Skylar Holmes: The Last Hope

2. SKYLAR'S HEIST OF THE MILLENNIA

SKYLAR STEPPED OUT from the cover of the packed storage racks into the open space of the Main Cargo Bay. She quickly approached and skipped onto the alien trunks' platform with all the audaciousness of the independent minded sixteen-year-old she was. She found herself beside the first property trunk. The trunk that she believed contained among its alien possessions, the twelve teleportation bracelets, the first teleportation devices ever to find their way on anything of human ownership.

Piron couldn't decide whether to keep Skylar in his line of sight or the Main Cargo Bay door window.

"You wait there on the floor while I borrow a few of the teleportation bracelets," she said quietly to Piron.

"Hurry up or we'll get caught," he replied in an urgent undertone. "And at least admit you're stealing the bracelets and not borrowing them."

"Don't get your tail in a knot. Anyway, I thought you hated shapeshifting into a cat."

"Domestic cats, not Big Cats. You know how much I love shapeshifting into a white tiger. In any case, needs outweigh wants. Now, for the sake of both of us, HURRY UP!"

With a broad smile on her face and the burning fire of adventure in her striking pea-green eyes, Skylar shimmied quickly up the trunk ladder and clambered into the trunk, carefully stepping onto the metal boxes that she was sure were the sturdiest of all the different types. She rummaged through some of the hard plastic boxes and was fortunate enough to quickly identify the small blue box that she believed contained the twelve teleportation bracelets. She lifted the unlocked lid of the small blue box ...

Skylar's eyes opened wide in delight at the sight of the bracelets. "So small in size, yet so huge in function," she whispered to herself. "There again, I suppose it is true that the smallest of things are the most complex and bewildering. Consider the actual smallest things themselves, where the elementary is paradoxically far from elementary."

Skylar plucked two of the bracelets out of the box and stuffed them in her jacket pockets. The boxes she had moved, she placed back in their original positions as best as she could. She snatched the bracelets back out of her jacket pockets, and over the rim of the huge trunk, she displayed them victoriously to Piron.

"Got 'em!" she said, in a jubilant straining undertone.

Piron, still in his black panther form, shifted nervously from paw to paw on the Main Cargo Bay's hard plasticised floor as if he were the living embodiment of the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. "Just hurry up and get down here. This isn't the time and place to celebrate your outrageous attempt at the heist of the millennia. If only I had a choice over the matter, I'd be off back to my universe."

"Yes, well, you don't. And neither do I. You're lucky you were bonded with me and not some boring human incapable of living life to the full." Skylar was already climbing back down the trunk ladder.

"If we get caught," said an anxious Piron, "it'll be nice living life to the full in a brig for the rest of our lives. Can't you at least be a little less bold and a little more circumspect?"

"Listen, Piron, those advanced Equalisers, know what they're doing and they selected and bonded us out of all the people they could have selected from at least two distinct universes from any time and space," said Skylar, stepping off the last rungs of the trunk ladder and turning to face the huge scaredy-cat. "A real brain teaser, I know. So I hope you can see that we can't change the way we behave, or we'd be making a mockery out of their selection. We'll just have to put up with ourselves."

Skylar jumped off the property trunks' platform onto the floor to join Piron.

"To the victor go the spoils," she said, handing out a teleportation bracelet to Piron who immediately shapeshifted in a blurry split second into the form of a pink-skinned sixteen-year-old boy, his usual shapeshifted form when with Skylar. His hair was jet-black and his eyes were an innocent steel-blue. He and Skylar preferred him to have pink skin, because as a duo, one dark-skinned and one light-skinned, they felt more socially comfortable in their brave new world. Although each looked the antithesis of the other, somehow as a duo, they fitted together. It helped that they were both athletically built in a slender kind of way, and were both five foot eight inches tall—though Skylar looked a good six inches taller when her snow-white Afro was in full bloom.