She bumped into her soon-to-be hero in the ladies’ room, which was a little weird, because this hero turned out to be a siren, and sirens didn’t need to pee and most definitely were not made for earthling toilets. After all, they were practically mermaids; they did their business the way most fish did business.
The siren whapped her ankles with its tail as it flopped along the ground, and honestly the movement looked so lopsided and clumsy that Ellipse would feel like a jerk if she mentioned the whapping, so she just kept washing her hands and tried not to react. She finished her first run-through of the English alphabet song just as the siren slipped into a bathroom stall, and then she heard a peculiar plunking sound, like someone dropping a rock into a lake.
“Deep space,” Ellipse groaned. “Please tell me sirens do not puke up rocks. I just unplugged the toilet in the first stall.” She pulled her hands from the sink and flicked away the excess water, and then, as she reached for the hand dryer, she opened her mouth and sang a series of tentative notes. Hopefully her accent was not too awful.
The siren sang back like a squawky novice clarinetist. It had definitely just puked. That was going to be hecking gross to clean up. Probably. Sighing, Ellipse pulled out her phone and asked the search engine about extraterrestrial emesis habits.
She learned a number of things in the ensuing seconds. One: sirens puked the same way people did, which was smelly and no less disgusting than rocks, but at least meant there would be no clogged toilets or busted sewage pipes. When the acrid stench of acid and seawater and frying oil smacked her nose, Ellipse simply brought up her free hand, pinched her nostrils, and took a deep breath through her mouth.
Two: the siren would want to rest in a saltwater tank soon, though one far less saline than any earthling’s saltwater aquarium, because the salt content in Sirena’s oceans was a solid ten parts per thousand, and Earth oceans were up around thirty-five.
Three: never doubt the strength of a fish’s tail. (Ellipse got whacked again when the siren heaved up round two, and her ankles smarted like the fiery surface of the hecking sun.)
She sang another question at the alien, and it answered back with a moan that sounded like a broken bassoon. That seemed like the siren equivalent of “euagh,” which Ellipse totally got. She would make broken bassoon noises too, if her voice had been pitched low enough.
“Should I call for your party?” Ellipse sang. Obviously, she did not sing the actual English words. They did not match the siren language’s syllable count, and the siren would just wonder what in deep space was wrong with her voice.
“Please,” the siren answered, sounding vaguely better. Ellipse assumed that bass-clarinet with a new, too-hard reed was better than broken bassoon, but she could be wrong. Not every species had the same taste in sounds. “I’m from the Conics.”
The what? Ellipse had not been to school for a while, but she was more than certain that conics were a subject of mathematical study, and not some kind of inspiring ship name. She clucked her tongue and stared at the ceiling, the hand over her nose blocking most of her view, and racked her brain for any words that sounded similar.
“You mean the Fragment?” she asked. That at least sounded sort of like a ship name.
And of course, the siren had meant what it said. “No,” it replied, and then it squawked and shivered, and the flat of its tail slapped against the tiled floor. “I sang Conics, like the field of mathematical study.”
Yes, Ellipse had seen stupider names, but those had been stupid in a the-owner-might-have-been-inebriated way, and not a the-owner-enjoys-the-torture-of-useless-mathematics way. Why anyone would name a spaceship after something as boring as conics, she could not fathom.
And Fathomless would be an awesome ship name, now that she thought about it.
“Fine, fine,” she sang. “Conics. I just wanted to make sure. Now I will go to find them for you.”
The siren vomited again, and Ellipse wished she could plug her ears and her nose at the same time, because the plopping sound was more than enough to get her stomach rolling. She hopped over the alien’s tail and scampered out of the bathroom, and then turned right to find the call station for custodial and restaurant staff.
The Fold Terminal was a zoo, like always. A terrifying hybrid of airport, industrial dock, and actual zoo, it smelled faintly of methane, sweet, cold oxygen, and citrus air freshener. Its floors and airspace were cluttered with feet and long, scaly necks, and swooping sky-born aliens.
A collection of food chains sat together a short way down the terminal, and there, the chaos of all the mingling species fizzled out. Instead of writhing in a mind-boggling mass of mismatched textures and patterns and colors, everyone sorted themselves neatly into lines according to species. An earthling burger joint produced a line of middle-aged humans in dark, sensible business clothing, though Ellipse did spot a family wearing vibrant t-shirts and a fellow custodian with bright green hair.
Across the hallway stood a line of gato: feline aliens who ran the pigment gamut from deep, blackish blue to snowy white. They didn’t do clothing, which was unusual among intelligent species, but they did wear backpacks, and had taken to lugging around earthling luggage as well. Several gato had their prehensile tails wrapped about the handle of earthling-style carry-on bags.
Ellipse caught a glimpse of bright yellow paint marring the grey cement walls of the terminal, and she quickened her pace. That would have to be the call station or the first aid kit or both, and any of those options would be useful right now. She hurried past the burger joint and the gato equivalent, tuning out the noise and occasional flashing light.
And then, because the universe made the sharing of bad luck its ultimate goal, Ellipse rounded the corner of the gato restaurant’s line and tripped over a kid in a wheelchair.
Actually, she tripped him, and then proceeded to faceplant into the tiled floor. Her foot caught the edge of the wheel, and his chair slipped, and the next thing she knew, she was making out with the floor. The boy in the chair managed—thankfully—to stay upright and seated.
“Oh shoot!” That was him. He sounded halfway between boy and grown-up, like his vocal cords could not just pick scratchy, manly tenor or soft-spoken alto and had opted for both. “I’m really sorry about that! Are you okay?”
Oh, and he spoke English like an American. Gross. The moment Ellipse talked back, he was going to judge her so hard. “I am fine,” she spluttered, face still stuck to the floor. “No harm is done.”
“Are you sure? Can you get up? Do you need help?”
“I am peachy,” she replied, trying to get her hands under her shoulders. “Everything is fine.”
He was quiet for a moment while Ellipse pushed herself onto her hands and knees.
And then he had the gall to muse aloud. “I’ve never heard the space accent before. It’s like Russian and Spanish and Mandarin and Hindi all at once.”
What an asteroid. Ellipse had half a mind to call him something nasty, but she stopped herself. She clenched her jaw and tried to smile, and when her face was no longer dark and angry and wrinkled, she beamed up at the boy and stood up. “Well, that is a lot of what Global Gliss comes from, you know? There are like a bajillion other languages involved too, but people only recognize the big four.”
“I wonder why the early colonists didn’t just use English,” the boy wondered. He smiled up at Ellipse, and she wanted to glower at him.
She did not glower. Instead, she shrugged and kept smiling and took a step toward the yellow box bolted to the wall. Red paint along the front told her it was both a call station and a first aid kit. Score.
“Say,” the boy continued, “you look a lot like that Elliott Bei girl who went missing.”
All heck to boys and conversations. Ellipse quirked an eyebrow and gave the boy a quizzical stare, ready to fire back with a celebrity lookalike, but when she took a long, hard look at his face, she realized she had no comparison.
He was dark and brown, with a strong nose and stronger eyebrows, and his black eyes glittered like space. His hair fluffed out in black waves, unruly as a solar flare.
Ellipse frowned and shook her head. “Do you only speak English?” she asked.
He nodded, still smiling.
“Really? No Hindi or Telugu or Bengali or anything?”
“Nope. My birth parents wanted to teach me, but some stuff happened, and I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to pick up their first languages.” Still grinning, he rolled his wheelchair back and forth for a moment, as if he were shuffling his feet like a nervous, two-legged boy. A blanket covered his lap, and he stored a briefcase in the space where his legs would have hung over the edge of the seat. Ellipse wondered if he lost his legs and his parents at the same time, but she kept the question off her features.
“That is too bad,” she offered. “But maybe if you visit Titan you can find someone to teach you.”
“Hmm. You know, you really do look like Elliott Bei. Are you related?”
Ellipse blinked. “To be honest, I have no idea who this girl is. Is she like an earthling celebrity or something?”
That, apparently, was the wrong thing to say. The boy laughed, and suddenly his glittery eyes were more on the nasty, mischievous, gleaming side, and he licked his lips like a predator going in for the kill. “You haven’t heard of Elliott Bei? But she’s infamous!”
Hecking heckity heck. Ellipse let out a nervous giggle, and her eyes darted around the terminal, searching for an escape route. “Is that so?" she twittered. "I am afraid I do not get out often. Custodians only make so much money, you know?” She took a step back, and then another, and then she hit a wall of fur.
The boy rolled towards her, that infernal smile still stretched across his chin. “Miss Elliott Bei, I’m afraid we’re going to have to take you in. That incident you had last year with Andra-Media broke a plethora of international-
Ellipse knocked over his wheelchair and bolted into the crowd. She had done nothing wrong.
(and fair enough)
). However, I feel like the first sentence is a bit of a run-on:
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