12Chapter One
There are eight legs on a brown recluse spider, two wings on a hummingbird, a tail on a spider monkey, but human beings have no real mold. One might argue all humans have two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth. My response would be that nearly other mammal on Earth does also. What I was getting at was the inability of humans to be classified into exact shapes.
How this phenomenon worked was a mystery to the smartest of scientists. The only one who seemed to get any of it was my godfather and uncle, Doctor Charles McLeod; the problem was no one seemed to get him. Some teachers, like my mother, tried to explain for my classmates, but she only succeeded in embarrassing me. Even I, who happened to be an unwilling example of the strange characteristic of humans, didn't really understand how it could happen.
But I didn't like to talk about it, much less think about it.
"Préyhen, dear, will you pass me the melted butter?" My mother asked, pointing at the saucepan on the stove.
"Mom," I pleaded. "Can't you see my hands are full?" This wasn't just the lazy whining of a fourteen-year-old dirty-blond female; I was slicing a raw chicken breast into nuggets.
"I see that, but would it kill you to help out your mother?" She gave me those endearing eyes of hers. "Please?"
Going back to stabbing the gooey poultry product, I passed Mrs. Tamina Griffin, as my mother was known in the village, the iron saucepan; it was half-full of a bubbling yellow liquid.
"Mom, I know my dad's coming home tonight, but why are we cooking? He hates it when you cook." I couldn't blame him, not with mom's cooking being less edible than a pile of mushy dog poo; sometimes it looked that bad too.
"Nonsense, who told you that?"
"Dad."
"You know how he is, he was probably tellin' you a tale." My mom said more for her benefit than mine. "I can finish up here, why don't you go spend some time with your friends? I think that boy, Victor, has feelings for you."
"Mom!"
"What? If you'd just look at him and stop counting his kooties, you'd see it." My mother's words were ignored as I scrubbed my hands free of bacteria.
Once outside, I glanced around for any of my few friends. Victor Weylin, the kind teenager who was two years older than me, wasn't anywhere to be seen; he was probably sleeping on the shore of Lake Wannapeg. Another of my friends, Oken Dabahov wasn't around either. She was probably shut away in her bedroom, researching the Catrion war; it was what she did. The last of my friends was more of a relative than a friend, but the son of my godfather was also missing. There was no telling what that rambunctious eight-year-old was up to; he frequently went on spontaneous growth spurts, like they were dangerous adventures.
Unfortunately, I wasn't alone at the village center. Where Victor Weylin was a nice sweet boy, Alaric Trancucci was an arrogant selfish thorn with mighty scheming powers of wrong-doing. To my dismay, it was he who sat against the red brick wall of the town's only church; he was toying with a scimitar which had belonged to his mother during the Catrion war. Supposedly, my father once saved Alaric's mother's life, but if anyone was grateful, it wasn't Alaric.
"Hey, how'd you get out of your cage?" Alaric sneered when I came within hearing range.
"Shut up Alaric." I never enjoyed my conversations with this snotty low-life.
"The freak can speak!" He gasped.
"The slime can rhyme!" I snapped back.
"Joke now, but wait until you see your reflection! That disgusting defect speaks for itself!"
I winced. I hated any mention of my deformity, and he knew it. Part of me wanted to charge at him and beat his face in, but a smaller more reserved part commanded me to ignore him and walk past. Against my wishes, the littler voice was right.
I marched past the arrogant fool to the field where my father was probably going to arrive. The grass was burly and uncut but it wouldn't stop the arriving transport which carried my father. I looked forward to seeing him again; I hadn't seen him in six months. Unfortunately, I had a long time to wait before I could see him; it was less than six months but it was still too long.
To appease my boredom, I climbed into a pine tree. Sadly the amusement didn't last the duration of my short attention span. While recumbent on a bow, I drifted out. The thought didn't occur to me that I could've fallen off, probably because I never did. It wasn't that I had superb balance, I was actually quite clumsy, but I just had a talent for staying in trees. One might say it was encoded in my DNA.
The commotion of many villagers and military pack animals below me startled me awake. As I'd known there would be, a large spaceship snored on the wild grass of the field beneath it. There must've been a hundred bodies rushing back and forth with armfuls of supplies and crops for trade. Most of the people entered the village from the ship, but a few, like old Mr. Dabahov, carted wooden crates of food in the ambitious hope of bartering some of it off in exchange for precious luxury. Usually, they weren't that successful, but on freak occasions, a villager had a homegrown vegetable that tempted the taste buds of the landing crew.
I sat on my perch watching the going-ons. My intentions had been to remain that way until I spotted my father, but a shout of my name distracted me.
"Préyhen! Would you help me with this?"
Looking down the trunk of the tree, I spotted the brown hair and signature white lab coat of my godfather. He had a cardboard box in his arms; a clear glass vial was on the ground beside him. I sensed picking up the vial was what he needed help with, so I hopped out of the tree, narrowly avoiding a few of the smaller branches, and landed softly.
"You are so much like your father." He mused to himself.
"How so, uncle?" I asked.
Doctor Charles McLeod, though I called him my uncle, technically he wasn't. My father had no living siblings, and my mother had a brother who was a flight coordinator on one of the largest spaceships currently in service; I never saw him. I called my godfather 'uncle' because of how I was brought up but if anything, he deserved another relative's name. Long before I was born, my father adopted Drib Nicholson, as my adopted sister had been called back then. This girl soon fell in love with Doctor Charles McLeod, and eventually married him, making my godfather more my brother-in-law. Still though, I called him uncle, again mostly due to my upbringing, but the term seemed appropriate since he was almost ten years older than my father.
"Your dad would murder me if I told you all the gory details." He winked at me. "You should hurry home and wash up. Your father told me he invited Mrs. Trancucci over this evening."
"I missed my father? Why didn't he wake me?" I asked myself, though my godfather had an answer.
"Silly girl, you were asleep in a tree! I've had to find your father so many times, I noticed you straight off."
I thanked him for the early warning and ran the whole way home. From the cobblestone street, I could see the unmistakable silhouette of my father in the window of the foyer. A smile wiggled between my cheeks at the sight of him.
Picking up my pace, I climbed the steps of the porch three at a time, or in other words, leapt onto the welcome mat from the patch of clover nicknamed 'the lawn'. Our tattered white screen door creaked when I flung it open and bounded inside.
My father turned and his smug face transformed into a welcoming portrait of happiness at the appearance of his one true daughter. He spread his arms wide and snatched me from the air into an overdue, yet almost making up for it, hug. It felt so good to have him back.
"Hey booger," He ruffled my shoulder-length hair. "How've you been?"
I shrugged. "I got lost in the woods for three days a few weeks back." I showed my teeth, thrilled to see my dad again. "What about you? You always have interesting stories to tell."
"Me? I want to know about you getting lost in the woods first!"
"It was nothing really, I knew where I was, but Mom was so worried, Drib had to come find me."
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "I'm sure you got the talk from your mother after that, and I want to hear about it all later, but for now, will you go get ready for supper? We're having company over."
I nodded and sprinted up the stairs to my room, grabbed fresh clothing, and moved to my bathroom where I showered. Normally, my showers were short, but this particular one required more time to work out the needles and burs from my hair.
The clothes I pulled on, like all my others were a mixture of sewn-together rags and manufactured fabrics from Mars, and even Earth before the Catrion war. A few people I knew tried to match their hand-sewn clothing with their hand-sewn clothing or manufactured with manufactured, but personally, I found their style tacky. My style was to blend the two, wearing underwear, stiff blue jeans, socks, and black sneakers taken from what had been a department store, and also the loose tunic my mother fashioned from a brown durable material. For me, this look epitomized the adaptability needed to survive.
My hair was still dripping wet when I opened the stained bathroom door, but I didn't care. What I cared about were the false manners of Alaric to my parents. If only they knew how annoying he was, they'd compliment him less.
As long as Alaric was downstairs, I was determined to barricade myself on the second floor. For a while, it seemed to work, but my deranged mother told Alaric he could climb the stairs, take a right at the landing, and go to the end of the hall to find me, but of course, it wasn't the first time she made such a blunder. Alaric knew exactly where my room was at the back of the house.
I'd shut my door, but my crystal doorknob was in disrepair, especially since even before the Catrion war, it was a hard-to-fix antique. Due to this tragic fact, Alaric strolled into my room, without knocking I might add, and pretended to not notice me. I got the impression he wanted to vex me, because he began to thumb through my things; he even dared to knock over some stuffed animals on a window seat. The most aggravating incident was when he shoved a ragged teddy bear, which Drib had loved before passing to me, onto the faded shag carpet. That had been the last straw, and it wasn't even a bendy one.
"Pick it up." I growled. Alaric ignored my demands and began sifting through my dresser. When I spoke again, that little responsible voice inside me did all it could to keep me from strangling him for examining the contents of my underwear drawer. "You have no right to go through my stuff."
"Watch it or I'll tell your dear mommy how mean you were to me. If you're not careful, you might be put down."
"Shut up," I commanded, contemplating how best to rip him limb from limb. Tearing off his arm and breaking his nose with the back of his elbow sounded nice, but so did clubbing him with his left knee.
"Make me." He teased.
"Fine then, I will." I stood up and stared him eye to eye. Though he was two years my senior, I was just as tall as him.
"Get your tail away from me." He hissed.
"I'm nowhere near you." I answered, working hard to keep my fists unclenched.
His eyes narrowed to slits. "I know what your problem is; you think just because your daddy is a war hero, you're better than everyone else. I've got news for you, you're not."
"And you are?" Without him knowing, I found the compound long bow which had belonged to my mother during the Catrion war. I wasn't going to use it but the fact I had it within reach comforted me.
"No, just you and your father-I don't have that disgusting appendage, and in my book, that makes me superior."
I wasn't sure what twitched, but I distinctly felt a muscle twitch. Hitting Alaric with my sturdy bow was indeed tempting, but I took in several long breathes through my nose instead.
"You could prove your worth though, if I could just see that thing of yours was good for more than making babies cry and grown men vomit."
This time, it was my eyelids that shortened the gap between them. "What are you proposing?" Knowing Alaric, whatever he had in mind was going to be degrading and humiliating. I just hoped he wasn't thinking like a pervert.
"You'd be too afraid to try. Forget I said anything." He stopped looking at me in exchange for exploration of my junk drawer.
I grabbed his shoulder and forced him to turn around. "What is it?"
"Ick, you touched me with it." He brushed his shoulder so that it was once again disease free. "I was just thinking you might want to show me what your body can do." He shrugged. "But I doubt you'd do it. It's too bad though, 'cause I'd be impressed if you succeeded."
"Forget it," I ordered. "I'm not going to play out one of your fantasies."
"Fantasies?" He laughed. "What did you think I was going to have you do? Pole dance? With your body, you could do it well, but I meant for something a little more daring."
"Like what?" I wasn't sure if I was ready for my mom to call the two of us to dinner or not. On one hand, if she did, I'd be free of Alaric's jeers, but on the other, I wouldn't know what would make him respect me.
"I just wanted to see if your anatomy is as skilled against the Catrions as the legends about your father claim." He stated.
"Why don't you ask him?" I retorted, knowing it had to be me.
"If you're afraid, don't be. I knew you wouldn't do it. You're content being a lousy freak who isn't respected." He turned back to his nosy business.
"How?" I asked.
Alaric couldn't answer because my father called up the stairs for us to come eat.
"It's time to play nice." He smiled at me and strolled out of my room.
Before I left, I locked the handle and pulled the door behind me. My door didn't have a key which meant I'd have to climb in my window, but if it protected my space from Alaric, I was fine with that. The question was though, if my broken doorknob would offer enough resistance.
Alaric was downstairs long before I was, and when I arrived in our formal dining room, I was the last person to be seated at the polished oak table. All the food was already positioned to my mother's liking in deep decorative bowls, and there was even a clear plastic tea pitcher on the floor next to my dad for easy access. Upon saying grace, my father, Admiral Griffin, invited his guest to have the first dinner roll.
"Thank-you, though I must say, having my commanding officer treat me to the first golden roll, is a change from the ordinary." Ms. Ashland Trancucci stated warmly while accepting the platter containing a bread product with her one hand. She'd lost her right arm during the Catrion War, and refused to have a prosthetic fitted even though modern technology made robotic limbs identical to natural ones, after the necessary time had passed. Ms. Trancucci refused the replacement arm because she wanted people to remember what the Catrion war had done to humanity. It was her way of honoring the dead I guessed.
As my dad passed the platter around, I twirled the blue stringy substance my mother claimed was sauerkraut onto my fork. No one else seemed to notice the queer appearance of the food, but they also weren't studying its poisonous properties; my parents and Ms. Trancucci were chatting about dull governmental affairs is if the topic was juicy gossip on who kept a companion on the side. Meanwhile, like good little children, Alaric and I clinked our forks to the glass plates, chewed slowly with our mouths closed, and assaulted the other's intelligence through the telepathic sparks of our gray matter.
"Is it true the Kyokujitsu is going to be retired this month?" Ms. Trancucci inquired before munching on an enormous bite of sick sauerkraut.
The Kyokujistu had been one of the most noted ships during the Catrion War. When my mother had taught a lesson on the interstellar carrier, I hadn't paid all that much attention, but I knew the basic story behind it well enough, having sat through the same lecture in the one room school house over and over again. Essentially, the massive ship (it was big enough to shelter more people than decent sized cities) had originated on Earth, from the Asiatic island of Japan, and was deployed prior to the Catrion War. During the Catrion War, it made a reputation for having the best-trained foot soldiers, yet it was most famous for the epic voyage it made to the Catrion homeworld. Thanks in part to my parents, the planet the Catrions had come from was located, so the Kyokujitsu traveled a great distance to investigate. Once there, its mission had been to try to draw the Catrions from Earth to defend their people from a slaughter similar to the devastation inflicted to humanity by the Catrions, but in a noble expression of mercy, the carnage was called off by the Kyokujitsu's captain. Before the conclusion of the Catrion War, the Kyokujitsu had taken part in several major battles, including the reclaiming of Earth.
"That old ship has been through a lot, so it's about time for it to be decommissioned." My father answered. "Fleet Admiral Yamamoto has decided that after next week, the Kyokujitsu will be salvaged for parts."
"Salvaged for parts? That ship is barely working as it stands. It's been refurbished and reconstructed so many times, it's a collection of loose bolts held together by duct tape." Ms. Trancucci scoffed, causing Alaric to snigger.
"It may be a pile of junk now, but it still operates fairly well, and most of those technological additions are valuable for other space ships." My father pointed out. "I imagine most of it will go into Earth's fourth Atlantean Class carrier, or if Mars is willing to pay enough, into a Martian Atlantean Class carrier."
The Atlantean Class carriers were the most recent breed of warships. My father, though he was a two star admiral, captained one of these gargantuan ships. Compared to the Kyokujitsu, an Atlantean Class carrier was an inflated beachball next to a stepped-on pingpong ball. The Atlantean Class carriers were hundreds of times more agile than the Kyokujitsu and its family of warships, not to mention their extraordinary amount of firepower and other technologies still being tested after the fifteen or so years they'd been in use. Pretty much, any spaceships of the Atlantean class were superior to their best competition.
"Where is it to be decommissioned?" My mother buttered her roll as she spoke.
"I'm not sure, but Yamamoto seems to be leaning towards South Africa." As my father rambled about matters outside the little village I knew as the world, I sulked over my most recent conversation with Alaric and how cursed I was to have the defect I did.
It had been from my father where I got it, but unlike me, he didn't seem to abhor the repugnant difference in his body from everyone else's. In fact, I got the impression he enjoyed the thing; he certainly made full use of it.
Suspended, though not immobile, next to my father's happy smile, was the tip of it. The rest looped backwards, arched somewhere around the middle, and then rapidly fell to its base at the end of his spine where his coccyx should've been. He'd told me stories about how he'd used it, most of which sounded like unsuccessful attempts to make me feel better about my own. He'd also told me why he and I shared the physical feature, but in essence, I focused my anger on the Catrions and their stupid war.
The short story was that the Catrions were brilliant genetecists, and they'd made a weapon designed to kill people by creating cancerous mutations on the bodies of the victims, but when my father came into contact with the weapon, an adverse effect happened. Like the others, he mutated, yet instead of dieing, he survived. The weapon that should have left him dead, did however scar his being, namely by altering his DNA in unfathomable ways.
Thanks to an unforeseen turn of events, and many incredulous Catrions, three people had my father's difference chained to their life. The first, was my father, whom had developed the defect before passing it on. Yes, I too had it, but chronologically speaking, I was the third individual to get it. Person number two had been severely injured by the Catrions, and regular transfusions of my father's blood had been all that could save her. Baffling doctors, my father's blood cured the girl of her mortal ailments, but also changed a segment of her DNA.
I got my version of the abnormality when my mother finally got pregnant after more than two years of marriage.
According to my father and godfather, who happened to be the leading expert on both Catrion technology and the mutated victims of their technology, having what I had, made me more adapted to a forested environment than any other human could imagine. The other things which supposedly came with my longer spine, I didn't care about as much; people couldn't see those things or spew chunks from seeing them.
If what they said was true, I had an immune system capable of fighting off the most lethal of pathogens, a naturally athletic physique, near perfect night vision, and incredible balance. All of those things weren't bad I supposed, but I hardly felt they made up for the hideous length of my spine.
It was six feet, eleven and a half inches too long to be precise. Thankfully, it didn't just drag about on the ground for people to ridicule and step on, the layers of rippling muscle between the skin and bone made sure of that. Also, it had its uses, particularly as a third hand with a longer reach than either of my arms; even the flesh of it helped grip what I picked up, being almost identical to the skin on my palms. When using it to lift things, it not only outdid my hands with its versatile reach in all directions, but also in the amount of weight it could lift. Interestingly, it was strong enough to lift just more than twice my weight.
Still, the fact remained, I had a seven-foot long prehensile tail which set me apart from society in ways I didn't want to be. Dealing with questions about it or accepting the ridicule it spurred was a daily nuisance. Frankly, I didn't like it.
So? Did you find pleasure in reading this? I admit that I did leave something of a cliffhanger in this first chapter, but I'm sure you didn't mind. I implore you to tell me your thoughts in a review.