“You have such a way with words,” I say, squeezing some more fly corpses off my tongue.
During the last stream, a subscriber picked that we continue a story that we wrote before about Sun Aliens.
Watch the full video here, or scroll down for the story.
We’d only written the first four paragraphs of the story before, about our down-on-his-luck main character Frank swabbing the deck of the U.S.S. Expectant, wishing he was part of the grime he was sending back to the sea.
Now, we skip ahead about five to six chapters. The ship Frank was on exploded and sunk when the alien escaped the ship (which he did not know was part of the cargo), and after days of interrogation by the beefy Tyson Warren at the FBI, Frank was declared the only survivor and set free. He was then approached by Deborah Sanchez, a conspiracy theorist/hacker who’s believed in Sun Aliens for years, though Frank is skeptical. Together, they now head to hopefully find the alien for the first time.
Here’s what we came up with:
I can’t believe I’m on a private plane with Derpy Deb to the Big Island of Hawai’i. Yes, that’s what it’s actually called. I thought it was crazy too, but there the name was, staring back at me on the map. All of the other Hawaiian islands have names like Maui or Oahu or Molokai, but I guess they ran out of ideas when they got to the biggest, main-est one.
Or maybe Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano in the world, just scared the crap out of them and they wanted to peace out real quick.
Deb’s theory is at least a little more sane than any of her others I’ve heard so far. The Solarian—a compromise we came to call the creature between her idea for “Solalien” and my idea for “Sooooo Alien”—is used to living in temperatures of 10,000 degrees. The closest anything on Earth could even come to that is an active volcano, around 2,000 degrees. That’d be like us finding refuge in a frozen tundra on an alien planet, but hey, at least a tundra is better than an active blizzard pissing ice on your face.
As for why we’re headed to this volcano and not literally any other in the world, especially one closer to where the Expectant went down in the Atlantic, that’s thanks to another one of Derpy’s theories. She’s been cracking into radio frequencies all over the southern hemisphere, and mapping out the weird ones on a board. Sailors seeing bright flashes zoom by, entire schools of dead fish floating in bubbling-hot water, anything out of the ordinary. So far, they’d been following a line underneath South America, back out into the Pacific, which meant that Mr. or Mrs. Solarian was likely headed in that direction.
Or, you know, it’s just global warming cracking its knuckles before the big event kills us all in a few years.
But Derpy paid for the private two-person tickets, and I’m currently unemployed with nothing better to do, so hey, why not? I’ve always wanted to visit America’s Culturally Appropriated One-Stop Tourism Shop, and this was as good an opportunity as any. Plus I’ve never flown in anything but coach before, and I have to say, this two-person plane is pretty swanky. Two cushioned chairs, all-you-can-drink alcohol, and delightful little confectionaries in all pastel colors piled on a plate. There’s not even any No Smoking signs. For the first time in my life, I wish I was addicted to nicotine.
“So what’s the plan?” I ask, leaning over to Derpy as she typed away furiously on her laptop. “They’re probably not going to let us just walk right up to the tip-top of the volcano. Something about, you know, accidentally falling into lava and pulling an accidental Terminator 2 on yourself.”
“Already taken care of,” she says. “This plane is landing right at the base of the volcano. We’ll just have a short hike to the top.”
“And how did you pull that one off?” I ask. Derpy rolls her eyes and slides the plates of cookies toward me.
“You don’t need to worry about that. Just try one of the pink ones.”
I wiggle my fingers in the air, pluck a puffy pink donut, and give it a munch.
“Ooh, delectable,” I say. “Ignorance tastes just as good as I thought it would.”
***
The plane lands at a small private strip right in the middle of what seems like nowhere. There’s no other planes, and just a small tower that’s decorated to look like a tall log cabin. Aside from the ocean-blue sky, the tall leafy trees everywhere, my pockets now overflowing with crumbling cookies, and the towering monster of a volcano right next to us, there’s nothing else.
“So this is what it feels like being on Gilligan’s Island,” I say, looking around at our tropical surroundings.
Derpy flashes me a smile and heaves her backpack on, with about a thousand things dangling off the sides. Everything from water bottles to knives to things I don’t even have the vocabulary to describe.
“Exactly,” she says. “Now, let’s get going, Skipper.”
I salute her back. “Aye aye, Professor.”
As soon as we take a step off the short runway toward the volcano, a man comes running at us from the log-cabin tower. He’s wearing a button-up hibiscus shirt, flailing his arms wildly, his face pallid with fear.
“Sir! Miss!” he calls. He stops right in front of us, out of breath. “You don’t want to go up there. We’ve had reports of increased temperature, and dead fish turning up along the coast. That might mean there’s been an underwater earthquake, and we may have to evacuate.”
I turn to Derpy, but she’s nothing but smiles. “That’s fine. That’s exactly why we’re here.”
***
After pacifying the raving man by giving him some neon-yellow and green cookies, Derpy and I start our trek up the volcano. It’s obviously not the path intended to be taken by tourists… because there is no path. We climb up steep sheets of grass and trees, insects buzzing and screaming all around us. I have to keep my hand in constant helicopter-spinning-mode in front of my face just to not swallow an entire family of flies every time I breathe.
Derpy leads the way in front with her machete out, hacking and slashing at pretty much nothing except for the occasional leaf or branch in the way.
“So why are you cutting nothing with that thing?” I ask, spitting out another fly family reunion from my mouth.
“Because I’ve always wanted to hack-and-slash my way through an adventurous fairy tale!” Derpy says. “And if we get our flesh melted off our bones today by an angry Solarian, then this is the only chance I’ll get!”
“You have such a way with words,” I say, squeezing some more fly corpses off my tongue.
As we continue up the side of the volcano, the insects become less along with the foliage. The grass slowly starts being replaced by long, smooth black rocks—hardened lava. Just a little ways more up, and the tropical jungle is only a lingering bitterness on my tongue as we’re surrounded by an obsidian desert, no sign of life anywhere.
Unless you count the swirling flames at the top.
Even though I’ve followed Derpy the whole way here, I have to admit I never really thought her idea about the Sooo Aliens had any chance of being true. It’s only now, seeing the fires dancing around at the top of the volcano, that I think for the first time, maybe, there may be a nugget of truth to what she’s been saying. The thought terrifies me.
“Come on, Frank!” she calls, waving her arm. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
She takes off running and clanging toward the peak, and I follow behind her as best I can. I’m barely able to keep up with her, even though I’m carrying about a thousand pounds less on my back than she is.
She hits the top before I do, and I almost expect her to do one of those dramatic takes where she stops in her tracks, turns back to me with a smile, and then I catch up to her and see the same magnificent sight. Instead, she throws her arm over her face and nearly falls to the ground as she cries out, stumbling mere feet away from the top.
“Holy crap!” she yells. “We need sunglasses. Here, grab a pair for me and you.”
I don’t need to ask where they are. There’s two pairs of heavy-duty sunglasses hanging off her backpack right next to the third canteen and cast-iron frying pan. Ripping them off the carabiners, I hand her a pair and put the other one on myself. Immediately, the world turns to shadow. I can barely see anything except the bright sky and the sun.
“What are these?” I ask. “Sunglasses for vampires?”
“Trust me,” she says. “You’ll need them.”
At this point, I don’t bother to argue. I just march next to her as we approach the peak together. Little flares of light leap out from right across the rim, pure-white through the goggles and probably outright-blinding without them. I’m already sweating from just being this close, like I’m standing next to a bonfire. The idea of being so near something this hot—without even any s’mores for protection—is somewhat terrifying.
Then we reach the edge. I peer down inside the bubbling bathtub of lava, and I realize I don’t know the first damn thing about terror.
I can see the Solarian. Thanks to the sunglasses, the boiling lava is nothing but a mere flicker compared to the white-bright creature, so intense I still have to squint a little even through the darkened lenses.
The only way to describe it is alien. It doesn’t have any mouth, eyes, or appendages that I can see. Its body, if it can even be called that, is like a thin sheet, billowing in the heat of the lava, constantly flowing along with it, dissipating and growing, inhaling and exhaling.
In the center is some sort of round-ish bulge, something I might dare to call a “head.” Honestly it looks like a melon riding a magic carpet, which it may as well actually be for all I know.
The whole time I’m staring at it, I can only think one thing: it’s real. This is what brought down the Expectant. This is what I’d been interrogated about for days. This is the thing—no, the creature—from the Sun.
It’s real.
“Is that actually the Solarian?” I ask Deb.
“Yes it is,” comes a deep voice from behind me that is definitely not Deb.
Both of us spin around, and I yank off my sunglasses to see Tyson Warren standing there with a small army behind him, grinning from ear to ear.
“And thank you for leading us to it,” he says.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: GAHAG (edited by me)