"That's a human…" Ryan managed to say.
"Yes." Shoky replied matter of factly, though what Ryan said wasn't a question.
"That's a human."
"Yea, we've established that." Shoky reminded him with an impatient edge to her voice.
Ryan tore his eyes from the young girl to gawk at Shoky wildly. "THAT'S A gud jävla heliga helvetet i hela skapelsen verkliga liv HUMAN."
Shoky shrunk a bit. Ryan only swore when he was really upset and only in Swedish . "FAN FAN FAN FAN FAN FAN FAN, WHAT THE HELL SHOKY?!" he continued. He began to pace his room. "Fan, fan, FAN…. What…. What?!" He stopped and stared at the two females. He tried again to form a question but only came up with another, "What?" then, "How? What? Wh- wh-"
Shoky carefully put her hand on his arm. "Just listen to Nalie's story. It'll all make sense." The sudden switch to English added to the jarring nature of this interaction.
"Listen to a jävla human?" Ryan crashed on his bed, completely defeated by his own overheating brain.
"Listen," Shoky repeated coolly. She turned to the girl who was still standing in the door and waved her in. "Tell him what you told me."
She stepped forward. She looked to be about preteen age and was one of those dark skinned girls that the light skinned humans are uneasy about. Her eyes were very big and her hair was tied in two poofy pigtails. "Well, as I was sayin', my name is Nalie. A while back, I was abducted by, well… y'all." She gestured towards them. "They sent a tornado to my house. I don't know if my family survived…" Nalie looked down and shuffled her feet nervously. "They said they needed me for some tests. I was on this ship for about 4 years- I guess that's 4 months for you guys. They had me in this cell with a TV, a bed, a table, some things to write or draw with, and some toys. Sometimes people in lab coats and masks would come in and poke me with things. They put me through all these machines and made me take all these drugs-"
"Wait, wait, wait," Ryan interrupted. He was beginning to regain his senses. "What did these aliens look like?"
Nalie looked at him confused. "Like y'all. No pupils, yellow eyes, pointy fingers with no nails. Different shades of green."
Ryan blinked. "You're saying that our people, my race of people, kidnapped and performed experiments on you?"
"Yes."
"I find that incredibly hard to believe." stated Ryan. "Perhaps it was the Sozarians. They kinda look like us."
"They're purple," Shoky reminded him.
Ryan inspected his own olive green skin. "It's a light purple. Under the right lighting…"
"Ryan." Shoky warned him.
"I'm sorry, I just find it hard to believe that any sound of mind zenonite would go to Earth and abduct a human." Ryan retorted defensively. "We are terrified of humans! We do everything in our power to hide from them. No citizen of this planet would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever willingly go to Earth, much less snag someone from there."
"And yet." Shoky waved her hand towards Nalie to show this statement was clearly false.
"So how'd you get on the Agrinaut ship?" Ryan was trying to get the facts straight.
Nalie gave him another confused look. "That's the ship I was in for 4 years. The one I was abducted in," she realized she'd have to spoon feed this guy.
The words felt like a slap both to Ryan's physical face and his mental world. "You're saying our government officials were the ones who took you?!"
Nalie shrugged, "If that's who owns that ship."
"No. No, no, no. No! That's not possible. We would never do that. Never. Not ever." he protested.
Shoky squinted her face because she knew what she was about to say was blasphemous. "Well, they did just go to Earth for the first time ever..."
"To gather food!" Ryan jumped up. He couldn't sit still anymore.
"Which you said was a stupid reason to go to Earth many, many times," argued Shoky. "Unless they had an ulterior motive…"
"This is insane!" Ryan shouted. "Our government isn't like that! Our government doesn't conspire. They are the most honest, open government in the universe. The opposite of human governments." Nalie's face tightened at his pointed disrespect.
"The timing matches up. And how else did she get here? How else did she end up on that ship?" Shoky demanded.
Ryan sort of thought for a moment. "She must be a stowaway." His eyes widened. "Omygod... Shoky!" He grabbed her and pulled her away from Nalie. "Shoky," he whispered, back in their native tongue. "What if she's a spy?"
Shoky gave him a very confused look in response so he explained further: "What if the humans have known about us all along? But they could never get to us because of our amazing cloaking and shielding abilities. But they knew we watched their shows so they made them all subtly project how amazing their food was, luring us to come to them. Then, they sneak an unassuming girl onto one of the ships when no one's looking. Free ride to Zenon! What if they're infiltrating us? They know that we know that their children are the least terrifying. They make us think we're the bad guys, get us to go on this journey to send her back to Earth, we get closer as a species and learn about ourselves in the process then BOOM. She's got the codes to the cloaking ring that's around our planet and how best to extract all our oil and destroy everything we've tried to protect."
It took Shoky a moment to process Ryan's words before coming up with her own. "That's some Terrascoist conspiracy levels right there," she told him. "You really think humans are capable of somehow knowing we exist And hiding it from us?"
"They're really good bluffs!" said Ryan defensively. "We don't fully know what they know."
"Yes we do!" Shoky reminded him in English after glancing at Nalie's confusion. "Remember last year when the Terrascoists were Also worried about the humans knowing about us and secretly planning our demise? So our government started keeping track of all the top secret government databases of Earth but found nothing except more terrible things humans had done to each other."
Nalie scrunched her face,"Wait, what?" Her eyes took turns looking at Ryan and Shoky but they both ignored her.
Shoky shook her head. "Lux, the people in the Middle East alone..."
"What about them?" Nalie asked.
"Yea, but what if they had some secret-er databases that our technology couldn't pick up?" Ryan tried again, still not trusting Nalie with what he suspected.
Shoky icked. "You know our technology is way more advanced than any human's." She paused before adding, "Look, you're being ridiculous. You're starting to sound like me!"
"At least you're admitting you're the crazy one in the relationship!" Ryan shot back in English so he'd have a witness. "And I didn't have a reason to believe those crackpot theories until a human showed up at my house unannounced. Y'know, you do this all the time. You find something dangerous, think it's a friend- and it's usually not- then you can't handle it and you come to me to help you get rid of it. You're just this naive, dumma flicka that runs around, doing whatever, not thinking that maybe the thing everyone says is dangerous is actually dangerous and maybe you shouldn't mess with it!"
Words got stuck in Shoky's throat like a cube in a tube. Since she couldn't say them, the words moved to her eyes, making them wide and glistening. She stared at Ryan with those eyes, making him instantly regret saying what was said.
"Look, Ryan…" Nalie thought to remind everyone of her presence.
"She knows my name!" Ryan snapped out of his self regret to point at the human dramatically. Perhaps if he proved himself right, Shoky wouldn't be so upset with him.
Shoky managed to roll her eyes back to normal and wipe away the forming tears. "I told her your name on the way over here," she explained.
"Ryan," Nalie said more firmly. "I promise, I don't want any of your government secrets-"
"My government doesn't have secrets!"
"I'm not here to destroy your planet, ok?!" Nalie was losing her patience. "I just want to leave and go back home and see if my family's ok. I'm not sure they are because your stupid government sicked a tornado on them!"
"Lies." Ryan hissed.
"Ok, everyone shut up!" Shoky exclaimed. She turned to her hysterical boyfriend. "Ryan, whatever the reason, wouldn't you agree the best course of action is to get her off our planet?"
"...Maybe…."
"So we should do that, then, shouldn't we?" pushed Shoky.
Ryan thought further. He glanced nervously at the child in his room. "We should turn her into the authorities."
"The same authorities that kidnapped her?!" Shoky shrieked.
"The government didn't kidnap her! She's lying! She's obviously lying!" Ryan shot back in English accidentally.
"Am not!" Nalie stomped her foot, causing Ryan to wince at his faux pas.
"You said so yourself," Shoky interjected. "Going to Earth was stupid. It was the perfect cover-up."
"Our. Goverment. Doesn't. Cover. Up." Ryan seethed.
"They obviously do." muttered Nalie under her breath, just loudly enough for everyone to hear her anyways. Shoky raised her hand at her, begging for her patience.
Ryan ignored Nalie's comment and began to rub his head again. "Why? Why would they take her? What purpose does that serve?"
Shoky, at a loss for an explanation, looked to Nalie for the answer. "They never told me what they needed me for," she said. "I remember hearing them telling me about something, like, reprociptive systems or something once but that's it."
"Reprociptive? That's not a word. Shoky, that's not a word," Ryan looked desperately at his zenonite partner.
"Ok, let's stop worrying about how and why; let's just focus on the what." Shoky raised her hands in surrender. "Let's review what we know. We know Nalie is here and she says she just wants to go back to Earth. So let's just do that and we can forget about this whole business- like it never happened. Ok?"
"How?! How would we take her back to Earth?!" Ryan shouted. "Mission In N Out was the first flight to Earth since the Galactic Debate that determined humans were too dangerous to come into contact with. No planetary transport system, especially Zenon's, is going to fly there publicly or privately."
"So... we borrow a ship…" Shoky coyly implied.
Ryan blinked. He suddenly realized why Shoky had brought this human to him in the first place. She just wanted to use his knowledge and access of ships as a pilot. Fine. She can have his expert opinion: "You want to hijack a ship?" he swallowed. "You do realize how tight transportation security is, right?"
Shoky rolled her eyes again. "Not hijack. We rent a ship, say we're taking a camping trip to Mars, and then go slightly farther than that."
Ryan stared at her a while before repeating, "You do realize how tight transportation security is, right?"
"Ughk," Shoky scoffed but Ryan continued.
"Every rental has a Galactic Positioning System in it to help keep track of all the ships and make sure they don't get into trouble. As soon as we passed Mars, they would know something was up."
"We can try to outrun them once they catch on. We could-"
"Outrun the Galactic Police?!" Ryan interrupted. "Are you mad? No rental is going to 'outrun' Galactic Police."
Shoky thought a moment before replying. "What if you... jammed the thing that told them where we were? The GPS thing."
Ryan blinked. " 'Jam' it? You want me to 'jam' it?"
"Yea, can't you do that? Don't they teach you stuff like that in pilot school?
"No!" he cried. "They teach me how to fly! Not break the equipment!"
"They must have told you where it was on the ship, what it looked like, how to make sure it's working and all that, though, right?" Shoky tried again.
Ryan wanted to say no but they had and Shoky could tell by his face this was the case.
"You don't have to do anything techy with it. Just…" Shoky paused as she started to mime what she was going to say. "...smash it."
"Smash it?" he echoed. "It's lodged deep inside of the engine of the ship so dummies like you don't break it 'accidentally'. How are we meant to smash it?"
"Tools, obviously!" Shoky replied. "We actually go to Mars. We'll land, get inside the engine and grab it, smash the bugger, then head off to Earth."
"They're going to investigate that!"
"Ok," Shoky thought more- not really her style. "Then we don't smash it. We're on vacation. We just leave it there and go."
"That's…." Ryan considered. "That could actually work."
Shoky lit up as she was filled with new and sudden hope. "Yea?"
"Yea…" Ryan thought. "Mars is pretty lame. Hardly anyone goes there. Wouldn't be hard to find a desolate spot no one would check often. And then we'll just… go to Earth instead. That's still over 200 days to get to Earth. They're going to check Eventually."
"But we'll have a head start and they won't know where to look. They're not going to think we went to Earth at least," Shoky started speaking with momentum.
Ryan squinted at his gunon before admitting, "Yea, that could work."
"Yea!" Shoky punched the air. In the corner of the room, Nalie began to smile.
"Wait, no," Ryan shook his head. "I still don't trust her." He eyed Nalie.
"Well, obviously, we're going to keep her locked up somewhere," said Shoky.
"What?" Ryan and Nalie both said simultaneously.
"Well, I'm sorry, Nalie," Shoky apologized. "But I don't think there's anything we can say to convince Ryan that you're an honest kid. Besides, getting rentals and taking time off work takes at least a week's notice and we can't have you roaming around freely during that time anyways. So the best solution is to keep you here at Ryan's until we got everything all ready to go."
"Whoa, why does she have to stay at my house?" Ryan demanded.
Shoky placed her hands behind her back and started rocking on her feet with her eyes wide and looking at the floor, lips pursed and sighing. She looked up as soon as she started speaking again. "I mean, I guess I could take her all the way back to where I live in Zenon Central where a lot of people- especially authority figures- live. Try to hide her from the fuzz, in the very place she was last known to have been. I doubt anyone would be especially looking for her there."
Now it was Ryan's turn to roll his eyes. "Alright, I get it. Fine."
Nalie quietly grumbled.
Shoky smiled. "Good." She looked around the room, hoping to spot more things to say. "Well, unless there are any objections, I think this has been a long night and we all better catch some rest. We have an adventure ahead of us." She gleamed brightly at the glum and annoyed faces in front of her before turning around to leave.
"Wait, Shoky." Ryan grabbed her elbow. "Can we… you should...." He stopped suddenly to turn to Nalie. "Don't touch anything," he warned her as firmly as he could. She scowled at him. Ryan ignored it to take his girlfriend into the hallway for a private chat. As soon as he left, Nalie immediately began defiantly poking everything in his room.
"Shoky," Ryan said once they were out of earshot. Who knows what the human knows? "You do realize this is insane, right? We're taking a human back to Earth... I really think it'd be better to tell an official about this and have them deal with it-" He ignored her, 'ugh'. "-We have no reason to believe our government is capable of something like this nor do we have any reason to believe her. If we get caught- and there's a good chance of that- we could get in serious trouble. This is treason, Shoky. That's not something to shrug off." He hoped his pleading eyes would be enough to convince her. She simply stared at them. And stared.
She eventually took his face and rubbed it a moment with her thumb before allowing her hand to fall to his shoulder. Finally, she quietly said, "Do you remember that time we went to Jurgan and I started feeding that bofollian in the park?"
Ryan sighed. "Yea...."
"You said it was common knowledge that bofollians are nasty creatures that'll attack anything and everyone for no reason."
"They do! That's why no one was in the park except you!" The look on Shoky's face told him to shut up so he did.
"But I kept feeding it," she continued. "When I saw it roaming the park, I didn't see an aggressor. I saw a creature just trying to do what it does. Do you remember what happened after I gave it some food?"
Ryan scrunched his face. "No," he lied.
"It gave me one of its feathers then ran off with my food. No harm done to me."
"So what, Shoky?" He demanded. "So you got a typically territorial animal to not attack you. We are not dealing with a cutesy, typically territorial animal here. We're dealing with a human."
Shoky put her hand up. "I'm just saying that everyone, including you, sees danger in a thing where I see fear and a need to survive. Not everything is as it seems. When I look at Nalie, I don't see lies or danger. I see that same fear and need to survive. I know you don't see it but I'm asking you to trust my judgement."
"What about my judgement?" he didn't shout or demand it. Just asked quietly.
"It's the same as everyone else's judgement," she told him dismissively. "The same 'everyone else' that says bofollians are dangerous."
"Just because everyone else says it doesn't make it wrong," he argued.
"Yea, but it keeps people from testing it every so often when everyone just accepts it."
"We don't need to test the sun to see if it still blinds us when we stare at it. We don't need to jump to make sure gravity is still a thing. We don't need to cut ourselves to make sure we'll still die if we don't stop the bleeding. There are some things that don't need to be tested every now and then because it's not just a theory; it's fact."
"It's not, though!" Shoky shouted abruptly. There was great conviction in her voice. "We've never interacted with them once! We just watch their movies and tv shows which are probably over exaggerated anyways. How can we know for sure if that's the only evidence we have?"
Ryan searched his brain. "Do you remember Men in Black?"
The question was so heavy with ridiculousness, the weight of it caused Shoky's head to fall to her right shoulder. She didn't say anything but her expression said, "Really?"
"You remember the part when J. was saying that people are smart enough to handle the knowledge of alien existence and K. said that a person is smart but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals?"
"Well, good thing Nalie isn't people. Just a person. So by that logic, we should be fine."
"No, Shoky," Ryan stopped her. "What I'm saying is, even humans on numerous occasions have admitted that they can't, on a whole, handle the truth. It's just… It's not realistic to dream of a day and age when humans know about the rest of the universe and still have everything be cool."
"Maybe…" Shoky admitted. "Maybe it'll be bad for a bit. But we can work it out. We are a people that can work it out."
"But they're not a people that can listen."
Shoky stared at Ryan, wondering if he'd expand on that statement. He didn't. "Fine," Shoky surrendered. "Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But that doesn't change the fact that there is a girl in your room who supposedly wants to go home. We can do that, at least, because we all know she can't stay here."
"Or we can inform the authorities and have them take care of it," Ryan tried once more. "They'd probably send her home, too. And more legally, as well."
"Unless they do weird experiments on her instead."
"They won't!" Ryan tried to assure her.
"How do you know?!"
"They're just… not that kind of government. You live here. You should know!"
"I know something about this is Really fishy," said Shoky. "How can our great scientist not notice a human girl on their ship for 4 months? Especially when they're so on edge about being discovered in the first place! Something isn't adding up."
"It's a human trick, I'm sure of it," said Ryan stubbornly though that was a good question.
Shoky's face hardened. She didn't want to have to use this next tool of persuasion but there didn't seem to be any way around it, "Ryan, if you don't at least Try to help me sneak Nalie off this planet, I will Never forgive you."
"Seriously?!" Ryan exclaimed indignantly at first but looking at the hard look in her eyes made him realize she was serious. He faltered. What did he love more, his government or his girlfriend? Shoky was the only girlfriend he had ever had. His paranoid, antisocial behavior and ludicrous pilot schedule tended to keep gunons away. His government would likely always be there, barring a human invasion which this could certainly lead to. Not being able to see Shoky smile again made his chest hurt, however. His face twisted at the possibilities. "Fine!" Ryan shot his hands up. "We'll do it your way. But first sign of trouble and I'm telling And I'm throwing you under the bus," he warned her.
Shoky's lips made an O as she lightly shook her head and held up her hands, sarcastically terrified.
"I mean it," Ryan reiterated. "I swear, this is literally every movie where if the dumb teenagers had just called the cops in the first place instead of getting all cocky and naive, they'd still be alive and well."
Shoky rolled her eyes and turned to walk towards the door. "Not everything is like in the movies, Ryan."
"Wait, where are you going?" Ryan called after her.
"Home," she replied shortly.
"Are you crazy? You're leaving me alone with that human?!"
Shoky turned to shrug at him. "Why not? She's not so bad once you stop insulting her species and calling her a lying terrorist."
"I- don't-" Ryan stuttered.
"Night Ryan." she continued walking towards the door. She wasn't actually planning to leave Ryan with the human- way too risky and she wanted to spend as much time with Nalie as she could- but she Did want to punish him.
"Wait!" he grabbed her arm and spun her around. She glared at him, obviously upset. He knew what she wanted. "Shoky," he said gently. "I'm sorry for calling you a dumma flicka. You're not. If anything, you are a pigg kvinna and I was just-"
"Being an åsna?" Shoky offered.
"I was going to say 'really upset' but that works, too." Ryan accepted the insult.
Shoky face briefly cracked into a smile. "Well, I do appreciate being called 'pigg' so I accept your apology."
Ryan smiled back. "Please stay the night."
One corner of Shoky's mouth flicked higher than the other. "Ok."