Daily Sketch
If you had to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with our landing expedition, you’d need nine or ten pincushions, minimum.
For starters, we didn’t land on the correct planet. The main navigator and one of the medics had a pretty nasty breakup midflight and the navigator decided to conduct a rigorous experiment to determine how much spice it took to completely fill in a certain five foot four omniscope wearing devastating smile flashing legs going all the way to the floor having shaped hole in his heart. He didn’t quite figure out how much spice it takes to get over a broken heart, but he did take enough to get his horse crab and his horseshoe nebulae mixed up.
We had packed for Belezon Gamma. Belezon Gamma has an almost perfect mixture of atmospheric gasses, stunning cerulean blue sand beaches with shimmering rose pearl waters, and a fully established UniFreight colony.
What we landed on instead was Tangria Alpha. I say landed but the atmosphere has an unusual concentration of Boron - that’s what the backup navigator kept screaming when the Captain demanded why we weren’t getting any slower the closer we got to the surface. I don’t know if the Boron is unusually high or unusually low, but whatever it is, it turns out that while it’s not enough to kill you, it does make every nerve in your body feel like it was coated in mayonnaise.
Less than half of us survived the crash. I’m happy to say that a small minority of us preferred to take our chances on the local cuisine rather than make abhorrent yet necessary decisions about how to combine the problems of food shortages and funeral arrangements. Of course, we had to put the greater part of a continent between our former shipmates in case cannibalism turned out to be an acquired taste.
This turned out to be a somewhat fruitless enterprise on my part, specifically. One of the local flora - I say flora, I mean, it’s practically identical genetically to an acorn squash, but it’s shaped more like a squid than a squash and it acts more like a squirrel than anything. As I was saying, these flora - I’ve taken to calling them llorta - developed an unhealthy fixation with my blond hair. For weeks I couldn’t fall asleep for more than five minutes but these llorta were pawing over every nook and cranny plucking every last follicle. I look exactly like I’ve got a full-blown case of Alopecia.
If that were the worst of my troubles I’d consider myself a lucky man. It turns out, Tangria Alpha has a surprisingly well-developed intelligent species. I’d put them at least an 8.4 on the Johannes-Feldman Index. I mean, they’re not exactly building washing machines or intercontinental ballistic missiles, but they’re well past the tying a rock to a stick phase.
But this is where it gets a bit awkward. You see, I’d been trying to figure out for weeks and weeks a way for us to become mutually intelligible with no luck. But then, one day, a certain Tangrian Sapiens whose grunts and shrugs I thought I could almost understand was leading me along the edge of a swamp when we were both attacked by what I’ve taken to calling wyverns - but think more toad than dragon, except a toad with the ferocity of a tiger, great big razor-sharp rainbow-colored claws, and the bad temper of a grizzly with an ulcerated tooth.
I routinely get my hair stolen by mobile, tentacled squash thingies, so you can imagine how I’d do against a twelve foot tall grizzly toad with great big toucan beaks for fists. But the Tangrian woman I was with didn’t even miss a beat. She was leaping and ducking and pirouetting, knives in both hands slashing at flesh and catching rainbow-colored claws with sparking clangs.
These wyverns have two heads and a fairly complicated nervous system. The only way to really shut one down is to put a great big hole in both brains at the same time. I had no doubt that the Tangrian woman would be able to put a whole in the head she was fighting but I thought the head I was facing would finish eating me before she got a chance. It had snatched me up with its long tongue and I was learning first hand what a shrimp felt like right after it had been dipped in cocktail sauce.
I couldn’t tell exactly but just as my free arm was about to give way from holding open the jaws as much as I could, I thought a look of pure anger crossed over the woman’s face. She threw one of her blades straight at me. Nearly straight, anyway. It stuck several inches into the wyvern’s snout right next to my pinky. I kicked the thing in the eye and dared to let go of its jaws for a moment and try to yank the sword free. I must have had a ton of adrenaline in me because I actually managed to get the thing out.
I looked over and saw that the woman had allowed the wyvern to ensnare her with its tongue as well. She was now more or less in the same position as I was. She gave me what I could only describe as a meaningful look and then mimed stabbing her knife into the creature’s throat. Then she gave me the meaningful look again. Then she started to count down on her fingers.
It might have been the poison entering in through the fangs on the tongue wrapped around my left side, but I swore I could understand her. In perfect unison, we both plunged our knives into the wyvern’s throats and up into its brains.
As the creature died, something very strange happened. I found out later that my blood and the woman’s circulated into each other through the barbs on both tongues that still gripped us.
Slaying a wyvern together is actually how the Tangrians get hitched, and on a much deeper level than we do. It turns out my dna actually got exchanged and mixed up with hers. We had synced up on a genetic level. I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can get an annulment from.
On the plus side, I could understand first her and then the rest of the Tangrians after a few weeks. I’m not exactly human anymore, and neither of us are experiencing the same kind of wedded bliss that either of our species might have imagined, but it’s not all bad.
