Oren-Zai was doing his best to fit into the legion.

Tasked with manning the retractor and fixing the damn radio whenever it broke, he succeeded in making himself useful, but he doubted the other crewmen or the soldiers respected him; he was sure enough about the brass. As such, it helped to take precautions. He kept his wits about him in the hallway lest anyone step on his tails, and whenever he passed a reflective surface, he checked to see if anyone had messed with his heat regulating spinal fans. He would have felt it if someone hit it with a laser, but the Plorothians on the ship could be rather sneaky. Unlike respectable Benden-Uai, they could crawl along sheer surfaces with their thousands of skinny little legs, and it was all too easy for them to write something indecorous on his fans with their stomach acid while hanging from the ceiling or walls. Not for the first time, he cursed their cheap labor.

He caught sight of Laren-Sai running from the other end of the hallway, looking better after her last egg-laying, but there must have been some reason she was hurrying enough to drop the stack of solid-state drives she was carrying.

"Here, let me get some of those..." he offered, picking up a few of them. "Are we near a habitable planet? The only reason we'd be doing brain scans-"

"Yes, yes- they're actually quite excited about this one, there's a chance we could learn quite a bit from them..." the researcher responded, collecting the drives herself.

"They're not a threat, though, or are they? Why wasn't I told about-"

"Well, I'm telling you now, aren't I? Get to the retractor controls."

Oren-Zai tossed a tail back and forth. It did not seem like something worth fighting over. Not telling him something he needed to know was basically how the order of the ship worked; he remembered no time when he felt prepared for anything. Laren-Sai scurried off to wherever she had been carrying the brain scans.

The controls were as he left them, at least- one never knew with Plorothians around. They had a habit of inverting the rays and getting away with it. To his surprise, however, there was a commander near his station. He could have sworn his name was Uryen-Rai, or possibly Inden-Nai.

"Is this about the brain scans?" he asked without slowing down as he got to the controls. He hated it as much as anyone else when someone stopped dead just to ask a question. "We found something?"

"I'm afraid we found something big. We can't tell if they're a threat to us or not, and we're having to cover up the readings from central." It made sense, if you wanted to capture organisms from a planet and study them. Reporting any kind of brain scans was a good way of getting a pet planet reduced to pebbles. It was well and truly impossible to make rank without a species to study, so the trick was to get one more interesting than they initially seemed. From the commander's expression, with the red whiskers of his face extended to full length, it was clear to the retractor operator that they had struck gold.

"What are we looking at?" he asked, calibrating the rays. There were five of them, which had to do with the five dimensions, or at least he was relatively sure of that. He was not required to understand the technology he was operating, nor usually the reason why he was operating it. The commander being at his station was more of a reason to be suspicious than proud.

"Well, if the scans we have are accurate- the network is down at the moment, that's why we're lugging them around, don't you forget it- then something like ninety nine percent of them are slugs; there's very little activity." He held up a drive labeled with a request not to take it out of research. "A few of them, however, are capable of something more, something we can't even properly measure."

Oren-Zai quinked. The pieces were beginning to fall into place. The commander had to use the brain activity pattern on the stolen memory to target one of the desired subjects. He had suspected that the lower digestive probing of the test subjects two cycles ago was off record, but that time it had been a legionnaire serving as a lookout; something like this was unheard of. All the same, he did not disobey.

He had to applaud the navigation team and whoever had designed the passive cloaking, since they were getting so close to the planet's surface without impacting the tides or their giving any sign of having detected the ship. Most of the time they ran straight into the planet and changed their own orders to include a crash landing. The rays were active as the commander attached the solid state drive to the control station, and it only took a manual interrupt to the processor to recalibrate the targeting computer. A sudden curiosity wondered what kind of brain activity the machine was seeking out; what pattern of synaptic signals registered as interesting to the researchers in the first place. The graphical representation of the planet's surface with its possible targets reloaded, showing significantly fewer. He narrowed the focus onto a cluster of them, but the trick was to grab one who happened to be alone.

"We're looking for a mature specimen, someone without any particular abnormalities," the commander offered. The retractor operator knew how to do his own job, to be sure, but he never quite figured out what was meant by 'without any particular abnormalities'. He had an idea someone would tell him if he ever screwed it up that badly. Well, that was if he ever screwed it up that badly and the result could be traced back to him. "What are you doing with that?" he asked, likely referring to him flipping a switch several times.

"Sorry, this one's a bit fiddly. Never quite gets all the way switched, you just have to switch it until it switches."

"I see." Oren-Zai would have offered a more helpful explanation, but job security on a ship full of Plorothians was even trickier to maintain than a control station. He had a habit of failing to report issues until they were discovered by someone else, at which point they would get fixed, but he could mostly conceal them with a system of complicated work-arounds for the basic functionality of most of the controls. These were not written down anywhere, at least to his knowledge. He figured that if they were going to get rid of him sooner or later, the least he could do was have a bit of fun training his replacement.

"Sorry, I'll have to count the clicks again. Usually I do this alone," he said, restarting the calibration. He knew the mechanical clicking sound had absolutely nothing to do with the calibration process, and there were at least a hundred of them every three or four times he quinked, but he would always enter a random number as a variable name. The commander leaned in, raising his tails to counterbalance.

"What the hell is that number?"

"It's the number of clicks... no, sorry, it's the log of the number of clicks. I just need the number of clicks to determine the log." An uneasy silence filled the air. "I can do logs in my head." All five of the commander's eyes narrowed as he turned back to the controls, hastily entering the fifth-dimensional coordinates. The rays were invisible; he could hardly point them once they were fired. The targeting system finally locked onto a mature subject, apparently alone. "He's not bending space, is he?"

"Better grab that one before he does, then."

"Might actually make this easier..." Oren-Zai muttered to himself as he executed the command, hitting three buttons unnecessarily. Generally speaking, the more complicated he made his job look, the less likely he was to lose it. "Looks like it was a success. He'll be in the old washroom off the side of the cargo room before you can quink." Without further preamble, they set off in the appropriate direction. Remembering something, he decided to preface the probable disappointment with an addendum, as well as deflect the blame from himself. "Oh, and O'o'o'ter from the wiring cohort estimates that there is an eighty percent chance that the subject will not be incinerated."

"Damn Plorothians..." the commander muttered, trailing off. "Last time he said seventy."

"Well, last time that was the high estimate. We actually thought it was around fifty... fifty-ish."

Four tails were swishing with contained excitement as they walked; it had been a while since the ship had acquired any test subjects of significance. For the officer, however, the excitement was short-lived. He stopped.

"I need to order navigation to leave the planet's gravitational field," he muttered, hitting a button on a communication module. "If they don't receive a direct order, they won't do it." The last time he had anything to do with navigation, they were fervently insisting they would not hit any asteroids if the shortest possible route between their current position and where they were supposed to go did not contain any. In any case, they were off again as soon as the order was out. They found the subject more or less where they expected him to be. He was a short biped with some protective tissue growing from his head, and a length of preserved plant matter in his hand. He was also lightly touching the back wall, which happened to also be the ship's hull. It reverberated with every poke.

"Simply fascinating... I can only guess at what motivates the use of a flexible hull," the subject observed. They had already put some of the brain scans into the ship's translation software. The Plorothians mostly manned the process, so of course the creatures they acquired rarely said anything that made sense. Oren-Zai could swear a few of the definitions of words had been switched around, just to see if anyone would notice.

"The rest of the ship only wobbles if you push really hard," he explained, defending a few of the patch jobs he might have done between shifts. Most of those could be blamed on navigation running into asteroids. "This is almost certainly O'o'o'yra's work."

"Interesting... how is it that I can breathe in here?"

"Almost all intelligent life forms prefer much the same gases. The researchers hope to better understand this phenomenon by the time your planet dies," the commander explained.

"It was a lucky guess." The subject looked back and forth between them. Based on his own bizarre raiment, Oren-Zai reasoned that he would not be able to tell the difference in their rank by looking at theirs. "He's my commander; you should probably believe him."

There was a pause.

"How is it that you speak my language?"

"We can't talk normally anymore. We just think and move our mouths and all that; the communicators are hooked up to our vocal glands. The sound you hear is just what comes out of them; the sound we hear is just what gets translated before being planted back in our brains. The system is pretty janky, but it works most of the time."

"You overrode your own speech to communicate with the people you abducted?"

"Not really; it was the damn Plorothians refusing to learn our language. You'll meet a few of them before we put you back if you're not lucky."

"Why, gentlemen, this is easily the best day of my life. I can't quite tell you how glad I am to be here."

"We're thrilled as well. You seem to be one of the more useful members of your species. The system was not quite able to read the brain activity from your subsection, unless Alden-Tai is just fucking with us again."

"Really? At least to me, it always seemed the muggles were the most interesting, but that might have only been my perspective. Why, I happen to think there is a lot to explore with your species, but you, of course, would have explored your own species first. I was never that interested in how magic worked; magic was always self-explanatory, at least to me, growing up with magic. As far as I know, the explanation for everything is just 'magic'. Where are my manners, though- Arthur Weasley, at your service." He held out an appendage. The commander stared.

"Right. I am called Uryen-Rai, and I command this particular cohort."

"What cohort is that?"

"The cohort furthest to the back when the Emperor counted off and divided us into groups. I think our number was three."

"Why, that's rather startling-"

"What's startling is that you claim there is such a thing as magic. We have not heard of it."

"Oh, well, then I presume you're muggles. That must be why I find you so interesting. Well, I would presume the reason you have not heard of it is that the magical members of your species are doing their best to conceal themselves from you. I don't entirely agree with the approach, in fact it frustrates me a touch, but, well, some of them might be getting skittish if there are way more of you than there are of them." He seemed to pause to consider something else. "Well, perhaps they've gone to a different planet. I suppose that's possible; might be even easy with both highly advanced technology and magic."

"Can you perform magic?" Oren-Zai asked, still wondering about the plant matter.

"Oh, of course; it's no trouble at all, really." A large seat appeared out of nowhere. It might have been comfortable for one without tails. "The problem is, I can't really tell you how I did that. I can't tell you how it works, where it comes from, what's going on 'under the bonnet', if you would- the preeminent scholars on everything have a hundred and one ways of saying it's magic- it's infuriating, that's what it is," he concluded, plopping down on the seat. "I'm not supposing you have all the answers for everything in the universe, but you could at least explain the way your craft works, am I correct?"

The Benden-Uai exchanged a look.

"Well, whoever designed it might be able to. We went to a mechanic on the last fuel cycle who said he knew the ship from top to bottom, but I'm pretty sure he was lying," the commander explained. "The data's written down somewhere in the ship's solid state drives, but I couldn't swear to where they are."

"Right, but there's someone on the ship who knows, am I correct?"

"Theoretically," the retractor operator compromised. "What else can magic do?" he asked, trying to change the subject. If Uryen-Rai's expression was any indication, he was due for a promotion, though he would likely decline.

"Oh, all sorts of things. I suppose you would be interested, since you never have seen it before." He waved the length of plant matter again, and a solid state drive flew from across the room to his hand. "Now what exactly is this little number? How is it that you use it?"

"That's... well, that's a solid state drive and it goes into terminals and data banks. It kind of moves information from one machine to the other when the network is down or we're trying to hide something." Oren-Zai took it upon himself to furtively take a blood sample and put it into a biological scanner they looted from a destroyed planet, hoping their subject did not ask about that as well. Surprisingly, he was quite willing to provide a bit of blood.

"A book for machines... and so small," the strange creature observed. "I never thought I'd see the day." He looked at each of them. "Oh, right, I'll show you another trick of mine. Incendio." A burst of flames came out of nowhere, causing them to draw back in shock.

"How the hell- there are laws in the universe, immutable laws like Bulden-Wai's law of things you can do and things you can't, and one of the things you definitely can't do is create energy out of nowhere!" the retractor operator objected. "How the hell did you do that?"

"Magic," the subject explained. The biological reading came back to show he was indeed a mature specimen, closer to the end than the beginning of his life. "I know, it's tiring, isn't it? It actually seems kind of lazy- I'm not entirely convinced they don't just tell us that so we don't bother looking into it. Someone would have you know- my children, if no one else. Why, when they were in school, they investigated every little thing and their little friends were just as curious."

The Benden-Uai exchanged another look.

"I'm starting to get a thought about all this," Oren-Zai said.

"I might be of the same mind." He looked around. "We can still get most of the credit for the discovery. All the information passes through us, we just need a new department. We just need someone we can spare-" He stopped short, looking back.

"What?" the subject asked. "I must be missing something."

"Oh, no, no, we're just as interested in you as you are in us," the retractor operator explained. "But there's someone you haven't met, someone who would be quite tickled by all your questions. How would you like to meet some Plorothians?"

 

Spoiler

This story's kind of just bizarre to me. I sort of see what you were trying to go for with the alien, but yeah it's just off. They simultaneously feel not alien enough but too alien at the same time? That's contradictory I know, but I guess they're alien in the wrong sort of ways to my sensibilities.

You also overuse your ellipsis. The dialogue goes on and on at times without breaks. One or two times is okay in a story of this legnth, but you do it consistently in the latter half without taking the time to build on reactions, characteriation, or setting.

Towards the second half when we find out that a wizard has been abducted by aliens---that premise is pretty cool, but you ultiamtely didn't go anywhere interesting with it. Arthur's reactions are bland, and there's too much of a focus on technical aspects of the abduction rather than truly interesting interplay of two different cultures (magical and alien).

The prose was so-so. You went for an overly minimalistic approach, and at the risk of sounding like a huge hypocrite, I'd say it was a tad too much. You've got these huge paragraphs of dialogue for your story towards the end, but very little to describe setting and reaction.

Arthur's interpretation of magic too felt... eh? This is the guy who charmed a Ford Anglia to fly and become sentient. Not exactly the type that goes magic bleh in my mind.

 

2930 words

 

Spoiler

I found myself struggling not to skim at the start of this because I had trouble figuring out what I was reading or what was going on.

I mean, yes. It was obvious that these weren't humans but I wasn't sure if they were magical or technological or if this was the future or the past or whatever. I kept looking/scanning for either (1) action or (2) a canon character.

Then I took a breath and went back to read again, but I still have a bit of trouble getting into it. It's almost like there's both too much and too little at the same time to allow me to get into the setting/characters.

I do quite like the idea of aliens kidnapping a wizard for this prompt. Gets a wizard into space without having to leave the canon world too far behind.

I guess... ultimately I think the first half of the story was too long. In a short piece like this I wasn't interested in that much set-up, and it did feel like set-up. Cutting some of it and streamlining would make that part flow better. As it is you don't have time to really give us everything you would in a larger story, so the best option is to go for less (this feels caught halfway).

Just an opinion.

Thanks for submitting!