Ssssoooo… I’ve been frustrated by the fact that, thanks to my current projects being a combination of older ones, and my tendency of reusing the same character templates in my story thoughts, I’m having two variants of the same character in the same story.
And now I realized I don’t. They are actually different character templates. I have no idea how I missed that, but I do feel very embarrassed about that.
Sorry if I've poster this before - I'm doing editing, so it's not new - but I'm just snickering too hard right now. Also this is actually half the chapter. Wonder if people will complain about too short chapters (I've seen it happen, even though I don't understand the rationale).
For a moment, the bridge is wrapped in a stunned silence. Thankfully, the falling doesn’t take long (and it’s not necessarily the proper definition in the first place: the sensation clearly is of that, but the directions in space are a bit more complicated than that) and before you know it, the reality snaps into a solid version of itself again, but the experience wasn’t exactly pleasant.
You glance at the screens. The hole in the space has disappeared; the alien ship is still there, as is the Gateway Station. Everything seems as it was before the hole appeared, apart from the fact that the ship isn’t shooting at you anymore. Then you notice the planet it’s orbiting is different.
“What,” the pilot says, “just happened?”
“I have no idea where we are,” the navigator adds. “The stars are all wrong.”
“I hate to be the bringer of bad news,” Commander Rosenkranz calls from the lab, “but it appears we’ve been… displaced.”
“Blast it all,” Commander Sol mutters, then says aloud: “All right, all right. Let’s all calm down now. Stay focused, everyone. Rosenkranz, temporal? Spatial?”
“I don’t have enough data,” Rosenkranz says. “But spatial seems more likely.”
“So now we’ve teleported elsewhere?” Captain Bertelsköld says in the comms. “Stellar.”
Sol chews her lower lip, frowning.
“Commander,” the comm officer interjects. “Call coming in.”
“Who’s calling?” Sol asks.
“The aliens, it seems.”
“Oh, so now they want to chat?” Sol shakes her head and sits down in the captain’s chair. “Repo, go to the tactical station. Miriam, put the call on screen.”
“Forwarding,” the comm officer says.
You nod a greeting to the tactical officer as you take a seat.
On the main screen, the view from outside the ship is replaced with a view from the alien ship. It resembles, oddly enough, Producer’s bridge, although there are differences (technology, and chairs, for example, are not at all similar, and there are a lot more handrails); the aliens seem bipedal and vaguely human-shaped (insomuch as a half-shifted wolf-shifter is human-shaped) but more dragon-bird-like in appearance, with beaks (or snouts? Muzzles?) and a lot of feathers.
“Repo,” Connor says in your ear. “What’s happening there? Vega went in frenzy.”
“Wait,” you say. “Do you need help? Are they a danger?”
“Only to themself,” Connor says. “It’s more like a some kind of psychic seizure, I got it under control. Them under control. Whichever. What’s going on?”
“Commander’s talking with the aliens,” you say.
“Oh,” Connor says. “I’ll leave you to listen, then.”
On the screen, the aliens are whistling to each other, gesturing wildly and flapping their crests. The one that seems to be perched on their equivalent of the captain’s chair says something that seems directed to your ship but what no-one can understand, thinks for a moment, tries something else with perfectly the same results, then makes a gesture that, as far as you can understand, means hold on for a moment (although you could be wrong, but it would make sense given how they turned their attention away from your direction), then exchanges agitated-sounding clicks with some of their fellows.
“Well,” Commander Sol mutters. “This is going great.”
On the screen, the whistling and clicking has turned into chittering, and then a new alien rushes in, a skinny one with their disheveled appearance a stark contrast to the impeccably-dressed bridge crew previously present. They stop next to the presumably-captain, tilt their head, and open their mouth as if to say something, but no sound comes out (no, wait, that’s not exactly true. There’s the faint echo of ultrasound at the edge of your hearing).
Sol gives the screen an annoyed glare, crosses her arms and taps her fingers on her elbow.
The alien captain says something and gestures to whatever must be their equivalent of the viewing screen, since the new alien glances in the direction that, from the position you’re looking at, appears to be, well, the direction of where you’re looking at. They open their mouth again, but the captain clicks and points to their head, to which the other alien blinks, touches their crest, shakes their head causing a small spread of tiny droplets (did they just come out of a shower? That would explain the appearance), combs their feathers with their hand (six claws) for a moment, and then, finally, turns to the screen, adjusting their uniform collar.
Commander Sol is, at this point, simply staring at them blankly.
The alien coughs an a-hem, then starts to speak… in Old Norse. Sol blinks, momentarily confused, and answers in German, which leads them to engage in a short back-and-forth that goes from Icelandic through Danish to Swedish, until they finally settle on New Vargheimian. Why the selection only includes Earth (or at least Earth-adjacent) languages, while neither of the speakers is a human, you know not the reason of, but there you have it. (Although the rest of your bridge crew is human, and the ship is registered as such, so if the aliens were running some kind of origin check on you in the background, gauging responses with human languages would at least be logical. What truly baffles you is… Old Norse? Seriously? Who speaks Old Norse?)
“This is Lord Commander Mighty-have-fallen of the Fifth Elder Fleet,” the alien says. “Apologies for the delay, we weren’t expecting you.”
