Fenrik’s Fate (Abandoned on Niflheim)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

FENRIK

I must have dozed off in the night because I jerked awake to find myself in the early light of pre-dawn. The fire had dwindled and the room chilled. I stood and rushed to the creature I’d found in the night. She wasn’t in the same position I had left her in. At some point in the night, she had rolled onto her side and curled up in a ball. I cringed, realizing that probably meant she was still cold, but was also grateful for the sign of life.

I looked her over. Her small mouth was still hanging open, and I could tell she was breathing. I wondered what other signs of life she might have in common with an orc. I thought about checking if her heart was beating but then I stopped to consider whether or not she had a heart. This had to be the most confusing situation I had ever experienced. I wanted to ensure her safety, but I didn’t want to scare her. I squatted next to the bed and could see her eyes flickering back and forth under her lids.

I wavered back and forth as I examined her up close. I’d never discovered… I didn’t really know what. She wasn’t from Niflheim, and I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know if there was a protocol for what to do with a creature that appeared in a circle of light in the middle of the woods. This was far out of my area of expertise as a hunter. Given I was so much larger than her and likely looked very foreign to her, I didn’t want her to run screaming the minute I woke her. I looked at her closely. A small scattering of light brown dots peppered the bridge of her nose. They were adorable.

Finally, realizing I’d have to go hunt for food at some point, I decided to wake her. I’d rather she wake up with me in the cabin than wake up alone and go wandering out into the cold looking for help.

I brushed a hand across her shoulder, pleased to find her skin warm to the touch. I shook her gently. She shifted and groaned, rolling onto her back. She blinked a couple of times as she came to. She propped herself up on her elbows, continuing to look around when she finally met my gaze.

“Wha—what are you?” she asked.

Surprised to find I could understand her, I responded, “I’m an orc, what are you?”

“I’m a human.” She looked very alarmed.

“I’ve never met a human before. Do you know how you got here?”

“Do I know how I got here? Shouldn’t I be asking you that? You’re the one who attacked me in the club!” Her face screwed up in anger.

I tried to remain calm. After what I had already been through, I didn’t need to be accused of attacking someone.

“I didn’t attack you in a club,” I said, raising my hands to show I meant no harm. “I don’t even know what a club is.”

“I was in the club, in the bathroom. The lights went out, then someone— you —stabbed me in the neck with an injection thing and knocked me out,” she explained, looking very disturbed.

“I didn’t stab anyone in a bathroom. I found you crumpled in a heap outside of the cabin in the middle of the night.”

“What?!” Her eyes got even bigger, and her skin seemed paler.

She scooted back on the bed as far away from me as she could. So much for not scaring her.

I stepped away and sat in the chair next to the bed, trying to show I wasn’t a threat. “How about this? You tell me what you last remember, and then I’ll tell you what I remember, and we will figure out how our paths crossed. Does that seem fair?”

She still looked very hesitant but nodded.

“Okay, what is the last thing you remember doing?” I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle. Whatever a human was, she made me think of a small, scared animal—like the kyrrs that hid in the undergrowth of the forest.

“My friends and I got all dressed up to go to the club.” At my confused look, she paused. “A club is a place with loud music and dancing and a lot of alcohol, usually.”

“So you went to the club for fun?”

“Yes.” She seemed relieved that I was following.

“Alright, and what happened at the club?”

“Well, we were all drinking, and I was pretty drunk, and I asked one of my friends to come to the bathroom with me.”

“Okay, and you said that is where you were attacked?” I stood to stoke the fire.

"Yes, it all went dark, and everybody disappeared. Then a cold hand grabbed me and that's the last thing I remember.”

I took a deep breath. “Alright, my turn. You are on Niflheim, a planet inhabited by orkin. I have never heard of humans before. I have been running for my life for the last several hours. My entire tribe is trying to find me because I refused to marry the jarl’s daughter.”

I explained to her how I found her, but didn't mention how pretty her little face had been poking out from under her hair.

“Your skin was cold to the touch, and it is freezing up here, so I took you in and did what I could to get you warm. I wasn’t sure if you would make it through the night—knowing nothing about how, er, humans function.”

She looked at me, incredulous. "So what you're saying is I was dropped here by a UFO.”

“I don’t know what a UFO is, and until just now, I didn’t know there were other places to live outside of Niflheim, but that seems to be true?” I said, voice going up a pitch as if I was asking her for confirmation.

“You don’t have a spacecraft?” she asked.

“Nothing that flies.”

“And you’ve never heard of other planets, Earth? Mars?”

“Nope.” I was having trouble following what she was saying. I’d never heard most of the words she was using. How did she expect me to know how she got here? She was the one who just appeared out of the sky.

“And you really don’t know what a club is?” she asked, giving me a skeptical look.

“Well, it sounds similar to one of our celebrations, but we don’t have a place called a club ,” I said, emphasizing the new term.

“So you expect me to believe some other aliens abducted me, and they just decided to leave me here? How do I know you didn’t abduct me?”

“Well, for one, do I look like I can fly some sort of sky disk?” I spread my arms wide.

My clothes were made of a mixture of natural fibers and leather. Whatever abducted this human was of a far more advanced species than orkin. She looked me over and then glanced around the room.

“Do you even have electricity here?” she asked, alarmed.

“I don’t know what that is.” This is not going well.

She looked down at her lap and took a couple of steadying breaths. “So, I am not saying I don’t believe you. Just let me walk through this. I was abducted by aliens, taken from Earth, and dumped on a planet that not only doesn’t have space travel but doesn’t even have electricity. Based on this… I have no way home?” She said this very calmly, as if she let herself slip for just a minute, she’d fall apart.

“That seems accurate,” I said, unsure if that would make her feel better or worse.

“Okay, and what are your intentions with me?” filled with trepidation.

“What do you mean, my intentions?” Taking my seat back in the chair next to the bed she was still in.

“What do you plan to do with me?”

“Well, so far, I planned to keep you alive through the night. I didn’t have a plan beyond that.” I shrugged—I really hadn’t thought of a long-term plan. Keep delicate thing alive was the only thought I had.

“So you saw an alien creature and brought it in, even though you’re running for your life?” She looked at me skeptically, pulling the blanket tighter around her bottom half.

“Well, I could see you weren’t dressed for the winters up in Niflheim. You’re barely wearing any clothes. I couldn’t just let you die on my doorstep.”

“So there’s no end game where you make me your sex slave or lock me in a dungeon?”

I was trying really hard not to be offended while also not making her feel like a complete idiot, but it was proving to be challenging.

“No sex slave, no dungeon,” I said, voice clipped. “Nurse you back to health and go from there.”

I looked again at her pale, skinny shoulder poking out from the blankets with the thin pink tunic strap pushed to the side. She definitely could use a real meal. But seeing her tunic reminded me of the satchel.

“Oh! And you had this with you!” I grabbed the bag from the floor. “Maybe that could explain to us what kind of aliens brought you here?”

She unwrapped herself gingerly, revealing more of the hot pink tunic. I couldn’t help but notice how it hugged her curves. It had slid down in the night, and her breasts were almost popping out of it. I averted my gaze as she adjusted herself. As she sat up, she tentatively took the bag from me.

“You found this with me?” she asked as she dumped the contents on the bed. For being such a small bag, it had a lot in it.

I looked at the items from her bag. I didn’t recognize any of them. There was a small card with what looked to be the human’s face on it. Then it hit me that I’d never even asked her name. I picked up the card and looked at it. There were letters on it, but not in any language I recognized.

“That’s my ID. I used it to get in the club,” she explained.

“They only let certain humans into the club?”

“You have to be at least twenty-one to drink alcohol, and since clubbing is mostly about drinking and dancing, they only let people who are twenty-one enter.”

“And you’re twenty-one?” I asked, realizing that based on her size, I couldn’t be sure of how old she was.

I hadn’t thought of her age until now. She didn’t have wrinkles or gray hair like our older orkin, but she seemed to be of age.

“I’m twenty-two. How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. I don’t know if we measure time in the same way here, though. How old are you when you are considered of age?”

“Generally eighteen. But you can’t drink until you are twenty-one. What about you?”

“We consider sixteen to be of age, but most orkin don’t move out of their family home until they take a partner, which ranges.”

I looked back at her ID, and she looked sad in the image.

“Why are you sad in your ID?” I asked.

“Oh, the DMV is notorious for taking the worst photos. They don’t give you any warning. They snap the photo.”

“And it says your name? Can you tell me? I can’t read human.”

She laughed. “It’s not in human. It’s in English. We speak English where I am from. My name is Tracy. What’s yours?”

“Fenrik. And we don’t speak English on Niflheim. We speak Kveoja. How is it that I can understand you? Do you know Kveoja?”

“Nope.” She raised her brows, sitting up straighter in the bed. “Are you speaking English?”

“No.” I felt like we were making progress, and now we’d reached another hurdle. How were we talking to each other if we didn’t even speak the same language?

“Well, that’s fucking weird. Maybe the aliens that dumped me here took pity on me and installed a translator in me or something?”

“You think that’s possible?” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I didn’t understand what “installing a translator” meant, she was already overwhelmed.

“Well, up until about five minutes ago, I didn’t believe in aliens, so…”She raised her hands palms up, shrugging as if at a loss. “I guess, I am happy I didn’t have some sort of weird alien surgery performed on me.”

“Reasonable.” I didn’t know what else to say, having even fewer answers than she did.

I went back to looking at the contents of her bag. She had several small tubes of what she called “makeup” and a few scraps of paper she said were “receipts.” I saw one scrap of paper that looked different and picked it up. It was in a language I recognized, so I held it up.

“Do you recognize this?” I asked.

“No.” She shook her head.

I examined the paper. The print was in Kveoja, but it was written in a very odd script. I read it quickly.

Human female. Age: twenty-two Earth years. Category: undesirable. Cause: system compromised by illicit substances.

I had no idea what that meant. Undesirable? Illicit substances? I didn’t want to say anything to offend her, but this information didn’t seem positive. I grimaced at Tracy’s expectant face. There was no way around it. I’d have to tell her if we had any hope of figuring it out.

I repeated it to her and asked, "Do you know what that means?"

To my surprise, she laughed.

“They didn’t want me because I was drunk!” She snorted, and it was strangely adorable.

“Because you had been drinking alcohol?” I clarified.

“Yep,” she said, still laughing. “Actually, I have never been happier that I decided to go out and get wasted. Whatever that creature who abducted me had planned for me has to be worse than your lack of a plan for me, right?”

I tried to think of reasons someone might abduct a human, and I had to admit I couldn’t come up with any good ones. I had to agree that my lack of any intent was better than ill intent.

“So, what now?” I asked Tracy.

“I dunno, dude. It’s your planet. You tell me.”