Zaiden Bradshaw was getting close to finding the ultimate treasure he was looking for: the famed relics of the ancient Selvadoradans.
For the last few years, he’d been traveling all over the world finding lost items for other people. Though he himself didn’t profit much from the finds, he did make enough money to finally quit his job as a teacher and focus solely on doing what he loved.
Treasure hunting was the most thrilling adventure Zaiden could think of. He got to go to exotic locales, visit places most people never got to see, and search for items most people presumed lost to time. Finding the items was just as adventurous as the travel could be…and often more dangerous. There were usually puzzles to solve, traps to overcome and dangers most people felt were simple myths. There were mummies in the pyramids of Egypt…and not just the ones lying around in the sarcophagi. There were walking mummies who could and would attack a treasure hunter such as himself. He’d heard that they could curse a person if they touched you.
In China, the ancient temples also had curses, but those didn’t involve walking monsters. Instead you had to solve magical riddles and avoid cursed traps. In many ways, the Chinese temples were more dangerous. A mummy could be avoided or outrun, but to get to the real treasures in China, you had to face the traps and defeat them.
Selvadorada’s temples were more like China than Egypt. But, Zaiden had heard that the dead did walk among them, though he hadn’t actually seen one. Most of the problems in Selvadorada had to do with poisonous snakes, spiders, and other monsters out in the jungle. Getting to the temples of Selvadorada could be as dangerous, if not more so, than what one would face once one was inside.
The one aspect of treasure hunting that Zaiden didn’t enjoy was the research he had to do. It wasn’t like you could go into a pyramid or temple without knowing what you were getting into. That was just asking to get cursed! No, you had to do your homework.
Zaiden didn’t like it, but he was good at it. One of his talents was a gift for languages. He grew up in Sulani where he learned both Simlish and Sulanese. He also studied the ancient Sulanese which the Islanders said was the tongue of the mermaids, a story Zaiden only half believed. Learning languages was easy, so he learned Chinese and Ancient Chinese writing before traveling to Shang Simla to search out treasure there. Before going to Egypt, he studied the meaning of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs so that he could better solve the riddles and read the traps inside the pyramids. And he was quite fluent in both modern and ancient Selvadoradan. This is what made him so good at his job.
But being a genius only got one so far in finding lost items. If that was all, he could make quite a good name for himself as an archaeologist. Lord knew there was enough to dig up all over the world! But that wasn’t what drove Zaiden.
He loved the thrill. He loved pitting himself against the dangers and coming out ahead. He didn’t care about the money, the history, the fame or anything else that came with being an explorer. No, what did it for him was the adventure of it all. He’d do everything exactly the same even if he got nothing more out of it.
Well, there was one more thing he loved. And that’s actually what drove him toward the lost relics of the Selvadoradans. He loved being first. People had been looking for the relics pretty much since the Ancient Selvadoradan’s buried them in their temples. No one had ever located them. Zaiden wanted to be the first. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one with that ambition.
Avirelle invited her parents to Britechester for the Winterfest holiday instead of going back home. It was actually the first time either of them had visited her while she was at school.
As an only child, Avi had always felt like her parents hadn’t wanted or planned to have her. They were considerably older than most of her friends’ parents. Her mom had been a paralegal and her dad had made a living as an angler. They hadn’t had much money when she was growing up, which is how she managed to go to UBrite on a full scholarship.
Her parents hadn’t understood Avi’s fascination with archaeology. They didn’t think archaeology was a lucrative job and they thought it was dangerous going out to exotic locations like Selvadorada in search for what they considered “buried treasures”. Both of her parents felt like she needed a more stable job. They wanted her to study business or pursue a career as a doctor or vet or even a teacher. All of these, to her parents’ way of thinking, would provide a better, more steady income.
To avoid the awkwardness of her parents discovering she was pregnant when they showed up and saw how much she was showing, Avi called them the morning before they left Windenburg. She didn’t want them to have too much time to think about it and cancel their trip.
As predicted, neither was pleased with Avirelle’s news.
“How could you be so irresponsible?” her mom asked.
“I wasn’t being irresponsible, Mom. We used protection. It just didn’t work.”
“And where is the father of this child?” her dad demanded. “Is he going to take responsibility for this?”
“I’m sure he would if he knew,” Avi said, explaining again that she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Zaiden. “I don’t know where he is or how to reach him.”
“You keep trying. He needs to do his part.”
“Dad, of course I’ll keep trying, but I don’t know if there is any way to know how to find him.”
After hanging up with her folks, Avirelle put her head in her hands. “This Winterfest is going to suck.”
“Don’t worry so much,” Lilith said. She’d come downstairs and overheard Avi’s complaint. “They might not be thrilled about everything, but what can they do?.”
“You look huge!” said Avi’s mom as she came into their house. She frowned at Avi’s stomach. “Are you sure you’re only a few months pregnant?”
“Yes Mom. I’m sure.”
“You aren’t having twins are you?”
“No.”
“Look at you Sweetie!” her dad said, pulling her in for a hug. “I think you look lovely. You’re glowing like your mom did when she was pregnant with you.”
“Paul!” Avi’s mom swatted him on the shoulder. “I was miserable when I was pregnant and you know it. I hated it, which is why Avi’s an only child.”
“It’s not that bad,” Avi told her parents. She sat down with her dad on the sofa. “The nausea is gone now, so I feel a lot better.”
“Just wait until your ankles swell up, you get heartburn, and you have to pee every half hour.”
“Clara, don’t scare her! Sweetie, I don’t think it’s the same for every woman. You’ll be fine. You’re young and healthy.”
“Thanks Dad,” Avi smiled faintly.
Angela and Lilith came into the room and thankfully distracted Avirelle’s parents for a little while, giving her a chance to try and relax. It hadn’t gone that badly so far. Maybe she could get through the holiday without much trouble.
Over dinner of roasted turkey, her parents asked her what her plans were now that she was pregnant.
“I’m going to finish the school year,” Avi said. “I’m so close. I don’t want to quit.”
“And what about graduate school? Didn’t you say your professor… what was his name?” her dad asked.
“Clement.”
“Yeah, Professor Clement. Didn’t you say he wanted you to be his assistant?”
“He did. But I told him I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to take the position from someone else who could do it.”
“And what about continuing school?” her mother asked.
Avi sighed. “I don’t think I will be able to continue right away. I won’t be able to stay here. I might have to do my doctorate online from home.”
“Home?” Avi’s mom frowned.
“We told her she can stay here,” said Angela. “We don’t mind.”
“Actually, we do sort of mind,” Lilith cut in. When Angela glared at her, Lilith shrugged and added, “Hey, I don’t want to have a baby in the house. I don’t like kids. They stink and they cry and they make messes.”
“Lilith!”
“No, it’s fine,” Avi said for the millionth time that this subject came up. “I don’t think this is the best place for a baby either. And besides, you girls didn’t sign up for this. You don’t have to give up your normal lives for a baby.”
“But…” Angela protested.
“Let’s just drop it. I’m going to go home after graduation.”
Avi’s mom was still frowning and she kept looking at Avi’s dad. The two of them seemed to be having some sort of silent conversation.
“It’s ok if I go home, right?” Avi asked, suddenly not so sure.
“Well…” her dad started.
“Your dad and I moved,” her mom explained. “We’re getting on in years and the house was just too big for us. We downsized.”
“We’re living in one of those tiny homes,” her dad added.
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, it happened over the summer. You were out in the jungle.”
Avi looked at both of her parents incredulously. “And I’m just hearing about this now? What about all my stuff?”
“We packed it up for you, Sweetie,” her dad said. “It’s in storage.”
“And when were you going to tell me?”
“Today. We were planning to tell you everything, but then you dropped this baby nonsense on us. It just slipped our minds,” Avi’s mom said.
“I think I might be sick,” Avi said.
“Are you still feeling the morning sickness?” her dad asked, concerned.
“No.”
“Maybe you should go lie down,” he said.
“Yeah, I think that might be a good idea.”
So Avi left the dishes to Angela and her mom. Lilith never did dishes. She headed to her room where she debated actually taking a nap like her dad suggested. But then she decided against it. She wasn’t really tired, just stressed.
Instead of sleeping, she decided to meditate. By the time she gathered herself again and went back downstairs, everything was clean and tidy. Lilith and Avi’s dad were watching TV, Angela was painting and Avi’s mom was puttering around the kitchen, doing a sort of deep clean.
“Ah, there you are. Feeling better now?”
“I think so. So you guys really moved?”
“Yes, we did. We didn’t think you’d move home, so we thought it was time.”
“I wasn’t planning on moving home, but now…”
“Well, now you have a baby to think about. You know your dad and I will help you if we can, but there’s just no room for a baby in our new house.”
“I know, Mom.”
Later that night, they all opened gifts before Avi’s parents had to head back home.
“Thanks for having us over for Winterfest,” Avi’s dad said to the three roommates. “It was nice to see where you girls live. It’s a nice place for a college house.”
“We inherited it from our grandfather who was a professor at Foxbury,” Lilith explained. “He left it to us as long as one of us planned to graduate from there.”
“But I thought you were graduating from Britechester?” Avi’s mom asked.
“I am,” Lilith agreed, “but Angela is at Foxbury.”
“I didn’t realize you were at rival schools.”
“We don’t make that big of a deal out of it,” said Angela. “I don’t have the same sort of fan loyalty to Foxbury as Granddad did.”
“I see, well it is a lovely home. I’m glad that you were willing to let Avirelle stay here for such low rent.”
“We like having a roommate,” Angela said, smiling.
“Keeps us from killing each other,” Lilith agreed.
“Hmmm,” said Avi’s mother.
“Bye Mom. Bye Dad. Drive safely. I heard it was going to snow in Windenburg today.”
“We’ll be careful,” said her dad.
When the two of them had left, Avi collapsed on the couch. “I’m glad that’s over.”
She stared at the little white stick in her hand and cursed again. There were definitely two lines on it. Just like there had been on the other one she’d tossed into the trash and prayed was defective.
It wasn’t.
There was no mistaking the two lines that looked like an equal sign.
Yeah. 1+1=baby. She was fucking pregnant.
Avirelle paced back and forth in the small bathroom. What was she going to do? She couldn’t be pregnant! She was just months away from completing her undergrad work and was ready to start on her doctoral degree in archaeology. It was almost the end of the quarter, and Dr. Clement had just informed her that he wanted her to be his grad assistant.
“What am I going to do now?” She collapsed back on the toilet and put her head in her hands, tears escaping her eyes.
Would she even be able to finish her studies with a baby? Would Dr. Clement want some pregnant woman as his assistant? And what about future archaeological digs? How could she travel if she had a baby to think about?
This is all Zaiden’s fault, she thought even though she knew that it wasn’t true.
The next few days found Avirelle and the rest back out in the jungle ‘digging in the dirt’ as the annoying Zaiden would call it. It was hot, sweaty work. As hour after hour, day after day, passed, Avi was beginning to see why Zaiden didn’t think her work was that exciting. They really hadn’t found anything special yet and they hadn’t really gone deeper into the jungle to search out other locations to explore.
At breakfast on the third day at the field site, Avi decided to ask the professors how close they were to finishing this dig.
“Do you think we will be able to go out a little further afield and try digging in another location?”
Dr. Clement frowned and shook his head. “No. By the time we have to leave at the end of this week, we’ll just have finished excavating this location. Any further study will have to be done at another time with more than two weeks to spend at the site.”
Avi tried to hide her disappointment, but Clement noticed.
“Archeology is a tedious and exacting process,” the professor admonished her. “It isn’t as glamorous or exciting as movies and television portray it.”
“I know sir.”
“If you want to do a little exploring, you’ll have another free day in town before we go. We’ll need to bring our finds back soon and start cleaning them up and categorizing them.”
Avirelle Adamson couldn’t believe it when her professor, Dr. Clement, told her that she was selected as one of the only students from the University of Britechester selected to go one a 2-week excursion to Selvadorada to study Selvadorandan culture and participate in an archaeological dig in the jungle.
“I’m so excited!” she enthused to her two best friends and roommates, twin sisters Lilith and Angela Pleasant.
“Aren’t you scared of all the jungle bugs?” Angela asked and shuddered with disgust. “And getting dirty and maybe being attacked by bats?!” Angela was a girl who would jump in fright at her own shadow, so Avi just waved off her concerns.
He had his ship’s AI teleport them to his medical bay. Before doing so, he spoke to both Ted Roswell and Sargent Demetrius determining that they were both ok.
“Ada needs medical attention,” he told them. “You will need to take care of the people here.”
It would be better if the two men handled the situation anyway. Though they knew he was an alien from Sixam, it was best if no one else did.
“Are you ready,” Zeb asked Ada. She nodded. He wrapped his arms around her and they were whisked away.
If Ada thought she’d been tired while working on the vaccine, she was doubly so now that she’d perfected the formula. So many things needed to be done before she and Zeb could finally defeat the mother plant.
First, she needed to figure out how to concentrate the vaccine formula into the weedkiller that she thought it could be. Then, once she’d done that, she’d need to make enough of it so that they could spray it all over the mother plant.
Working on this during work hours was out of the question. People were starting to question her research. Why would a geologist be working so hard on a chemical serum? In order to do what was needed, Ada had to create a small lab outside her trailer. She ordered the equipment she needed and set it up so she could work from home.
At work she focused more on creating the weapon they’d need to spray the serum. Using her knowledge of metals and crystals, Ada managed to meld the Sixam weapon schematics with the Sim Ray that the Institute had already developed.
The plant infestation of Strangerville was definitely getting worse. Since she and Zeb had discovered the mother plant alive and well in the basement of the crater lab, the number of buds and flowering plants had increased.
So, too had the number of infected roaming Strangerville increased. And what was worse, at least to Ada’s mind, was how the plant tendrils seemed to be coming up through the sewer system. The first time Ada had seen plant tendrils coming out of her toilet bowl, she nearly screamed. But now, it seemed, every time she took a shower, used her sink, or flushed the toilet, plant vines instantly grew!
He went back to the top secret lab the next day without Ada. He justified not asking her to accompany him so that he could go in without his disguise. He wanted to do some snooping around the facility, look through the discarded papers and hack into the computers for some clues. If he was able to use all of his tools, he thought he might be able to hack into the system that powered the locked door. If he could bypass the lock without a keycard, that would be ideal.
Though he didn’t want to admit it, the real reason Zeb went back alone was that he knew he couldn’t let himself get into a relationship with Ada. His desire for the sim girl was extremely inconvenient. He wasn’t ready to reveal himself to her, and he knew that if he pursued a romantic relationship with her, he would have to. He could hold his sim disguise protocol during normal interactions, but holding while in the throes of passion would be impossible. No one had that much brain power!
And besides not wanting her to know he was a Sixamian, Zeb really didn’t want to become entangled with Ada emotionally. He had enjoyed spending time with her. He liked how her mind worked. She approached problems like he did with a scientific logic and a determined curiosity. Zeb’s usual relationships with females tended to be primarily physical. With Ada, he found himself equally interested in her mind. He could see himself becoming attached to her. And that would be bad.
Someday, once he had defeated the Stra’Cinortcele mother plant, he knew he’d have to return to Sixam. It was highly unlikely that he would ever return to this backwater part of the universe and this primitive Sim Earth. He wasn’t even supposed to be here in the first place. His ship had gone off course (something he and the AI still hadn’t figured out!) and he’d ended up a lot farther from his home than he ever intended to go. He wanted to go home. No, he needed to go home!
So Zeb forced himself not to seek out Ada. He forced himself to go to the lab alone. He searched it and hacked the computers and attempted to hack the keycard lock on the door.
Though he wasn’t able to breach the locking mechanism, his search around the facility was a success. Digging through the abandoned papers and debris, he found evidence of the mother plant’s initial infestation, some notes about the facility’s research done on the plant, a partial memo detailing “strange behavior” and then read about “increased danger” and how the facility had to be shut down to prevent “further harm.” Over and over, Zeb also noticed one name: Dr. Everett Pries.
The mysterious doctor seemed to be the head of the facility until he began acting oddly. Then, one of the documents Zeb found mentioned that he had gone missing. Perhaps, Zeb thought, he needed to find out more about this doctor.
Would Ada know about him? Just thinking about her, Zeb felt his chest warm and his fingers tingle. Though he knew she shouldn’t, he was inordinately pleased that he now had an excuse to seek her out again.
Going with the girl Ada to the secret lab in the crater wasn’t really necessary. Zeb could have gone by himself, but he knew that if a fully grown Stra’Cinortcele mother plant was somehow located inside the lab, he’d need help to eradicate it.
Perhaps the girl wasn’t the best choice for this, he thought as he got out of his sleeping pod the next morning. But he had to admit, at least to himself, that he just wanted to spend more time with her.
And to be completely honest, Zeb missed female company in general. When he’d signed on for a solo mission, he knew being celibate would be the most challenging aspect of it. He enjoyed females…of any species. He liked their smell, their soft shapes, the feeling of their bodies rubbing against his.
Merve! He cursed, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts from turning more amorous as he imagined the girl’s body. What would she feel like? Would her pale skin be soft? Would her slim but shapely body feel good next to his? When they kissed, would her single mouth taste as good as the double-mouthed Zemorians’? Would her two soft hands feel as good wrapped around him as those of the four-armed Y’tician he still sometimes dreamed about?
He couldn’t help it. Zeb moaned as he thought of it all, and took himself in hand, giving a few good strokes. Being alone was not for him!
Leaning against the wall, he closed his eyes and pictured the girl Ada’s pale pink hand taking the place of his own. He stroked himself some more as he pictured the richer, darker pink of her mouth as well. He imagined how her body would feel around his…all wet heat, he thought, and groaned as his hand sped up. In his mind he pictured how her breasts would look. What color would her nipples be? Would they bounce as she rode him? Hels, he bet they’d be tasty little morsels that he could suck until she begged him to stop!
At that thought, Zeb came. He stroked himself a few more times more slowly and tried to catch his breath. Though his body had released, Zeb didn’t feel any better. Being solo was not nearly as satisfying as being with someone else. Zeb sighed as he walked to the cleansing stall to clean himself up.
From A to Z 