As his thoughts picked up the earlier thread, when he’d been contemplating her amazing cleavage, and combined that with the strawberries, he arrived at a mental image of her breasts covered in strawberry sauce with her nipples poking out of the sticky liquid. He realized that his mouth was watering, then he remembered that Sarah had just said something to him.
“Yes, little one?” He felt sheepish that he’d gotten distracted so easily.
“I’m sorry I ran away. I just got so scared. Everything’s so different here.” She sounded so small and vulnerable that Ral’s heart melted. Of course she got scared. She hadn’t exactly given him a chance to explain, though, and he still thought she had a lesson to learn.
“You didn’t give me time to tell you it was safe before you ran off, young lady.”
“There’s so many things I don’t recognize.” Sarah looked uncomfortable. He wanted to tell her about everything in the galaxy, and show it all to her as well, but at the same time, he was trying not to overload her with new things all at once.
“I’ll make sure you get everything you need to settle into life in modern times. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the council and get you a chip. It’s what we use instead of currency, and it has all your information, such as your age and whether you can drive. Well, on planets that still have manual cars, anyway.”
“What other sort is there?” Sarah wondered.
“See the flying cars? They’re all driverless. Fully automatic. You just tell them where you want to go, and they take you there.”
“Why do they fly at different heights?” Sarah stared at the most distant flying cars, which were level with the tops of the skyscrapers.
“They’re very hot underneath, so they have to be a certain distance apart. General rule is, the lower they are, the shorter the journey they’re making. The lowest ones just circle the city until someone hails one.”
“Like a taxi cab? Do you have a flying car?”
“No, they’re all owned by the city. People have their own spaceships sometimes, but no one owns a car. It makes everything a lot easier.”
“I bet there’s no arguments about parking, sure, but where do they all go at night?”
Ral loved that she was so curious about everything. “The city has one big parking lot for them all, and they just keep switching them, so cars circle the city day and night. My first ever job, as a newly graduated archaeologist, was to excavate Minos Kerala city’s parking lot. We were there for six weeks, and found nothing.”
“Ral?” Sarah asked.
Ral realized he was dangerously close to talking shop, so he derailed his train of thought and gave Sarah his full attention. “What is it, Sarah?”
“Why do you keep calling me ‘little one’?”
He stopped walking in astonishment.
“You need someone to take care of you at the moment, until you find your feet. Also, I’m considerably taller than you.” He wondered if he’d explained very well.
“Does that mean you’re my grownup?” she asked, gazing up at him with her astonishing blue eyes. The way she said it, in her strawberry voice, made his heart glow.
He smiled thoughtfully. When he’d seen Sarah playing with Laila, he’d hoped Sarah might get to this conversation.
“I guess I am. And if you’re going to be living under my roof, I will expect you to call me Daddy and follow my rules, or there will be consequences. For example, you’re in trouble for running away like you did. This city’s not safe and you’re very lucky you bumped into Laila.” He watched her face to see how she was taking this new development.
“Sure; that seems to be what people in the future do.”
She didn’t seem particularly concerned about it, and Ral worried slightly that Sarah was accepting this too easily. Perhaps he shouldn’t have brought it up yet. A couple of sentences when she was half-asleep and an affinity for crayons didn’t prove she knew anything about ageplay, or that she ever wanted to. Did she even understand what this would entail?
“Are you sure you aren’t going to have any problems with that?”
“When in Rome and all that…” Sarah shrugged.
“What happens in Rome?” Ral asked. He’d seen references to it as a tourist destination but didn’t really think it had an eventful past.
“It’s a saying. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’”
“And what do the Romans do?” Ral was perplexed. He wondered if her old-fashioned words were putting too much strain on the Speakeasy chips.
“Well… they have gladiator matches, and they like to put on Greek plays, and they really like conquering the rest of Europe. And maybe if you visited Rome you might want to do those things. I don’t know. You’re the archaeologist; shouldn’t you know this stuff?”
“I know a little, but I can’t know everything about every obscure site from Earth’s past.” Ral was confused when Sarah started laughing hysterically. “What’s so funny?”
“I don’t really know much about history, but Rome was one of the most important cities in Europe for, like, thousands of years or something. Didn’t you know?”
“You sure?” Had she confused it with some other site? All the evidence suggested that only the most primitive and barbaric peoples had occupied Europe until relatively recently.
“Don’t you have history books in the future?”
“No, we don’t. It’s all stored on computers, and until very recently each planet only had its own internet, and data had to be moved between planets and outposts manually on big spaceships. Most of the planets like Earth which were destroyed didn’t have much—if any—information stored off-world. Archaeologists had a lot to piece together and only secondhand accounts of Earth’s distant history to go on, because a lot of Earth’s knowledge was lost during the mass civil unrest of the twenty-second century. Next you’ll tell me that the legends were true that claimed Egypt had enormous ancient pyramids.” He stopped talking and watched as Sarah nearly doubled over with laughter. “What now?”
“Egypt’s pyramids were real, stupid. Don’t you know anything?”
“Young lady, while you may be an expert on pre-cataclysmic Earth, I am definitely not stupid. For example, I know exactly how hard to spank the bottom of a naughty young woman who thinks she knows best just because her cultural knowledge is a little different to mine. You already have a spanking coming for running away like that.”
Sarah stopped laughing and looked at him in surprise. He guessed she was wondering if he’d really give her a spanking for misbehaving. He let her uncertainty amuse him for a moment while he watched her make up her mind whether to keep pushing at him or back off.
“Sorry,” she said contritely, and didn’t seem too fazed by what he’d said, because a few minutes later she was climbing on a wall and balancing on it, beside the pavement.
“Get down from there, please, Sarah.” Ral was worried she might fall and hurt herself.
“It’s fine. I do this all the time on… Oops!” As she spoke, she slipped on the glassy surface and fell sideways toward the hard ground. Ral caught her easily, and righted her on the pavement. He picked up the towel she’d been clinging to before she fell, and handed it back to her. What was the big deal about the towel? He couldn’t understand why she was so adamantly holding onto it. It wasn’t like she was cold or wet, or using it as a pillow or as a sling for an injury… when he thought about it, a towel was a very versatile and useful thing to have in a strange situation. Had the people of Earth all carried towels around with them everywhere they went? It seemed like a great idea. Perhaps he should carry one as a matter of course, too. He turned his attention to giving her a stern talking-to.
“It’s not safe to do that here. The material that the walls are made of is very slippery, like glass. It’s different to the pavement, which has a rougher surface so people don’t slip over. You didn’t have time to do as you were told before you slipped, but if you climb on a wall again, I will put you over my knee,” he warned he
r.
Sarah stared at him again, as if she were deep in thought, then started walking on the pavement beside Ral. When he reached down and took her hand, she didn’t protest.
Chapter Three
Ral’s apartment wasn’t far from Laila’s. Now that they were alone, Sarah wondered if Ral was going to take advantage of the situation. Something about him reassured her that he was trustworthy, though, even after the encounter with the tentacle monster. He seemed to care a lot about her wellbeing. She wondered what was wrong with her. She felt a little guilty that she was sad when she thought about everything that had happened to Earth, but she wasn’t upset when she didn’t think about it all. It was all a bit distant, like it had been in another lifetime. Anyway, she felt okay about Ral. She even liked him, even though he kept making jokes about spanking her. And it wasn’t so bad here; it didn’t look like aliens were farming humans, and the machines didn’t seem to have risen up and enslaved everyone.
Waking up three hundred years in the future must have been an overload of weirdness, she decided. Maybe when the shock had worn off, she’d be more resistant to being looked after by Ral. For now, it was good that he wasn’t just leaving her to fend for herself in this unfamiliar world.
It helped that he was very easy on the eye. Sarah had never seen anyone over seven feet tall before, and she couldn’t help sneaking glances at his broad shoulders and muscular arms when she thought he wasn’t looking. His hair was incredible, too. It looked like someone had made thousands of long, thin strands of gold, mixed them with brown, and turned them into a man’s hair. The slight wave at the end made it look like a golden-brown waterfall that reached his shoulders. As he held open the door for her, she noticed how large his hands were. Her stomach fluttered as she imagined getting spanked by those hands.
“Wait for me inside the door, please, Sarah.” When he said her name, a chill ran down the back of her neck. She wanted him to say it to her over and over again, in that same tone, until she remembered the sound of his voice whenever she wanted to. Listening to him was like sipping at a syrupy bourbon, and his tone filled her body with warmth in this scary world.
The lights turned on automatically when Sarah stepped through the door, and she stood, staring around the apartment, while Ral got the door closed.
Like dwellings she’d seen before, the apartment had walls, a ceiling, and a floor, but there the similarities ended. The flooring in Laila’s apartment had been polished wood, but Ral’s was a beautiful multicolored mosaic made of tiny tiles of iridescent colored glass. If Sarah had ever imagined the Rainbow Road from either Mario Kart or Thor, this would be exactly how it would look in real life. It glimmered in the area lighting.
“You like the floor?” Ral now stood beside her. She nodded, unable to put it into words. How did something so beautiful exist? Just to be walked upon and to hold up furniture? It seemed impossible.
“I made it myself, based on the mosaics found in Early Nidian dwellings on the Prime planets. It took me every weekend for six months; I wanted it to be perfect.”
“You must be very pleased with the result,” Sarah said, still staring at it in amazement.
“Not quite; there are some places where the tiles didn’t shine as much as the others. But generally, I like how it looks.” Ral smiled down at her. “I’ll give you a tour after I’ve spanked you, if you like?”
Sarah nodded again, then her cheeks flushed as he mentioned punishment again. When Ral reached down and took her hand, she didn’t protest as he led her deeper into his apartment, while she stared in awe at the mosaic under her feet.
“This is the living room,” Ral said, and Sarah noticed there were four large beanbags. There was a low white table between the seating, and it had an empty mug on it. At least people still drank out of mugs, she thought with some relief, then she remembered she’d seen similar things at Laila’s home. “Before we continue our tour, it’s time for your spanking for running away.”
Ral sat down on one of the beanbags and before Sarah protested, he pulled her over his knee. She tried to wriggle free but he was far too big and strong, and he easily held her in place. He lifted Sarah’s hospital gown. She realized she had no idea which panties she was wearing, as his hand caressed her bottom over the fabric. Hopefully, she hadn’t been frozen in something embarrassing, like her retro Space Invaders underwear. Would Ral even know what that was?
“Okay, joke’s over, I won’t run off from any more tentacle monsters,” she said, to cover the fact that she was becoming quite aroused as she awaited retribution.
“Good to hear, missy. You’re still getting spanked.” Ral’s tone was firm. His hand began to land on her rear in a loud and hard series of swats that very quickly left her breathless. Her cheeks stung and she pounded her fists against the floor as he showed no signs of finishing anytime soon.
“Hey, stop! This isn’t how I—” imagined it, she finished the sentence in her thoughts; it was too embarrassing to admit that she’d ever thought about someone’s hand on her bottom like this.
He paused and rearranged her on his lap.
“This isn’t how you…?” he prompted, then waited for her to finish the sentence. Sarah flailed for a less candid way to finish her thought.
“This isn’t how I thought it was going to go, when you said you were going to spank me. It hurts!” She filled her voice with as much indignance as she could muster.
“That’s the point.”
“Then I don’t like the point. And I don’t like this. You’re mean.” The lady doth protest too much, methinks came into her mind, and Sarah blushed furiously as she stopped talking. Ral continued to spank her. His hand was hard, and very quickly she was tossing her hair and trying not to cry.
“It would be mean to let you start your new life thinking it was acceptable to run off around the city when you don’t know your way around. This city’s a hundred miles long! You could get hurt or kidnapped. There are plenty of gangsters around the city who would sell you as a slave if they could.”
Sarah couldn’t respond because her bottom was burning too much. Between her legs, a fire was beginning in her core, too, and she was horrified that her nipples were hardening into points through the flimsy hospital gown. She gave up trying to hold back the tears, and they tumbled out of her like a waterfall as Ral continued to correct her with his hand. How did she feel cared for and infuriated at the same time? As he kept going, she realized she should have at least given him a chance to explain before she’d run away. He had probably been quite worried about her.
When he finished, he left her over his knee until she stopped crying. While she was there, he stroked her bottom through her panties, and she felt soothed and reassured, even through the burn in her haunches. He gently tipped her upright, then stood up and drew her into a hug.
“I’m sorry I ran away.”
“Good girl, Sarah. I forgive you. But don’t do anything like that again, please. Want to see the rest of my apartment?”
Sarah nodded, and they continued looking around as if nothing had happened between them.
As she looked at the walls, she realized that one of them was actually a floor-to-ceiling opaque panel of black glass where the others were a matte gray-blue color.
“Why is the wall like that?” she asked.
“It’s a window,” Ral explained.
“What, all of it? Why is it black?” Who had black windows?
“Because it’s nighttime. The glass turns opaque at night so people can’t see into other people’s homes or businesses. It reacts to the UV light from our sun, so it turns transparent in daylight. Since light-reactive glass was invented, crime rates plummeted.” Ral turned and guided her up a small set of five steps, which led beyond a five-feet-high partition wall, so Sarah could see down into the living room when she gazed over the wall, but no one would be able to see into the bedroom from the living room unless they were taller than Ral.
“This is my sleeping area; you’ll
have to excuse the mess. I wasn’t expecting any visitors today.” Ral straightened out his crumpled pillowcase. Sarah frowned. The bed was sunk a few inches into the floor. In addition to the lack of floor-to-ceiling walls and any kind of door, there were some other things missing from this room.
“Where’s your duvet or blanket? And your closet?” she wondered.
“My clothes live under the bed, in the pull-up storage. Watch.” He pressed a button that Sarah had assumed to be a light switch, and his bed began to raise. When it reached about four feet high, Sarah saw that there were hanging rails and drawers.
“That’s incredible! It’s so neat and tidy when it’s hidden away. But that doesn’t explain where your blankets are,” Sarah persisted.
“There are no blankets, little one. We can set the temperature in the apartment so we don’t need to cover up to keep warm, or undress to cool down.”
Sarah’s jaw nearly dropped. How were there no blankies? What did people do when they wanted to snuggle up?
“Something’s the matter, little one,” Ral observed. He seemed to notice a lot of things.
Sarah was suddenly overcome with shyness. “I don’t want to say.”
“You can talk to me, sweetheart.”
“I know, it’s just… I feel a bit silly saying it.”
“More silly than a multicolored tentacle monster tap-dancing on a trampoline?” Ral cocked his head to one side as he spoke. Sarah burst out laughing and shook her head.
“No! Nothing is more ridiculous than that! I just felt a little bit sad that there aren’t any blankies to snuggle.” She knotted one corner of her towel between her fingers as she spoke.
Ral’s face softened and Sarah stopped worrying that he was going to laugh at her.
His Little Earthling Page 3
