The Alpha's concubine (Girl x Werewolf)

Chapter 79/Escape and Family

So I'm sitting beside a moon pool. This is a technical term, meaning we are sitting in an upside-down goldfish bowl at the sea's bottom. The bowl contains air, and the open bottom sits a rippling surface of nose attacking chlorine, bleach, and ammonia sea. The coastline is a flat tiled surface like a swimming pool. It is the human rest-and-recreation ground. If you wanted to have an analogy, it's like sitting in a well lit underground cave for mermaids. That's assuming mermaids are colossal squid with no eyes, but a shimmering surface like a dress made for a pearl sequin obsessed bide-to-be. When the mermaids pull themselves onto land, they grew legs, and lose the scales. Or in my case, they grow a head, eyes, hands, legs, bellybuttons, and generally turn into dad. Perhaps you're sitting there, nodding going - yeah, my dad on Sunday morning, I know.

We retired into one of the beach huts where dad came over we found the human food and had a cup of coffee to help recover. I was feeling a weird glow of achievement.

Dad looked at me, "OK, let's face facts. You've been sentenced to death for blasphemy. I mean real death classic. Naturally, I'm not going to let that happen."

You know what I'm sentenced to death for blasphemy, and I'm in no way down about it.

I looked at him. "Dad, I've got a massive battleship orbiting the planet. It's like a deathstar with better styling by Apple. You've got to come with us, you've got to get out of here."

Dad's head slumped "yeah, this wasn't the teaching gig I was expecting. I could do without," He said. "It started OK. I mean we were coming to a civilization which couldn't even make metal, they couldn't have electricity and seemed so backward. Then it turned out they didn't need metal; they had organic stuff which they could grow, which was stronger than steel. We thought they were a primitive civilization which had survived after a huge collapse in civilization. Turns out, they were on a 1,000-year digital detox. So all we did was introduce them to zealotry and bigotry", he said.

Zealotry and bigotry were now Earth's biggest interplanetary export. That was sad, unfortunate, and if my inner cynic was to be listened to, only to be expected.

Mr. Hargeves nodded, "I think you will find a lot of us are like you. I would get out if I could. I'm not really cut out to teach people to drink Kool-aid."

I looked at Dad, "We are going to escape, come with us. I'll even give you a two for one deal with Mr. Hargeves."

Dad looked over to me, "You have an escape plan?"

I looked over at Victoria she raised her eyes "Phone queenie and get her to blast this planet a second asshole. Actually, I'm guessing a first asshole—either way increment asshole count by one. If genocide isn't your thing, get back to the ship. Take off."

"The docks are out of bounds. ." Mr. Hargeves said.

"Actually," Peter began, "No need to phone. I asked the nice woman to drop a few nukes from orbit as a distraction if we didn't appear in time. She said she would use the ray beam thing. Start on the dead surface and begin zapping in the direction of the city threateningly."

Victoria looked over an smiled, "You asked her to do that? So did I! That's so sweet."

"Attack the plan jix," Peter said, leaned over and hugged his daughter.

Now I felt like an idiot for telling Queenie just to leave if we didn't get back.

I looked at Dad, "Dad, escape with us." I said.

Dad looked down and then back at me, "I'm not going without your mother." He told me.

My heart both leaped like a firework and sank like the titanic. I was pleased about my mom but somewhat stretched about staying for longer. My plan was only to find out if they were here. I had thought I could come back later to get them. This gave me this dreadful feeling like I was going to be made late.

"You can come back later," Victoria said, which I felt but didn't want to say.

Dad pulled his thoughts together for a second "Look your bombardment plan isn't going to happen for a few hours. I'm going to send your mother a message by trout. Meanwhile, let's get you out. I know some girl guides who will be willing to hide you from the red-cloaks as they call the Pandoras."

There are some questions you are asking your self by now like. Is my dad's trout called 'Hedwig' or 'Errol'? What are these girl guides like, and most of all, how difficult to animate would the octopus-like red cloaks the Pandoras as the high inquisition be? The answer is the cloaks moved through the water in a manner almost unnaturally eerie. The hoods were large and opened out in a huge freakish way. OK, so most cloak hoods in movies manage to stand out, casting darkness on the head within. Most hoods you see in the movies stick out like gravity, and draping doesn't apply to them. The red Pandora's octopus form cloak hoods that did so in a way that diverged from reality even more so. Even in the water, they managed to hide the unearthly glowing.

"Girl guides," Peter said.

Dad nodded, "Well, it's the nearest translation. They have been guardians of peace and justice throughout the entire ocean for the last millennia. They tend to be young and idealistic, impossible to bribe as they tend to still live with their parents. The girl scout analogy comes from their collecting of badges indicating skills they have mastered. Think of them as kind of warrior monks, but like they are twelve."

I looked over, "Thanks for the info dump, dad." I said, "Look, there was a guy called Bob with us."

"The sacrifice?" Dad said, "I know him a nice guy."

"Yeah him. He was with us. Can you break him out too?" I said.

Dad blew air out of the side of his lips.

"OK, I haven't seen you in a long while, so sure." He said.

You might think he was being rough on our octopus/squid friends, but one of the tick boxes they had on the application form was 'have you ever eat calamari?'. They had been unknowingly fed on blasphemers' bodies for a few months after arriving before being told. This had its kind of 'toughened' them up. Before you start shaming them I'm going to point out that Iceland, Norway and Japan all still hunt and eat whales. Whales who's only problem is they have a brain five times bigger than us and spend most of their time humming, show tunes, and can dance (sort of). So yeah the teachers were a bit callous towards the Calistrians but I'm guessing that's why Pandora did this whole kidnapping/recruitment/feeding on disbelievers' thing.

"So we all go back to the ship. This distracts the Pandoras from dad who tries to go and get mom, it the homing trout fails. We all get back to the ship and leave in about eight hours right?" I said.

Everyone agrees

So our escape was a little lacking in drama. We went back into the glamorous mode in our spacesuits dived in the water. Dad and Mr. Hargeves dived in the water, and while they started to thrash around, I wondered how they managed to take a shower. The answer was that Callisto's sea contained ammonia and bleach, which gave them a smell like an accident in the boys' showers after football practice. Dad soon had us going through the undersea base. It was harder than he thought as the 'doorways' for the Callistrians were narrow slits. Like octopuses (the FYI, I looked that up and I'm correct, not octopi ) they had no bones so could squeeze through narrow gaps inches wide. Like a massive human-sized octopus can fit through a letterbox, no problem.

Eventually, we were hidden in a delivery truck, which was like a massive seed pod dragged by a huge fish with three tails in a harness. One sure we were hidden, dad left us and a while later, After turned up with Bob. Bob, who was in no uncertain terms, pleased to see us. After that, the top of the massive seed pod was closed, and we were pulled out into the city beyond.