Maggie awoke on a green velvet chaise sofa. Her body had been laid here in a sort of delicate way, with her knees brought close to her chest and her hand resting on her forehead as if she'd had a bit of a faint. She was still wearing the long, cotton blue dress she had been wearing earlier that day, but her hair was newly made up and once again covered with her wrap. Her platform wedges were off and set nicely as a pair on the glass floor at the end of the sofa. She looked down at them and then lifted off the sofa to peer down below at the goings on beneath her. Whatever sort of room it was below was empty, from what she could see at least, just a white tiled room with benches and mirrors and nothing else. Maggie breathed deeply and then blinked and then looked up into the face of a tall, thin, lizard-like man.
“Right,” she nodded and looked all around her at once. The room was silver and metal and space-age, littered with other green velvet sofas and tan leather arm chairs and small, dark wooden end tables. The floor was transparent glass all around the room, and along the walls there were cubes of thick glass that looked out into the darkness of space. Behind her was a single open archway and a long, dark corridor ran off of it. She looked back at the man before her. “Where am I?”
“You're aboard The Ship,” Izen said softly. Behind him, sprawled out on his stomach on his own green velvet sofa, Idec stared at Maggie. He had his scaly, pointed chin resting on his knuckles and were he not so lengthy and the age lines not quite so etched into his face, he might have looked like an excited child with a new pet or infant sibling.
“Cool, cool. Uh, does the ship have a name?”
“No, it's just The Ship.”
“Mmhmm, and where are we going?”
“Around The Universe.”
“Ah, the universe?”
“The Universe.”
“Yep, on THE ship.”
“On The Ship.”
Maggie rolled her eyes.
“I kicked the shit out of him,” Maggie gestured towards Idec who now sat upright at the edge of his sofa and looked at Maggie with a hopeful gleam in his eye.
“When we were wrestling,” Idec began.
“Fighting,” Maggie interjected. She sat at the edge of the sofa and slipped her wedges back on. She stood up and turned away from Izen and Idec to better view the room she was in. She she wandered, the rooms below her shifted around and she caught glimpses of other reptilians in various revolving rooms, each room more absurdly Victorian than the next even as they were surrounded by the seamless silver metal of the exterior of the ship. The movement of the rooms made her dizzy and she walked slowly across them.
“When we were so close,” Idec's voice dropped several octaves and for the first time the usual rough, grainy quality of his voice was smoothed by romance. “I bit you.”
“You tried to eat me, and I jammed an iron rod into your abdomen.”
“No no, I didn't want to eat you. There's a difference. I just bit you. See, you're still here, in tact.”
Maggie turned back around and stood before the two alien men. Idec was falling over himself on the sofa, his eyes pleading and naive. Izen stood with his arms crossed lazily over his chest, his great, ponderous head seeming to nod off.
“What Idec is trying to explain is that he turned you.”
Maggie looked confused. The rooms below had seemed to lock into place and the spinning sensation dissipated. The movement of the ship could not be felt, but from the far window across from her Maggie could almost glimpse the speed with which they were travelling.
“In the old days,” Izen continued, taking a seat on the sofa Maggie had woken up on and leaning his head back to speak indolently up at the ceiling.”We used to...mate.”
“Mate?”
Izen gave a heavy sigh, as if he were remembering something from very long ago and without much fondness. “We haven't mated in many, many years. But our dear Idec, it seems, has fallen in love.”
Idec returned his chin to its resting spot atop his knuckles. Maggie's eyes widened. “So I'm his...mate?”
“Yeah.” Izen sluggishly moved his great big head and looked down his nose at Idec. “You don't have to have sex with him or anything that old fashioned.”
Maggie looked away from them both and moved closer to the edge of the room where there was a window just to her right.
“Unless you want to.”
Maggie turned and looked back at Izen who was again staring at the ceiling.
“So, what do we do now, then?” Maggie asked.
“We wait,” Izen drawled.
Idec used a long, sharp fingernail to pick at a piece of ligament that was stuck in his teeth, which had been bugging him for sometime. Maggie turned back to the window and leaned her shoulder against the wall as she looked out into the heavy darkness as they sped off through endless space. She sighed, a soft and gentle disappointed sigh, turned her back and leaned against the cold metal wall.
“Shit.”
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