Boarding School on Alpha Centauri – Chapter 2
Bob I called him. You would too. He doesn’t look like a Bob, doesn’t sound like a Bob, doesn’t act like a Bob. But dear lord I needed something to hold on to.
The headmaster pushed open the door using one of his prehensile tongues. I shuddered at the thought of putting my tongue against that red and black furry surface. Then again I wouldn’t want to have to use my tongue like a hand like he does. Still, it was gross.
Then came our room.
I had been expecting something, well, advanced from the school. They had put me in stasis and taught me an alien language for the trip over. But no no, it wouldn’t do to keep throwing that sort of technological superiority in student’s faces.
The room had an advanced environmental control feature. I later learned that other students had specific requirements while sleeping, amoebic nutrient baths, specific types of light, electrical currents, magnetics fields, temperature changes, esoteric noises. All of these things were possible. What I’m getting at is that some of my classmates and dorm mates have specialized needs. Bob is one of them.
Bob’s special need is that he carpets our entire living space in this fur that is a symbiotic extension of his skin. He respires through it. It’s very thin, lets him shed heat quickly, evacuate toxins, he can even change its color and texture. Quite cool, so long as you aren’t living in it.
Then there’s Bob himself. It should come as no surprise that Bob is large. It’s only big creatures that need to go to great lengths to cool down. Small creatures have that surface area to volume thing under control. When I say small I’m generally referring to anything smaller than say a Rhino.
Bob isn’t as big as a Rhino, he’s more gorilla sized. Covered in more of that hair. Don’t let the size comparison throw you off, he’s not a gorilla, doesn’t resemble a gorilla, definitely doesn’t eat like a gorilla. He’s from a semi-aquatic species with seven genders. I’m calling him a he because we don’t have the right gender pronouns in English.
Sorry, I misspoke; Bob isn’t usually the size of a Rhino. Except during mating season. Which was when we met. He’d been given a pass to skip class as he was incapable of acting appropriately and kept trying to mate with the students and the teachers… and the furniture.
He explained all of this after the headmaster left in what seemed like quite a hurry.
Did I say explained?
What happened was that Bob lunged at me and grabbed me with two of his four arms. They were long, this probably made up for the fact that at the moment he looked like an immobile blob. His legs (four again) were little stumps that poked out from yellow and orange fur, kind of like a grossly obese tabby cat.
Bob wrenched me off of my feet and dragged me over to him and smushed me against what I’m going to call his torso. Somewhere at this point I realized I should have been screaming.
Yeah.
Sedatives are a fantastic thing. At least I’m pretty sure I was sedated. Otherwise I was in shock. One of the two. Anywho.
Right, so smushed me against his torso. There I was sinking into his ‘chest’ and thinking of Lenny from ‘Of Mice & Men’. Then it got weird.
The carpet of our floor lifted up and pressed against me like a blanket. On one side I was crushed against Bob and on the other his carpet-skin. It smelled divine.
I can’t quite explain it, but the first time it happened it was like showering in the scent of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.
How much time passed like that I wasn’t sure. I came to standing a few feet away from Bob with about ten centimeters of clear floor stretching out in ever direction from my feet. I was swaying a little.
Bob was staring at me with three of his five eyes. That sounds like it should be harder to be sure of; but isn’t. Bob’s species has motile eyes. An usual trait for a species with a fixed skeleton. He has five eyes, but many eye sockets. Due to the nature of his skin the underlying musculature was able to raise an eye from any given socket and move it to another. At the present moment three of them faced me, while two of them were drifting to other parts of his head, closer to where you’d expect to find the ears.
“Sorry.” He said to me (Okay, yes, it was high pitched screeches that tore at the brain and made my eye sockets want to bleed a little, but what it meant was ‘sorry’).
I collected my thoughts, which was a bit like unscrambling an egg. It took me a good minute to straighten my eyes out and feel coherent.
“Sorry?” I asked.
“I can’t help it. The urges are so strong right now. That’s why they let me stay out of class.”
“Right.” I ran my fingers over my skin, my clothes were intact, and other than the pervasive scent of baked goods there was no trace of our ‘cookie-hug’. “How often is this going to happen?” I was way too calm about it, I’m certain there were sedatives involved.
His fur rippled through a few colors and patterns. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but again later learned that it meant that he was momentarily confused. “How do you measure time?”
Of course, I’d forgotten that he wouldn’t be used to minutes, days and hours.
When I didn’t answer he said. “Every two class cycles.”
A class cycle is equivalent to one of our school weeks back on earth. Sort of. Their ‘weeks’ are longer as are their days. We’re expected to standardize our days to match. Lots of fun that.
“Oh, okay.” I plucked at my clothes. They and the floor I was on were the only non-furry parts of the room. “Can I see my bed?”
The post Boarding School on Alpha Centauri – Chapter 2 appeared first on .
