Aurora Episode 01-0

Aurora Episode 01-0

(Revision: 4)

A tall beautiful girl lay sleeping unprotected in the wilderness, laying in a high mountain meadow on the lee of a tropical island. She lay sleeping peacefully on her side, her slow deep breathing causing her chest to rise and fall dramatically. Long, lustrous, blond hair curtained half of her beautiful face, the silky strands draping the ground around her head with a textured cloud of shimmering pale gold.

She lay sleeping for several hours, the violent sounds of her unexpected arrival having long ceased to echo from the surrounding hills. An occasional biting insect landed on her bare skin only to depart in frustration, failing to penetrate her smooth, soft skin, failing to even disturb the sleeping girl. Finally, as the sun rose directly overhead, the girl’s eyelids flickered and her mouth moved softly as if withdrawing from a dream - she finally began to awaken.

Our story now begins…

*

Fairchild heard a symphony of song birds chirping loudly as she savored the artificial ambience of the Trans-Unit, her body floating nearly weightless in the soft yet secure web of the Transport couch as she had so many times before. Noticing a 'hole' in the surrounding wall of sound, she focused her hearing up and down the audible range, exercising the powers she had been working so hard to learn to use, eventually discerning that the hole came from the Trans-Unit itself. The usual sounds of the machinery were absent, sounds that she had taken for granted in the past were swallowed up by the sound of the wind. Finding that very unusual, the Trans-Unit machinery had always active and throbbing before, even between transports, she wondered how long she had slept. She normally was only out for two hours or so at a time, but perhaps she had overslept following this transport.

Shrugging gently in her half-sleep, that thought wasn’t enough to worry her. After all, the goal had been only to transport herself from one side of the lab to the other, traveling through a single dimension and then back again to the one that her world existed in. In fact, she appreciated the silence, glad that the techs were shutting the lab down, the days regime of tests apparently completed. She had been lucky to draw the last time slot of the day - the first time she had been lucky enough to do that.

Some of her friends who had done the last transport of the day had described how the techs had allowed them to sleep off the effects of the Transport drugs as they shutdown the lab for the night, finally helping them walk to their small apartments. Fairchild usually needed some help after a transport. For some reason, the drugs always affected her more than the other girls who were in the training program.

Listening more closely to the sounds of songbirds carrying on the wind, she realized that Galtere, the laboratory technician that she had recently become good friends with, must have been thoughtful enough to play his favorite music. His selections of relaxing environmental sounds always helped her sleep off the haze from the damnable drugs they made her take! His sounds were definitely working this time: she was having real trouble waking up!

Finally forcing herself at least half awake, still savoring the melody of bird songs, she was soon surprised that she wasn't able to identify any of them by their song! She and Galtere had made bird songs a bit of a hobby and she thought she had heard all the songs he had recorded. Wondering where Galtere had found such an exotic tape, the birds possibly not even native to Velor or Daxxan, she forced herself to wake up some more, a tingle of excitement filling her as she thought of learning to identify some new birds, maybe even an alien species! She hoped Galtere was still here in the lab so that she could borrow the tape and the holo-book that she knew went along with it.

Coming closer and closer to full wakefullness, she imagined that she could almost feel the breeze blowing through her hair, the wind suddenly louder as she heard it blowing high up in some trees, the songs of the birds coming and going on the wind. Smiling faintly to herself, her consciousness now more than halfway between awake and asleep, she slowly rolled away from her side and onto her back, smiling softly while languorously stretching her long arms up over her head. The sound of the breeze suddenly grew even louder as her right ear became uncovered, the sound of the breeze so realistic that it truly felt as if it were blowing through her hair. Galtere had really outdone himself this time, this was a really cool recording!

Her soft smile grew broader as she dreamily remembered the vacation she had just completed with her parents on Daxxan, Velor’s sister world. The recorded sounds she was hearing seemed to take her back to that warm fragrant jungle island that they had stayed on. She briefly imagined that she was still on her vacation instead of being back in this distinctly unpleasant lab with all its probes and disorienting drugs and endless questions and tests. But thankfully, this stage of her training was coming to a close. Despite being the youngest girl ever admitted to the Protector program, she had excelled at her studies. And now the initial year of hard work was almost over. Another five short months and she would be ready for her final tests. All that would remain after that would be for her to be assigned a planet and for her to learn the customs and languages of her new home.

She smiled excitedly in her half-sleep, the thought of finally getting off on her own, of escaping the constant surveillance, testing and evaluation that was so much a part of her training, was almost a dream come true. Her smile grew even broader as she imagined the incredible adventures and challenges that awaited her on distant planets. After all, she was a true ‘super’ girl, a woman born to be a Velorian Protector! The hard vacuum of alien space and the raw planets of evolving civilizations were to be her natural elements for the remainder of her life!

She bent her knees slightly while stretching her arms, her mind taking longer than normal to awaken, her thoughts wandering along pleasant paths for a bit longer before she knew she would have to finally force herself to wake up the rest of the way. Besides, it was bound be late… but still, maybe she could just lie here a little longer.

Her thoughts turned to Galtere again. She hoped that he was still in the lab as she remembered that she had invited him home tonight. She planned to make one final attempt at preparing his favorite dish, Rikintra. They were both still laughing over her last largely inedible attempt at preparing that most difficult of Daxxanian dishs!

Blinking at that humorous thought, a blinding light met her eyes as she tried to open them, the white-hot brilliance causing her to blink them closed again! Waiting a few moments, she cautiously tried again. It wasn't so bad this time, the light still a bit bright, a light so strong that she could feel the radiation warming her face. Straining to focus on it, she narrowed her eyelids to reduce the glare, finally able to get the light to slowly swim into focus. She was very surprised to see a huge ball of fire with strange flames reaching out far beyond it!

She couldn’t ever remember seeing a fire this bright, nor one with flames that didn’t really appear to be moving noticeably. It was also very puzzling: how could a fire like that be burning in the ceiling of the Dimension Transport Lab?

Completely disoriented now, she finally shrugged her strong shoulders, dismissing it as unimportant. It was obviously just another of the psychedelic side-effects from the drugs they always gave her for her practice sessions in the Transporter. She really wished she didn’t have to take them, but the techs always insisted, telling her that the shock of Dimensional Transport would be too disorienting without their protection. Fair wasn’t so sure about that. It was her theory that the spatial and temporal disorientations would be far less of a problem without such mind-altering substances! At least for her.

Relaxing again, she focused her brilliantly blue eyes on the strong light, staring directly into it as she gradually brought it into sharper and sharper focus. It took but a few moments of concentration before she began to notice that it had some irregular dark spots imbedded in it, spots that the flames seemed to swirl around. Focusing in tighter on one of the spots, the swirling round object grew larger until it filled her entire field of view, the effect much like that of increasing the magnification of a telescope. Staring inside one of the spots, she was surprised to see that they were themselves swirling masses of darker flames, almost like that of a Daxxan typhoon!

Somehow, the whole thing looked so familiar, yet she was puzzled to find that she still couldn’t put a name it. Strange - she had always had such an outstanding memory. Must be the damn drugs, she thought disgustedly. She was definately going to protest the next time they asked her take this type!

Pulling her eyes away from the light, she slowly rolled back onto her side to look around the lab. The sound of the breeze was very noticeable this time, so real that a few strands of her blond hair actually started flying around her face! Feeling her hair moving, she suddenly realized that someone must have carried her upstairs to the holodeck. In fact, it looked and felt undeniably like she was now outdoors, lying near the edge of a wide grassy tropical meadow. Galtere!

"Computer, End Simulation," she said, her strong voice carrying on the breeze. Nothing happened. "Computer, this is an Override, code One. End playback now!" Still nothing. "Galtere, are you there? Stop playing around now and turn the projector off." No response. Suddenly feeling a little nervous, she had never heard of a Holodeck computer that had failed to respond to an Override command.

Feeling a brief moment of panic and increasing disorientation as she struggled to remember where she was. She could only remember the training mission, the practice run through the dimensional gap, the start and end points no more than a hundred feet apart! Yet outside that simple memory, she couldn’t remember anything. She couldn’t remember where she was supposed to go when her training ended. It seemed as if they hadn’t told her that, yet a faint memory teased the back of her mind. A memory of a blue planet and a yellow sun. A dream perhaps.

Her faulty memory now terrified her even more than her strange surroundings, all that she seemed able to remember was that Dimensional missions required long preparation and were inherently very, very dangerous - even for Protectors such as herself! And the planets they were invariably assigned to, the ones with yellow suns, were wild and primitive.

Closing her eyes once again, she lay motionless on the grass for quite some time while continuing to rack her memory, trying to find the threads of her memories, to find at least some mental clue as to where she now was. While she found she could recall fragments of many memories, she couldn’t remember anything that was of any real use to her in figuring out why she was lying outdoors in a meadow that she had never seen before in her life! The mission couldn’t have started yet, could it? No, impossible, it was still months away. That she was sure of.

She finally opened her eyes again to look around at what was obviously a grassy meadow, surprised to find that her vision was extremely clear, far sharper in fact than she could ever remember it being before. Despite having stared directly into the sun for many minutes, there was no trace of spots or other distortions in her vision. In fact, she could make out the tiniest details of the flowers that grew along the opposite side of the meadow, more than 300 metrons away! She suddenly felt as if she could count the petals on them if she had wanted to!

Really puzzled now, she could not even begin to understand how she had been able to stare at the sun like that and then be able to look at the ground around her without the slightest problem. Strange, she thought to herself, if anything, I should probably be blinded by now!

Flexing her abs gently to sit up, she found herself rising effortlessly to a sitting position. In fact, she felt so light that her upper body almost floated off the ground from just the slightest flex of her muscles. Stretching her arms, she felt so very strong and energetic, her body brimming with energy. Rising to her feet, she seemed to stand without any apparent effort, despite having just woken up.

Rising slowly to her full two metron height, she looked around the meadow, quickly noticing that there was a huge brown furrow of overturned earth running down the middle of it and partially up the hill on the other side. Following the furrow to a deep impact crater just above the base of the hill, she saw that a very slight pall of smoke was drifting lazily across the meadow, the base of it coming from the crater itself. If she didn't know better, she would have guessed that some flightcraft had crashed over there!

Focusing back on her immediate surroundings, she saw that she was standing near the edge of the meadow, the open grassy area surrounded by unusually tall palm trees. The meadow itself was covered by a thick layer of rich green grass that rose above her ankles with a scattering of some small piles here and there, the smaller ones nearly hidden in the luxuriant growth.

The nervous butterflies began to flutter faster in her stomach. This didn’t look at all like any place she had ever been on the normally dry and near-desert landscape of Velor. In fact, it looked far more like one of the jungle islands of Daxxan than Velor. Yet there was no apparent way that she could have gotten from the Transport Lab to a meadow on Daxxan. Daxxan itself was a sixty hour trip by space shuttle, and the passengers were all heavily drugged by the crew before departure to ensure that they didn’t damage the ship or each other as they flew far outside the strength-dampening surface effects of their two golden planets. Yet surely the crew would have balked at drugging an unconscious girl without at least waking her up to sign the release forms! Unless maybe her parents had signed them for her! No... they would never do that without telling her, would they?

She wasn’t on Velor, but she had to be on Velor. Didn’t she?

Unless… unless the Dimensional Transport had taken her somewhere! Maybe not to Daxxan. Maybe somewhere else… because in reality, it could carry someone a thousand light years across the galaxy as easily as it could take her across the room.

Feeling more and more disoriented the more she thought about it, she glanced again at the impact crater on the other side of the meadow, noticing that it was now billowing out a florescent green smoke, the kind she had seen in pictures of flightcraft accidents! My God, had she really been in an accident of some sort?!

Quickly looking down at herself to check for any sign of injury, she was shocked to discover that she wasn’t wearing any clothing. Not a shred! Crossing her legs and wrapping her arms around herself, she tried to cover up her generous young body as best as she could while looking around to see if there was anyone else in sight. Fortunately, she saw no one.

Relaxing just a little, she slowly ran her hands down her sides to see if she was injured or burned, looking over her shoulder to see that her backside looked just fine. In fact, more than fine. The big bruise on her thigh from her martial arts training of last week was completely gone now! Yet a flightcraft accident was the only thing that made sense. Except it didn't make sense that she could feel this wonderful, far better than normal, when she had apparently been in some kind of violent accident and fire!

Turning to take a tentative step forward, she quickly found that her body felt so light that she almost seemed to float off the ground! Her toes seemed to barely touch the grass as she walked; almost like she was in a much lower gravity field than normal. Thoughts of an article she had once read about life on the low gravity moon of Eridador immediately came to mind. While Eridador certainly wasn’t lush like this place, she had been fascinated by the descriptions of how people initially felt when they arrived, almost like they were floating on air as they walked in the fractional 5% gravity.

Pushing her long blond hair behind her shoulders, she turned to walk determinedly toward the crash site, struggling with every step as she tried to get used to being this light on her feet - it seemed like her body only weighed a few ounces. She also felt light-headed, but that didn’t really explain how the rest of her body felt, she wasn’t really dizzy or anything like that. Walking just seemed to be effortless to her now, and the gravity seemed barely strong enough to bring her back to the ground between steps!

Stopping after walking about twenty metrons, her body still feeling so amazingly light, so strange, she paused to examine herself again. Something was definitely different about her body. Running her hands across her stomach, she slowly traced them up under her breasts to cup herself. She was shocked by the way her breasts filled her hands, they were somehow fuller and higher than ever before! Squeezing herself just a bit, she was reassured to find that they felt as warm and soft as ever but they were somehow sitting much higher up on her chest than normal. In fact, they almost felt as if they were sticking straight out from her body and had lost their usual teadrop shape.

Smiling as her fingers stroked across her relaxed nipples in familiar ways, she noticed that they felt very, very good, more sensitive than she could ever remember. It seemed like she was still in some kind of dream, her body transformed into that of some fantasy woman’s, everything feeling so much stronger, rounder and more shapely - and so much more vital!

Looking down between her firm jutting breasts, she noticed one of the small piles of smooth hand-sized rocks scattered among the larger rocks along this side of the meadow. They looked like shiny black weathered granite, almost like river rock. Absently picking one up, she tossed it casually toward a nearby creek while walking across the meadow. To her great surprise, the rock flew well over the creek and landed halfway up the hill on the other side. Yet she had barely tossed it! It seemed to fly on its own for more than a hundred metrons. [Editors note: A metron is just slightly greater than a meter. \Sharon] The gravity must really be less than normal, she thought to herself in amazement!

Picking up another rock, she jiggled it in her hand as she looked for a place to throw it. It fit smoothly and comfortably in her palm while she gripped it firmly, rubbing her thumb strongly but unconsciously over the smooth surface. She was just preparing to throw it when she felt the rock suddenly cracking in half as it began to crumble in her hand. Closing her hand tighter, she looked down in surprise to see tiny crushed fragments of rock dust falling to the ground!

Truly surprised now, she bent down to pick up a similar rock in her other hand, examining it even more carefully. It certainly looked solid enough, exactly like hard granite or gneiss worn by the wind and water. Gradually squeezing this slightly larger one, she noticed this time how her hand and arm felt kind of funny as she slowly increased her grip on the rock, her arm seemingly taking longer than normal for her to reach her full strength, the tendons across the back of her hands standing out like steel cables. Suddenly, and without any warning, the rock completely crushed in her hand just like the other one, her fingers literally snapping into her palm as they reduced the hard rock to the finest dust!

Gasping in disbelief, she looked down at the powdered rock that drifted slowly toward the ground, she exalted in the sensation of crushing that rock, the feeling sending a rush of tremendous strength coursing up her arms and then through her entire body. Thrilled with these enlivening sensations, she quickly reached down to pick up more rocks, easily crushing each one of them to powder with just quick flexes of her bare hands. This was amazing! How could these seemingly hard rocks actually be fragile enough for her to do this? Rocks were rocks, no matter how little gravity there was.

She amused herself by crushing the rocks for a little while before growing bored with it, finally brushing off her hands as she began walking across the meadow again. It still felt very peculiar to walk in this low gravity: she felt like she was going to bounce way up into the air with every step.

Finally arriving at the edge of the deep furrow, she looked down at it as she turned to walk along its edge towards the crater, noticing that it definitely appeared that some kind of flightcraft had crashed here. Small and medium-sized rocks and dirt were mounded up on both sides of the impact trail. From this new angle she could see that the crater was actually a long slanted tunnel that appeared to be bored deeply into the hillside.

Reaching the hillside tunnel, Fairchild leaned over to look carefully along the tunnel floor, noticing that there was a single set of footprints coming up towards her, the footprints clearly visible in the soft smooth dirt. Turning away from the tunnel, she followed the footsteps across the broken ground until they disappeared into the grass, heading directly toward the spot where she had been sleeping. Stepping closer, she set her foot next to one of them, barely surprised now when she noticed that her bare foot was an exact match! She had already guessed that these must be her footprints, and that she had indeed walked away from the smoking wreck that must be buried in the hillside! Yet as she turned back to look more closely at the impact crater, it didn’t seem possible that she could have survived such a violent crash, one strong enough to burrow this deeply into hard-packed earth. Yet here she was, far stronger and healthier feeling than ever before.

Determined to solve this mystery, she stepped cautiously into the tunnel as she began to walk down its length. She had to see what was at the end of it. She had taken less than ten steps before she felt her entire body beginning to tingle uncomfortably. A few steps later, and the tingling became sharp needles of pain that lanced mostly through her chest and lower abdomen, her legs beginning to feel weak, her head starting to swim. She struggled to turn around just as her legs grew so weak that they collapsed beneath her! Instinctively knowing that she had to get out of there QUICKLY, she frantically used her hands and whatever movement she could muster from her nearly paralyzed legs to painfully crawl her way back up onto the grass outside the tunnel opening. Rolling painfully to her side, she barely made it free of the tunnel entrance before her vision began to dim, darkness rushing over her as she collapsed face down into the tall grass.

*

Fairchild woke up some time later, surprised to find that she felt just as strong and energetic as she had before entering the tunnel. She had no idea what had happened to her earlier, but she was still determined to find out what was at the end of that damn tunnel! Swinging her bare legs over the side of the deep furrow again, she started walking back down the tunnel, this time carefully feeling for any change in her body. It took less than ten seconds before she felt the painful needles beginning again. Prepared for it this time, she was able to make a strong leap back toward the tunnel entrance, flying 20 metrons before tumbling on the grass.

This time she recovered almost immediately getting out of the tunnel. Experimenting, she reached her hand down over the edge of the furrow and immediately felt the painful tingling needles radiating upward from it. Damn... there must be some kind of radiation coming from the hole that was weakening her! Radiation that had nearly killed her earlier.

She sat thoughtfully for a while on the soft grass, legs crossed as she unconsciously leaned forward to run her hands over her legs while she again tried to remember something, anything, about how she had gotten here. Instead, the pleasant feeling of running her hands over the strong muscles of her legs distracted her, bringing her thoughts back to the present At least they still felt normal, she thought, the well-defined muscles of her thighs more than filling both her hands. She had always been proud of her body, especially of the very unusual muscles she had developed over the thousands of hours of intensive exercise in her father’s gym.

She crossed her legs further, her ankles resting against each other while running her hands slowly from her hips down to her knees, slowly flexing her strong thighs at the same time, the contours of the hard muscles feeling warm and so familiar as they expanded dramatically. She smiled happily, remembering how she had recently become the center of attention in her father’s gym when she had daringly begun working out in the very skimpy exercise outfit that her girlfriend had helped her buy. She had wanted to impress Galtere with it. Instead, she had impressed the entire gym!

That incident had made it clear how unusual a Protector like herself was, her body not only beautiful but far stronger and more dramatically muscled than any of the other women who belonged to her father’s athletic club. She had felt great pride when she had discovered that she was able to work with weights that were heavier than any of the men’s, their staring eyes somehow giving her a strength that she never knew she had, her body tingling wildly in a familiar but very private way.

It was a week later when her father left her in charge of the gym for a few days while he traveled on business. Starting the first day he was gone, she had begun to ‘prepare’ herself in the privacy of the locker room before she worked out, wearing only a tiny revealing costume. Within three days, she had started appearing on the exercise floor without her top, a custom she had learned was not unusual for a Protector in training. But one that was VERY unusual for ordinary Velorians. She immediately fell in love with the way the men reacted to her muscular and nude upper body, at the way her young breasts jiggled when she did the bench presses, often resting the massive bar on her ches when she paused, the weight somehow feeling so wonderful as the bar sunk deeply into the softness of her breasts.

She felt both rebellious and proud as she saw the way all the men stared at her when she appeared on the gym floor, at the way their faces then twisted in anger when she outlifted them by more than two to one. Looking around at the men, she learned that her bench presses were especially popular for the customers of her father’s gym to watch, the massive bar pressing so firmly against her chest on each downward stroke.

After several days of such blatant exhibitionism, her father had finally returned, quickly taking her aside to tell her that she was going to have to wait until the gym was closed to work out anymore, that she was distracting too many of his customers. He told her that he had had a number of complaints from the men about allowing a female Protector into the gym, even if she was his own daughter. After all, the male-dominated society of Velor did not take kindly to women who were stronger than men. And her scandalous lack of attire complicated their anger by mixing it with desire, a combination of emotions that no Velorian male should have to endure.

Fairchild had listened to her father with growing anger, her eyes glancing around the lobby at the half dozen men who were staring back at her even now, their smirking smiles letting her know that they had been the ones to complain.

"So, father," she finally said, her voice loud enough for all to hear. "I have become an embarrassment to you have I? Do you also dislike my workouts, does my greater strength make you feel like less of a man also? Or are you just relaying the complaints of your customers?"

Staring in his eyes, it took Fairchild only seconds to see the truth. His angry and embarrassed look told her that her own father shared the same masculine hang-ups of all Velorian males. A sudden flush of anger rose up to make her blush.

"Well, if you feel so intimidated by me, perhaps I should just quit and let you run your silly gym on your own." She raised her voice even more. "And don’t expect me to come home tonight, I’m going over to Galtere’s to sleep with him! To make love to him, Father. At least he appreciates my body. And you can’t stop me!"

Father and daughter glared at each other. He had made it clear many times that he disliked Galtere, even forbidding Fairchild from seeing him. Her inflammatory statement about sleeping with him, one that everyone in the lobby overheard, now made him blush. After all, a technician’s job like Galtere's was one of the lowest status jobs on Velor, a job that stressed analytic thinking and creativity above that of politics. A totally disrespectful position for a man who wanted to date his daughter. A catastrophe for a man who was planning to sleep with her!

"No, Fairchild, you will not go to Galtere. I have forbidden you to see him. Just go home now and tell your mother that I’ll be late tonight. The men and I have a meeting tonight to decide on some new rules for the female members of our gym. You have created a lot of trouble for me lately. Ten of my oldest and most important customers have resigned their memberships because of your behavior. And the wives of a dozen others are threatening to make them quit."

The anger boiled up inside Fairchild, a strange warmth making her thighs slip against each other, her hands closed tightly as the astounding muscles of a Velorian Protector flexed to their full power. Reaching down to pick up a huge barbell, one that the strongest man couldn’t lift without a spotter, she lifted it effortlessly over her head and lowered it behind her father's back, her proud breasts pressing tightly against his chest. Flexing her shoulders and back, her remarkable muscles exploded into steely mounds the like of which no man had ever seen before, the massive bar groaning as she bend it completely around her father's upper body, the massive weight driving him to the floor as the steel bar trapped her arms. Reaching down, she bent the ends of the bar together and then twisted them closed in a crude knot, locking him into a steely embrace that would require heavy equipment to remove.

Astounded at her sudden burst of superstrength, understanding that it was somehow related to the warmth she'd felt between her legs, she turned to face the men in the lobby, reaching up to rip the moist T-shirt from her body, the one with the logo of her father’s gym on it, tossing it toward the closest man.

"Here, you weaklings can have this gym, your equipment is too wimpy for a woman like me anyhow."

With that, she stormed out the door and into the crowded street, her upper body scandalously nude!

*

Fairchild had not worked out since that day, the embarrassment she had felt after she had cooled down was too great for her to face her father again. Despite the fact that she had said she was going to Galtere’s place, she had actually spent a couple of nights with her girlfriend. Now, it was her father who refused to speak to her.

Her mother had finally found her a Sher’Al’s house, Fairchild holding her tightly and crying on her shoulder as her mother told her that this type of behavior was normal for a young female Protector, the effect of her misplaced sexual arousal back in the gym making her much stronger and more emotional than normal. It was just her hormones, her body having ten times the sexual hormones of an ordinary Velorian. It was all part of her becoming the super girl that she was destined to become.

Listening carefully to her mother, Fairchild found that she was secretly growing ever more pleased by the knowledge of her legacy and her dramatic potential. Yet she was just terribly embarrassed that she had lost control of herself in such a personal way, shaming her father in front of some of his most important clients. She felt even worse when she learned that she had broken one of his arms when she had bent the massive weight bar around his body!

*

Sitting here in this grass now with no idea where in the entire Universe she was, she fervently wished she had been able to make amends with her father before leaving. Yet she also knew it had been far too late for that, her strength and power now far greater than that which any Velorian male could accept, even her father.

Bringing her thoughts back to the present, it suddenly occurred to her that she would effectively be even stronger here on this light gravity world. Perhaps that explained why she felt so light on her feet. However, it didn’t begin to explain how she could crush those rocks in her bare hands. Glancing up at the yellow sun, she was able to sift through her clouded memories enough to realize that the color yellow was significant, that it had something to do with strength. Yet her strength would have to be hundreds, maybe even thousands of times greater than a normal Velorian to crush rocks in her bare hands. And she had been maybe twice or three times as strong as the men at her father's gym - except for that one time. Yet the pleasant thought of being really REALLY strong definitely did appeal to her. She had had this strange yet very intense fantasy about being superhumanly strong ever since she was a small girl. In fact, that persistent fantasy was one of the reasons she worked out so hard in her father’s gym. She could clearly remember the many very vivid dreams she had had since then, dreams in which she performed impossible feats of strength in front of a group of older men, using her perfect and almost always nude body in ways that they had never seen before. Even her fantasies about sex had usually been coupled with having far greater strength than her partners, the slow physical overpowering of her male lovers being a huge turn on for her, even if it was only in her imagination.

After talking so long with her mother, she now at least understood that this was just her 'Protector' genes acting up. Having reached her second coming-of-age, the first one sexual, the second one muscular, she was now a fully mature Protector, at least in a physical sense. Now if she could just figure out where she was and what she was supposed to be doing! While her body felt fine, wonderful in fact, her mind was still so confused and sluggish.

Standing up to look around the meadow, Fairchild felt an incredible thrill as she placed her hands on her firm bare hips. She knew that as a Protector in training, her genetics had been very special even for a Velorian, genetics which potentially made her stronger than any other Velorian who lived on Velor or Daxxan. Yet even the weakest Velorian would be effectively a super being on any planet except Daxxan and Velor, the gold cores of these planets dampening their inhabitants’ powers a thousandfold.

But could she really be as strong as she had been in her dreams, stronger than any man who had ever lived? She felt her imagination running away with her, the tremendous vitality and strength that was coursing through her veins giving her a confidence she had never felt before.

*

Walking slowly forward, she tilted her head back to look up at the branches of a palm tree high over her head. Suddenly remembering another crazy dream she had once had where she had been able to leap high up into the upper branches of a tree just like this one, she decided to try it! Her legs felt so incredibly strong and energetic that she began to think that maybe her dreams had come true in this place! And despite feeling a little silly about it, she was curious enough to try to see how high she could jump.

Bending her legs slightly, and hoping there really wasn’t anyone around to see her acting out such a childish fantasy, she suddenly flexed her thighs and calves to leap gently upward.

Amazingly, she felt herself soaring more than a hundred feet straight up into the tree. It was just like in her dream! Smashing into the thick upper branches a few seconds later, she reached out desperately to grab them, finally hugging one to herself and hanging on for dear life, trembling in shock and fear. Turning her head around to look down over her shoulder, staring wide-eyed at the ground so far below, she felt a rush of butterflies in her stomach, her hands suddenly gripping the branch so tightly that the hard wood splintered in her grip.

Shaking like a leaf, she looked around for an easy way to climb down, quickly observing that the trunk was long and smooth, offering little chance of handholds. Suddenly it occurred to her that this was probably silly. She didn’t have to climb down. If she could jump up here, why couldn’t she just jump back down?

Despite the fact that it seemed logical that she could safely fall as far as she could jump, it took a real effort to gradually relax her hold on the branch to let her legs dangle freely. She hung effortlessly with just her hands for a while as she looked down, working to calm the butterflies. Finally, she took a deep shuddering breath; and let go.

It seemed like she fell for a very long time while her body slowly tilted backwards, the ground finally rushing up at her as she felt a sharp impact, landing mostly on her bottom, her head pitching backwards to smack down on a large flat rock. Yet instead of being stunned, she was up on her feet in a flash, instinctively rubbing her bare bottom and the back of her head, both of them a little tingly but surprisingly unhurt. Staring down at the shattered rock that her butt had landed on, it seemed incredible that the softly firm flesh of her buttocks was really harder than these rocks!

Her confidence soared now as she started running across the meadow, jumping with joy, acting out her most private dreams and fantasies. Her body flew higher and higher with each jump as she danced and spun herself around and around above the ground, feeling like a young girl magically dancing on nothing but air. During one of her jumps, she tumbled end over end in midair, actually falling head first nearly two hundred feet before landing heavily on her shoulders and back across some rocks. She was amazed as the rocks again shattered, yet the fall hadn’t hurt her at all.

Leaping back to her feet again, her confidence soaring to even greater heights, she turned to run toward one of the huge two hundred foot tall hardwood trees at the edge of the meadow, flexing her calves strongly in an effort to jump over it. Despite the last few minutes of exercise, she was still surprised at the power of her leap as she left the ground - her body not only cleared the tree, but soared nearly fifty feet above the uppermost leaves. Using her old diving reflexes, she playfully rolled and twisted her body several times before landing lightly on her feet in another smaller meadow.

Fairchild had no idea what had happened to her to give her these incredible muscular powers, but she knew she had to determine how strong and invulnerable she actually was before she went much further. She decided to start with the most fragile part of her body.

Reaching up to pull a single long strand of golden hair from her head, she wrapped it around her fingers and stretched the glowing strand of pale gold until it felt like it was almost ready to break. Walking over to a small hardwood tree, one about 6 inches in diameter, she pressed the strand against the wood, surprised to find that it passed through the tree trunk and severed it like a hot knife through butter! In fact, the cut was so fine she could barely see it until the upper half of the tree toppled over with a crash.

Shocked and surprised, she was barely aware of what she was doing as she absently reached down to flick the tightly stretched strand of golden steel across her firming nipples, the excitement of discovering the full extent of her powers now having a rather unexpected erotic side-effect. She noticed what she was doing just in time to feel the steely strand break as this other delicate part of her body proved to be far firmer than even the hardwood tree had been.

Dropping the broken strand of hair, she turned and reached down to pick up a large rock about two feet in diameter. Despite its size, it felt light as a bird’s feather in her arms, yet the deep depression it left behind in the firm ground testified that it certainly wasn’t as light as it felt to her. Sitting down carefully in the lush warm grass and crossing her legs, she rested the rock on her thighs and her lower stomach, gripping the rock between her strong legs. Locking her ankles tightly together, she began to squeeze the rock, running her hands over her firm muscles as she again enjoyed the feel of her powerfully flexing legs as they strained against the impossibly hard rock.

Yet they did not truly strain. Fairchild had often imagined that her muscles might someday be nearly as hard as steel if she could only exercise them enough. Yet it now thrilled her to think that this wild fantasy might actually have come true in this place.

Her inner thighs initially flattened against the rock as her strong muscles grew more and more defined from her exertions; but soon only the hard rounded contours of her inner muscles touched the rock. Tracing her fingers over silky skin that covered the steely contours of her thighs, her body began tingling wildly where the rock was pressing so strongly against her protruding pubic bone.

She suddenly heard a loud cracking noise that sent sharp vibrations up between her legs, her head jerking down just in time to see a network of tiny cracks spreading through the rock. The dozens of hard curves so visible on her thighs proved to be powerful enough, her legs suddenly crushing tightly together, trapping her hands between them as the smooth granite rock shattered into hundreds of pieces.Flopping onto her back, she gasped for breath at the shock of what she had just achieved. Lifting her head to look back down at herself, she slowly lifted her long legs high over her head while running her hands firmly over them, brushing off the fine rock dust from her now moist inner thighs. It had always felt so wonderful to caress her leg muscles after exercising, but this time they just felt incredible! She also was well aware that she had just performed a feat that should have been impossible for anyone. Yet she hadn’t felt any strain, only a sensual warmth that was even now growing stronger between her legs, a warmth that spread upwards across her stomach and chest until it caused her nipples to tingle and burn slightly.

She continued lying on the grass, enjoying the warmth of the noonday sun on her bare breasts, slowly running her hands up across her flat stomach to cup herself, gradually massaging her breasts with her strong fingers. She was cupping herself very firmly, her fingers pinching her nipples even harder at times, when she suddenly realized that she was now holding herself more firmly than she had squeezed those rocks while crushing them to powder! She knew that such a strong grip should have hurt her, yet her breasts just grew ever warmer and more tingly the more firmly she held herself.

Finally relaxing the grip on her softly resilient breasts, she began to run her hands lightly back down across her flat stomach, tracing her fingers down her firm abdomen until they began to tangle in her blond bush. She was just starting to run her fingertips lightly between her legs, tracing the moist outline of her mons, when she suddenly remembered another crazy vision from one of her dreams.

Quickly standing back up, she walked over to pick up a rock that was large enough that she could barely get her arms around it. Her back and buttocks flexed strongly as she lifted it from the ground, pressing her breasts tightly against it at the same time while hugging it tightly against her chest. Squeezing the huge rough rock more and more firmly, she closed her eyes and imagined that her firm breasts had become even harder than the rock itself. Thrusting her excited nipples up against it, the tiny microscopic muscles beneath her soft skin flexed to turn even this soft part of her body into something akin to Vendorian steel. Smiling, she enjoyed how wonderful the cold rough rock felt against her huge nipples, the hard edges of the irregular rock making her feel more and more tingly as she imagined these soft feminine parts of her body becoming strong enough to split rocks apart.

A sudden burst of erotic tingling raced up between her thighs as she responded by squeezing the rock against her breasts with all her strength, her arm muscles exploding into dozens of hard tight curves. Her fingers began breaking off small protrusions where she gripped the rock, the granite starting to make crunching noises as she felt her nipples tearing into it, the soft bare skin of her breasts proving to be far more invulnerable than mere rock. She kept increasing her strength while thrusting her chest harder against it, pushing her tits forward harder and harder until she finally felt a huge pop that vibrated through her body, the rock inevitably yielding to the incredible twin pressure points that were being exerting against it. The now vastly weaker rock shattered into many fragments, many of them tickling her slightly as they tumbled down between her proud out-thrust breasts, down across her stomach and legs, a thrill filling her body as she realized that even the softest part of her body could become stronger than these granitic rocks!

While most of the rock fragments fell to the ground, she held on to two palm-sized pieces. Since she had enjoyed the feeling of the rough rock rubbing against her breasts a moment ago, she now started to rub these smaller ones experimentally over her ruby-hard nipples, finding that the rough edges felt so wonderful, her protruding nipples tingling wildly as they became even more engorged under the rough stimulation. She soon found that she was rubbing the rocks faster and harder across her nipples with every moment, closing her eyes while enjoying the pleasant little tingling sensations that were flowing downwards through her body, the rocks flicking her nipples back and forth, her nipples scraping along the rough edges, the warmth finally flowing down between her tightly closed legs! Her hips started to move forward slightly as she felt a gush of moisture between the inner steel of her smooth thighs. She could hardly believe how turned on she was starting to feel.

Her nose suddenly wrinkled as she smelled something burning! Startled, her blue eyes snapped open to look down at herself as she saw a definite trace of smoke coming from between her tightly grasped fingers, curling upward from her nipples! The two rocks themselves seemed to be glowing as they were partially buried between her breasts, her very feminine chest dimpling under the immense pressures from her hands.

Yet the sensation of wonderful warmth continued to spread across her breasts as the edges of the rocks began to glow slightly in the shade of the tree she was laying under. Arching her back to push her breasts further upwards, she was wonderfully aware of how large her nipples had now grown, amazed as she looked down to see that they now seemed to stick out more than an inch from the rounded contours of her breasts! And they were glowing dull red just like the rocks.

Suddenly compelled to hold herself even more firmly, she noticed that the rock fragments were beginning to crumble slightly as her hard protruding nipples proved to be even harder than the rock itself. A sudden rush of tingling pleasure flowed through her body as she looked down to see her nipples tearing off small pieces of the rock on each stroke, as they wore grooves in the rock itself!

The apparent impossibility of this startled her, but not enough to derail her growing passion. Feeling a sudden urge to press the rock even more firmly against her breasts, her hands stroked the fragments faster and harder across her wildly tingling nipples. She could now feel the heat from the rocks warming her hands and washing upward across her chest to warm her face. Looking down again, she saw that her breasts were beginning to glow red hot from just the friction between the rocks and her soft skin.

"My God," she breathed to herself in a whisper, "this is exactly like the dreams I used to have!" She clearly remembered dreaming of having such powers and strengths, dreams where her body was invulnerable, dreams where she was strongly aroused by performing feats of strength that should have been completely impossible for any living being to perform. Also dreams where she had drawn secret pleasure from having men watch her while she did impossibly sexy things with her super powers.

This sudden physical realization of her wildest and most impossible fantasies energized her entire body, her arousal now peaking to such a degree that her hips began surging upward with uncontrollable passion, totally astonished when she looked down to see the tanned skin of her breasts glowing cherry-red from the incredible heat. She couldn’t stop herself now as she slid the glowing rock in her right hand slowly down over her flat stomach, feeling the warm sensuous glow following it as she traced the rock slowly and ever downwards across her body. Her whole hand was now glowing red hot from the intense heat as she bent her knees upwards and outwards while easing the glowing rock between them. Her hands began to rub the sharp edges of the rock over her swollen mons, a sizzle of steam announcing the copious wetness it found inside as the rock fragment began parting the edges of her nether lips. The violent heat of the rock radiated strongly into her sex, seemingly warming her from the inside out as she forced one sharp edge into herself far enough to rub it up against her clitoris, that tiny organ rising from beneath its little hood.

Fair suddenly couldn’t hold her screams of pleasure back, the incredible pressure and heat from the rough edges of the rock driving her wild as she ran it across her clit with enormous pressure, her hands moving faster and faster as wave after wave of tingling warmth spread upward through her entire body. It seemed that the rougher she made it, the better it felt, her clit protruding as it grew from her labia to scrape so wonderfully against the hard rock. Finally arching her back and thrusting her hips high into the air, she felt all her muscles flexing uncontrollably under the wild demands of her passion. She panted and screamed loudly enough to send flocks of birds into the air for a half mile in every direction as she finally reached her startlingly athletic climax. She was now running on sheer unconscious instinct as she unleashed the immense strength of her hands to try to satisfy her needful sex, her fingers pressing the rock deeper and deeper into the copious moisture that coated her hands.

It wasn’t long before the partially melted granite could no longer survive the incredible strain of her passionate sex, cracking and shattering into a hundred pieces under the forces of her out-of-control muscles. Yet the disappearance of the shattered rock failed to diminish her growing passion, her fingers pressing right through the pulverized rock as they sought out her protruding clitoris, the weaker rock now replaced by her far stronger fingers as she stroked her thumb and forefinger frantically up and down her hard clit. Thrusting her hips high into the air again and again, her head and feet slammed into the hard earth beneath her, a raging climax exploding from deep within her young body with such power that it shook the very ground upon which she lay.

Fair climaxed continuously for several minutes, her feet and shoulders making deep depressions in the hard ground as she joyously arched her pelvis upwards again and again, finally throwing her hands outward to scatter the almost completely melted rock fragments across the meadow. Rolling on her side to pull her knees up tightly against her chest, she turned to collapse onto the warm grass, trying to catch her breath as she lay gasping on the ground, the remaining rock making crinkling noises as it cooled inside the intimate folds over her body.

Finally able to breathe freely again, a girlish smile crossed her lips as an amazing and ridiculous thought filled her mind. She knew she could probably start a fire just by rubbing rocks over her nipples or by squeezing them between her normally delicate nether lips! How about that for a wilderness skill, she giggled to herself? The thought was so outrageous that she couldn’t help but laugh out loud, her rich high-pitched laughter echoing from the trees surrounding the meadow.

Jumping excitedly to her feet, her body feeling more alive than she had ever felt before, she decided that it was time to head off and explore the rest of this strange place, even if she didn’t have any clothes to wear! She no longer cared about such details, her body was beautiful, so strong and so sexy, that she was not concerned what any man saw. She was a Goddess, a true super girl, a Protector. She was 18 years old.

Walking slowly across the meadow, she found that her knees turned in a bit, the grating of cooled rock inside her less than pleasant. Pausing to remove the remains of her enthusiastic use of the local rocks, she finally was comfortable again as she resumed her walk.

It wasn't until she got to the other side of the huge meadow that she finally came across a crude road, really just two wheel tracks, that left this second meadow and appeared to run down into the adjoining valley. Since she had always done a lot of running as part of her fitness training, it now seemed natural to start running down the road and into the trees on the other side of the meadow. Instinctively breaking into a run as she normally would have back home, she hadn’t taken ten steps before she found that she was flying well off the ground!

Quickly discovering that she had to lean her body forward more and more so that her bouncing steps would take her further forward and not as high into the air, she was soon bounding forward more than fifty feet with each slow motion step. Unfortunately, she also found that she was leaning forward too far and was getting more and more out of control with each step. Being this far off balance, she didn’t know how to slow down without losing her footing, so she just kept on accelerating. This worked fine until the road suddenly took a turn to the right as it came out of the trees, dropping over the edge of a steep slope into the canyon. She quickly saw that there was no way she could make that turn - her legs were now way behind her body.

Twisting her body in earnest, she tried to make the turn anyway, but all she could manage was to get her legs tangled up and to trip herself. She was going more than seventy miles per hour when she left the road and crashed off into the underbrush, sliding along the ground backwards while flailing with her arms, trying to grab onto something, anything, to stop herself. Her wish was finally granted, sort of, when she came to a shuddering stop by smashing backwards into the trunk of a tall coconut palm tree fifty feet from the road.

She was stunned, her body jammed against the tree, a half dozen coconuts falling around her. Old instincts die hard, and based on the force of her crash, she was terrified that she’d injured herself. However, after moving around gingerly for a moment, she rolled over onto her side to look behind her. While some of the tree bark had been stripped away and sap was coming from the wound, her back felt just fine! Her confidence soared once again as she realized it was going to take a lot more than a crash like this to injure her now.

Rising up on her knees, she picked one of the coconuts up and ripped it in half as if it was made of soft expanded plastic. Feeling really butch all of a sudden, she reached part way around the huge palm tree, digging her fingers into the sappy bark. Sinking her fingers to their roots, she lifted upward, her knees digging into the soft ground until they hit the hard rock beneath. Struggling to raise one leg until her foot was resting on one of the rocks, she lifted harder, rising from a one-legged deep-knee bend. Her body shook violently from the long tearing vibrations that came from the tree, the massive plant, more than 75 feet tall, ripping from the ground as she rose to her feet to hold it over her head. Turning toward the nearby canyon, she threw it forward, the massive tree, easily weighing many tons, flying more than a hundred yards to disappear over the rim of the canyon.

Looking down at her sap-covered hands, Fairchild was now convinced that she had actually been sent across the Dimensional Gap. As strong as she had been on Velor, what she had just done was completely impossible for even a hundred Velorian women to accomplish. She began to think that she had been sent on the mission she had been training for, sent long before her training completed. It had to have been an equipment or programming fault in the TransUnit computer, the date sequence of her increasingly long jumps getting scrambled in its computer memory or something. Unfortunately, even if it was accident, she knew that there was no way back across the Gap, the machinery could only be operated at full power to send one person each year through the Gap, and it could never return anyone. More frequent full-power use would be detected by the Ancient Ones, the Gods that had created the Velorian race, the ones that still watched over their prodigy.

Overcoming her initial disorientation, she found that she could begin to remember some additional fragments of her abbreviated training, recalling that they had told her that she should expect to be a lot stronger at her destination. That made sense, everyone knew that Velorians were a hundreds of times stronger than normal once they got away from planets with gold cores.

But for the life of her, she still couldn’t remember where she had been going or what she was supposed to do when she got there! She knew that there had been many months of briefings and training sessions ahead of her before she was supposed to have left to cross the Gap. Those sessions were supposed to tell her all about her destination planet. They were also supposed to tell her what her mission was.

Sitting down hard on the soft ground now, she struggled to remember at least some fragments of her training, but her memory still seemed so very blurry. However one important memory gradually began to emerge: the rumor that Galtere had repeated to her, the one she had not believed at first. He had told her that she was being trained to go to the Mother World, to Terra, to Earth! A planet which had not had a permanent Protector for all of its history! She felt a surge of excitement as she recalled this, her childhood memories of the fairly tales of Earth coming back to her. Looking at the vegetation around her and the yellow sun abover her, she suddenly realized that it had all been true, that she probably really was on that mystical planet even now! EARTH!! The most dangerous and exciting place she had ever read about. The origin of all known humanoid life in the galaxy.

Looking around herself with a renewed perspective, she studied the trees and plants as if for the first time, fragments of her long fascination and study of the Mother world coming back to her. Everything she had read about Earth matched what she was now seeing! Shaking her head in stunned wonder, feeling both elated and a little frightened at the same time, she walked slowly back to the road and started running again, this time very slowly. She had to find some people to confirm her suspicions, to find if she really was on Earth.

This time, she tried to smooth out her running gait to stay closer to the ground, her legs moving faster and faster as she accelerated down the steep hill. She found she was soon going much faster than before, yet she now had the control to negotiate the gentle turns in the road as it traveled along the side of the canyon.

Suddenly, she saw that the old road abruptly ended where a huge section had slipped away into the canyon, the collapse leaving a gap of more than five hundred feet between the two intact sides of roadbed. The missing section of road was now a vertical cliff that fell downward for several hundred feet! It was immediately clear that she was running far too fast to stop in time, so she decided to jump for it. Her bare legs became a blur as she accelerated even more strongly while approaching the broken edge of the road, pushing off strongly with her toes in a desperate attempt to leap the wide gap.

Fairchild realized as soon as she left the ground that she had used far too much strength; she was not only going to clear the gap in the road but she was going to fly right over the turn on the other side! That next turn was to the left along the canyon wall. She saw that she was going to sail right over the road, probably traveling half a mile in mid-air, before falling thousands of feet down into the dark canyon below!

She instinctively squeezed her legs together as she flailed her arms, trying vainly to change her direction. Looking back up at the road as she started to fall past it, she closed her eyes as she mentally visualized herself standing on it once again. Suddenly, she found that her fall had stopped and she was moving rapidly upward, crashing head first into the large rocks along the edge of the road. Hanging on for dear life, her strong fingers tore crude hand grips in the smooth granite boulders as she climbed shakily back onto the roadbed.

"What the hell," she thought as she turned to look back down over the edge. "What stopped my fall?" Looking around, she couldn’t see anyone or anything that could have been the cause. In fact, if she didn’t know better, she would have thought she had actually been able to fly for a moment!

One good thing had happened though. While she was high in the air she had seen a large house located about halfway down the valley and a boat dock at the bottom where the valley emptied into a lagoon several miles below the house. Shrugging as a young girl might do when she didn’t understand something, Fair turned and began to run at remarkable speed down the road, heading toward the only sign of civilization that she had seen so far on this desolate world.

The Smuggler’s Dwelling

Fair knocked loudly on the front door when she arrived at the house, disappointed when it soon appeared that no one was going to answer her knock. Trying the doorknob, she found that it was securely locked.

Remembering what she had done to the rocks only an hour before, she slowly gripped the handle firmly while twisting it firmly. A smile lit her face as she looked down to see the heavy bronze lock tearing apart in her hand, her fingers twisting the metal of the door handle as if it was soft clay! Any doubt that she was on a relatively gold-free planet now left her. Being able to crush rocks of uncertain composition in her hands was one thing, but she knew what a bronze doorknob looked like, even if it now felt like nothing more substantial than soft putty in her hand.

Slowly tearing the heavy door handle apart while watching the steely tendons and muscles of her forearm flexing, she dropped the mangled remains of the lock on the floor as she slowly pushed the door open with her other hand. The hinges made a very soft creaking sound as she pushed inward on it, the door sounding as if it had been a while since it had last been opened. It was open nearly wide enough to enter when she saw two very bright flashes of light immediately followed by sensation of dozens of little stinging impacts all across her bare chest. A huge double BANG startled her at the same time, the quick flexing of her legs and the powerful impact against her chest enough to throw her violently backward. Flying ten feet through the air, she landed hard on her back in the middle of the wide porch, her bare legs spread widely apart.

With her heart pounding painfully in her chest now, she instinctively ran her hands over her breasts, quickly realizing once again that she was OK. Yet while the impacts hadn’t really hurt her, they weren’t exactly comfortable either. Still blinking rapidly in shocked surprise, she slowly sat back up on the front porch, her legs spread out to the sides as she looked down to realize that some of the tingly spots had spread all the way down between her bare legs.

Looking around her, she discovered dozens of tiny metal pellets laying all around her on the porch. Brushing her fingers lower, she slid them between the soft folds of her mons, extracting even a few pellets from there! Slowly getting back to her feet, she stood in the doorway for a moment, surprised to find that most of those spots now felt kind of tingly and good, especially the ones closest to her bare nipples.

Squinting her eyes, she looked further into the darkened room to see some kind of crude projectile weapon aimed at her, the inside doorknob attached to the bottom of it with a long string. Fairchild walked through the door to casually pick the weapon up, noticing that it had two large barrels which were nearly an inch in diameter, both of them feeling slightly warm in her hands. She felt a surge of anger as she unconsciously tightened her grip on the weapon, the steel flattening between her strong fingers. Someone had deliberately booby-trapped this door in an effort to kill her or anyone else that might come in!

While she, like everyone else who watched holo-TV on Velor, knew that Terran people were a most violent race, she was still surprised that her very first contact with a manmade Terran objects had been so violent. She moved more carefully now as she walked further into the darkened house, not wanting a repeat of her violent ‘welcome’. Her eyes seemed to glow in the dark as she stared at the strange decorations and furniture that she saw, amazed to see these obviously alien artifacts for the first time. Lost in her exploration, the following hours seemed like minutes as she wandered through the dark dingy and totally alien house.

It was near the end of her long exploration when she found a large amount of women’s clothing in an upstairs closet. Examining them closely, looking for something that might fit her, she was dismayed that so many of the garments had dried red smears on them and small torn holes in the tops. Shuddering unconsciously, she avoided the red-stained garments while selecting some undamaged clothes that sort of fit her. She was surprised to find that most of the slacks were either too short or too tight to fit her long legs. Most of the blouses were also impossibly tight around her bust. This was surprising given the wide variety of sizes she found. While she hadn’t been remarkably tall on Velor, only 2 metrons, her figure about average, these clothes suggested that she might be a lot taller and better developed than the normal Terran woman.

Fair continued to search the house, returning again and again to an interesting wall that contained a number of electronic devices. Finally feeling brave, or maybe just a little bored, she started to push the buttons in a random pattern, hoping she could make something happen. It wasn’t long before her efforts were rewarded, a projection screen that was similar, but smaller, than the old 2D one that she had had back in her bedroom on Velor suddenly lighting up.

The picture wasn’t very clear compared to what she was used to, but the images immediately intrigued her as they seemed to show Terran life from many different perspectives. In fact, it was so fascinating that she sat before it for most of the night, frequently pushing the button that changed the images, carefully watching a succession of strange and confusing little skits where people talked while they performed the most hilarious stunts! Yet the more she watched, the less sense it all made to her - in fact, the shows that came on very late at night were mostly just people sitting and talking about things she didn’t understand, with everyone in the audiences laughing in the strangest places. Either that or they were crude sex shows, the men and women barely talking as they engaged in some of the strangest sex that Fairchild had ever seen.

Finally, after watching a half dozen sex shows, ones that were more graphic than any she had been allowed to watch at her parents house on Velor, she found something familiar, an adventure drama vaguely similar to the type she had enjoyed back on Velor: it was about some people trying to take over a huge steel ship, a lowly cook being the apparent star. She grew more and more astounded and shocked at how many weapons the criminal men had and how many people they killed or injured as the story progressed! But in the end, she was most impressed with the blonde actress in the drama as she finally showed that she was able to truly help the men.

The presence of any feminine leadership or ability in a movie was so totally different from anything a Velorian movie would have ever presented that she felt a wave of excitement rising through her body. This was exactly what she had read about regarding Earth. While it was the most dangerous place in the galaxy, it was also one of the few places where women had some measure of equality with men, where they could sometimes actually be in charge of men!

Thrilled by that alien thought, she eventually turned off the screen and read through all the papers she could find in the house, turning the pages of books as fast as she could while her bright blue eyes scanned each page. Her many long classes on alien languages had prepared her well and her quick intellect and nearly photographic memory allowed her to read a complete book every fifteen minutes. Yet the more she read, the more concerned she became. While it was clear that Earth looked quite a bit like her home planet of Velor, actually more like Daxxan, the people were so very, very different. Yet some of them sort of looked like Velorians, although their physiques were generally much less developed and many of them had weird hair colors. Browns and blacks, colors that were completely wrong, some almost disgusting looking! In fact, they looked almost like the ugly pictures that she had seen of their enemy, the Arions!! In addition, the stories they told and the places they described, many of them dealing with various forms of violence, were completely alien to her.

*