“Look, Dialla, don’t feel too bad. Literally nobody ever notices the gun in my other hand. Besides, we both know that isn’t going to keep you down for too long. Sorry. *sound of tranquiliser gun* Whilst you’re still awake, we need to talk. If we want to close the portal that’s bringing in those locust beasts, I can’t do this alone. So, whilst I know we’ve double crossed and blown each other up more times than either of us can count, we need to trust each other. Just one more time. Even then, the two of us aren’t going to be enough, so I’m putting together a team. When you wake up, meet me by the vorago near the source of the invasion. I know you won’t walk away from this; your justice won’t let you, and I’m not turning back either – you’re the only one I could ever care about. Like it or not, it seems we’re… trapped together.” *wink to camera* – Dan McNeely, Co-Protagonist of the Trapped Together franchise, 2262. Transcript taken from ‘Trapped Together: Revelations’. How the hell do people watch this tripe?

  “Ok, that’s not even a choice,” Bernard said, shaking his head. “You can easily take on ten duck-sized horses, but a single horse-sized duck? No way.”

  “Yeah, but think of all the little horse bites!” Madison exclaimed. “And they’d be fast too! They’d be at your shins in seconds.”

  “No way. A giant duck with a huge beak and with wings the size of a hang-glider? Not a chance.”

  The discussion of ‘would you rather’ was one Elias had never seen discussed at a high-level research laboratory before, but there was a first time for everything. It was the day before their presentations to the research committee, following which the IGS would commence in full. The months might as well have drowned in a paper cup with how quick they had felt. Elias had all his documentation and presentation ready for his interspecies harness, as well as a few prototypes to show off, but still he felt unsatisfied with the FTL project not quite reaching a clear conclusion.

  How was the strange sensation of providence triggered? Elias had thought it had been a reaction to a primal part of the brain in a stressful situation as it attempts to fall back on its base survival instincts. However, through some imperfect testing of having Chel-Lin startle from him behind, falling backwards off a worktop in a chair to produce a fall response, or even attempting to submerge his head in water for as long as possible, he found nothing had produced the strange precognition so far. Part of Elias felt it just required more time, the one thing he was running out of before he might potentially lose access to Nucleus’ resources.

  Nevertheless, Elias wasn’t particularly sad about it. Though he might lose the chance to work on the DS-Drive in the immediate future, he had earned something that would stick with him for a lifetime.

  “Ok then, no animals,” EXCAL said through an android, only half paying attention to the conversation as he projected his mental view of him playing SigilPlane onto a nearby screen of the recreation room the team found themselves in.

  “Would you rather… try to ding-dong ditch Lucian after one of his regular shouting matches with the other GaltCorp supervisors, or insinuate you want to try the ‘human handshake’ to one of those really clingy looking Cambiar over at Birkdale’s Gate – the ones hanging around that shop full of human souvenirs.”

  “Hmm…” Bernard played with his necklace as he thought.

  Elias could see that the older scientist looked brighter and happier since their discussion about his medical issue. Maybe he had found a solution, maybe not. Either way Elias had a feeling that helping Warnick finding a ‘why’ to his health condition might have been more important than fixing the issue itself.

  Elias considered answering the question but the death stare he got from Chel-Lin made it clear that any sort of Cambiar polygamy would not turn out well for their relationship. Instead, it was Madison who spoke up.

  “Ooh, what caste of Cambiar?”

  “Let’s go with… Delkar? The big red ones.”

  “Ah, no way,” Bernard said. “I’d go with dealing with Lucian. Have you seen the goddamn size of those four-legged tanks? If I made the move on one of them, they’d problem just bust through my door if I turned around and said no afterwards. I should know, made that mistake with a little Onusian back when I was touring Out-Han space. Found her halfway through deconstructing my window.”

  “That’s hot,” EXCAL said.

  He was rewarded with a look of ‘what the fuck’ from everyone else.

  “I-I mean, ‘Boo, who doesn’t want an obsessed alien breaking in after you’.” EXCAL said unenthusiastically. “Man, you guys are stiffs when it comes to a bit of alien excitement. So, what if she tries to break in? Take a chance; she might make some killer pancakes.”

  “I think that grave you’re digging yourself into is only getting deeper, EXCAL,” Kurt said, sipping a beer. “Everyone knows that crazy chicks might be grippy, but they’ll probably cut your cock off if they get in a certain mood.”

  “Fine, fine,” EXCAL admitted, shrugging. He then paused his game, stood and cleared his throat. “So, moving on from the silly hypotheticals, I just wanted to say some things before the IGS.”

  “EXCAL, you don’t need to get sappy,” Bernard said. “It’s not like we’re gonna die.”

  “Yeah, sure, but still. I think it should be said that I want to thank you guys. For everything. It’s been a ride.”

  “Yes, it has been a lot of fun,” Chel-Lin said, giving a subtle wink to Elias. “Do you remember CrashOut? I still haven’t used my IOU from that yet, Elias.” Uh oh. “But… I think I’ll save it for a bit later. Don’t think I forgot, ok?”

  “Uh, sure,” Elias said. “Anyways, remember when we had to hide all the S-Drive parts from Lucian and Rannos when they came for a surprise visit?”

  “I can’t believe you two have managed to get away with all the shit you’ve pull so far,” Kurt chuckled in disbelief. “Hey, remember when Bernard’s misunderstanding led to us playing strip poker? Why haven’t we done that again?”

  “Hey!” Bernard called out. “I thought Elias had made it clear what sort of poker game it was going to be. Besides, none of you said no!”

  “That is technically true,” Kurt said before looking at Elias and Chel-Lin. “And then you two got pissed over UNO, for some reason, and all we could find to replace it was Monopoly!”

  Everyone began to laugh over the memories they had made, good and bad. Whether it was annoying Chel-Lin by spamming voice lines in a co-op horror game, or saving lives during the Nucleus fire, or teleporting rats about, no one would forget the time they had shared with one another. As time wore on, and they all continued to up the ante, people started calling out.

  “And then when Bernard drank from that coffee machine, the one with the little nametag on it, he spat it out all over the wall!” Madison between peals of laughter.

  “Yeah, yeah! And that one time I got stuck in a SigilPlane session with EXCAL for twelve fucking hours trying this one stupid quest, over and over!” Kurt laughed. “Oh, god, what was that boss again?”

  “Dlough, the gnome!” EXCAL said, slapping a mechanical knee. “Oh god, that was almost as funny as the time I walked in on Elias and Chel-Lin in the store room banging each other!”

  The group continued to laugh for a few seconds as the realisation of the last sentence slowly dawned on them all. It was EXCAL who froze first, artificial eyes as wide as dinner plates. Elias had taken a sip of a Super Lemon and let the can fall from his fingers once the words soaked in. Chel-Lin had matched his aghast appearance, mantle rippling more violently than he had ever seen. Kurt simply looked about the frozen expressions of the others before rolling his eyes, as if he already knew.

  It was Bernard who broke the deafening silence. “Fucking come again, what?!”

  “You two are…?” Madison snapped her view between the two of them. Elias couldn’t help but blush cherry red.

  “Um, oops,” EXCAL muttered.

  “What the hell man, I seriously believed you when you said there was nothing going on!” Bernard had stood and couldn’t help but frantically gesture between the two. “Elias, you fuckin’ dog! She’s practically political royalty, you know! And Kurt, what the hell is up with you? Why are you smiling about this whole thing?”

  Kurt had remained cool and calm. He simply looked towards Elias. “What’s there to say? I may not be a genius, but I can tell that two nerds who work that closely, all day, every day, who like to play ‘video games’ together are almost definitely up to something.”

  What the hell?! They did play video games… admittedly usually before or after sex, but that wasn’t the point! That, and the goddamn bastard of a bodyguard was also fucking an alien, but no one seemed cared about that right now!

  “Hey! Well I mean, we did play video games, but.. um…” Elias raised his hands, unable to give a reasonable explanation as why he was banging his lab partner. Instead, he looked to his girlfriend for advice.

  “Wha- Ah- Well- It’s funny you sho- I mean- You see-“ Chel-Lin stammered out, half-formed words rushing from her translator. Then, she turned to him, mantle flowing rapidly. “Elias, they’re onto us!”

  She rushed forward, as quickly as her graceful drifting would allow, and half-dragged him out of his seat with a tendril. Following her cue, Elias pulled her along as he ran back towards their lab, a safe refuge from the dangerous social conundrum they had gotten themselves into.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “Let’s get outta here!” Elias shouted to no one in particular, as if he were running for his life.

  As they left the room, Elias heard one last thing over Bernard’s confused raving.

  “Wait, so how did they actually… do it?” a confused Madison said. “And why In the store room? That can’t be sanitary. EXCAL, I need footage. Now. For uh… safety purposes.”

  A few hours had passed after they found sanctuary within their lab, a crudely scribbled warning on the outside of the door to all who might enter. It wasn’t that they were even thinking of sex, just that neither could stand to discuss the matter with the rest of the team at the moment. Gods, Elias had made it through months of keeping his relationship with his Tylas girlfriend a secret, and the goddamn CAI blew it on the second to last day.

  Still, it had given them some alone time. Funny, as they had little to hide at that point.

  “They are so going to think we’re up to something… salacious.” Chel-Lin muttered, making minute adjustments to the Daksira-Savage-Drive’s BFM component. She was modifying the design to make attachment and detachment easier through magnetic clips affixed to the DS-Drive’s side.

  “I mean, would they be wrong for thinking that?” Elias said, looking up from his side.

  “Well… no. But the point still stands! Now they think we’re such… sluts.”

  “Hey, I’m not a slut.” Elias pouted.

  “And neither am I! You, on the other hand, look a bit like a manwhore.”

  Elias gave her a deadpan look.

  “What?” Chel-Lin said with a shrug. “What sort of normal scientist has muscles like you do?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a good physique. A healthy body is a healthy mind. Besides, I need these muscles for my hoverbike. It isn’t easy holding onto her at full throttle without any training.”

  “That’s true, I suppose. I certainly don’t mind how it makes you look either…” Just as Chel-Lin gave him the usual bedroom eyes, she snapped back to reality. “Oh. So, the rest of them know now. I do feel a bit dirty, considering how they might think of us…”

  “Eh, could be worse. I think Bernard has a few videos of himself with his fans doing you-know-what floating about. Maybe we could prank him with something like that.”

  “That implies the brief sight of seeing Bernard have sex would be worth any discomfort it might cause him.” Chel-Lin shuddered.

  “What, not into religious superwhore rockstar scientist bods?”

  “Hmm, more of a ‘toned, annoying genius with a fat cock’ kind of girl.”

  Elias laughed at the compliment and pushed up his glasses. “Not bad taste, if I say so myself. Yeah, I’d have to agree on the Bernard part – dude probably has caught something nasty from his misadventures, and I’d rather not spend what little time we have left looking at his crotch mushrooms.”

  He thought back to what he said before strip poker. Who knew what sort of freaky STDs had mutated out in the reaches of space beyond the CCH’s borders where Bernard may have ventured. Eurghhh…

  Gross line of thought concluded, Elias finished his side of the adjustments. Elias still desperately wanted that future sight he had seen before, and felt he was on the precipice of a change. With the machine ready, Elias flicked the power switch on the DS-Drive’s battery pack and leant back.

  “Anything different?” Chel-Lin asked.

  The sensation of the DS-Drive was the same as before. A light initial tingling all along his nerves as the S-Field passed through his body, but nothing else. He looked over himself, did a few jumping jacks, but nothing.

  “Nada,” Elias said.

  With no clear changes, they left it on standby as they chatted.

  “So, Elias, what do you want to do after the IGS?” Chel-Lin asked, leaning against his shoulder.

  “It’s a bit of a ‘wait and see’ sort of situation. Depends on how well the Symposium goes. If we all make friends and sing kumbaya, guess I’ll see if I can get a spot in Urestior. Otherwise, I’m sure Birkdale’s will have some spare apartments around. It looked busy, but I’m sure I can find something.”

  “You… wish to stay?”

  Elias turned to her and raised a brow. “Chel-Lin, when I said I would trust you and stick by you, I meant it. I know it might not be easy, hell I know GaltCorp will flip their shit about me staying here if the IGS doesn’t pan out and they need to leave, but I don’t care. I love you, Chel-Lin, and no stupid family bullshit, company drama or anything else will keep me from you. Together – still death does us part. Forever.”

  Elias realised how absolutely soppy that turned out, and felt the need to back off.

  “That’s uh… not a proposal, but uh… I guess what I’m trying to say is-”

  “Elias… I…” Chel-Lin’s eyes quivered. Though she couldn’t cry, Elias was pretty certain she would if she had tear ducts. She wrapped herself around him tightly. Straps dug into his neck, his back, his thighs as she slipped under his clothes. “Together. Me and you. The future better look out – it’s in for some trouble!” She pushed against him, desperate to reduce their already non-existent distance even further.

  And then Elias bumped into something with his thigh and the sound of a glass shattering rang out. Spinning around in shock, he knocked into a beaker, teetering on the brink of falling and reached out to grab it, groaning at the mess he’d made. What a nice moment ruined.

  Except, as he reached down, the intact beaker in his hands he looked to the floor.

  And saw no glass shards anywhere on the floor.

  “Elias?” Chel-Lin said.

  “Whoa,” he muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” She pivoted around him, looking at the small container.

  “I… felt myself knock it off, heard it shatter. But…”

  “But it’s still there. You grabbed it before it hit the ground.”

  Holy shit. Holy shit!

  “Chel-Lin, the readout for the Drive, quickly!”

  They both scrambled to the computer attached to the DS-Drive and scanned through the output data. Most of it was junk, just the usual measurements of the air and other pointless information. Then, a massive chunk of special data stood out.

  “There!” Chel-Lin tapped furiously away. “I see it. It appears to do with some sort of binding coefficient with your QIS Pattern and the S-Field. Are you still feeling it?”

  Elias took a deep breath, and held up his hand. He forced the thought of moving his digits around without actually doing so. Then just before he went to actually move his hand, he saw the shadowy, shaky outline of his hand moving before the real one did. It traced a future-afterimage of every little thing he did, everything he heard, he saw. After a few seconds of standing, he considered walking about the lab, and his view became a mirage of shapes. It took a moment to get used to the various viewpoints he was seeing through at the same time, overlapped images of the path could he take around the lab and seeing the same objects from all angles. In a sense, he immediately became aware of everything around him, down to the finest detail. The Elias of countless futures checked every cupboard, read every open document and touched every surface. Needless to say, it was immediately overwhelming to him.

  He suddenly felt drained, needing to support himself against a workbench from the sudden rush of senses.

  Chel-Lin quietly spoke as she moved in front of him, “Elias, your eyes,”

  She moved to higher row of cupboards before returning with a small hand mirror. Holding it up only further refracted the overwhelming senses bombarding his mind, but a clear reflection of himself stood out. It was as he was normally, light stubble, messy hair, and scratched glasses atop his nose. But there was one significant change - right in the centre of each of his pupils was a tiny flickering pinpoint of yellow light. Immediately, he blinked, thinking it was a trick, but no. Chel-Lin confirmed the ocular oddity and circled him, scanning for other changes. Aside from an feeling of an increasing weight growing crushing his brain, he felt no other change to his body. There was a slight urge to move, to act, but Elias chalked it up to the excitement of the situation.

  The most eye-opening aspect about the whole event was not the prescience itself, but the fact that it felt like a new muscle had been found that he never knew before. The closest he had come to the sense was during the Nucleus fire, but that had been more like a the reflexive motion of a struck knee than an active movement. Stress wasn’t the trigger. No, it had just forced a half-developed aspect of himself into action too early. Now, the sensation was far more natural, though still likely to give him a headache if used for too long, and Elias knew he could use the precognition at will, should the circumstances be right. The only thing his body needed for the act was a strong enough S-Field, the sort to raise goosebumps on his skin and make his nerves itch.

  “Chel-Lin, this is-“ He reached out to grab her strap in a rush of joy, only to react too slowly to what his prescience showed him.

  The second they touched, his skin grabbing hers, all the air in his lungs left him. He dropped to his knees as a sudden rush of icy cold swallowed the air around him. His skin felt raw, his shaky exhalation left fog in the air, and his mouth felt like frost had formed all across his palate.

  The air had rapidly chilled around him, shaking him to his core and sending him into a wheezing fit. It was the coldest he had ever felt. Nothing had ever touched Elias like that before. Not walking into a lab freezer or the one time he had visited a snowy colony planet as a teenager. Nothing even came close to the ice in his chest at that moment.

  That was, except, when he had his energy drained by Chel-Lin. It had only happened a few times – when they had made their first deals together, or when she was feeling experimental during sex – but the feeling was the exact same. Only intensified to an extreme. It was no longer a slight tingle across his skin, leaving pins and needles, it had escalated to draining the air of energy all around him.

  Looking up, he saw Chel-Lin paralysed on the spot. Motionless in the air, her eyes were wide and she had opened up dozens of slits across her body. Her internal core, normally twisting and smouldering with a quiet intensity not too dissimilar to a star, had become violent and raging. Dregs of her internal gases leaked out and seemed to lash out at the air around her. A light buzzing sounded as the gasses linked together between the slits at various points across her body. Little chains and ropes of her gases formed links all over her form. As more and more slits opened up, as if her core were to be fully exposed to the air, she managed to slam her eyes shut and regained some sort of control.

  It was now or never. Elias saw futures where this went on, out of control, and it wasn’t a pretty sight for him. With all his strength, he tore his hand away from her strap. The second they disconnected, the effect Chel-Lin’s energy draining had on the air ceased, and Elias slumped to his side. Chel-Lin, back in the present, shuddered for a second before she slammed the killswitch on the DS-Drive. Darting forward, she grabbed a hold of him. All shadows of the future faded as the present became the only reality open to him.

  “Elias!” she cried. “Elias! Oh, Barald, are you ok? Please, talk to me!”

  “That…” Elias struggled to find the words as he leaned forward. It would likely hurt her to say what he wanted to, but he needed to.

  “Elias… please…”

  “That… was… fucking awesome!” Elias pumped a fist in the air before holding a red and raw hand out for a high five. If she reciprocated, it would probably hurt, but that would be well worth it. In the end, she just pushed his hand down, shaking her head. Seeing he was well enough to cheer, Chel-Lin helped him up. Moving to a different, slightly warmer, spot of the lab, Elias couldn’t help myself.

  “That was amazing! First the whole ‘see the future’ stuff, and now this whole new energy draining stuff! Chel-Lin, we have to test this-“

  “No!” Chel-Lin scolded him. “Elias, you nearly got yourself hurt. You look bad enough as is, and you want to try it again? I think the DS-Drive is getting to you.”

  Maybe it was. Maybe it was just the pure thrill of a whole new avenue to explore. The S-Fields weren’t able to affect the Tylas directly, that had been clear from the testing, but through him, his QIS Pattern, she had been able to tap into a part of herself far stronger than normal.

  As he tried to move towards the DS-Drive, she pulled him back.

  “No, Elias. I mean it. I don’t want you getting hurt. The presentations are tomorrow, and we wouldn’t have enough time anyways. Besides, you said you would be with me ‘til death does us part, right? Don’t think you’re getting away from me so easily.”

  “Guess not. How about we make up for the near-death experiment with some more life experience?” Elias leant forward in expectancy. “Eh? Eh?”

  Chel-Lin rolled her eyes. “Fine, my silly little monkey. But not in the lab. If EXCAL told them everything, then I would like to reduce our chances of being branded workplace exhibitionists.”

  “Agreed,” Elias said, taking Chel-Lin by the waist as he led her back to his doom, flicking the lab lights off as they passed by. “That would be an interesting way to kick the IGS off.”