Chương 13: Settling In, Temporarily

"Really? Uh, what should I actually call you day to day? Wonder Woman, like on TV?" For someone he'd never met before who was still willing to put in the time and effort to teach him, Kaelvorn figured she'd earned a baseline of respect.

"You can call me Ms. Prince." Behind him, Bruce quietly pressed a hand to his own face. Diana shot him a warning look, then turned back to Kaelvorn with something close to anticipation.

"Ms. Prince." Kaelvorn tried the name out exactly as asked, then a confused look crossed his face.

"Does that word only mean prince, or does it also cover princess?" Pfft. Bruce lost the fight against his own laughter. Diana's expression went dark, but she thought about her own early days figuring out human society, all the naive things she'd said back then that looked ridiculous in hindsight, and let the irritation over her own surname go. She shot Bruce a look sharp enough to wipe the smirk off his face fast, then pressed her palm to her forehead.

"Prince is just my last name. Do you have anything you need to pack?" Kaelvorn opened his mouth to say he had nothing beyond one bag of secondhand clothes, but Bruce cut in first.

"Hold on. He's actually got some luggage." Kaelvorn blinked, briefly wondering if Gotham's richest man was about to hand him a generous chunk of startup cash to help him settle in on Earth. Instead, Bruce led both of them down into an underground storage bay. Sitting inside, freshly restored. His escape pod. This wasn't remotely what Kaelvorn had expected. No disappointment at a fantasy falling through, just a real jolt of shock.

"How the hell did this get here?" Kaelvorn stepped forward and ran a hand over the pod's silver hull. Seeing the thing that had carried him out of hell and toward whatever hope this planet offered brought up something complicated in his chest.

"Wayne Enterprises' orbital satellite happened to pick it up. I put in a little effort getting it back down here. Patched it up while I was at it." Bruce said it lightly, the way someone mentions grabbing a hot dog off a street cart with spare change. But as Kaelvorn remembered it, the black-suited stranger who'd pulled him out of the pod had done it while it was still a real distance from Earth. He suddenly felt like he owed Bruce tens of millions of dollars, out of nowhere.

Though, factoring in who Bruce actually was underneath the suit, there was a decent chance he'd only recovered the pod to take it apart and study it. Dig through it for anything useful about Kaelvorn, or about Viltrum itself. Unfortunately for him, this particular pod had absolutely nothing to do with Viltrum. It came from a civilization Viltrum had already conquered.

And the conquest itself had been carried out by Kaelvorn and a handful of his fellow Viltrumites, all of them fresh out of that bloody coming-of-age ceremony.

"One more thing, while we're here." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Bruce's expression, standing behind him, turned serious.

"While I was repairing the ship, I took a look at the flight log."

"Part of the data's corrupted beyond recovery. Which means somewhere during your unconscious drift through space, you may have lost track of some amount of time." Kaelvorn, who'd been crouched by the pod, straightened up slowly, confusion crossing his face.

"That shouldn't matter. I remember the pod only carried about three years of power reserves..." Bruce shrugged.

"Space does strange things. Energy consumption isn't a reliable measure of how much time you actually spent out there. We can't read the corrupted section right now, so consider this just a heads-up."... Under the night sky, two shapes cut fast across the dark. One small, one larger, the larger one hauling an escape pod.

"Where do you usually live, Ms. Prince? New York?"

"You've been watching too much television. Not everyone lives in New York. I'm in Boston. Massachusetts." Below them the city sharpened out of a blur of light, rows of brick townhouses lined up neat and orderly, the Charles River cutting through it like a ribbon of silver, and far off, Harvard's dome catching a pale gold shine under the moon.

"That's Vanessa's place, right up ahead." Diana's voice cut through the wind as she dropped toward a five-story building tucked behind a stand of camphor trees. She'd already told him about Vanessa on the way over. About as close to a friend as Wonder Woman had in the human world who actually knew who she was. Vanessa's mother, as it happened, was also the roommate who rented Diana her room. Also, apparently, a Harvard professor.

Kaelvorn followed close behind, deliberately reining in most of his strength on landing, his feet touching down with barely a sound. Ivy climbed the building's outer wall, and warm yellow light glowed from a first-floor window. The second Diana rang the bell, the door pulled open, and a young woman with brown curls in a loose knit sweater leaned out. Vanessa. She looked at Diana, then at Kaelvorn behind her holding a sleek silver-white pod with both hands, and showed zero surprise. Just a grin and a wave.

"Diana, you're back? This the kid you mentioned?"

"His name's Kael. He's from another planet." Diana kept the introduction short.

"He doesn't have anywhere to stay right now. I was thinking the roof for the ship."

"Roof's all yours. Mom's up in the study prepping for class." Vanessa stepped aside to let them both in. The stairwell was carpeted in dark red, soundless underfoot. A middle-aged woman came down the stairs, gold-rimmed glasses, an easy, cultured air about her. Vanessa's mother, Julia. Julia looked at Kaelvorn hovering awkwardly in the doorway with the pod in his hands, pushed her glasses up, and smiled, warm and easy.

"Diana's alien friend, I take it? Welcome to Boston. Roof's perfectly safe. Nobody really goes up there, so settle in however you need." Her tone came out so naturally, like she was welcoming any ordinary guest, no strangeness whatsoever attached to the word alien. Kaelvorn blinked, and said "thank you" almost on reflex. He'd braced for suspicion the moment his origin came up. Getting this instead loosened something tight in his chest. Vanessa pointed up at the ceiling, grinning.

"That thing's definitely not fitting through the door. Want Diana to fly it up for you?"

"Huh? Oh, no, it's fine. I can fly too." Kaelvorn lifted straight up into the air with the pod still in both hands, and Vanessa shaded her eyes with one hand, making an exaggerated noise of amazement.

"Why does it feel like flying's just a standard-issue skill for aliens. Makes humanity look developmentally behind." Julia, Harvard professor mode fully engaged, called up the stairs.

"Go help him already, or would you rather stay up here and do your homework instead?" Vanessa rolled her eyes, hurried past Diana, and elbowed her in the ribs on the way by. Diana clutched her side like she'd actually been hurt and complained after her.

"What was that for. You're the one who told me to bring home a good-looking roommate next time."

"He's clearly not even an adult! Though, credit where it's due, at least he's an improvement over that grass elemental who kept leaving the whole room smelling like dirt." Vanessa clearly wanted to argue the point further, but settled for a thumbs-up at Diana instead, and thundered on up the stairs. The roof was laid with non-slip tile, a cluster of thriving succulents piled up in one corner.

Kaelvorn set the pod down in a shadowed spot along the edge of the platform, and Vanessa arrived a moment later, out of breath, holding out a tan waterproof tarp.

"Throw this over it. Keeps the rain off and it won't stand out."

"Thanks." Kaelvorn took it politely and got the pod covered in a few efficient motions, weighing the edges down with bricks. He popped the hatch open to check inside. The cryo chamber's indicator light sat in standby, the interior lined with soft padding. Lying down in it actually looked reasonably comfortable. Vanessa circled the pod once, eyes lingering on the open hatch like she badly wanted a proper look inside, but held herself back in the end.

She'd known Diana three full years now, and this was the first time Diana had ever brought home a roommate who looked fully human. And male. Couldn't risk scaring the guy off. After a couple more laps, she just called out a quick greeting from outside, mentioned Kaelvorn was welcome to come down for dinner later, and hurried off. Kaelvorn didn't pay much attention to what was happening outside.

He got himself squared away, tucked his one small stack of spare clothes into the pod's storage compartment, and settled in, at least for now...... +40 advanced chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOO