Chapter Text
"Fuck you."
You take a step back and the hot chocolate only hits the bottom of your pants and your shoes, most of it going all over the sidewalk. You were definitely drunker than she was, and her angry, pale face swims before you, Christmas lights blurring and fading in and out behind you.
"Fuck you too!" you shout, once your brain has had a few seconds to process the fact that somebody threw hot chocolate at you. You aren't sure who she is or what you said, so you just back up with your middle finger in front you like a crucifix holding back a vampire. You don't notice your boot hit the edge of the sidewalk, sending you staggering backwards out into the road, arms pinwheeling. A bright light blinds you as you hear a horn and tires screeching.
...
You choke on a cloud of dust, feeling gritty sand under your fingertips as the snow melts off of your clothes and starts soaking into your heavy wool coat. Your fingers tingle as the hot air chases away the chill clinging to you for a few moments anyway.
Pulling off your hat and unwrapping your scarf, you stand up and shove them under your arm. The road slush on your boots is soaking into thirsty ground, making reddish-brown mud. Rocky cliffs rise up behind you, rolling dunes stretching away in the other direction. The sun is slightly angled toward the cliffs so you start heading that way. Hopefully that's the way the sun is going too.
When you strip off your jacket, you try to hold it over your head to block some of the sunlight, but after only a few minutes you can feel the sunburn settling into your exposed skin. Is this hell? It definitely has that hellish feeling. You remember watching something on the internet about how even though deserts look barren, they're actually full of all kinds of plants and animals. Taking a moment to scan your immediate surroundings, though, there's no sign of anything. No bug tracks, no scraggly desert thorn bushes, just powdery red sand and the cliffs taunting you with their promise of shade.
You did kinda luck out though, the sun seems to be setting behind them, so their shadows are stretching out toward your shambling steps. There might be actual shade if you just keep marching forward. It's hard going, though, and you take a second to dig around in your pocket. When you pull your phone out, there's no signal. "NO SIGNAL" right there. Well, fuck. Not that you're particularly surprised. You'd have been shocked if it'd been the other way, to be honest. You check your map app and find there's no GPS signal either. Just a flashing blue dot over the last place you were: across the street from the bar, right next to the park. While the blue dot pulses and "SEARCHING" blinks slowly on the screen, you drop it back into your pocket and start walking again. Yeah, you're definitely not there anymore.
It's another two hours before you make it to the shade. Your lips are cracking, and you can tell you're already sunburned to shit and back, although you imagine it would have been worse if you hadn't had your coat over your head. There's no sweat on your clothes either, just salt. That's bad. You'd look up how long it takes somebody to die of dehydration, but your phone isn't working, now is it? At least you aren't drunk anymore. You're about as far from drunk as you've ever been in your life. Even though the heat is less murderous and the shade feels wonderful, you only stop for a little while to catch your breath before you start walking again. You keep your eyes on the cliffs as you get closer. The wall is made of reddish-orange rock, with smooth, round holes of various sizes scattered across its surface. Caves. Caves out of the heat. Maybe even water. You're probably already dehydrated. Without water, you're definitely going to die.
It's another several hours before you collapse with your back against the cool stone, producing a cloud of powdery red sand.
"I thought I was going to have to go get you." The voice is high-pitched and scratchy. You turn your head slowly and see two long whiplike antennae sticking out of the manhole-cover-sized opening in the stone next to you. The small yellow-brown hand that you can see is covered in chitin. Just two fingers and a thumb, and the last digit of each is a long hooked talon.
Another arm slides out holding a scuffed aluminum canteen in a padded camo sleeve. It sloshes enticingly with water, and you snatch it immediately, unscrewing the cap and drinking deeply. It tastes metallic, but it's cool and makes you feel like you're not about to die. As the refreshing liquid suffuses your body, the fact that you're not about to die lets you consider what the fuck is going on. You sit up slightly, peering into the hole that just produced the water for you.
The two antennae wiggle slightly, and you see a slightly oblong face looking up at you. There are two big pitch-black eyes that wrap around the sides of the ovoid head, the thick bases of the antennae right in the middle of the face, making the eyes look c-shaped from the front. The chitin is darker yellow-brown than the limbs, with a heavy plate covering the small mandibles and several accessory mouthparts on either side. There's a round dark brown chitin plate behind the head that covers up the neck and shoulders, and short, dark brown wing cases behind that blocking off your view of anything else. The two arms you can see are more yellow than brown, each with a three fingered hand and long, dark spines down the sides of the thin forearms.
It's a cockroach. A giant, bipedal cockroach.
You fall back and try to scoot away on your butt, kicking up a cloud of fine red powder.
The cockroach emerges from the hole in the rock in less than a second, instantly on her feet. You see a humanoid torso wearing a camo vest with military-style webbing, a pair of wide hips and very thick thighs in camo cargo shorts, and a wide round insect abdomen behind her. Her lower legs are reddish brown with long spines like her arms, ending in tiny feet with two hooked talon toes each. She has four arms, but only two look usable. The top pair are the ones you've seen before, and the ones under those are small and curve in on themselves, covered in long interlocking spines and nodules and tucked against her sides.
It's the lower pair that vibrate when she talks, producing that weird, chirpy voice you heard before.
"Hey! Stop!"
You throw the canteen at her, but she snags it out of the air, her arm flicking up lightning-fast and grabbing the strap. You keep scurrying backwards away from her.
"Stop that! I just saved your life!" She holds her hands up, not approaching, and you take the opportunity to scramble to your feet, quickly realizing that although she might be huge for a cockroach, she's only about half your height. She's slightly less creepy when you're looking down at her like this, her ovoid head pointed up at you and the canteen swinging back and forth as she holds the strap in her raised claws.
"Yeah, thanks for the water," you say, slowly backing away.
She slips the canteen strap over her shoulder. You can see she's got a lot of little pouches and things on her belt and clipped to the webbing on her chest.
"I don't mean..." She crosses her arms over her chest, stomping one tiny foot. "Okay, well that too, but I mean from the bus. The bus that was going to hit you."
"Bus?" You'd been stomping through this desert for half a day. You'd almost managed to forget that you'd been standing outside the park a few hours ago. Right. New Years party. Extreme inebriation. So she's saying she's the reason you're here in the first place?
"Yeah." She takes a step toward you and you hold your ground this time. "The bus. You were about to get hit by a bus and I pulled you out of there. I rescued you." She puts her hands on her exceptional hips, her antennae wiggling as she keeps staring at you.
You slowly look around at the barren hellscape you find yourself in. The towering rocky cliffs, the sea of red dunes and infinite-seeming expanse of fine sand.
"I'll be sure to thank you properly while I'm dying of exposure." You try to sound as unamused as possible. "It kinda looks like you just drug things out."
"Well, we aren't staying here," she says. She's made it all the way up to you, and you let her approach. She pokes you on the hip with the end of her talon. "This is a dead world. There's literally nothing alive here other than us. Now come on."
She turns.
"Woah, woah, woah, hold on a second. I've got a lot of questions that need answering," you say.
"Later, later! Let's get somewhere more comfortable." She doesn't even turn around. Watching the only other living thing start walking away, you figure you don't have much of a choice. Once you get back to where you started, she disappears back into the hole she came out of. Before you can decide how much you don't want to crawl into it, she pops back out, hauling a backpack with her.
"Here," she says, shoving it into your arms. It's a canvas backpack on an aluminum frame with several big external pockets. There's also some things strapped to the frame under the bag itself. If you had to guess, it's probably a tent and a sleeping bag: long-ish bundles in stuff sacks that are cinched closed. It's honestly not that heavy, and clearly sized for someone much shorter than you. You take it, loosening the straps before you put it on. She nods, seemingly pleased with this outcome, and scurries over to one of the bigger holes. It's a good bit above the ground, but she doesn't even slow down, scurrying straight up the wall and over the lip. This one is big enough for her to stand up in, although you're going to have to hunch over. It's only about chest high to you, so with a bit of scrambling, you pull yourself inside, sitting against the smooth, cool curve of the wall.
Without asking, your new friend starts digging through the backpack, mostly taking things out of the big exterior pouch that's right in the middle. You brush her antennae away because they keep flicking against your face while she digs around in there. In such close quarters, you also pick up on her unpleasant oily smell. Like a fryer that needs cleaning.
She comes away with some big square devices in chunky, scuffed plastic cases. One is rectangular, with a tiny black and white CRT screen on one of the short sides and what looks like an oscilloscope on a little panel that she flips out on top. The device has two little feet on the CRT side that elevates it so you don't have to lay down on your stomach to see the screen. She plugs two heavy black plastic antennae on round metal bases into the other side, connected to the device with large-diameter coiled black cable and a big heavy metal plug that reminds you of a headphone jack about the size of your finger. Like what your buddy used to plug his electric guitar into the amp.
"So, what's all that crap?" you ask.
She holds a finger up. "One sec. I need to pay attention. Just let me set this up."
She spends some time adjusting the distance between the two antennae, and angling them one way and then the other. She has the oscilloscope panel facing that side of the device so she can see it, and keeps looking at it frequently as she makes her adjustments. You take the time to dig through the bag and put your coat, scarf and hat into it. Looks like some cans with no labels, a jar of peanut butter, a plastic jug full of water, and some big freezer bags with somethings wrapped in tinfoil inside of them. Once she's satisfied, she plugs a big square controller with a pistol grip on the bottom into the CRT side. The flat top of it has some dials and sliders, and there's a chunky red trigger at the top of the grip with a clear plastic cover over it.
"Are you going to tell me what the hell you're doing?" you ask as she peers into the grainy display about the size of your palm.
"Sure, in a little bit." She sounds awfully dismissive.
You lean over her shoulder, but you can't really make much of anything out. There's more than just the screen there, though. There's a chunky white 4x4 keypad next to the screen and four red digital displays underneath with long strings of numbers. She clicks a big knurled nob on the machine itself and the numbers change. As you look more closely at the display and the keypad, your vision starts to swim. You think they're Arabic numerals, but some of them are not right, and seem to be different when you blink or look away. It's starting to give you a headache. You lean back, blinking and massaging the bridge of your nose.
"Base ten?" Roach girl turns her head toward you.
"Huh?"
"This thing"--she pats the machine, deciding to finally explain what she's doing--"Lets us move through different kinds of reality, and it generates what's called ontological alignment when you do, which is how we can understand each other even though we're speaking completely alien languages. It's why I had to pull you onto a dead world. It tries to shift the traveler, which is you and is about to be us, into alignment with whatever the dominant sapient lifeforms in the area are, which was just me in this case, and let you understand each other, read the writing if you're literate, and so on. But it's not perfect, so like, your number system is probably base ten. This number pad is base twelve, so your brain isn't sure what to do with the symbols that don't exist in your native writing system. It's something that your brain will get better at faking the more you do it. The same effect is also why you barely freaked out when you saw me. Your brain knows I'm a person because we're ontologically aligned."
"Uh, I was pretty fucking freaked out when I saw you." But when you think about it, the weird claw didn't even give you pause. It wasn't so much that she's a giant talking bug, it's more that she's a giant talking cockroach. You feel a little bad that thinking about it now makes you kinda want to push her out of the hole with your foot.
"Oh, I'd hardly call that freaking out. Trust me, without this thing it'd be way worse." She waves her hand dismissively.
"Anyway, as long as we both travel at the same time to the same place, we'll be able to understand each other too, because we'll be aligned with the same thing, in case you were worried about that. Now let's get going. This place sucks."
Finally, she walks around to stand between and in front of the two antennae and motions you to join her, holding the big control thing in her hand. You stand next to her as she messes with the sliders and dial on the controller, intently focused on the oscilloscope's flickering green display. You slowly crab walk next to her, feeling like you don't really have much of a choice. It's not like you want to stay here.
"Okay now hold my hand." She reaches toward you with on e three-fingered claw.
"What?" You look down at her hand with mild displeasure, noticing the oily sheen.
"Don't be an ass," she says, opening and closing her curved talons.
"I feel like you're fucking with me. Why would I need to hold your hand?"
"For fuck's sake." She grabs your wrist, then flicks open the plastic cover and pulls the trigger with a heavy metallic click.
You sort of expect a flash of light or a sensation of movement or something, and you do stumble slightly as the ground underneath you goes from being smooth curved stone to relatively flatter grass and gravel. The machine drops slightly too, and you look around at what looks like the camping area of a state park. The tall trees look kinda like pines, there are green-painted wooden benches, a little parking area, what looks like a public bathroom made out of cinder blocks, and cool, crisp air that's a marked improvement over the boiling heat of where you just were.
"Call me Necla," your companion says, letting go of your hand after a little squeeze. You immediately wipe you palm on your pants leg.
"My name is-" you start, but Necla(?) immediately cuts you off.
"Don't tell me your actual name," she says as she starts to disassemble the machine again, the plugs coming out with satisfying clicks. "Just make something up. Like Sam. Let's just assume your name is Sam."
"Okay... " you say awkwardly, putting the pack on the ground.
She wraps the wires up, putting everything except for the main body of the machine away and pulling out several sections of metal rod. She starts to screw them together, creating a pole about as long as she is tall. with a round flat base. She uncoils a heavy black wire from it and plugs the big hexagonal plug on the other side into a socket in the machine. Shoving about three quarters of the rod into the grassy ground next to the gravel, she looks up at you.
"Step on this," she says.
"Why? What does it do?"
"It's the charger," she says with obvious exasperation.
You're not sure what she's so pissy about. You're the one that's put out here. You don't argue, though, driving it the rest of the way into the ground with the heel of your shoe. She clicks a switch on the device and you feel a tingling on your skin. An unpleasant electrical sensation traveling up through the bones of your legs. There's slight resistance as you pull your feet up and take several steps backwards.
"That'll charge the orgonne battery." She dusts her hands off on her shorts, hauling her backpack towards one of the picnic tables. "We need to leave it for a few hours. Come sit over here or something."
You kinda want to push her over. She still hasn't really explained anything and you're starting to get annoyed. Even if, and it's definitely an 'if,' she actually saved your life, you're still totally lost with no idea where you are or where you're going. You sit down heavily across from her.
"So, you gonna tell me what I'm doing here?"
Her antennae flick and jitter. She grabs one, bending it down and running it through her mostly-concealed mandibles, using her fingerlike mouthparts to slowly move it up as she cleans it. Her secondary arms produce a single, sharp buzz, kinda like she's clearing her throat.
"Well, obviously, I kinda need some help, which I figure is a fair trade for saving your life and such, you know? I think it's fair that you'd help me." She finishes one antenna and starts on the other.
"About that." You lean forward, putting your elbows on the table and propping your chin on your hands. "Why the hell did you pick me, how the hell did you pick me, and how the hell do you know I wouldn't have been fine?"
"Uh, obviously you're not going to be OK if you get hit by a bus," she says, starting back on the first antenna again.
You frown when she doesn't say anything else. Her antenna cleaning becomes downright meticulous.
"Look, it's, let's say 'safe' to pull out somebody right before they die. The machine can kinda detect when you're, like, let's say... "
You raise an eyebrow, starting to get more and more annoyed.
"There's no nice way to say this, OK?" she finally stops chewing her antennae and throws her hands up. "It's really disruptive to pull things out of one reality into another, so the machine can kinda detect how big the ripples are going to be, and making big ripples is, like, something you really don't want to do, for a lot of reasons. The more people that know something isn't there that should be is kinda the easiest way to figure out how big the ripples are going to be. So, you know, I keyed in on you and-"
"Wait, wait." You sit back on the bench, waving your hands in front of you as if it would clear the ideas out of the air. "You're saying that objectively, nobody would give a shit if I wasn't there?"
"That's definitely not how I'd put it," she says, leaning closer. Her voice wavers a little though. "You are healthy, and tall and stuff, and educated. There are a lot of factors! There are lots more people less important that definitely wouldn't have worked!"
"This is fucking amazing," you say, turning your back on her and leaning against the table. "So my entire life gets effectively destroyed because I'm some kind of friendless loser?"
"No, that's not true! Plenty of people are definitely going to probably notice you aren't around anymore! They'll totally miss you for at least a little bit!" She puts a claw on your shoulder and you think about brushing it off but don't. It's weird and prickly.
"And hey!" She gives your shoulder a little squeeze. "It means you didn't get hit by a bus! And you get to go on a cool adventure with a cute girl, right?"
This time you do brush her hand off, turning to look into her shiny black eyes. She's crawled halfway onto the table to reach you, and you notice the unpleasant way the light shines off of her greasy-looking yellow-brown carapace, the long hairlike spines on her forearms and lower legs, the way every little movement she makes is sudden and twitchy. The way she looks like a giant fucking cockroach person.
"Necla, right?"
She nods.
"You're definitely not cute."