“Let me the fuck out!”
He did not let her the fuck out. He sat down next to the cage and proceeded to pull out some kind of stone tablet thing that might have been like an iPad, or maybe a letter. It was hard to say, until he put it to his mouth and bit off a piece of the rock. Apparently, it was food. It looked like stone to her.
“Must have been hard for you not to start chewing the buildings when you were on Earth.”
Dominax ignored her. She got the impression she had caused some trouble. Well, so fucking what? This was like being invited to someone’s house for dinner, but instead of food there was just sex and booze. Katie had experienced such invitations before, and as far as she was concerned, getting plastered was the appropriate response in any culture, alien or human.
“Hey. Dude.” She wrapped her hands around the bars and pushed her face as far through them as it would go.
“What, human?”
“Let me out.”
“No.”
“Let me out please?”
“No.”
“Let me out now?”
“No.”
It went on like that for quite some time before she changed her tactics up a little.
“Let me out now, or when I get out, I’ll fuck you up.”
“That does not give me much incentive to let you out, human,” Dominax pointed out wryly. “If you were capable of such a feat, which you are certainly not.”
Rattling the bars of her cage, Katie amped up her hostility.
“Let me out, cocksucker!”
Dominax was unmoved and unafraid. Katie gritted her teeth and tried to think of a way to get revenge on him. There weren’t a lot of ways to do that from the inside of a small metal cage. Apparently, he was taking this pet thing literally. She wouldn’t have believed it, if not for the incredible solidity of her captivity.
“You know what? This is fucked up," she declared. “This is against the Geneva Convention.”
“As a winged alien, I am not subject to your Geneva Convention. I am not subject to any of your conventions, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, I’m going to starve to death inside this cage,” she said, pushing her face up against the bars. “You haven’t fed me since I got here.”
That actually got his attention. “How often does your kind need to eat?”
“Like, three times a day?”
“That is a lot.”
“Yeah. Well. You’re killing me here. Literally. Just thought you should know.”
“We can’t have that,” Dominax replied. “I suppose you might be interested in these, if you could behave long enough to be given them.”
“And what are these, exactly? Because if it’s rocks, I can’t eat those.”
He turned to his left, and reached for a handle on the wall. It was very brightly colored, iridescent and incandescent at the same time. She would have noticed it before, but it was just one of a great many curiosities and strange things. Dominax’s bedroom was basically a cross between a brothel and an antique shop.
When he pulled on the handle, a portion of the wall emerged and with it a very familiar smell.
“Are those… fries? They smell like the ones we made at work.”
“They are fries. And they are the ones you made. This may look like a simple drawer, but it is actually a small captive anomaly. With the correct programming, it can reach to any part of the universe and contain whatever might be needed.”
“That seems like it would break a world. You can get anything from anywhere at any time?”
“There are limitations,” he said, pulling out a red sleeve of cardboard, containing slivers of golden potato, salted to what looked like perfection.
Her stomach growled, and her mouth watered. More than that, her entire body welled with a sense of overwhelming homesickness. Everything she had been through in the last few hours, from losing her virginity, to being ripped from her world seemed to catch up with her all at once. She felt an insurmountably painful ache in her chest, and tears welling in her eyes.
“Let me go home,” she said, all the alcohol induced bravery draining from her. “I can't live here.”
“You can, and you will. Now, if I let you out of that cage, are you going to kneel at my feet like a good pet and beg for these?”
“Sure," she said, willing to say practically anything to escape captivity. The cage was claustrophobic and humiliating, and uncomfortable besides. “Whatever you say.”
He reached down and flicked the cage open. She scrambled out of it and would have put as much distance between them as possible, but for the scent of the fries luring her close to her winged alien captor.
He had the only piece of home left to her clutched in his massive red alien hand. She noticed that the hue of his skin was much less noticeable here. Something about the atmosphere of the planet made him look almost… human.