We Make Mayhem [boyxboy]

Elise's Story, Part I

Once upon a time, there was a girl. Her name was Elise. She had a normal upbringing, with two parents who loved her and grandparents who lived on a farm. She spent every summer there, riding horses and mucking out stalls and attending 4-H Club meetings, learning everything there was to know about livestock. During the school year, she felt trapped in suburbia, always longing for her grandparents' vast property, the fields, the garden, and the forest she would escape to once all the work was done.

On the day she arrived in the summer she turned sixteen, she wandered in the woods, visiting all her old haunts. She jumped between familiar rocks to cross the creek and trailed her fingertips over the gnarled roots of her favorite tree. When she reached the hollow at the heart of the wood, she found something unusual in a small hole in the grass, as if it had fallen there from a great distance.

It looked like an egg, mostly, but it also didn't. It was green, she thought, or maybe purple. It looked hard, but when she poked it with a stick, she found it was soft. Very carefully, she reached out and touched it, and it broke open as if she'd unlocked it.

Inside was a substance that was solid, liquid, and gas all at once. But that wasn't all: it was somehow also a thought, a feeling, and an idea. It was an emotion, too. It made her brain hurt to look at it.

It floated toward her. She cupped her hands and it filled them. She felt that it was happy, in the same way she knew an animal was happy when she was petting it. It swelled in size, spilling over her hands, wrapping around them. It was seeping into her skin, into her blood, into her heart. She felt it start to know her, though she couldn't explain how.

Then it spoke to her. She felt the words, rather than hearing them.

"Hello, Elise," it said.

"H-hello," she said back.

"You've found me," it said.

"Yes. Um... if you don't mind me asking, who are you?"

"You're so polite. I know I don't look like a 'who' to you, but you were considerate enough to call me a 'who' instead of a 'what.'"

She blushed. "Well, when something's talking to you, it seems only right."

"Though I'm not talking the way you talk."

"Neither does my cousin, Nate," she said. "He's nonverbal, but he can communicate in his own way."

She felt the strange mass reach into her thoughts and seek out all her memories of Nate. It seemed to understand perfectly.

"Yes," it said. "I see. Nate cannot speak, but you understand him. Just as you understand me."

"You haven't answered my question yet," she reminded the Mass.

"I don't have a name for you to call me, but suffice it to say I am a being from another place. I'm here to study your planet and your species."

"Where do you come from?" she asked. "What's it like there?"

"I come not from a single planet, but a planetary system, millions of light years from here. My species became interplanetary many millenia ago, after conquering an existential threat on our original. Our migration has been so successful we no long remember which planet we originated from. We're a highly advanced species with technological capabilies far surpassing what you can even conceive."

"Try me," she said.

She felt the Mass probing her mind, looking for something. She wasn't sure what, but it made her uncomfortable.