Young Writers Society

Blinking his eyes open from a deep, heavy nap, Avery heaved a sigh and rose to his feet.

“Jason, we've been flying for hours. Where're we going?” he asked groggily, rubbing an eye.

“In circles,” Jason replied, staring intently out the large windshield, beyond which laid the murky depths of space.

“What?” Avery queried, grabbing the arm of Jason's seat and hunching over against the glare he caught on the windshield. He peered through the glass and into the dark, trying to catch sight of something that might explain Jason's minimal answers, but nothing proved informing.

“Circles, Avery,” Jason exhaled. “You know those round things you study in preschool? We're making those with the ship.” Avery turned his head to stare at Jason in a bewildered sort of manner. “It's pretty fun,” Jason added, oblivious to Avery's reaction.

With another sigh and a set of slouched shoulders, Avery slumped back in his seat and stared at the ceiling.

“Jason.” he spoke after a decent amount of ceiling-gazing. “How far are we from Earth?” Jason sat up abruptly, keeping his face pointed ahead.

“Err...” He quickly turned to a screen on his right and pressed a few buttons, then muttered to himself and did the same with a screen on his other side. Spinning back to the first screen, he pressed another series of buttons before returning his sights out the windshield.

“Jason?” Avery repeated.

“A long way, bud,” the pilot replied. “A really long way, alright? So just buckle in and chill out.”

“No, I was gonna ask...” Avery began solemnly.

“Eh?” Jason prompted.

“Can we go back for Jasmine?”

Jason spun in his chair and stared at Avery as if he were his Lessgood doppelganger.

“'Can we go back for Jasmine?'” Jason tapped his fingers on one of his armrests. “No, sorry, can't do that.” Avery's heart sunk. He tried to formulate a protest, but Jason spun himself back around to the controls and dismissed any further interaction.

The ship decided to take over the quiet with the sounds of its lurching and creaking. One of the light fixtures in the floor beside Avery's chair flickered. Slipping a concerned glance back at the locked-down closet door, Avery shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Well that's just... rad,” Jason stated sarcastically, dragging himself from his seat and hurrying to another door towards the rear of the cabin, this one on a side wall. He pushed it open, disappearing inside with a jumpy little jig.

Avery raised an eyebrow and wondered how he could have missed all of these doors before. Sighing once again, which brought his record to an obscene amount of sighs, he surveyed the empty cabin. It was the first time he'd been alone in it, he observed, and all of the flashy screens and unusual little buttons and shiny silver switches greatly intrigued him.

Standing and approaching the control panel, he swung his gaze about. He knew he shouldn't, but it was really quite a difficult job, containing his curiosity. Surely he couldn't do that much harm?

No, you're definitely going to do a lot of harm, he told himself. He paused for a moment to contemplate this. Before the moment could draw itself out for too long, though, he shrugged and fell upon the controls.

Flipping switches and jabbing buttons, Avery threw caution to the vacuum of space. Then he instantly regretted doing so.

“Avery!” His ears flooded with the sound of anger and he spun on his heel to face a steaming mad alien. “What the bloody Mars do you think you're doing?!” Jason bellowed in his face. Avery stumbled backwards over the pilot seat and landed on his backside, with a grunt, on the opposite end. Petrified, Avery watched as Jason's bright pink complexion transformed into a searing red tone, and his previously spiky hair grew somehow spikier.

“Can I not run off to the little spaceman's room without some dimwitted, wool-brained idiot messing with my ship?” Jason spit and spewed, gritting his teeth as the last words flew from his mouth.

Quite expectedly, Jason ran his mouth off into a world of profanity, cursing Avery's heritage, “stupid round face”, and at least two prominent English footballers, whom he seemed to think were some focus of worship back on Earth, (though, admittedly, perhaps they were to some folk. People tend to take their sports very seriously).

Stopping halfway through ripping his hair out, Jason glared at Avery, who had slowly dragged himself away from the control panel. Marching over to him and grabbing him up from the floor, Jason snarled in Avery's face.

“If you ever touch anything in this ship again, without my permission...” His words trailed off as he dropped Avery and returned to his chair. “Buckle up,” he said sternly. Avery rose to his feet, careful and quiet, and made his way back to his own chair. Jason pressed some buttons on one of his screens, muttering to himself about “idiot humans” and “control backlogs” and “did I use soap this time?”

Meanwhile, Avery busied himself with regaining control of his now rapid breath and asking himself what the hell he'd been thinking. Not many appropriate answers came up, and he just resorted to hoping Jason wouldn't ask again.

“You hungry?” Jason asked after some thousand eternities of awkward silence.

“Er...” Avery replied, his nerves still on edge.

“How often do you humans eat anyway?” Jason asked, glancing in the novelty rear-view mirror positioned above the windshield.

“Er, at least three times a day, usually,” Avery replied nervously.

“Hmm...”

That marked the end of the conversation, and the cabin was once again taken over by the sounds of the ship's moaning and creaking, accompanied by the occasional buzz of a flickering light. Avery wondered when Jason would address these issues. He then found himself wondering if alien spaceships had insurance, or if aliens had even thought of insurance, or if there was even some form of currency in space. And was it intergalactic, or did you have to exchange some currency for a different kind when you entered another system?

Avery continued to distract himself with these thoughts until Jason tossed him back a large green helmet that, Avery was sure, would never fit his head. It had a surprisingly hideous golden visor and white lines streaking down its sides, meeting in the back before shooting upward and over the top, ending in a sort of stretched U right above the visor.

“Uh...?” he sounded.

“What, never seen a helmet before?” Jason asked, grabbing himself a new silver one after he'd lost his black one on the Cephalod ship.

“Why do we need these?” Avery asked.

“Two reasons,” Jason replied, shoving his head into his helmet. “One, we're going out onto an unprotected parking platform. And two,” he pressed a large icon on a screen, reading 'Auto-Landing'. “We can't let anyone know you're a human.”

“How come?” Avery asked, hesitantly slipping his own helmet on. He was shocked to find some sort of computerized interface on the inside of the visor and momentarily forgot about his question. Jason tapped impatiently on Avery's visor like one of those damn snot-nosed brats tapping on the glass at an aquarium.

Quickly sliding the helmet off and clearing his throat, Avery looked expectantly up at Jason.

“We can't let anyone know you're a human,” Jason repeated pointedly. “Because humans aren't supposed to exist.”