Ramliel by A.M. Griffin

Chapter Four

 

Mia’s eyes opened on a flutter. One second she was sleep, blissfully unaware of anything, then she was staring at something blurry. Wait. No. Not blurry. She stared at glass. The glass slid to the side and she heard the voices, so many of them over the sounds of the recording.

She was tired of recordings. Wait. Why was she tired of recordings? She couldn’t figure out why. But she was.

“Good morning. We trust that you have had a restful and peaceful slumber. Please take your time to sit up and re-orient to your surroundings. Once you have your bearings, climb out of the stasis chamber and return to your assigned quarters where additional instructions will be provided.”

Mia yawned. Had something gone wrong? The last thing she remembered was hugging Lina and Diana, joking about how the next time they saw each other they would be two hundred years older. She’d climbed into a pod-looking thinking with a comfortable bed and closed her eyes maybe five or ten minutes ago?

She glanced around. Unable to see anything but the padded walls of her stasis chamber, Mia set up. The others were emerging from their stasis pods as well. White things that had an uncanny resemblance to coffins on the floor lined the room by the thousands.

She spotted Lina, a few coffins, er, chambers down from her. They were aligned by numbers. Mia crawled out of her chamber. She felt good and refreshed, relaxed even.

Glancing down at her body, she realized she only wore a plain white bra and panties. Wait. Her legs looked…muscular? She flexed her thigh muscles and angled her legs this way and that. There was no mistaking it. She had muscles now.

“Whoa. Muscles?”

She raised her arms and studied them. She flexed one arm and low and behold, she had biceps. “Where the hell did these come from?”

“Probably the same place these came from,” Lina said as she flexed her arms too. Then did a few body builder poses. “I was killing myself in the gym for years, well, not consecutively, but you get the gist. I tried for a very long time to get guns like these.”

“How do we have muscles after a few minutes in stasis?” Mia asked.

Lina shook her dark head. “Not a few minutes. A few hundred years, remember?.”

Low murmurs filled the room as more women emerged and stretched. Some hugged each other. “Can’t be. I don’t feel like it’s been two hundred years. I feel refreshed.”

Lina chuckled. “Yeah, like you’ve been asleep for two hundred years.”

Mia pursed her lips and thought about it. “Wouldn’t that have made me sluggish?”

Lina let out a laugh-snort. “You’re asking me? The girl who knows just about the same information as you?”

“Right. Maybe Diana would know.”

Lina cocked her hip to the side and fisted her hand on her waist. “The other girl who knows the same amount of information? Sure. Yes, let’s go ask her.” Lina held up a finger. “Or…just hear me out…we could go to our rooms and see what message they have left for us there?”

Mia exhaled heavily. She was being ridiculous. Lina looped an arm through hers. “Come on. I need to get naked and look at my new smoking hot body in the mirror.”

“I kinda want to look at mine too. Do you see my butt?” As they walked, snaking their way through the crowd of women, Mia looked over her shoulder. “Did you see it? It’s like I did a million and one sumo squats.”

“I could bounce a quarter off it,” Lina said, rolling her eyes and dragging Mia down the hall to their rooms.

* * *

Mia stood in front of the whiteboard in her room. Lina had gone to her room and they’d decided to meet later for breakfast. She read through the messages that were left for her.

According to the notifications, she had indeed slept for two hundred years. It was still a little hard to grasp. Two hundred freaking years? That meant everyone back on Earth who she knew and loved was dead. Aunt Denise and Uncle Rob? Dead. Her coworkers? All dead.

She’d known they would be dead when she woke from stasis, but it hadn’t seemed real. None of this really seemed real.

Feeling refreshed and revitalized was normal after stasis, she read. And the muscles? They’d been stimulating her muscles with a TEMS device to prevent muscle atrophy and the real kicker? Apparently, they’d downloaded information into their brains, nothing invasive, just hours and hours of recordings (two hundred years’ worth) teaching the women about Teague, the world, the culture, the rules and the language. She was fluent in all things Teague now.

There was also something else she hadn’t been expecting. The timer located on the top right of the board. A countdown to when they would reach Teague. It was programmed to Teague time, which she now understood.

Three months.

In three months, she would be on an alien planet and meeting her new mate. Her chest constricted and a new wave of anxiety hit her. Three months felt like a long time, but also too short.

Why hadn’t the aliens awakened them with a few days to spare? That would’ve helped with the anxiety. What were they supposed to do for the next three months? It wasn’t like they needed to spend it learning about their new home.

Mia now knew all about Teague. The Yatur people, what a sector and star system was. She knew about comlinks, hovercars and shuttles. She also knew what to expect with sex.

She took a deep breath. Sex.

Sometimes the male would bite the female when he orgasmed. The scary part? The Yatur had sharp pointy teeth.

Not nice. Not nice at all.

An incoming message pinged on the whiteboard. Calling it a whiteboard was a stretch. It was actually a control console. She could use it to communicate with anyone onboard the spaceship. She could pull up a map of the ship and locate where the various activities that were available were being held. There was a schedule of daily events, but what caught her attention at the moment was the incoming message icon that flashed.

She pushed the button. There was a pause then something flickered and took up the entire screen. An image of a little boy. Not like any boy she’d ever seen on Earth, but thanks to the new information downloaded into her brain, she recognized him as a Yatur boy around five years old.

Short, brown hair covered most of his face, leaving the area of his eyes, nose and mouth hairless. The hair on top of his head was longer and spilled around his face. He wore a shirt, like she’d expect a normal boy to wear.

He smiled into the camera, displaying sharp white teeth. “Hello! My name is Ramliel but sometimes my friends call me Ram.” His excitement had him fidgeting in his seat. “You’re coming to visit me from so far away! Is it true that your people didn’t know that other species existed?

“Why don’t you know how to travel in space? Why did we have to send our ship to get you? My father said I’m to show you around when you get here. I can’t drive a hovercar right now, but when you come I’ll be able to. Wouldn’t that be fun?!”

Mia listened to the little boy ramble and with each passing moment her anxiety melted away.

“I have to go eat dinner now, but I’ll talk to you again next week!”

 

Message complete. Do you wish to receive the next?

 

Mia selected the option to play the next message. She wasn’t disappointed. He was just as jovial as the first time. This time he showed her his favorite toy. It was a figurine of an animal that he hoped to see when he visited his grandfather’s house which was located on the southern tip of his planet. He told her that she would like his grandfather because he always carried snacks in his pockets.

His favorite treat was made up of sugar and was sticky. He couldn’t have it often because he often made a mess of it and his mother complained. It all sounded so…normal. Mia almost forgot she was listening to an alien and that alien child was now grown and waiting for her to be his mate.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Come in!”

Diana poked her head through the doorway. The pudginess that had been on her brown face before stasis was gone. There was a lean look to her now when combined with her high sculpted cheekbones.

“Damn girl,” Mia said, touching her own face. “Were they giving out cheekbones while we were in stasis and I missed out?”

Diana chuckled and entered her room. “You see my hair?” She unraveled it from her bun. It fell in thick coils down her back. “My hair has never been this long or healthy!”

Mia ran a hand through her curls. It was also longer and thicker. She’d gone natural a few years ago and hadn’t been able to grow it beyond her shoulders. Now it hung down her back. “They must’ve given us some helluva vitamins. They had to be a doozy to keep us fit and healthy for the past two hundred years.”

Diana ran a hand down the side of her body. “My body feels good, but my stomach and brain are at odds with one another. My brain is saying I’m not hungry, but my stomach is like, ‘Bitch, put some real food in me’.”

Mia chuckled. Her stomach growled. She opened her eyes wide and a laugh burst from her mouth. “I guess I’ll be eating too. Let’s stop by and get Lina.”

“She already did,” Lina breezed into Mia’s room. She glanced at the video of Ram, paused mid-laugh and holding up a piece of his favorite candy. “Oh, cute. Have you fast forwarded to what he looks like now?”

Diana inhaled a sharp breath. “Lina! You didn’t!”

Lina laughed. “Of course, I did. I mean, I’m going to go back and listen to all the ramblings of a child, but I wanted to know what the end result was.”

“These videos are a way for us to get to know our new mates,” Diana said. She lifted her chin, angling it. “I think it’s nice that we’ll get to see them grow up. It’s sweet.”

Mia turned back to the screen. “It is sweet.”

Diana’s stomach growled. “But we have three months to get through them. Right now, let’s go to the dining hall and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

“Me too,” Lina agreed.

Mia took one more look at the screen before leaving. She wondered if the dining hall served sugary and sticky sweets like the one Ram held.