System: Unknown

  Location: Unknown

  My body ached with a deep and unrelenting soreness, the kind that suggested every muscle had been strained beyond its limit. This discomfort was a dull echo of the sharp, invasive memory of being forcibly carried across the void from one ship to another. As consciousness clawed its way back, I remembered the iron grip of my captor, the disorienting rush of space between the Kinsley and this unknown vessel. My eyes flew open to a stark realization: I was still encased in my suit, but no longer aboard my own ship. The sterile, unfamiliar environment hummed with a strange silence, a stark contrast to the familiar vibrations of the Kinsley. The fact that I was now a captive in an alien craft, far from the battlegrounds of humanity, pressed down on me with an almost physical weight.

  Silvery metal surrounded me. Lines, circles and odd symbols covered multiple sections of the walls. Some were lit up while others were dim. None of it made any sense to me. Standing up, I moved closer to one of the lit diagrams. Looking it over and trying to figure out what it could be for. Suddenly a window popped up in my vision. ‘Identify?’

  What the fuck. I looked around to see if something had triggered the window. There was no one else in sight. In fact, apart from my breathing, I could not hear anything. No ship I had ever been on had been quiet. Faint vibrations from the equipment, pipes, and engines had been in the background my entire life.

  Shrugging, I said, “Sure.”

  Welp…that made absolutely no sense to me. How could a bunch of random lines do anything, let alone shield a section of the ship? Shaking my head, I moved down the hall, ignoring the random art and looking for someone to question.

  The place was a maze, or at least it felt like it when I kept ending up going in circles. After wandering around for nearly an hour, I found myself looking at the same corridor I had started in. That or there were a lot of places that were exactly the same on the ship.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  There was only one thing I could ask for answer, my AI, if I could call it mine. “Where am I and how do I get out of here?”

  ‘You are on the ship Quicksilver on route to a nearby core world. As the ship is not in real space, there is nowhere to go.’

  So, I was trapped on this ship. Thankfully though, I wasn’t locked up in a cell. In fact, I was free to wander. Maybe I could find something I could use to take over the ship and return to Earth.

  Feeling the start of some hunger pains, as well as a full bladder, I thought about finding a restroom before finding food. It wasn’t like I could do anything on an empty stomach, and given that they had left me alone, they were not likely to kill me. At least not for now.

  My imagination rushed ahead, thinking about what I might find and what some of them would do to me. It was enough that my head started to hurt. Absentmindedly, I reached up to rub my forehead only to be blocked by my suit. Grumbling, I asked “Can you at least give me directions to where I can get some food and water? Maybe even a toilet?”

  Instead of another window popping up, a simple line painted itself on the floor. Taking it as an answer, I followed it. It wasn’t even five minutes before it stopped at a door. As I approached the door, it opened to reveal a moderate sized bathroom. A full mirror was next a small indent in the ground. Looking up, I saw hundreds of holes in the ceiling. Separating the possible shower and the rest of the room was a small bench.

  A small sink sat about waist high with another mirror above it. The only other thing in the room was the toilet. There was no indent for clothes to form, nor any sort of cleaning dispensers.

  Tapping the spot where the suit had emerged from, it started to retract. Streams of nanites flowed along my skin and back into the shape of a small puck. The color was off, but what was that oddity compared to everything else going on. Sitting on the warm seat creeped me out a little, but at this point, I didn’t care. Quickly finishing, I got back up and washed my hands.

  Looking up from the sink and into the mirror, I noticed my hair. Or rather, the color. It was no longer just the dark brown I had grown up with. It had grown out a couple of inches and each new inch was a stark white color.

  I stood there in shock before just shaking my head. Given that I had been under stress for the last few days while out fighting, I could understand a few white hairs. But how did my whole head turn white at the same time?

  Walking out of the room, I looked down at the floor. The line returned and went off in a new direction. Hoping to find food at the end of the line, I jogged down it. Corridor after corridor, turn after turn, I followed it. Twenty minutes later, I reached the end of the corridor and the line.

  The hall opened into a moderately sized room. Tables were spread out haphazardly. Some facing a couple floor to floor-to-ceiling windows while others were bunched together. It was only then that I realized I had been hearing people talking. Had been because they all froze upon my entering the room.

  Each and every one of them looked strikingly similar to the alien I had killed. They all had different colored hair and number of tails, but they all looked to be the same species. All but three were women and none of them moved, not until one of them screamed. “Who brought a fucking elf on the damn ship?”