Lont's Palace

Jade and Peter opened their eyes, and they were in the middle of a great room. They were not standing on the platform of a transporter; it seemed as though they had just materialized in the room. The walls were not white, as on the spaceship, but were instead varied in color. Just like on most of the rooms on the spaceship, the walls, floor, and ceiling all curved into each other and were the same color. Upon closer inspection, they found that the walls were not flat, rather with thousands of small bumps. The wall was a three-dimensional tessellation of shapes ranging from triangles to decagons. Every one of the polygons was regular, and each was a different color. There were no aliens in this room. There were places on the wall where the pattern bent inwards and formed an opening, through which light streamed. Looking through these openings, Jade saw a vast and varied landscape.

"I think we're on the planet now. Maybe we got to Lont's palace. Come over here. You can see outside." It looked like a slightly rocky desert outside with some large arches of rock that extended out of the ground, but there were a few reddish plants scattered about. There were also some animals about half a foot long that crawled around and over the rocks.

"You're probably right about us making it to Lont's palace, but I wonder how we can get out of here." There were no openings visible in the room other than the small ones that seemed to be windows. Searching around the room, Peter came across an area where the floor bulged upwards and flattened out on the top. There were some blobs on the top of this bulge in the floor. They were slightly orange-colored with small green flecks in them. Next to these blobs were small contraptions in two parts and a panel, slightly larger than the things next to it, with symbols on it. Each part of the objects on the bulge looked somewhat like spoons with sharp tines on the end of them. One was much wider then the other and they seemed to fit together. Peter yelled across the room to Jade, "I think this is food over here, Jade!" Jade came over to join his friend and looked at the blobs.

"Bon appetit!"

"You feeling hungry, Jade? I think I'm going to try this stuff."

"I'm not going to bet you to do it, Pete. You go right ahead. I'm not that hungry."

Peter picked up the utensils lying next the food and scooped a part of the blob into his mouth. He chewed on it for a moment, then swallowed. "I was right. It is food. And it's not that bad. In fact, it's pretty good. You should have some, Jade. It tastes like Mexican food."

"I guess I'll have some, if you say so." Jade picked up another set of utensils and ate some of the other blob. He chewed and swallowed it, and said, "It tastes alright to me. I just wish there were something to wash it down." However, there was nothing there to drink. Jade and Peter continued to eat, but Bob had come without any food. He asked Peter for some of the food, so his immediate reaction was to scoop some into the bowl. Bob, who was now quite hungry, immediately charged the food and ate it. There was silence in the unusual room for a few minutes while all its occupants feasted.

While Jade ate, he continued to examine the room. He saw that in front of him, just behind where Peter now sat and ate, the ceiling curved upwards and formed an opening.

"Well, I know how we could get out of here, if only we knew how to levitate." Jade pointed upwards at the hole in the ceiling.

"Right now, I don't really care. We were supposed to talk to Lont, right? He'll probably come to get us. Besides, this stuff is pretty good."

Peter was very close in his prediction. Within five minutes, an alien dropped down through the hole, and landed just behind Peter. It was about five feet tall, smooth-skinned, light blue, and had four legs and two arms. It had a large tail, which was also blue, and a head, where the only fur on its body was located. A pair of pointy ears and a large nose, similar to that of a dog, extended out of the long hair that obscured every other part of the head. The arms were very muscular. The hind legs apparently were adapted to jumping, as they had huge muscles at the top, and pads that elevated the foot at least two inches off the ground. The front legs were for walking, and it used these and its tail to travel quickly over to the side of the bulge in the floor, to Jade's right. It extended its arms, which were equipped with suckers rather than hands, towards the two boys and grabbed them. Peter was still carrying Bob's bowl when the alien leapt through the hole, barely missing its sides.

They emerged in another room, where the floor was a single color, purple, and the corners were all right angles and not curved. The walls had large pictures on them that looked like extremely complex fractals. Looking back at the hole, Jade saw that the pattern flattened out and turned purple to become the floor of this room. Awaiting them was Lont, who still wore the dark glasses.

His head was just the same as they had seen on the picture on the spaceship. He had a long neck that joined his square shoulders with his head. He was quite tall, almost seven feet. He wore no clothing. His head had no hair on it, and his nose looked like a small ball in the middle of his face. His unmoving mouth stayed perpetually open, and his body was quite thin, except for his abdomen, which stuck out like a balloon. He had three fingers on each hand, which were situated so that they all functioned like a thumb. The palm was at the end of the arm, and each finger radiated from it. His bare feet had no toes, but were instead flat and had no divisions at all. However, a section of it was flexible and could move and bend in many different ways. Lont began to talk, in a very crude form of English, to the boys.

"Well-come to my - place," He said in an unsure tone. "Hope - like my - Mexican food." The last phrase exactly mimicked Peter's words, with the same intonation. "Need help - use machine."

Knowing that they would have to respond as clearly as possible, Jade slowly replied, "We will help you, Lont. Where is the machine?" It was as if he was talking to a baby.

Without responding, Lont walked towards a wall and pushed against it. The wall bent inwards and slowly formed a hole, through which Lont stepped. Jade and Peter followed him through it into a room. This room was lit with natural light streaming through the many holes in the walls. There were many doorways on each wall, most of which led into magnificent gardens and menageries of unusual creatures and plants. One door, however, opened out to the vast desert surrounding the palace. Lont walked through this door and continued to walk outside. Jade and Peter quickly followed him.

Once outside, they looked back towards the palace and saw how magnificent it was. There were windows up the sides of the tan palace for hundreds of feet. It looked like a giant geodesic dome that was half-buried in the sand with hundreds of large spires extending out of it. Lont was still walking away from the palace, towards a large structure that extended above the greyish clouds. It was completely made of shiny metal. Three curved parts extended out of the ground. Each had many holes in it. They met together at the bottom of a large sphere, which could barely be seen below the clouds. This structure had to be at least a mile tall. Extending from the base of the sphere was a long cable that attached to a giant structure resembling a satellite dish.

"How - work machine?" asked Lont. Jade and Peter examined the large base and the satellite for any indications of how to work it, but could not find any.

"Lont, we do not know how to work this machine. For what do you use it?"

Lont did not respond with words, but instead emitted a growl. He then said to them, "You not help Lont?" He then screamed a series of noises into the air. A crowd of aliens poured out of the palace and came to Jade and Peter. They grabbed them with an assortment of tentacles and arms, then awaited a response from Lont. Lont emitted another series of noises to the crowd, then yelled a short noise like a Nazi salute.

The crowd then quickly carried them towards the palace and through an assortment of rooms. They then came to a room with a hole in the floor, through which they were tossed. They fell for quite a distance, and landed on the floor of another room. There was very little light in this one. They explored the room and found that it was a dungeon. With no doors through which they could exit, they then undertook to meeting the other inmates. There were a very few other prisoners in the room, but they could not communicate with them. After a while, Jade and Peter laid down for some rest in a corner of the room.

 

Jade was again the first to wake up when he heard a sound. His joints were very stiff. He tried to wake Peter, who was balled up on the floor next to him. "Pete," he whispered. "Someone's coming."

Peter awoke and looked at Jade. "So what? I want to sleep." The hole above the room they were still in was now a circle of bright light. It seemed that there were some aliens milling around the hole and obscuring the light. Suddenly, the hole got very dark, but just for a brief moment. Jade thought that someone had jumped down through it, and he was right. He heard something land on the floor, with a sound like a huge pile of laundry being dropped from a great height. The light was again obscured, but now simply because the newest occupant of the giant dungeon was slowly approaching them. Two large arms extended from the creature when it neared the pair, and Jade and Peter were snatched away from their corner. The alien that had retrieved them all was extremely large, and covered with layers of long fur. Its face extended far out from underneath its shroud of hair, wrinkled in layers. Its mouth dripped with saliva that glinted like its eyes in the dim light of the room. Its eyes were small, elongated, and black that squinted through the folds of brown skin.

The monstrous alien then did an about face and trotted back towards the hole in the ceiling. Once it was under it, the alien hopped once and bounced through the hole, landing in the middle of a group of aliens. Underneath them, Jade and Peter heard scurrying movements and hushed alien voices. The large creature that had carried them through the hole jumped back down, and soon came up again with an additional pair of aliens. This went on for quite some time, until there was a group of about thirty prisoners and their captors crowded around the hole.

The group was then led in a procession out of the room, through a hole in the wall to Jade's left. The room was quite small, and had a lump in the floor at the far end of it. Jade watched the lump and noticed that it did not stay still, but seemed to ripple and shake in its place. Lont was in the group as well, and he walked across the room and sat on the rippling lump. It immediately gave under his weight, but also supported him. The displaced volume of the lump then seemed to flow over Lont's lap. The entire room was quite dark, but Jade saw that the walls, ceiling, and floor had the same pattern as those of the room in which they first arrived. Lont suddenly shouted something, and one of the aliens pushed one of the prisoners towards Lont with a sharp staff of very reflective metal. The alien seemed to be just a smaller version of the large one that had brought them out of the dungeon. Lont then barked something at the alien, who extended his tentacle. Lont grabbed this and shoved it into his mouth. The alien began to scream, as a thick, dark, yellowish liquid dripped out of Lont's mouth. After about twenty seconds, Lont shoved the alien away from him and emptied his mouth of the putrid slime within it. He shouted again, and again an alien was directed to him.

"Jade," whispered Peter, "I think this is Lont's form of torture. We've gotta get out of here!"

"No way. I hadn't thought of that." Peter said sarcastically, frantic in the face of impending torture.

The group slowly thinned. After each individual had an appendage mangled inside Lont's unmoving mouth, they were escorted out of the room and tossed back into the dungeon. Soon enough, Jade and Peter, who still clutched Bob's bowl, were remaining only with three more aliens. Jade looked around nervously and suddenly heard a great shuffling of feet. Lont looked up from torturing an alien and peered through the hole in the wall into the next room. A band of humanoid creatures was killing all the guards in the room while others jumped down the hole in the floor in an apparent attempt to rescue prisoners. Lont again yelled something at the remaining guards, and they turned and left the room. They attempted to suppress the attack by these aliens by stabbing many of them with their staffs. They were successful in this only for a few moments, after which they were overtaken by the horde.

The group of aliens then traveled into the room in which Lont, Jade, Peter, and the other prisoners now were. Lont had by then discontinued his torturing and attempted to flee the room through an exit behind him, but was caught. Other aliens grabbed the prisoners, and the entire group left the room. As the two aliens holding Lont dragged him out the hole in the wall, an army of other aliens came through the hole opposite them and rescued Lont, killing his two captors. The other aliens managed to escape, taking Jade and Peter with them.

 

The aliens now carrying Jade and Peter had bodies exactly like those of grown men below the neck. However, their heads were quite large. They had long ears that tapered to a point at the top. Rather than two eyes, they had one single large eye in the middle of their foreheads. This eye seemed to be a compound eye, as it had many bumps on it. Where a normal human would have hair, these aliens had rooster combs.

The procession flew through the building and outside. Jade and Peter stumbled along in the middle of a rushing, unruly crowd, seemingly floating in a rushing river of alien bodies. The walls of the corridors through which they were being ushered only flashed by in a blur. Once they exited the palace, by a path unknown to them, they headed for the two large structures, the dome and the satellite dish. However, the procession rounded the building to their left. Jade and Peter slowly separated themselves from the group and paused for a moment to look at the two enormous objects protruding from the rock-strewn sand.

Above them hovered a magnificent circular spaceship at least two miles in diameter. Jade could only tell this by the magnificent shadow it cast on the clouds. It blocked the sunlight and shrouded the entire area in darkness. It was covered with both blinking and constantly lit multicolored lights, which showed through the cloud, creating small, pulsating spots of color inside the shadow. Some of the plants around them dimly glowed, the only source of light aiding the sight of each individual in the group.

Suddenly the ground began to shake. Although it did this only very slightly at first, it quickly escalated into a violent earthquake. The ground cracked and quaked, making the aliens at the end of the line, as well as the sole two humans on the entire planet, off their feet, if not tossing them high into the air. The dusty ground around the bases of the satellite dish and the dome began to collapse on itself. It sank, flowed in a sort of grainy cascade, and fell under the structures as they seemed to be lifted out of the ground. Soon, the two structures floated hundreds of feet in the air. They suddenly swung backwards, and then forward high in the air. Eventually, after the swinging had slowed considerably, they moved off towards the horizon as they gradually lifted above the clouds.