Twinks in Space: Fantastic Voyage - Part Two - 47. Chapter 47 - Godstrolls

Stawren, Lyoth, and Captain Suoki were in the safe house just outside the city limits of Glinterdale. It was night.

“What happened ten years ago?” Stawren asked the men.

“It was so tragic,” Captain Suoki replied. “The Voscijas had been oppressed for generations. Something like one-hundred-fifty years ago, their people were conquered and made to live as subjects under the Striliox Empire. When the man who is currently emperor took the throne of Striliox, one of his first orders was to wipe out the Voscijas.”

“I was in the Guild of Houses at the time,” Lyoth added. “A majority of the Voscija population had already died of disease or the imperial slaughter by the time we got there. We were a last-ditch effort to save any we could. I called Suoki, and he brought his private military battalion to help.”

Captain Suoki continued. “We managed to bust the few remaining Voscijas out of a prison camp where they were being held for summary execution. All of them had been de-tailed.”

“And half-starved,” Lyoth said in a somber voice. “The group we got out was the last of them. There were only sixty-seven survivors.”

“Gods,” Stawren whispered, “that’s so horrible.”

“We packed them into a military cargo shuttle and brought them here.” Captain Suoki sighed. “It was rough.”

“But to see the Voscijas healthy,” Lyoth said with a smile, “to see so many youths at the Lapis Lupine, my little heart is exploding for them!”

Captain Suoki’s face broke into a beaming grin. “There were so many of their young at the concert! I can’t even begin to express the joy I felt at being around all those Voscija kids. A group of four young brothers tried to teach me a card game before the show.” He laughed.

“It’s so good to see their people on the rise,” Lyoth added.

Stawren looked curious. “I’m glad you were able to help them, and thank you for telling me a little of their sad story. It’s so tragic.” She looked from Lyoth to Captain Suoki and back again. “But that’s not quite what I was asking.”

Lyoth was confused. “Wait, now I don’t remember what you asked; what did you want to know?”

Stawren took a breath. “Ten years ago, their people were almost entirely wiped out,” and she added, “so were mine.”

Lyoth and Captain Suoki were startled by her reminder of the plague.

“The Allarei and the Voscijas both almost disappeared from the universe at the same time,” Stawren stated. “Did something happen ten years ago that links the plague on Allthrin to the genocide of the Voscijas? Lyoth, I can’t help but keep thinking about that bartender in Raxtack City who told us the plague was actually an intentional genocide. If what he said was true, if the plague was a secret attempt to massacre my people, it coincides with the slaughter of the Voscijas. Do you think there’s any chance they’re connected?”

The two men tried to process the information.

“I’m going to call my aunt Thia again,” Stawren informed them. “I think we need to present the idea to her and see if she can find anything that might point to the plague being something more than just a disease.” She initiated the call and did not receive an answer. Stawren pocketed her device and looked over at the men. “Maybe we should put these ideas on the back burner for the time being.”

Lyoth huffed a breath. “Godstroll blood.”

“Any idea how we’re supposed to get it?” Captain Suoki asked.

“My aunt Thia has some information,” Stawren replied, “but we won’t know what it is until we get ahold of her.”

Stawren’s communicator began to chime.

“Finally! It’s her!” She answered. “Auntie Thia, we’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”

“Hey, kid. I know, sorry. I’ve been hunting down info about godstrolls, and I came across an old digital seminar that happened on Allthrin way back before even I was born.” Neptithia let out a laugh at herself. “The discussion panel didn’t have any information about where you and Lyoth would be able to find them right now, but it did tell me about where you can’t get them, and I learned a bit about their anatomy, including their blood.”

Lyoth and Stawren were both staring into the screen with Neptithia’s Blue face on it, and Captain Suoki popped between them. He waved and Neptithia smiled at him as she continued.

“The godstroll homeworld is a planet called…” she paused and checked her notes. “I think it’s pronounced… Garlest? There’s an apostrophe between the R and the L. Anyway, the planet is inhospitable to most species. The air has a high concentration of vaporized hydrochloric acid and lead; that’s right, I said vaporized lead in the atmosphere! It’s their normal air. Despite their extreme home, their anatomy is very similar to most other species, just larger.”

“Lyoth proved that,” Stawren added, “when he took out the godstroll man back in the spaceport when we were traveling as refugees to Allthrin.”

“He was massive,” Lyoth confirmed.

“Not only are their bodies enormous, but their heads are out of proportion, much bigger than you’d expect them to be.” Neptithia went on, “Their mouths also stretch wider across their faces.”

“So they can eat people,” Stawren stated.

“That’s true,” Neptithia confirmed. “Godstroll teeth are made for chomping through bone, and they feed on sentient species whenever they can. In the seminar, a group of experts who were studying the effects of godstrolls consuming brainwaves explained that it was a crucial part of their metamorphosis process.”

“Metamorphosis?” Stawren ventured. “Auntie Thia, pretend we have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Captain Suoki snorted a laugh at her.

“This is about to get confusing, isn’t it?” Lyoth asked.

“Probably,” Neptithia agreed, “I’ll do my best to be clear.” She gathered her thoughts and continued. “Godstrolls have three, or possibly four life cycles; it’s apparently debatable. On their home planet, godstroll adults lay eggs that incubate for between eight and ten years. The shells are a composite of quartz with a titanium matrix. Godstrolls start their lives as serpent-like creatures inside their eggs, slowly growing until they reach their first maturity. They begin to develop limbs during their final year before hatching, and their tails shrink and disappear. The last thing they develop before breaking out of their shells is a single short horn from the center of their foreheads that allows them to pierce the egg and crack out of it. Hold on a second. This is what they look like when they hatch, all scrawny and spidery.”

An image of a pale animal popped onto the display screen in front of the trio. The creature was a quadruped, standing on all fours like a dog, but its appearance was in no way dog-like. It was skinny and looked sickly. Its limbs were long, and it stood bowlegged with its knees poking out. Bony ribs bulged from the thing’s torso and its spine was visible through the grey skin of its back. Instead of a mouth, the creature possessed a crushing beak like a snapping turtle.

“After hatching, the horn drops off, and they begin gorging. During this second phase of their lifecycle, they need to consume enough material to look like this.”

Another image appeared, but the picture could not have been more different from the first. A bloated monstrosity filled the screen. Its limbs were enormous, and the thing’s torso was so massive that its four legs were almost hidden beneath the girthy mounds of flesh.

“In this phase when the godstrolls go from skeletal to engorged, they have no digestive system. They use their beaks to crush up minerals and organic compounds from plants and animals they eat, but none of what they consume is digested. Instead, the third life cycle of godstrolls – the giant phase – is slowly growing inside.”

“Like a parasite,” Captain Suoki mumbled.

“More like a butterfly changing in its cocoon,” Neptithia countered. “The process is quite astounding. When the second stage godstroll has consumed enough matter, it falls asleep. Oh, and in phase two, they don’t eat sentient species; that’s only in phase three. Now, here, watch this.”

Neptithia’s face was replaced by a time-lapse video. Stawren, Lyoth, and Captain Suoki found themselves looking at one of the bloated creatures at the end of its second life cycle, but the thing appeared to be dead. The video’s timer at the bottom of the screen began to speed through one hour after another after another, and the image began to vibrate and slowly change. The creature’s back ruptured and split along the center of its swollen torso. Then things got nasty.

The trio of watchers could tell that whatever was working its way out of the fissure in the flesh was covered in slime. It took days time-lapsed into seconds for the opening to expand wide enough for the creature within to begin wriggling backward. More days passed as a bulbous mound freed itself with the jerky effect caused by the video’s effect, and along with the mound, five thick limbs slowly slid out, giving the slimy thing an appearance similar to a hideous starfish.

Lyoth, Stawren, and Captain Suoki were astonished to watch two of the appendages twitch themselves into rigid humanoid legs, as two others became arms. The final limb bulged into the hideous head like all adult godstrolls. With the time-lapse still running, there was a brief moment of the thing sitting upright, and it disappeared.

Neptithia’s smiling face filled the screen again. “Wasn’t that fascinating?” she exclaimed.

“Auntie Thia, it was gross.” Stawren looked like she smelled something unpleasant.

“What can you tell us about the blood?” Lyoth asked. He did not want to discuss the video, which had looked to him very much like a tarantula molting out of its exoskeleton.

“The blood is another curiosity,” Neptithia replied. “The crystals can be extracted by dehydrating godstroll blood, but during their first and second phases, godstrolls literally have no blood in their bodies. In the shells, their veins flow with a similar solution to the substance they’re suspended in within the eggs. During the second phase, they are essentially walking cocoons with the capacity to collect whatever the thing growing within them needs.”

Lyoth interrupted. “I’m sorry, Neptithia, but is all this for real? I mean, I know I have no reason to doubt you, but it feels a little hard to believe.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been in this digital seminar for the past three hours. I took quite a lot of notes, and I’ve tried to learn all I could before getting back in touch with you. I think my information is as accurate as it can be for as little as I know.” Neptithia flipped back a page in her notes. “Three or four life cycles,” she read, “snake in an egg, gorging omnivore, then giants – like the one you killed, Lyoth.”

“Wow,” Stawren marveled, “bizarre. Auntie Thia, what do they normally eat? Besides the animals and plants, you mentioned minerals; is that how the crystals enter their blood?”

Neptithia let out a little laugh. “I don’t know much! The experts talked about all sorts of things in this seminar, and I don’t know why the blood is so special in their third lifecycle, but I’ve learned some of the speculations of why they eat people.”

“I’ve been dying to know!” Captain Suoki declared.

“This is the part that’s unproven,” Neptithia admitted, “but a lot of the experts support the idea. Once a godstroll individual has consumed enough brainwaves from other sentient species, they somehow shed their physical forms and become incorporeal entities of light in the cosmos. They no longer have thoughts or desires, and exist only as flashes of benign energy speeding across the universe.”

The four people on the call fell silent for a moment.

“Well that makes it sound like they’re ascending into some sort of higher beings,” Stawren said in an incredulous tone.

“They do seem like pretty special beings,” Neptithia commented.

“Yeah, especially when they’re chewing on you,” Stawren replied, and Captain Suoki could not help but snicker.

Neptithia chuckled. “One of the natural abilities of adult godstrolls is an almost instantaneous adaptiveness to any environment. Their planet would instantly kill any of us if we were stuck there, but the same isn’t true for them. They can survive almost anywhere in space.”

Stawren scowled at the screen. “Why can they do that? It’s not fair.”

Captain Suoki laughed aloud at Stawren’s reaction.

Neptithia flipped to another page in her notebook. “That was a lot of information about them as a species and where they come from. Now, on to what I’ve learned about them in the present; I found most of this next stuff before I discovered the archived seminar. There are godstrolls who are part of a mercenary group called the Brocian Contingent, but they make up a fairly large portion, and I think there’d be too many to deal with at once. I did locate some planets with reports of godstrolls, but if we had a way to see where some of the Brocian Contingent have been deployed, maybe you could take out a few at a time, but I haven’t been able to spend enough energy focused on their digital security systems to break into their files yet.”

“Neptithia, you’ve already done so much!” Lyoth replied. “Thank you.”

She laughed again. “Every time I learn something new, I realize that I still have so much more to learn! Who knew how fascinating I would find the study of godstrolls?”

Stawren scoffed at Neptithia with a playful smirk on her face. “Auntie Thia, you’re so weird.”