Page 14 of Emerald

When I feel a surge of arousal, I know that I have truly lost my mind.

The woman beside me looks at me with a mix of unknown expressions. I want to scream again, to rage, but my voice is caught in my throat. The slug speaks again, and its words make my skin crawl.

"Just imagine them bent over like that for your own purposes."

Suddenly, I find my voice.

"OHFUCKYOUANDYOURPURPOSEYOUSLIMECOVEREDPIECEOFSHIT!"

The horror of it all hits me, and I can't hold back my voice from hurtling into a gibberish-filled scream. The woman grabs my shoulders and I barely restrain myself from lashing out, her voice urgent in my ear. "They won't stop pumping gas in here until you stop screaming. Just…" She doesn't get to finish before another wave of gas makes us cough.

When the air clears again, I'm making terrified moans, my throat raw. The slug keeps talking about our bodies, about how they'll be used. I can feel the woman's arms around me, her whispers trying to soothe me, her touch doing the opposite.

I had settled on the bug situation. I hate change.

Hate. Hate change.

The woman speaks again, interrupting my litany. "I have you. I know this is terrifying, but it only gets worse if you seem scared. They like it."

Tears are streaming down both of our faces now. "Wh-Where are we? What is that?" I manage to ask, my voice trembling.

"On a spaceship. Those aliens captured us," she says.

Spaceship. Another one? The words spin in my head, trying to make sense, and then I slap myself lightly to remind myself that the events of the past couple of days, weeks, or months are not a fever dream, and that I need to stop looning out before this lady figures I am a few bolts short of well-mounted engine block.

I look around, really seeing my surroundings for the first time.

Standing casket-like pods, very much similar to the pod I just fell out of, dominate the room with glass panels through which I see other women lying still, with their features stuck in various states. I look back at the woman, and something about her eyes catches my attention.

I look to my own reflection and see I’ve had a similar modification. Green eyes. Green hair. That’s new. A glance down at my body reveals I don’t have the giant breasts and healing scars the bugs gave me anymore. I look almost… normal.

My mind stutters and I look back at the woman.

"What did they do to your eyes?" I ask, stupidly, before almost kicking myself.

They did the same thing to youreyes dipshit, I screech internally.

I feel unmoored, but then with a start I realize that my thoughts are coming sequentially. They haven’t done that for a while. Not since they started drugging me.

The woman holds back a groan. Her eyes are a vivid shade of aquamarine, completely blue except for the black pupil. It's unsettling, unnatural, albeit beautiful in its own way.

She moves on to another topic before I can backtrack, and I hear the slug snigger something to his asshole colleague before an errant thought pings me at the fore of my mind.

I gesture vaguely at the slugs, careful not to make the motion too obvious. "Why can I understand it?"

Well-read I may be, but I'm pretty sure I never learned to speak snot alien. Or bug chitter, for that matter, but I was too drugged to wonder about it before.

"They put nanites in us that do lots of things, including somehow letting us understand and speak other languages," she explains.

I'd spent ages alternating between isolation and that bleak hall waiting for a crumb of info on what exactly was going on, but it's safe to say that I am not prepared for the info being piled on me.

Nanites. Languages. It's all too much.

Involuntarily, I feel myself one wrong exhale away from a shutdown and I can’t. The last thing I need from her right now is sympathy, so I push the rising panic back down.

"There's a live feed running at all times, and they like it when we watch it. Don't look at it because you'll be able to read the comments," she warns me.

I stare long and hard at the nonsensical-looking strings of characters that pop up in the comments bar and sure enough, I can read the comments with all the fluency of one born into the language.

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