Circum Universe
Two:
ALIENS, BOOZE, DIRTY TUXES AND A NEW JOURNEY

     Out of the darkness a brightness sparked, and Kitzani flinched at the suddenness of it.  As her eyes widened, she realized the brightness was a rectangle, almost door-shaped.  The grip she had on Miata’s hand tightened.  Could it be that her fantastical musings were true?  Kitzani could feel her chest tighten in anticipation.  She stood, shakingly, ready to meet whatever came out of that light, whether it was good or evil, she had to know what manner of creature lived out there, that came to visit their small, simple planet.  Out of the light came a silhouette, tall and broad shouldered, like a man.  The figure stepped forward, into plain sight.  He was definitely a man, just like those that lived on Adivai, except…he had no ears.   She covered her mouth to keep from screaming.  There was no doubt, now.  He was not of their world.  The man turned in their direction and stooped forward, his eyes narrowing, studying them.  “Hello, ladies.” He mumbled.       
     “I…I come ….I…uhhhh.” At that moment, he proceeded to collapse into a heap on the ground.
     “Oh…oh dear.”  Kitzani gasped and rushed over to the spot where the figure had fallen.  Miata caught her arm in a tight grip as she reached him.  
     “Are you mad?  We don’t even know what it is.”  Her sister looked up at her, brow furrowed.  Her face was dirty from the dirt and debree from the impact.  
Kitzani paused, only for a moment.  “I have to help him.”  With that, she kneeled down at the figure and studied him carefully.  His hair was dark and unruly, held back out of his eyes by a red piece of cloth.  Stubble speckled his face, which was somehow, both pale and flushed.  She smelled a faintly familiar scent on his breath – some kind of alcohol.  He was drooling.  
     “He’s okay!”  Kitzani proclaimed.  “Just, passed out intoxicated, I think.”
Miata leaned down and peered at the man, skeptical.  “Wait…so…you mean to tell me that, this alien got drunk, crashed his star-ship, and just happened to land in our field?  I thought you said space creatures were supposed to be ‘great and advanced’ beings.”  Kitzani flinched.  Of course, this is how her sister would react.  
“Well they are advanced, anyway.  What should we do?”  Kitzani searched Miata’s face.  Her sister always knew what to do, no matter what transpired.  For once, Miata seemed at a loss.  Her silence said it all; whatever they had stumbled upon was something that could affect their entire lives, even the lives of everyone on Adivai.
     “Hi!”  A strange voice rang in Kitzani’s ears.  She whirled around to the direction of the star-craft.  Another alien stood in the doorway of great, metal thing.  He was different from the first – still earless, but short, dirty, and had a huge mass of white hair atop his head.  His face seemed permanently scrunched up, with a moustache that traveled across his upper lip and down around the sides of his mouth and chin.  The man smiled broadly at them.  She noticed some gold gleaming from his teeth.
     “Help me get him up, will ya?”  The short alien bent over to grab onto his friend’s arms, motioning for Kitzani to pick up his feet.  She blinked at him for a moment, stunned, and almost automatically stooped down and picked the man’s feet up.  She guessed she was on orders-autopilot from being bossed around by Miata for her entire life.  They stepped into the craft, which Kitzani noticed was a large, red, metal thing on the outside, but inside, appeared almost as normal as a house on Adivai.  There was even wallpaper on the walls, and carpet covered the floors.  The wallpaper depicted animals she’d never seen, however, and the creatures seemed to be dancing on water for some reason or another.  She could hardly imagine what places this vessel had visited, the worlds these strange men had seen.  
     The strange man led them to a room adjacent to the hallway with the dancing creatures wallpaper.  It was plainer than the hall, with a mattress on the floor in the corner.  She noticed bottles nearly covering the floor of the room.  Upon closer examination, she saw that each bottle had slip of paper pasted onto it, with different things scrawled on each one.  “Eve” said one, and “Chartreuse” was written on another.  They gently set the tall alien down upon his bed, and Kitzani stepped back to examine the white-haired one.  He was still grinning from ear to ear.
     “Name’s Ergo Keb.”  He said, suddenly and loudly, jumping on her with a hug so tight, she thought her shoulders would break.  “K-Kitzani.”  She replied, taken aback by his greeting.  After he jumped down off of her (he was so short, he had to almost leap to hug her), she noticed her clothes were covered in dust and black grease.
     “Kitzani.  I like you!”  Ergo replied, still grinning.  “Who’s the angry girl that’s hiding behind you?”  Kitzani turned to see Miata crouched behind her, scowling.        
     “Oh…that’s my…”
     “Her sister, Miata.  If you jump on me, I will break your arm.”  Miata interrupted, a fire in her eyes.  She clearly didn’t trust these people.  Though, Miata hardly trusted anyone outside of family.  Just last week, she had kicked a boy in the stomach for wandering onto their property.  They came to find out, only later, that he was simply a lost traveler looking for directions – Miata had just assumed he was a thief after their Ootin.  
     “Yeeep!  Scary.”  Ergo dove behind Kitzani, now.  She was starting to understand how walls and corners felt.
     “Ehm…Ergo?  What happened?  I mean to say, erm, why are you here?  Why did you crash?”  Kitzani suddenly craved answers.  Everything that happened was so…out of the ordinary.  She wanted to log it all away in her journal and ask a million questions, about the universe, the people that lived in it, everything.  She had to start somewhere, however.  So she began with the first thing that prodded at her mind – why had it happened to them, anyhow?  Of course, Miata’s mindset about the situation was completely different.
     “Yes, explain yourself!  Why have you trespassed on our planet, destroyed much of our crop and nearly killed us?!”  Miata’s ears were twitching.  Kitzani gulped hard.
     “Eeep!  Well I er…I broke it.”  Ergo buried his face in Kitzani’s back.
     “Broke it?!  Broke what?  This…star-vessel?  So this drunkard didn’t crash it?”  Kitzani looked down at the sleeping man.  He was dead to everything around him, and salivating profusely.  She could not even imagine what sort of a man he was.  
At this point, Ergo suddenly got brave and hopped out from behind her.
“If by star-vessel, you mean the Remarkable Nebulous Pyre, then yes.  And by drunkard, you mean the Captain, then yes to that too, he did crash it.  See, I modified the ship’s hyperdrive so she could outwit the other ships better, and I forgot to program it to steer clear of planets’ gravitational pull, so, we jumped and ended up in yours.  Captain Conno was asleep at the helm, and since I don’t know how to fly the old girl very well, we crash landed in your fields. The jolt must’ve half-woken him up, but as you can see, he’s out cold again.  Should be awake in another hour or so, according to schedule.”  Ergo exhaled hard and flopped to the ground.  He had rattled all of that off in one breath.  It apparently exhausted him.
     Kitzani didn’t understand much of what he said, he talked as if they should know exactly what all that space gabble meant.  What she did catch was the fact that the other man was the captain of their ship, which was apparently, the Remarkable Nebulous Pyre, that the captain’s name was Conno, and the crash was somehow both of their faults.  What she really didn’t understand was why the captain had a schedule for his sleep.  It must be an alien custom.  
     “Is that normal for you extraterrestrials?  An automatic sleep schedule of sorts, among your brain functions?”  Kitzani was excited beyond explanation.  She had so much to learn among these men, and she hoped she could spend as much time as possible with them before they departed their world.
     “Umm…no, the Captain’s just special.  He stays awake for three days at a time, and sleeps three days at a time.  It’s just his way.”  Ergo thumped Conno on the head roughly.  He did not even shift in his sleep.
     “I assume alcoholism is his way, as well.”  Miata frowned at the bottles strewn about the room.
     “Yup!”  Ergo replied enthusiastically, plainly not realizing Miata’s abhorrence to drunkards.
     “Oh, what do you people use for power, here?  Gasoline, steam, nuclear energy?  Thermal?  The ship’s power supply broke during the crash.  Let’s go get some!”
     “Power?  Umm…something for energy?  Ootin leaves, maybe?  We use it every day for energy!”  Kitzani beamed.  She was helping extraterrestrials out with some advanced technology.  It was so exciting!
     “Organic energy!  Oooo…okay!”  With that, the funny little man skipped down the hall to the outside.
Miata looked up at her sister, scowling.  “Are you insane?   We cannot give them our Ootin.”
     “Well, Sis, if we don’t, they will be stuck here, never to leave.  Is that what you want?”  She smiled.  Miata would never want those bizarre aliens to stay.  She could not protest to helping them.  The twins followed Ergo outside, where he promptly crouched down and began sniffing the vegetation.  Miata glanced up at her sister, eyebrow raised.  He was a strange one, that man.  
     “The black plants you see all around you, that is Ootin.”  Kitzani explained, motioning her arm in a circle around them.
     “Pretty!  Okay, let’s pick some.  Oh, you’ve got a head start already, good.”  Ergo said, noticing the basket in Miata’s arms that was full of the plant.  He quickly began collecting more, stuffing his pockets full.  Kitzani noticed he appeared to be wearing some sort of formal wear, they were so stiff and clean-cut, but the material was as dirty and worn as workman’s clothes.  She could not get over how odd these aliens were, and wondered if they were eccentric for their race, or if all of them were like this.  
     Once their arms were full of Ootin, the group trudged back inside the ship, with Ergo in the lead.  He escorted them further down the hall and up three flights of stairs to a great metal room full of contraptions, parts, and bottles of mysterious substances.  In the middle was a large cylindrical apparatus made of glass and metal, with yellow liquid oozing from it.  Kitzani guessed that this was the broken power supply Ergo had mentioned earlier.  The dwarf of a man trotted over to it, pulling hard at the cylinder.  He struggled quite a bit to get it loose, and then tossed the thing off to the side.  Kitzani found a nice corner to sit in to observe his work.  It was a hectic affair.  He ran back and forth across the room, opening and closing cabinets and drawers like he didn’t know where anything was located.  She noticed her sister had wandered off, probably to explore the ship.
      After quite a bit of frantic looking around, Ergo seemed to find the device he was looking for.  It was a cylinder, like the one he had tosses aside, only smaller.  He took a couple of handfuls of Ootin leaves and blended them together with a green, glowing jelly substance, then filled the cylinder with what looked like a gelatin gone horribly wrong.  At this point, he went off into another frenzy of running about and looking in things.  Once he had found a thick black cord with a box of some sort in the middle, with more wires running out of the back of the box, he did a little jig.  Kitzani covered her mouth and giggled silently.  It was rather entertaining to watch how this funny man worked.  Ergo then proceeded to haphazardly tape the wires onto the gelatinous contraption and installed it into the machine that held the previous energy supply.
     “Let’s see how the Remarkable runs now, shall we?”  Ergo turned back and grinned at Kitzani.  His eyes sparkled with excitement.  She could tell this was what he loved to do – he had the same look on his face that she did whenever she discovered something new studying the night sky.  She smiled.
     “Alright.  Give it a try.”
     Ergo ran to the corner of the room to a panel that said “Manual Controls”  and pulled down a large, red lever.  The ship jolted.  
     “Wooooaaaah…here we go.”  Kitzani heard a slurred voice off to her side.  Turning her head, she saw the Captain, awake as scheduled, with a bottle in his hand marked “Estelle.”
     “Good evenin’, darling.  How’d such a lovely creature end up on my ship?  Ergo…is this your girlfriend?  Cause I can’t let you get away with having such a nice girl.  You’ll…get her all dirty.  Looks like you already have, actually.  Ew.  So where’re we going?”  
     “Going?  We are going somewhere?” Kitzani jumped up, startled.  
     “Sure are, lovely.  Afro-head here just activated the hyperdrive.   Welcome to the Remarkable Nebulous Pyre!”