by Archer, Mia
Holy crapola!
Okay. Safety note. I was going to pretend that purple sand was the world’s biggest game of “the floor is lava” from here on out. The last thing I wanted was to wind up sliding down the gullet of something that could swallow one of those lizards whole!
I mean sure it probably wasn’t going to bother me all that much in the long run, but I’d lost my powers once. Knowing my luck, I’d lose my powers again just in time for one of those sand monsters to gobble me up.
Not my idea of a good time. Also? I was totally starting to understand why the locals spent a good chunk of their time flying around in those flying saucer things. If touching the ground meant risking being turned into a snack by something like that…
I shivered and flew down to a bit of rock jutting out of the purple sand. I also totally tried not to think about how something that big could totally disregard a big chunk of rock like that.
One of the humanoids had also scrambled up onto the rock.
I moved down to help them up. The alien pulled away from me and pulled out something that definitely looked like a weapon. Sure the particulars were different from what I might see back on earth, but those particulars didn’t matter because I knew a gun when I saw it.
I held my hands up to try and let them know that everything was okay. That I was a friend and I was trying to help them. It was right around that time that the bastard pulled the trigger and my field of vision was filled with a blinding flash of light.
4
Buried Alive
Not for the first time that day I was treated to the sensation of flying. It wasn’t even the first time that day that I found myself flying because of forces beyond my control.
Whatever that alien fired at me packed one heck of a punch. Which I suppose made sense. If they were firing off weapons that were meant to go to work on one of those giant monsters then it would have to pack a heck of a punch.
I flew in an arc, and I was so surprised that I didn’t recover before I landed on the purple sand again and went sliding. Dang it. I looked around and saw other aliens in that weird armor trying desperately to scramble back onto their flying saucers or convenient nearby rocky outcroppings.
Also? There were more flying saucers coming over the rise and bearing down on me. I’d like to think they were a rescue party, but something told me that wasn’t the case.
No, they didn’t look like they came in peace.
Honestly, though, I was more worried about where I was standing. Right in the middle of the spot where that giant something had sucked the giant lizard into its mouth using that quicksand thing.
I took a deep breath. Told myself it wasn’t a big deal. The giant thing might’ve looked scary, but it wasn’t a danger to me. There wasn’t much of anything, outside of stupid Dr. Lana and her stupid gun, that was a real danger to me.
Besides, I’d totally been standing on this sand before and nothing bad happened. Maybe that thing didn’t attack every time something landed on its trap. I didn’t have to worry as long as the sand didn’t turn into that strange quicksand thing and oh, that was weird, I didn’t remember being up to my ankles in sand the last time around.
Also? The aliens all around me who were still in the sand, still trying to get their broken flying saucers to work, were panicking. They didn’t look like they were doing all that hot in their attempts to get out either.
I struggled to get out of the sand for a moment before I realized that I was acting like an idiot. I could totally fly. There was no point in trying to walk out of this death trap.
It’s not like it was all that weird that I forgot about that though. I’d just spent a couple of months without my powers and got used to doing things the way other regular people did things. It was hard to get back into the habit of being awesome again.
I felt bad for the people who were going to get stuck in the maw of whatever thing was rising up out of the purple sand to make snacks out of everything, but not too bad. The jerks had shot at me, after all.
I flew up, but before I got too far something rose up and blotted out the sky above me. Crapola.
I’d been too late. The thing managed to get up and snap its jaws shut, and then the bottom dropped out beneath me.
Not that I had to worry about the bottom dropping out beneath me because of, y’know, the whole flying thing. Though that didn’t help the other poor bastards who fell along with the surrounding sand.
I suppose for some people this would be the point where they’d give up. After all, being swallowed down the gullet of a massive sand monster wasn’t the kind of thing most people could survive.
Well I was sick of this. I’d had to deal with Dr. Lana on the other side of that portal. I’d had to deal with strange armored cat things stalking me on this side. I’d had to deal with the locals firing on me even though it wasn’t a very hospitable thing to do.
I tried to be a positive person. Only it was hard to stay positive when I was floating over a dark abyss that led to the digestive system of a monster trying to make a meal out of me.
Well if that monster wanted me to go down then I was going to go up. Natalie might have the fortitude to go flying through the gullet of a creature in the interest of taking it out from the inside, but I wasn’t going to be doing anything of the sort thank you very much.
So I flew up. Straight at the spot where the mouth parts had come together. The only problem was when I hit the insides of the creature’s mouth something weird happened. Instead of finding myself in the open air I instead found myself getting showered in sand.
It was getting everywhere. In my suit and in my hair. It was going to take forever to get that out of my hair. Assuming this planet had the kind of hair care technology that allowed me to go to work on my hair like a civilized person in the first place.
Stupid sand monster. Obviously the thing had sank down below the desert surface and now it was enjoying digesting its meal from the safety of wherever the heck we were.
Well I wasn’t going to put up with that, dang it. I didn’t like being trapped down here, so I wasn’t going to be trapped down here.
I found a different spot and pressed a little lighter this time around. Like we’re talking I was still putting out a heck of a lot of power, but at the same time it wasn’t enough that I ripped through the thing’s skin.
The surface felt all drippy and gooey. That was pretty disgusting. It reminded me of closing my eyes and reaching into a creepy bowl of spaghetti at a budget haunted house when I was a little kid.
“When this is all done I’m going to go back to earth and kick Natalie’s ass. Then I’m going to kick Dr. Lana’s ass. Then I’m going to go back and kick both their asses again just to be sure I did it right,” I grunted as I kept pressing up.
The thing shivered around me. Okay then. It would seem that I was starting to get a response out of this giant bastard, and it didn’t like what I was doing.
I smiled. Good. Then I regretted smiling because that meant opening my mouth just a little, just enough to show some teeth, and the next thing I knew monster goo was dripping down on my teeth.
Can you say gross?
I spit the goo out and pressed again. And pushed right through the goo until I had sand falling down on my head again.
Yet again, can you say gross?
Dripping with goo was bad enough. I didn’t like dripping with goo. Now I’d also pushed through the thing’s mouth and sand was mixing in with that already sticky goo and creating a disgusting layer of nastiness that cracked and squelched as I moved around. Gross.
Also? Something totally came up out of the darkness and smacked me. Hard.
Okay then. I guess the big monster decided it didn’t like the little creature inside it causing some indigestion. Now it was giving me the same treatment I’d give a popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth.
Great. It didn’t help that I couldn’t see a thing in here. The massive something in here with me hit again and I got completely di
soriented. I was wary of flying in any direction because I worried that flying in one of those directions might result in flying down the thing’s gullet.
I wasn’t worried about being swallowed by the big scary monster so much as I was worried about finding myself in the digestive portions of the big scary monster. Something told me that wouldn’t be pleasant watching all the aliens who’d been caught down there getting slowly dissolved.
“I am not going to be trapped in here!” I shouted.
As though in response, the tongue, at least that’s what I assumed it was, slammed into me again. Only this time I was ready for it. The thing was good and solid, and I could feel something hard underneath.
I thought back to some of the lessons Natalie gave me when she was trying to teach me how to fight smart. How to go into a fight relying on my mind to get me through things rather than relying on my power.
One of the things she’d gone over was how everything had a fail point. How I couldn’t just go grabbing onto giant things and hope they’d stay in one piece because most things didn’t have the structural strength to stay in one piece when they were being lifted by one point on the large whole.
She went on about basic physics for a little while after that, but honestly I hadn’t paid much attention to what she was saying. I got the gist of the lesson, and after that it’d been way more fun to spend the rest of the time pretending to listen to her while I watched her strut around in her catsuit.
It was one heck of a “hot for teacher” moment I’d enjoyed.
I shook my head. I was a long way from that wonderful day floating here in the middle of an alien monster’s mouth, but that lesson did tell me I could do something with this.
I punched into the thing’s tongue. That was good for some more rumbling and flailing around. I held on tight as I was whipped around.
The tongue slammed me into a wall. It was a surprise, but I was able to hold on. I had a grip on something solid now. Some bone that I could really sink my hands into. So I did. I crunched the bones under my grip to make a couple of holes that allowed me to really hang onto the thing.
I pulled up. I couldn’t be sure if the bones in this thing’s tongue would be strong enough to allow me to lift it all the way out of its hidey hole, but I was going to try.
It was also hard to tell if I was even doing anything considering I didn’t have a frame of reference. I was just flying in a direction that I assumed was up because that’s how the thing had been oriented when it came out of the purple sand and that’s the direction its tongue was pointing. Not to mention there was still sand occasionally raining down on me which I assumed meant I was going in the opposite of whatever direction gravity was currently going.
I really hoped this worked. Otherwise I was going to have to go the other direction and try to find a vulnerable part of this thing that I could beat the crap out of. That or I could wait until it opened its mouth again, but I had no way of knowing how long it would take for something like that to happen.
I shivered at the thought of being stuck in here for weeks. Natalie would have more to say about predators who wait to ambush their prey and how long they could lie dormant between meals, but all I had to go on was what I’d seen on old reruns of Animal Planet back when they still showed things about actual animals.
Then something surprising happened. My surroundings rumbled and shook. A small sliver of light appeared in a semicircle all around me and I smiled.
The thing was opening up. I’d done it!
5
Escape
The tongue stretched up towards the light. Purple sand fell down into the darkness looking like a giant dry waterfall. We’re talking Niagara Falls levels of sand flying down into the thing.
Above there were even more flying saucers floating around than before, and some things that looked way bigger than the flying saucers, though they still had the same basic shape.
Clearly the locals had decided they were going to call in the big guns. I guess little old me beating the crap out of a giant lizard probably was a good reason to call in the cavalry from their perspective.
That or they were hunting the even bigger monster I was pulling up out of the sand.
I suppose I could have stopped lifting the thing by its tongue now that I was above the surface, but I was irritated. It had eaten all those people. It’d eaten me and it’d creeped me out.
I think the fact that it creeped me out was, more than anything, my main reason for getting pissed off to the point that I was teaching it a lesson. Which was stupid since I didn’t even know if it had the intelligence to learn a lesson in the first place.
The thing kept rising. Higher and higher. Its tongue was sticking high out of its mouth now and I could look down at the giant rows of teeth extending to either side waiting to grab onto anything stupid enough to walk on the sand around the thing.
Though the sharp teeth seemed a tad superfluous considering how big the thing was.
It was huge. Like we’re talking if something like this was lurking under the streets of Starlight City, stranger things had happened, it would’ve taken up an entire city block.
Not the kind of local wildlife I’d want to accidentally bring back home. Assuming I could ever go back home.
I figured the idiots on those flying saucers would’ve started firing on me like they had the last time they saw me. The armored cat things on those saucers stared with their tails lashing, but no one opened fire.
A lot of them were pointing and shaking their heads. I couldn’t be sure if that meant the same thing on this planet that it did in human body language. Natalie had forced me to watch enough of her scifi shows that I knew I could be having a lost in translation moment.
Maybe on this planet shaking their heads meant they were about to fire everything they had at me.
Considering the reception I’d already gotten on this purple dirtball that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
I lifted higher and higher. High enough that I could see the city off in the distance. Complete with a couple of monsters still attacking the place. Though now that I was up this high I could also see that there were more of those flying saucers hovering around the giant monsters, though I couldn’t tell if they were firing from this distance.
Weird. I would’ve figured they’d send everything they had against the monsters in the city rather than attacking the ones that were safely outside the city.
I wondered if this thing I was lifting would be big enough to be seen all the way in of that city. We were certainly high enough. I looked down to the gaping maw and realized the thing was even bigger than I’d imagined at first.
Something cracked. One moment I was holding onto the big sand monster and the next it went hurtling down. It landed with a thump and a splat. The thing’s head was massive and spherical, and I’d even pulled out part of its body that was stretched and distended like a snake that had eaten a meal that was a little too large for it.
In this case that meal was in the obvious shape of a dead and digesting giant irradiated lizard. Talk about choking on a meal. This thing might’ve died even without me helping it along.
Huh. It was like the thing was a giant sand snake or something. I didn’t even know if sand snakes were a thing on earth, but apparently oversized versions of the hypothetical earth creatures I was calling sand snakes were a thing on this planet.
Weird.
Also? The thing looked like it was totally dead. When it landed against the dune the thing splashed open sending guts everywhere. Not a pretty sight, but I’d take it if it meant there wasn’t a creepy giant monster thing lurking in the sand ready to eat anything that came at it.
Myself included.
I turned to the flying saucers gathered all around me. They seemed to be hovering in shock. I knew it was ridiculous to ascribe emotion to a fleet of hovering flying saucers, but that’s what it felt like. The longer I went without them firing on me the more I figured that’s exactly what was going on
here.
“You’re welcome jerkfaces!” I shouted at them.
I wasn’t sure if they could understand English, probably not, but they could certainly understand my tone. Maybe that was another thing that didn’t need any translation. One of the aliens in an open air flying saucer moved something to their mouth and spoke.
“Surrender now and we won’t hurt you,” the person said in a decidedly feminine voice.
Well that was worth a surprise. I didn’t expect anyone to speak English on this world any more than I would’ve expected someone to speak English if I was fighting giant sand monsters in the middle of the Gobi desert.
Still, I wasn’t going to knock the convenience. Even if it did have me curious.
“Um, why the heck would I surrender?” I shouted back at the lady.
It seemed like a reasonable question to me. From the way the chick exchanged confused glances with the other aliens on her flying saucer it looked like she wasn’t used to people defying her authority.
My eyes narrowed. I wasn’t sure what the heck was going on on this strange planet, but I did know the look of someone who abused power. It always upset me when we got to those parts in history class.
They were the only parts I ever paid attention to. A bunch of weird dates and dead white dudes discovering a bunch of crap that people had been living on for thousands of years was pretty boring, but the thought of someone trying to use their power to keep other people under their control always made my blood boil.
If that was going on here on this planet? Well maybe the giant sand monster wasn’t the only thing that was going to feel the hurt.
“You will surrender to the authority of the grand Silvani Collective,” the lady finally said. “You will do this because it is the natural thing for all creatures.”
I pointed down to the giant sand monster I’d just killed. “Yeah? Did this guy get the memo? Because it seemed like he was pretty happy to eat your people before I got down there and took it out. I can’t help but notice that your little flying saucers weren’t able to do crap about it or the giant irradiated lizard!”
