Insane World

[WP] The zone of madness was thought impossible to traverse. The Federation of planets was, needless to say, intensely distressed by the news of an unknown ship emerging from the zone. They call themselves "human" and originate from near the center of the zone.

*****

Around captain Zarzak, his crew who were already aiming their guns at what they had assumed was but another a unauthorized smuggler ship skirting into the edge of the Madness Zone, came to a lull as they all turned to behold this sheer impossibility of the being that had appeared on the main decks monitor screen.

The beings face seemed to be entirely made of solid matter. Zarzik tried to recall seeing something like this but he simply had not, at least not outside of speculative fiction. A wave of uncertainty washed over him, and he steeled his horn-gills before they could shiver. There wasn't a touch of translusency to this being, not a twist or twirl that hinted at a gaseous body, not a joint or gap or glow in their skin to betray the use of a fire-filled exoskeleton. The face was bare skin, wrinkled, especially around what Zarzik interpreted to be eyes. Said eyes were strange and piercing, with a circular and dotted tri-color pattern of white, black, and brown that revealed where their gaze flickered and moved at an impossible speed. Above the eyes were two thin lines of short fur, and they had a much larger patch of fur that grew from their scalp. That fur was long, grey, wiry, and swept back over their head. The rest of them that Zarzak could see were covered in textiles. The face seemed vaguely kharkanoid in structure, just in a shape he had never seen.

"Holy zarking fardwarks..." he heard his second in command whisper, just barely breaking the silence that had fallen over the deck.

A crease between the beings eye-fur patches deepened, and Zarzaks translation device interpreted it as an expression of confusion and surprise. That made him pause, and he glanced at the implant display embedded in his wrist. Sure enough, it said LANGUAGE NOT RECOGNIZED BY DATABASE.

Then how the stars is it translating it!? Zarzak thought, looking back up at the alien. The alien that had come out of the zarking Madness Zone, he slowly realized*.*

In the end, he spoke first.

"Greetings. This is Captain Zarzak V'khoor of the border control vessel Stellar Quest. Can you understand me?"

"That I can." came a court reply, the being somehow forming sounds, words, with a mouth of solid matter. Their voice was steady, deep, in a way that felt both familiar and soothing despite Zarzak having never heard anything like it before. "I'm captain Amanda Novas, of the Night Oddysey. I must say, when we were hailed I believed it to be another human ship. This comes as a surprise."

"Likewise." Zarzak nodded, mentally noting down the word 'human'. "I must ask you about how you traveled through the Madness Zone, and what your purpose there was? WHat is your purpose here?"

"The Madness Zone?"

"Yes, the hostile, monster-filled void you recently left."

".. huh." Amanda said, her grey eyebrows rising into what the translation interpreted as another expression of curiosity. Zarzak glanced at his implant display again. LANGUAGE NOT RECOGNIZED BY DATABASE. Because of course it fucking wasn't. It wasn't like they were having a perfectly understandable chat here or anything.

"I don't know what to tell you there. The Oddysey is a frontier ship. We're on a mission of exploring and mapping the area outside of our home system. We've encountered a few alien races, but nothing I would describe as.. monsters."

Zarzaks gill-horns wavered. Somewhere to his left, he could hear one of his crews alienthropologists fail to suppress little excited chirping noises. He did not share their enthusiasm, and rather felt an ominously sinking feeling.

The Madness Zone was called that for a reason. The only good thing about it, Zarzaks grandfather had told him, was that nothing within it seemed interested in, or capable of, leaving.

-----

"I can't believe this!" said the alienthropologist who had come with captain Zarzak, along his guards, to meet captain Amanda in person. The blue gas that made up most of the short zherkians form swirled and buzzed with excitement. Their pod was currently en-route towards the Night Oddysey. "This is a first contact with sapient natives of the Madness Zone! This is the finding of centuries!"

"I sure hope so." Zarzak said, composing himself. And not the disaster of millennia.

"Oh, I can't wait to meet them in person!" the zherkian continued on as the pod docked with the Night Oddysey. "How the Zark can we communicate with them when their language is not in the translators database? How is it possible for a being of solid matter to function, move, and stay alive? This is incredible."

Zarzak just nodded and turned his attention to the mission at hand.

With a strange, mounting feeling of wrongness and dread, Zarzak boarded the 'human' ship with his crew members. The ship was large, made for beings twice his height. There, in a room of white metal, he saw them. He recognized captain Amanda Novas, having not realized just how impossibly large and towering her species was. He could only imagine how much they must weigh.

But that was not what stunned him and even his excitable alientrhopologist into silence.

Swirling around the shoulders of the humans, flickering around their heads and beholding them with eyes that were much too deep, was a mist that he could barely percieve. It was small to his vision, but he got the impression of something inconcievably, mind-bogglingly vast. Many, many transluscent eyes formed and watched, eyes that had not been visible on the monitor. Soft, feathered wings rustled without sound, attached to the mist with neither rhyme or reason of understandable anatomy. Tentacles formed and dissolved.

The mist around the smiling Amanda spoke before anyone else had the chance to.

Tentacles formed, as did a face. It was haunting and beautiful and horrifying and it had a row of star-filled eyes, a row of eyes that continued into an infinity that Zarzaks' screaming mind could not follow. It smiled, an expression that Zarzaks species did not have but that he deeply recognized on some much older, more fundamental level. It was a soft expression, a softness that was not meant for him. It was a softness that held a warning. A silent threat.

"Shhhhhhh." it whispered, its voice an ancient, lulling, and treacherously comforting song that was much like Amandas voice had been on the radio, just infinitely more. "They're just children. They don't know about us yet. It's a secret. They're too young to know."

The stories of Zarzaks' grandfather clicked into place. The soft smile.. its words. Suddenly.. Zarzak knew. He knew, in much the same way a mouse would know the den of cat.

The Madness Zone was not a weird space weather, not a magnetic disturbance or anything like the leading scientific theories on its existence.

It was a nest. A galaxy-spanning nursery. Guarded, protected, shielded from anything that dared draw too close to the life hidden within.

But there was nothing that Zarzak could think of that would require such a level of protection. No known threat that could warrant a response that sent people of all known races into frantic insanity and that soon killed the fools who breached it anyway.

And that - more than the implications of these nestlings venturing beyond their nursery of nightmares, more than the mistlike, smiling creatures that withdrew into the nothingness they had come from until they seemed to have been nothing but a mirage he had imagined - that was what chilled him most of all.

*****

THE END.