100 words of Ugly Ducklings
May. 12th, 2020 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_natureshttps://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/375006.html?thread=2193603806#cmt2
They found the child in a battle-scarred escape pod on the bank of the river. A small, fragile humanoid, with large, pale green eyes, a shock of golden hair, and loose, tawny skin. His body was oddly out of proportion compared to other species with the same basic configuration: arms and torso longer than average, legs shorter; there were bumps and lumps that suggested more under the skin, but that were filled with only a strange, cartilaginous substance. It left him clumsy and off-balance, a shambling figure compared to his playmates. No recognisable sex organs: he'd chosen 'boy' once he'd fit into the human colony well enough to form a preference.
He developed at the same rate as the human children until he hit the appearance of a ten-year-old, then seemed to stop, struck down by a mysterious illness that made his loose skin fill with fluid at the slightest digestive imbalance. There was a whole cocktail of minerals he had to be kept away from, or else he'd swell up and lose consciousness, and he annoyingly insisted on craving foods that contained them.
Overall he was a complete mystery, but he was kind-hearted and clever, and most importantly he was one of their own.
That being said, they'd have preferred to know whether he'd reached adulthood or not.
*
"Pick on someone your own size!"
The Xevallian soldier barely gave Doctor Zhiva a backwards glance, its entire focus too trained on the corner-bunk where Moses was trying to shield an unconscious patient with his small body. He should have been cowering away from the monster, but instead the daft little beggar was baring his teeth and growling, long and low. An old habit, one that Zhiva had thought he'd grown out of once he'd learned that he was safe with the colony.
As he watched, the Xevallian spoke into its communicator. His own translator implant took a moment to toggle before providing: "Here is an Alulian whelp. Find the mother."
Zhiva swallowed. It had to mean Moses, even if the bright hues of its alarm-crest seemed far out of proportion to the size of the threat. He wanted to grab the invader and shake it, force it to tell him everything it knew about the child they'd found years before, but first he had to deal with the immediate problem of Moses being about to be shot.
"I said leave him alone!" Zhiva bellowed.
The creature swung its weapon around and pointed it at him; he had just enough time to see the tip light up before it vanished sideways in a blur of tawny-gold, cracking him across the forehead as it went. Zhiva hit the floor hard, heard the Xevallian cry out in agony. Its dark blue blood spattered the ground, splashing his face and spraying up the wall.
He heard a clatter to his left and realised the monster had dropped the weapon. He grabbed for it, almost threw it away in horror when he found a hand still attached, but caught himself at the last moment. It was the best defense he had; they weren't prepared for an attack on the colony, let alone invaders in the underground safety of sick-bay. He scrubbed at his eyes, trying to work out which way to fire the weapon, but when his vision cleared he found a scene nothing could have readied him for: Moses clung to the Xevallian's back like a demon-possessed kitten, teeth buried deep in its neck despite the comparative size of his prey. Bone crunched under his powerful jaws; blood spurted, and Zhiva watched him swallow it down while the Xevallian screeched and clawed at him with its remaining hand.
"Moses, stop!"
The only acknowledgement he got was a growl of dissent and a flicker of bright green eyes in a mask of darkest blue. Moses swallowed blood again and raked his blunted toe-claws down the Xevallian's back, under its armour.
Zhiva swallowed. If those weren't kept scrupulously trimmed there'd be Xevallian bowels strewn across the floor...
What the everloving fuck was an Alulian?
He couldn't think about it now, there was too much noise coming from the corridor. Bracing himself, he turned the alien weapon towards the newcomers and prayed he could get the thing to fire. He didn't even have enough time to find the trigger before Moses beat him to the punch, leaving his paralysed, still screaming prey and hitting the first of his new victims in a blur of blood and snapping bones.
Zhiva couldn't move, could only listen in mute horror at the chaos running through the corridor as weapons fired and monsters screamed for mercy, for their mothers, and the innocent kid he thought he knew tore through them like an Earth-Prime weasel having the time of his bloody life in a rabbit warren.
A slow, creeping realisation made his gorge rise up in his throat: Xevallian blood was rich in all of the minerals they'd denied Moses for so long...
Oh, what had they done?
*
"I can't get him off them," Judge muttered. "Fucking hell, Doc, what have we raised here?"
Zhiva shook his head, still unable to find his voice. The Xevallian ships had been seen off by the Terran navy, but they'd left without collecting their survivors, and mopping them up was taking some time. Most of the townsfolk had retreated to the underground cave-system which usually only held storage and sick-bay. Of course, they'd had to pass a lot of Xevallian corpses to get in...
Moses was still eating, if the thing that remained could still be called Moses - a swollen blob that sat atop a pile of its vanquished victims, tearing open the bodies to get at blood-rich organs, crunching bones to feast on the marrow. Any attempt to separate him from his prey was met by snarls and claws, as though he didn't even recognise his people, or care who they were, but... he hadn't attacked anyone who left him to his meal. The whispering varied: "He's saved a lot of lives". "Surely it's better to shoot him now, before he runs out of Xevallians to chew on?" "Are you mad, he hasn't attacked any of us!" "...Yet."
The entire room fell into silence as the topic of conversation dropped a thighbone mid-chew and yawned, showing off his powerful jaws and long canines. He pulled himself up to all-fours as best he could with the horrendous swelling, dragged himself down the decomposing pile, and began shambling across the floor towards Zhiva, his distended body leaving a dark trail of blood in his wake.
Zhiva froze, horror rising in his gullet. He loved Moses like a son; he was a sweet kid who didn't deserve the health problems that nature had dealt him; he read stories to any other children who found themselves in sick-bay; he wanted to be a doctor, and dreamed of studying on Earth-Prime as surely as if it was his own home world. This thing couldn't be him, could it?
Zhiva squeezed his eyes shut as he remembered the blur of gold that had knocked the Xevallian's gun to one side, had saved his life... that was probably when Moses had gotten his first taste of blood.
This was all his fault.
He swallowed convulsively, trying to control his shuddering. It was his fault. He heard another mention of shooting, and it was more than enough to galvanise him. He pulled himself to his feet and met Moses part way, leant down and picked him up. The way the kid's swollen flesh squished between his fingers almost made him vomit. He ignored it and held the child close, refusing to react to the way the blue blood squelched against him as he turned and carried Moses through sickbay and into his office. There were patients in there, but it was still a place where he felt he had some authority. Hopefully retreating to his stronghold would see off any more violent suggestions.
Moses refused to stay in a cot, instead shambling under the desk and curling up in the dark. After a few attempts at moving him, Zhiva gave in and let him settle, then he buried his face in his hands and tried to think what to do. He didn't have access to any of the treatments he normally used when the kid had gotten his hands on bala fruit, or any of the other foods that made him sick.
Knowing what little he did now, he wasn't sure if he ever should have used them.
*
When he woke up Moses was still asleep under the desk - except 'asleep' was only partially accurate.
"Any clue what's going to come out of that cocoon, Doc?" Judge murmured from a chair by the door. He had a gun laid across his legs, with no indication of whether he was supposed to be keeping Moses in, or keeping people who wanted to hurt Moses out.
Zhiva shook his head. "Something that scares the shit out of Xevallians."
"With good fucking reason, if that performance was anything to go by."
*
Even after it was safe for everyone to return above-ground, and Zhiva had his office back to himself, he left the cocoon beneath his desk, choosing to work on a trestle-table instead of disturbing it. He needed to know what was going on inside, but he forced himself to hold off - he didn't know whether vibration, or radiation, or any other method of getting a closer look would cause damage. He didn't know if he'd already caused damage, spending so many years preventing Moses from acquiring the mineral nutrition he needed to enter the next stage of his life cycle.
He had to satisfy himself with waiting, and hoping that whatever came out would be the same kid, even if he was in a very different form.
And what possible form might he take? Zhiva had only ever heard stories about humanoid species with such strange habits - fanciful sailors' yarns from the depths of space. Just how far had the pod they'd found Moses in travelled? And had the matching ship been destroyed by the Xevallians?
So many questions, too few answers.
He took to sleeping in his office, wanting to make sure he was nearby when, or if, the big day came.
*
A thud roused Zhiva from his sleep. He sat bolt upright, clutching his blanket, and stared around the dimly lit room. A nightmare? But no, if he strained his ears he could hear quiet whimpering. "Moses?"
Another thud, then: "Uncle Zhiva?"
The voice was far deeper than it should have been, almost unrecognisable, but the surge of gratitude that hit Zhiva was so rough that he could barely pull himself together. He scrambled to his feet and approached the desk. "Moses, are you okay?"
"I don't know... M'stuck in something."
Zhiva gestured for the lights to turn up a little brighter, although not enough to blind them both, and peered around the edge of the desk. A flailing limb almost smacked him in the face, but missed and bumped the desk again. Well, that explained the thud, if nothing else. The limb bent unnaturally, as if the bone inside was soft and flexible. Near the base of the cocoon he could see a small split where a very human-looking, albeit blue-stained, nose and mouth had escaped their prison. Oh, thank the stars, at least some of the kid was recognisable. "Hold still, I'm going to help you get out, okay?" he said as he pulled his scanner out of his desk drawer and ran it over the escaped limb. A matrix, like the spongy tissue he inserted into a patient when a chunk of bone was missing... huh.
"Why am I in here? What's happening to me?!"
"It's difficult to explain, so I need you to stay calm while we get you out first, can you do that for me?"
"Um, no?"
Relieved laughter spilled out before Zhiva could help it. It was definitely Moses. No matter what he looked like, or sounded like, only he could achieve that exact combination of sarcasm and earnestness. Zhiva hooked two of his fingers into the split near the protruding nose and pulled, grunting with the effort. Dark blue liquid spilled out, dribbling in thick blotches across the floor, but he couldn't get the gap much wider. He grabbed the sensor and took some readings: Moses' exposed nose, then the bump of his skull still inside the cocoon, then down the lines where his spine and each limb should be, and finally one of the pools of gloop. Interesting.
Moses licked some of the fluid off his lips and swallowed. After the briefest of pauses he licked his own nose, swallowed again, then froze. "Sorry, tastes good."
"And why would you be sorry for eating something that tastes good, little one?" Zhiva asked, already suspecting the answer.
"...Tastes like bala fruit."
Because of course it did. "Okay, hold on, I'm going to get something to catch it with, okay?" he said as he motioned the lights brighter. He also grabbed a scalpel while he was finding a suitable receptacle. Getting the cocoon into the plastic tub was awkward; it had grown while under the desk, but at least it weighed the same as Moses had when Zhiva carried him into the office two weeks previously.
"Uncle Zhiva, what's going on...?"
"You ate the equivalent of a lot of bala fruit," Zhiva murmured as he gently slid his fingers beneath the surface of the cocoon again and pulled it away from Moses' face. Using his scalpel, he very carefully sliced through the leathery material until there was enough room to free the kid's head completely. Oh, now would you look at that.
"I'm really sorry," Moses said, letting his cheek rest against Zhiva's hand.
"Don't be, I think you're the one who's owed an apology," Zhiva replied. The dark blue made it difficult to get a really good look, but he didn't need detail to see the obvious: Moses had looked like a pre-pubescent child for years, but now his pale green eyes gazed back out of a young adult's face. Late teens or early twenties by human standards, but immediately recognisable as their strange little baby, all grown up at last.
Smart really, Zhiva thought, to spend puberty slumbering in a cocoon instead of living through a hormone-riddled hell. Clearly a superior race of beings. "I think the fluid is a stockpile of nutrients you're supposed to ingest now that you're awake," he said as he went back to cutting him free. "Most of your skeleton is soft right now, but it looks like it's ready and waiting to start taking up what it needs to harden - you're playing catch-up with your own growth-spurt, little one."
He paused in his work and gazed thoughtfully at the escaped limb for a moment, bent and cramped under the desk as it was. They were going to need more room.
*
The whoosh of the door opening was enough to distract Moses from the pile of bala fruit and dechil-seed pancakes he was gorging himself on. He beamed and called out: "G'morning, Uncle Judge!"
Zhiva was glad he looked up in time to catch the expression on his old friend's face. He'd banned everybody from the grav-ball court, worried that one of Moses' fragile new limbs would be nudged or stepped on in a crush of curious onlookers, but he'd fully expected the head of security to ignore that order and enter anyway, and he wasn't disappointed to learn he was right.
"Zhiva?" Judge said uncertainly, his gaze flicking between the doctor and the newly-adult Alulian - whatever such a creature was, other than 'a Moses'.
Smiling to himself, Zhiva went back to carefully rearranging the quills that protected his patient's partially grown flight-feathers, aligning them so that they wouldn't interfere with the hardening process of the nearby bones - especially the delicate fingers and thumbs that protruded from the second joint of each wing; those were definitely not vestigial, they already twitched and tried to grasp.
Moses was still stained blue from the amniotic fluid of his cocoon, but here and there his original tawny-gold showed through: in his new velvety fur, and patches of his bare skin - skin that now fit his slim frame like a glove. He couldn't stand yet, his four long legs still far too pliable to take his full weight, but when he did he'd probably be between four and five feet tall at the shoulder. His sternum and ribcage had already hardened to form a deep keel that would eventually anchor his massive wingspan, and his spine now extended into a long, tapering tail, complete with a fluffy puff of feathers at the tip.
Overall he was a scrawny creature, all gangly limbs and big paws, but it spoke of late adolescence: that period after the growth spurts had done their work, but before a youngster started to fill out and put on some adult weight.
A sapient species that started out humanoid, but ended in another shape altogether. And the Earth-Prime historians were going to have a bloody field day when the exact details of Moses' adult form got back to them.
Zhiva sat back to examine his handiwork, wiping blue gloop off his fingers. "It seems our duckling is not a swan, my friend."
"Look, Uncle Judge," Moses announced, his voice so filled with delight that it still sounded childlike despite its new bass notes. "I'm a sphinx!"
They found the child in a battle-scarred escape pod on the bank of the river. A small, fragile humanoid, with large, pale green eyes, a shock of golden hair, and loose, tawny skin. His body was oddly out of proportion compared to other species with the same basic configuration: arms and torso longer than average, legs shorter; there were bumps and lumps that suggested more under the skin, but that were filled with only a strange, cartilaginous substance. It left him clumsy and off-balance, a shambling figure compared to his playmates. No recognisable sex organs: he'd chosen 'boy' once he'd fit into the human colony well enough to form a preference.
He developed at the same rate as the human children until he hit the appearance of a ten-year-old, then seemed to stop, struck down by a mysterious illness that made his loose skin fill with fluid at the slightest digestive imbalance. There was a whole cocktail of minerals he had to be kept away from, or else he'd swell up and lose consciousness, and he annoyingly insisted on craving foods that contained them.
Overall he was a complete mystery, but he was kind-hearted and clever, and most importantly he was one of their own.
That being said, they'd have preferred to know whether he'd reached adulthood or not.
*
"Pick on someone your own size!"
The Xevallian soldier barely gave Doctor Zhiva a backwards glance, its entire focus too trained on the corner-bunk where Moses was trying to shield an unconscious patient with his small body. He should have been cowering away from the monster, but instead the daft little beggar was baring his teeth and growling, long and low. An old habit, one that Zhiva had thought he'd grown out of once he'd learned that he was safe with the colony.
As he watched, the Xevallian spoke into its communicator. His own translator implant took a moment to toggle before providing: "Here is an Alulian whelp. Find the mother."
Zhiva swallowed. It had to mean Moses, even if the bright hues of its alarm-crest seemed far out of proportion to the size of the threat. He wanted to grab the invader and shake it, force it to tell him everything it knew about the child they'd found years before, but first he had to deal with the immediate problem of Moses being about to be shot.
"I said leave him alone!" Zhiva bellowed.
The creature swung its weapon around and pointed it at him; he had just enough time to see the tip light up before it vanished sideways in a blur of tawny-gold, cracking him across the forehead as it went. Zhiva hit the floor hard, heard the Xevallian cry out in agony. Its dark blue blood spattered the ground, splashing his face and spraying up the wall.
He heard a clatter to his left and realised the monster had dropped the weapon. He grabbed for it, almost threw it away in horror when he found a hand still attached, but caught himself at the last moment. It was the best defense he had; they weren't prepared for an attack on the colony, let alone invaders in the underground safety of sick-bay. He scrubbed at his eyes, trying to work out which way to fire the weapon, but when his vision cleared he found a scene nothing could have readied him for: Moses clung to the Xevallian's back like a demon-possessed kitten, teeth buried deep in its neck despite the comparative size of his prey. Bone crunched under his powerful jaws; blood spurted, and Zhiva watched him swallow it down while the Xevallian screeched and clawed at him with its remaining hand.
"Moses, stop!"
The only acknowledgement he got was a growl of dissent and a flicker of bright green eyes in a mask of darkest blue. Moses swallowed blood again and raked his blunted toe-claws down the Xevallian's back, under its armour.
Zhiva swallowed. If those weren't kept scrupulously trimmed there'd be Xevallian bowels strewn across the floor...
What the everloving fuck was an Alulian?
He couldn't think about it now, there was too much noise coming from the corridor. Bracing himself, he turned the alien weapon towards the newcomers and prayed he could get the thing to fire. He didn't even have enough time to find the trigger before Moses beat him to the punch, leaving his paralysed, still screaming prey and hitting the first of his new victims in a blur of blood and snapping bones.
Zhiva couldn't move, could only listen in mute horror at the chaos running through the corridor as weapons fired and monsters screamed for mercy, for their mothers, and the innocent kid he thought he knew tore through them like an Earth-Prime weasel having the time of his bloody life in a rabbit warren.
A slow, creeping realisation made his gorge rise up in his throat: Xevallian blood was rich in all of the minerals they'd denied Moses for so long...
Oh, what had they done?
*
"I can't get him off them," Judge muttered. "Fucking hell, Doc, what have we raised here?"
Zhiva shook his head, still unable to find his voice. The Xevallian ships had been seen off by the Terran navy, but they'd left without collecting their survivors, and mopping them up was taking some time. Most of the townsfolk had retreated to the underground cave-system which usually only held storage and sick-bay. Of course, they'd had to pass a lot of Xevallian corpses to get in...
Moses was still eating, if the thing that remained could still be called Moses - a swollen blob that sat atop a pile of its vanquished victims, tearing open the bodies to get at blood-rich organs, crunching bones to feast on the marrow. Any attempt to separate him from his prey was met by snarls and claws, as though he didn't even recognise his people, or care who they were, but... he hadn't attacked anyone who left him to his meal. The whispering varied: "He's saved a lot of lives". "Surely it's better to shoot him now, before he runs out of Xevallians to chew on?" "Are you mad, he hasn't attacked any of us!" "...Yet."
The entire room fell into silence as the topic of conversation dropped a thighbone mid-chew and yawned, showing off his powerful jaws and long canines. He pulled himself up to all-fours as best he could with the horrendous swelling, dragged himself down the decomposing pile, and began shambling across the floor towards Zhiva, his distended body leaving a dark trail of blood in his wake.
Zhiva froze, horror rising in his gullet. He loved Moses like a son; he was a sweet kid who didn't deserve the health problems that nature had dealt him; he read stories to any other children who found themselves in sick-bay; he wanted to be a doctor, and dreamed of studying on Earth-Prime as surely as if it was his own home world. This thing couldn't be him, could it?
Zhiva squeezed his eyes shut as he remembered the blur of gold that had knocked the Xevallian's gun to one side, had saved his life... that was probably when Moses had gotten his first taste of blood.
This was all his fault.
He swallowed convulsively, trying to control his shuddering. It was his fault. He heard another mention of shooting, and it was more than enough to galvanise him. He pulled himself to his feet and met Moses part way, leant down and picked him up. The way the kid's swollen flesh squished between his fingers almost made him vomit. He ignored it and held the child close, refusing to react to the way the blue blood squelched against him as he turned and carried Moses through sickbay and into his office. There were patients in there, but it was still a place where he felt he had some authority. Hopefully retreating to his stronghold would see off any more violent suggestions.
Moses refused to stay in a cot, instead shambling under the desk and curling up in the dark. After a few attempts at moving him, Zhiva gave in and let him settle, then he buried his face in his hands and tried to think what to do. He didn't have access to any of the treatments he normally used when the kid had gotten his hands on bala fruit, or any of the other foods that made him sick.
Knowing what little he did now, he wasn't sure if he ever should have used them.
*
When he woke up Moses was still asleep under the desk - except 'asleep' was only partially accurate.
"Any clue what's going to come out of that cocoon, Doc?" Judge murmured from a chair by the door. He had a gun laid across his legs, with no indication of whether he was supposed to be keeping Moses in, or keeping people who wanted to hurt Moses out.
Zhiva shook his head. "Something that scares the shit out of Xevallians."
"With good fucking reason, if that performance was anything to go by."
*
Even after it was safe for everyone to return above-ground, and Zhiva had his office back to himself, he left the cocoon beneath his desk, choosing to work on a trestle-table instead of disturbing it. He needed to know what was going on inside, but he forced himself to hold off - he didn't know whether vibration, or radiation, or any other method of getting a closer look would cause damage. He didn't know if he'd already caused damage, spending so many years preventing Moses from acquiring the mineral nutrition he needed to enter the next stage of his life cycle.
He had to satisfy himself with waiting, and hoping that whatever came out would be the same kid, even if he was in a very different form.
And what possible form might he take? Zhiva had only ever heard stories about humanoid species with such strange habits - fanciful sailors' yarns from the depths of space. Just how far had the pod they'd found Moses in travelled? And had the matching ship been destroyed by the Xevallians?
So many questions, too few answers.
He took to sleeping in his office, wanting to make sure he was nearby when, or if, the big day came.
*
A thud roused Zhiva from his sleep. He sat bolt upright, clutching his blanket, and stared around the dimly lit room. A nightmare? But no, if he strained his ears he could hear quiet whimpering. "Moses?"
Another thud, then: "Uncle Zhiva?"
The voice was far deeper than it should have been, almost unrecognisable, but the surge of gratitude that hit Zhiva was so rough that he could barely pull himself together. He scrambled to his feet and approached the desk. "Moses, are you okay?"
"I don't know... M'stuck in something."
Zhiva gestured for the lights to turn up a little brighter, although not enough to blind them both, and peered around the edge of the desk. A flailing limb almost smacked him in the face, but missed and bumped the desk again. Well, that explained the thud, if nothing else. The limb bent unnaturally, as if the bone inside was soft and flexible. Near the base of the cocoon he could see a small split where a very human-looking, albeit blue-stained, nose and mouth had escaped their prison. Oh, thank the stars, at least some of the kid was recognisable. "Hold still, I'm going to help you get out, okay?" he said as he pulled his scanner out of his desk drawer and ran it over the escaped limb. A matrix, like the spongy tissue he inserted into a patient when a chunk of bone was missing... huh.
"Why am I in here? What's happening to me?!"
"It's difficult to explain, so I need you to stay calm while we get you out first, can you do that for me?"
"Um, no?"
Relieved laughter spilled out before Zhiva could help it. It was definitely Moses. No matter what he looked like, or sounded like, only he could achieve that exact combination of sarcasm and earnestness. Zhiva hooked two of his fingers into the split near the protruding nose and pulled, grunting with the effort. Dark blue liquid spilled out, dribbling in thick blotches across the floor, but he couldn't get the gap much wider. He grabbed the sensor and took some readings: Moses' exposed nose, then the bump of his skull still inside the cocoon, then down the lines where his spine and each limb should be, and finally one of the pools of gloop. Interesting.
Moses licked some of the fluid off his lips and swallowed. After the briefest of pauses he licked his own nose, swallowed again, then froze. "Sorry, tastes good."
"And why would you be sorry for eating something that tastes good, little one?" Zhiva asked, already suspecting the answer.
"...Tastes like bala fruit."
Because of course it did. "Okay, hold on, I'm going to get something to catch it with, okay?" he said as he motioned the lights brighter. He also grabbed a scalpel while he was finding a suitable receptacle. Getting the cocoon into the plastic tub was awkward; it had grown while under the desk, but at least it weighed the same as Moses had when Zhiva carried him into the office two weeks previously.
"Uncle Zhiva, what's going on...?"
"You ate the equivalent of a lot of bala fruit," Zhiva murmured as he gently slid his fingers beneath the surface of the cocoon again and pulled it away from Moses' face. Using his scalpel, he very carefully sliced through the leathery material until there was enough room to free the kid's head completely. Oh, now would you look at that.
"I'm really sorry," Moses said, letting his cheek rest against Zhiva's hand.
"Don't be, I think you're the one who's owed an apology," Zhiva replied. The dark blue made it difficult to get a really good look, but he didn't need detail to see the obvious: Moses had looked like a pre-pubescent child for years, but now his pale green eyes gazed back out of a young adult's face. Late teens or early twenties by human standards, but immediately recognisable as their strange little baby, all grown up at last.
Smart really, Zhiva thought, to spend puberty slumbering in a cocoon instead of living through a hormone-riddled hell. Clearly a superior race of beings. "I think the fluid is a stockpile of nutrients you're supposed to ingest now that you're awake," he said as he went back to cutting him free. "Most of your skeleton is soft right now, but it looks like it's ready and waiting to start taking up what it needs to harden - you're playing catch-up with your own growth-spurt, little one."
He paused in his work and gazed thoughtfully at the escaped limb for a moment, bent and cramped under the desk as it was. They were going to need more room.
*
The whoosh of the door opening was enough to distract Moses from the pile of bala fruit and dechil-seed pancakes he was gorging himself on. He beamed and called out: "G'morning, Uncle Judge!"
Zhiva was glad he looked up in time to catch the expression on his old friend's face. He'd banned everybody from the grav-ball court, worried that one of Moses' fragile new limbs would be nudged or stepped on in a crush of curious onlookers, but he'd fully expected the head of security to ignore that order and enter anyway, and he wasn't disappointed to learn he was right.
"Zhiva?" Judge said uncertainly, his gaze flicking between the doctor and the newly-adult Alulian - whatever such a creature was, other than 'a Moses'.
Smiling to himself, Zhiva went back to carefully rearranging the quills that protected his patient's partially grown flight-feathers, aligning them so that they wouldn't interfere with the hardening process of the nearby bones - especially the delicate fingers and thumbs that protruded from the second joint of each wing; those were definitely not vestigial, they already twitched and tried to grasp.
Moses was still stained blue from the amniotic fluid of his cocoon, but here and there his original tawny-gold showed through: in his new velvety fur, and patches of his bare skin - skin that now fit his slim frame like a glove. He couldn't stand yet, his four long legs still far too pliable to take his full weight, but when he did he'd probably be between four and five feet tall at the shoulder. His sternum and ribcage had already hardened to form a deep keel that would eventually anchor his massive wingspan, and his spine now extended into a long, tapering tail, complete with a fluffy puff of feathers at the tip.
Overall he was a scrawny creature, all gangly limbs and big paws, but it spoke of late adolescence: that period after the growth spurts had done their work, but before a youngster started to fill out and put on some adult weight.
A sapient species that started out humanoid, but ended in another shape altogether. And the Earth-Prime historians were going to have a bloody field day when the exact details of Moses' adult form got back to them.
Zhiva sat back to examine his handiwork, wiping blue gloop off his fingers. "It seems our duckling is not a swan, my friend."
"Look, Uncle Judge," Moses announced, his voice so filled with delight that it still sounded childlike despite its new bass notes. "I'm a sphinx!"
