Chapter Five

"As long as I have known you, we have never been cordial. And worse, the barrier between us has only stiffened in the years hence our other mutual acquaintance's untimely departure. "

 

It—Callana—stared at the “teevee,” mesmerized. It, or—what did they say? “She?” She curled up in the shifting pile of bottles and crunched one while the flat, square thing on the wall flashed pictures of Upright Things running around and kicking a sphere. She had tried that a few times with stars, but they usually scattered into clouds of elements with one whack of her tentacles. In comparison, these little spheres seemed much more entertaining.

The Gina kept looking back and forth between the screen and Callana, which she supposed meant that the Gina liked looking at Callana just as much as the screen. Callana had no doubts about why—she was a rather magnificent being, after all. Even in this shamefully diminished form. If only those Angry Things had left her alone, she wouldn’t have had to shrink herself like this.

But then again, if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have come up with a “name” for herself. What a strange concept—in the Void Between All Things, there was no need to distinguish between one thing and another. But down here, everything moved so quickly, every moment was a new experience, a new adventure. Callana had learned more in the last ten minutes than she had since the end of the Third Age! For a being who had lived through five- and-a-half Eternities, spontaneity seemed a rare treat, so she lapped up everything she came across, consuming experiences the same way she used to devour galaxies.

Honestly, to think she’d have eaten this planet without a second thought if she’d had the chance—what a waste that would’ve been.

“Hello, the Gina!” she said, leaping up onto the couch. The Gina seemed like a reliable source of novelty, so she figured she might as well acquaint herself with this new… Upright Thing that she knew.

“Uh—hey, Callana,” the Gina said. Callana mimicked the Gina’s pose, with the two top tentacles off to the sides of the couch while the lower two tentacles stayed kicked up on the “coffee table.”

“I…” Callana said, struggling to put together the bizarre sounds Upright Things made in the right order. “I… w-want… see more… about the Gina.”

“You want to see… you want to know more about me?”

“Yes!” Callana said, flashing a wide grin.

“Oh, okay,” she said, taking the little box she used to control the “teevee” and turning the sounds it made off. “Right, uh, well, I’m Ginavriklin Kteth vende Murovtskin, but I go by Gina usually.”

“The Gina, yes,” Callana confirmed, bobbing her head in affirmation, the way the Nard did all the time.

“Yeah. I grew up a bit south of town—this is Eston, by the way. I’ve always lived by the beach, so I guess I never got the hype, but people love it here. I mean, the tourists do. But it’s home, and the mosquitos haven’t chased me out yet, so I guess I’m not leaving any time soon. Let’s see… I went to school with Von, and we got really close, and we even dated up until the point where he and I both realized we were... uh, not normal. Pretty much at the same time, actually. The school’s Harvestday Dance back in ’44. I’m not gonna go into details, but yeah, it didn’t work out. But we actually pretended to be a couple for a while. Neither of us got to go to college, in the end—Von had his own reasons, you’ll have to ask him about it, but my da got sick. Real sick, and I needed a job, and I couldn’t stay in school, so I took my Equivalence Exam, graduated, and started working as a waitress, and that’s… yeah, that’s about the whole story.”

Callana nodded furiously as the Gina told her “story.” She’d gotten a lot better at understanding the words—perks of having eighteen brains. Still, the Gina had a strange face shape while talking, and her voice was slow. For some reason, that made Callana feel… different.

“Anyhow,” the Gina said. “What about you? Where are you from?”

Oh dear. Callana’s brains worked double-time to try and remember if anyone had said any words that even vaguely related to her life.

“Up!” she said. “Eat shiny ball, always night. See snack—shiny! Little things hurt me! Call an ambulance! Run away, curl up; say hello, the Gina!”

“Uh…” the Gina said, her face looking a bit stiff. “Okay, so you came from… up?”

“Yes!”

“Space?”

“What am space?”

“Okay, uh… so, it was always night, there were shiny balls that you ate. And then some little things… hurt you, so you ran and came down to Earth?”

“Earth?”

“Here. The planet. Earth. Ground? Dirt?” She gestured around herself. “Earth. That’s where we are.”

“Yes!” Gina said. “Came to Earth from up—space!”

“So, you are an alien?”

“I am big! Used to. Used to am big.”

“You used to be big?”

“Yes! Used to be big. Bigger than… bigger than Earth!”

The Gina’s eyes thinned, and her mouth thinned too. That looked like a fun face shape, so Callana tried it too.

“Okay,” the Gina said slowly, “so you used to be bigger than the whole planet—if I’m getting that right—and you somehow aren’t big anymore, and I guess you’re saying, what, you ate planets or something? Shiny balls… I guess planets are pretty shiny.”

“Bigger than planets,” Callana corrected. “Shiny balls bigger, bigger, bigger!”

Pursing her lips, Gina took a deep breath. “Stars, then? You’re telling me you used to eat stars?”

“Stars…” Gina repeated. She hadn’t heard that word before, but the context sounded right. “Yes! Stars! Eat stars, tasty! Shiny!”

Gina idly blinked. “That’s a bit… far-fetched, don’t you think?”

Callana cocked her head. She knew some of those words. “Yes, far. Far but when big, not so far. Not as big as used to be.”

Shame crawled up her back, and she couldn’t help but mimic that one, quiet face shape the Gina had used earlier, with her eyes low and her lips downturned.

“You shrank?” Gina said, softening her voice. “Are you… okay?”

“Just wanted shiny snack,” Callana said. “I be not sure why hurt me. I ran away. It hurt a lot.”

“Oh, gee,” the Gina said. She reached out and touched one of Callana’s lower tentacles, and it felt… nice. “That sounds horrible.”

“Horrible. Yes. It was horrible,” Callana said. “But I came here, and I got ‘bottle’ snacks, so I am not sad. Most sad about be small, honestly.”

“Because you liked being big.”

“Safer when big. Harder to eat you if you being big.”

“Was being eaten a big issue before?”

Callana nodded her head, fiddling with her mini-tentacles. “Not for a long time. Not since long before.” She paused, unsure how to express just how long ago it was. “Long, long, long, long, long before. Big long. Biggest long.”

“How old are you, then? You don’t even look nineteen.”

That was impossible to answer. Hmm. How would she phrase it? This “speaking” stuff was hard, especially since she didn’t know all the words yet. But she sensed an opportunity to clarify, so she took it.

“What nine-teen?”

“Nineteen? Nineteen years old, I mean.”

“Year?”

“Uh—a year is… like… when the earth goes around the sun—the big star in the sky. We circle it. One year is one full circle around the sun. One orbit, I guess. I never learned much about astronomy. I had an intro course in high school, but that was forever ago.”

“Year…” If that meant what Callana assumed it did, and if that was the means by which the Upright Things measured time, then that wasn’t very long indeed. “Year short. What bigger long than a year?”

“Okay,” the Gina said. She held up her upper mini-tentacles. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” she said, holding up one mini-tentacle per number. “Ten years is a decade. Ten times ten is a hundred, and that’s a century. A century times ten is a thousand, and that’s a millennium. A millennium times a thousand is a million. A million times a thousand is a billion. Got it?”

“A billion…” Hmm. That wasn’t much. “A billion too short. What bigger than a billion?”

“Uh… what’s bigger than a billion? A trillion—that’s a thousand billions. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. I don’t know what’s bigger than that, though. But the universe isn’t that old, it’s only a few billion years old, I think.”

“What? If billion am a thousand, thousand, thousand years, that not older than the universe. Even a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand years am not older than universe. Are you sure year is just one circle around sun?”

“Y-yeah, a year is one circle alright. I think we’re getting bogged down on details, though. Point is, you’re apparently really old, right?”

“Really old.”

“I’m twenty years old.”

Callana was shocked. She leapt to her “feet” and exclaimed, “The Gina is an infant!”

“N-no,” the Gina said, “no, I’m an adult. Grown up. I mean, I don’t feel like a real grown-up yet, but that’s what I am, apparently.” She shrugged her shoulders.

“Only twenty circles—I saw Earth circle sun two hundreds of thousand times.”

“Two-hundred thousand times?” the Gina said, that thin look showing up on her face again. “You were flying here for two-hundred thousand years? I’m sorry, Callana, but I’m honestly having a hard time believing all this. I mean, I know you can eat glass and do… weird things with objects, but you’re telling me you’re out in space eating stars for, like, a hundred quadrillion years and whatnot, and… I mean, I don’t even think the universe has existed that long. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that.”

Callana cocked her head. Hmm. While it wasn’t strictly necessary for the Gina to believe her, for some reason it stung when she said she didn’t. But how could she prove it? She couldn’t swell back to her original size, that’s for sure. First of all, she’d probably crush the whole planet, and that wasn’t even considering the outpost of Angry Things a few star systems away.

Then, she got an idea. She could change back to her old form! That would help!

So, she Willed herself back to her original, albeit shrunken, shape, expanding into the spaces between dimensions, her tentacles appearing and disappearing between realms as her billions of eyes all focused on the Gina’s face, and her billions of mouths bared their teeth into toothy grins.

The Gina screamed.

 

Hello, friends! If you're enjoying this story, consider supporting me on Patreon! If you'd like more stories, I post new chapters to my mainline series every Monday and Friday, and I upload a new short story every other Wednesday! Below are some of my other stories.

The Old Brand-New: Lena lives in a lonely mansion, but one snowy night, a vengeful clone of herself comes to make her pay for the life she never got to live.
Little Comforts: The world ends, and two men, Dan and Andrew, must rush to the shore for safety, pursued by a vengeful soldier and the remains of her family.