don't need to learn a thing."
Well, I should have known that someone who had dropped off from space wouldn't have a shitty brain. But I also remembered what Allecra had told me about being made from the best DNAs there were. No wonder she wasn’t just a beauty but also a genius.
"You know what, Allecra, you should be my personal tutor from now on," I said, which caused her to chuckle.
"With pleasure, Miss Antonina Black." She grinned widely.
We started doing a lot of school stuff together. She was a great teacher, too, who always knew how to connect the dots for me. And I learned from the world through her eyes a little more while she did the same through mine.
But most importantly, I started to feel like I could trust Allecra with anything, and that was a very important milestone in any relationship. This unsullied feeling held the key. It was like the secret to a food recipe. The main ingredient in any relationship was trust. If you didn't have trust, everything tasted blunt and the whole dish was ruined.
So when trust itself finally blossomed, all the fear ceased to exist.
For the first time, I understood what true freedom meant. It was not just being liberated and free from the bond placed by societies, but also being liberated and free from the bond within oneself.
Allecra and I grew closer together as the days passed by. We would talk about innocuous things, but if we should happen to touch, I felt a stronger fluttering in my chest and the same tingling in my stomach.
Soon I started to find it difficult when the weekends were drawing near and I would desperately wish for Monday to come. I would make extra lunch for her and make sure I had put all my heart into it. That afternoon while we sat eating lunch together under our favorite pepper tree, I decided to ask about her past relationships with the potential girls.
"Tell me," I said in a demanding voice, though I knew I could have gotten the answer through persuasion.
"What do you want to know?" she asked, sounding annoyed at my determination like it was a bug.
"How did you meet your potentials? Everything from start to finish in fine details. Don't spare me," I said and then continued in a softer tone. "Please, Allecra, I have to know."
"Are you sure you want to hear everything even if what you might hear will bother you?" she asked.
I nodded solemnly.
"You will hate me after this." Allecra sighed.
"I won't."
"Alright then," she said. Her face looked as if she was confessing on a trail. "It was when I turned thirteen that I met the first one."
"Thirteen?" I couldn't help my surprise.
"What? It wasn't my fault I hit puberty early," she said.
"Sorry, please go on."
"We met her in Africa."
"Africa?"
"Why are you so surprised, Nina?" Allecra frowned at me.
"No, it's not in a bad way," I reassured her and sidestepped the minefield. "Please continue. I won't interrupt you again."
She let out a long exhale before she went on.
"That year we lived at the edge of a beautiful town. Behind our house was the country view. We had a vineyard and orchard garden. Green fields and woodland stretched far to the mountains. I loved it there. I was still young at that time when I met Nattia. She was a daughter of a rancher, who raised cattle and horses," she said. "Triton helped her father repair his beloved truck by chance, and he invited us to his house. Then I saw her. She was three years older than me, but I was tall for my age, and I was instantly aware that I was sexually attracted to her that day. We got to know each other, and we went riding together every day. She told me about horses and how they are tremendously influenced by the phases of the moon - both physically and emotionally. Their brain waves go wild as full moon approaches, and they would start having all kinds of physical problems. When the full moon arrives, some of them die. No one knows why this happen. I told her where I came from had no horses, and if there were, they would all be extinct since the full moons were quite frequent. I thought we were close enough to talk about it. I knew she liked me a lot, too. She asked me where I came from and I told her the truth. At first, she thought I was joking, but as the sun began to set and we were alone, I showed her my tattoos that had recently shown up on my body."
"Your tattoos are natural?" I said, even when I knew I shouldn't interrupt, but Allecra just nodded.
"It's our patterns. Every Arzurian has it, just like a tiger has stripes," she said.
I wanted to tell her that in fact, humans also have patterns, but it's invisible and only the females bear the marks. See how strange that is! In some world, people have stripes while in other world, the males carry babies?!?
"And what happened after you told her?"
"Nattia said she didn't mind who or what I was. I was so happy," Allecra said. "That night we decided to make love."
There was a long pause from Allecra. Her eyes dissected my expression and her usual easy demeanor faded. She almost looked guilty. I let her know that I wanted her to continue.
"We went to our secret hut inside the woods. There was a full moon in the sky that night and we kissed for a while. We were both already naked. Then when she started touching me, I began to feel something weird inside my body. There was a great pressure between my legs. I thought I was just too aroused."
I shivered, imagining too vividly to myself what Allecra had described — the small straw hut in the wood, the shape of the trees, a full moon that could kill horses, and Allecra, like a glorious goddess with her creamy nude form, as she bathed in the moonlight. I imagine seeing beautiful Nattia in her arms and I felt a pang of jealousy rose from somewhere I didn't want to acknowledge.
"But before I realized what was happening, something sprang out from within me. I screamed then. Nattia didn't know what was wrong. She held me as I curled into a ball. My hands were over
my private part."
I later realized Allecra didn't know that she was born with both sexes either. It might have happened when she hit puberty.
"Then the pain subsided," Allecra continued, she could barely look at me. "And suddenly I was thrown into a new wave of sensation. It was an impulsive need that had just broken free of its shell, and it was like my mind was switched off. I turned and pushed Nattia back onto the bed. She went from being confused to very frightened when my tattoos and eyes went aglow. I begged her and begged her, yet I still forced myself on her. She tried to call out my name, to make me stop, but I didn't hear anything other than my thumping heart and the throbbing need to be inside her. And that I did."
My breath came to a halt. Allecra looked up with concern.
"I will stop now," she said. Her voice was like a rock hitting the bottom of an empty well with a dull thud.
"No, don't." I shook my head vigorously at her. "You must continue the story. No need to hide it from me anymore. There shouldn't be any more secrets between us."
After a moment of contemplation, she nodded.
"Nattia covered her face with her hands and cried a little. I felt sorry for her, but I couldn't make myself leave her body. I felt my new member got even harder like it had set down roots. ‘I understand,’ Nattia said to me. ‘I won't protest anymore. But I want you to remember this, Allecra, that you are raping me. I like you, but it's not how I wanted it.’ I didn't say a word. I was overcome by my own lust. My hands drew her close to me and my hips started moving, slowly for a while then violently at the end. Nattie closed her eyes and gave herself up to me. Her face was expressionless as she turned her head away from me. I could still see the tears streaming down her cheeks. But gradually, I could sense the pleasure rising up through her body like an extension of myself. I had never felt such a powerful sensation. I remember climaxing over and over until I thought my whole body was melting. It was my first experience of sex. "
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