Through the Rift 2 (Patreon)

I don't feel like I got very far into the tale with yesterday's scene, so I decided to do another. Happy Xmas Eve, everyone!

———

The lion took the folded cloth from my chest, and I must have flinched. He tapped my chest and growled what I suppose he intended to be a reassuring sound or sentence. He put the package back up on the shelf and gave me some sort of growling explanation that involved pointing at the locks and at me. I supposed it meant, “They are here if you want them.”

I nodded, too numb to know what else to do.

Also, I found myself growing tired of thinking of him as “The Lion”. That seemed stupid. I was still mostly certain that this was a dream, but even in a dream, I felt dumb calling a person that. I had failed spectacularly at saying his name, so instead, I started thinking of him as “Simba”, the lion from that Disney movie. The growl he’d used for his name didn’t sound anything like Simba, but the name would be easy for me to remember, so it would do for now until I’d woken up or had more time to practice his actual growl.

I looked around Simba’s home and tried to place it in our human history. It wasn’t stone age, obviously. The walls were made of rough cut timber and the stove looked to be cast iron. And it wasn’t comparable to our modern level of technology with computers, electronics, and motorized vehicles. The setting reminded me slightly of those old Little House on the Prairie books where a frontier family had to cope with growing up without any of the modern conveniences of their age.

I looked at Simba too. He was quite a sight at seven feet in height and with well-defined muscles beneath his pelt. He reminded me a bit of the old myths about a minotaur, a man with the head of a bull. Except that in this case, Simba had the head of a lion, and it wasn’t just his head that was lionesque. Fur covered his entire body, and the tail that draped over his butt would have been right at home on a lion’s ass.

He looked like a perfectly natural creature. The only thing about him that really stood out as weird to me—again, discounting that he was a lion—was the thick triangle of pubes that covered his crotch. He was completely golden from top to bottom with three exceptions: he had dark brown hair for a mane, his pubes, and the larger puff of fur at the end of his tail. The mane and tail looked so natural to me, but the pubes were so strangely out of place that my eye kept being drawn to them.

I tried to think of them as a brown Speedo, but even that would have been bigger, so instead, I pretended he was wearing brown bikini bottoms. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, but I wasn’t accustomed to hanging out with naked people—whether they were covered in fur or not.

Taking a moment to wipe away the tears I had shed over my crewmates, I cleared my throat. If they really were dead, then there was nothing that I could do for them now. First, I needed to focus on my own survival, and then I could worry about how to get back home. “Hey, um,” I said, “I’d love to just lie here all day, but I’m gonna need to take a piss pretty soon.” When he stared blankly at me, I tried signing. I tapped my chest for me, and with a fingertip, I traced an arc through the air beginning at my crotch.

Simba paused for a long moment. Then, he reached under the bunk and pulled out a metal bucket. Signing back, he pointed at me and then posed, squatting, over the bucket. Close enough. I nodded and Simba nodded back, but when I tried to sit up, he put his paw back on my chest, keeping me down.

“Well, I’m gonna need to get up for this,” I groaned.

Ignoring me, Simba began to carefully peel away the thin blanket that was laying over me. He started at my left side and then worked with far more care than a blanket truly required, trying to roll the cloth up as he went.

As he peeled the blanket away, I could see that I was still in my spacesuit. My helmet and left glove had been removed. Like my helmet, the glove disconnected with a quarter turn mid-way up my forearm. But as Simba got closer to my right arm, he slowed his progress, rolling and peeling the blanket away with more and more care.

Ah, I got it now. My right arm didn’t just hurt like hell because it had been banged up. It had actually been injured, and my host was trying to make sure that he didn’t make it any worse. Just great.

Simba peeled away the rolled-up blanket starting at my shoulder. When he got down to my biceps, I could see that my spacesuit had been cut away. Internally, I groaned. These damn suits probably cost the government something crazy like ten million dollars each. That was chump change compared to a wrecked spacecraft, sure, but I could still imagine being held responsible for a debt that I couldn’t pay off with a hundred lifetimes worth of savings.

My host had cut away all of the outer shell and the LCVG—a liquid cooling ventilation garment—underneath so that only my bare skin remained. But there was only a couple of inches of that before he got to the bloody cloth that he’d tied around my elbow.

I couldn’t see how badly my elbow was injured, but I didn’t really need to. What I could see was a foot-long piece of metal that disappeared into one end of the bandage and reappeared out the other.

Shit.

This was gonna be a real problem. Simba removed the blanket completely, and I just laid there a long while staring at the debris that stuck from my elbow. “Damn,” I finally sighed, “that’s the biggest splinter I’ve ever gotten.” I didn’t bother trying to sign that.

Instead, I signed, “I need you (pointed at Simba) to pull (gripped my fist beside the metal fragment) this thing out (mimed pulling it free).”

Simba immediately shook his head. He pointed at himself (if I) gripped beside it (pulled) pretended to pull it free (it out), then he made a funny noise with his mouth that I guessed was supposed to sound like squirting blood (you’re going to bleed to death).

He might be right about that. I was no doctor, but injuries like this were hard to predict. The metal could have cut into something major, or it might not have. There was only one way we’d find out.

I signed, “I need you (pointed at Simba) to wrap a tourniquet (looping action next to my arm) around my arm (pointed) and pull it tight (jerking action with a fist), then pull the metal out (repeated the pulling action).”

Simba shook his head. He gripped his own arm tightly with one hand (if I put a tourniquet on your arm), he mimed his hand going limp and flopping to the side (lack of blood flow will cause your arm to die).

“Yeah, but if you don’t pull it out, the infection will absolutely kill me,” I said. I pointed at my chest. I made my left arm flop to the side in the best representation of death I could manage.

It didn’t look like Simba wanted to discuss it. Instead, he fetched a knife from his kitchen area and started cutting the suit away with a careful incision above the belt-line. “Fair enough,” I sighed, “let’s worry about pissing in the bucket first. We can discuss amputating my arm later.”

The spacesuit opened from the back, but with a metal rod sticking through my arm, I wouldn’t be able to remove it as intended. Besides, he’d already ruined the thing, so cutting it away made sense. Still, it hurt me just to watch.

Soon, he had peeled my clothes away from the waist down as gently as he was able. Then, he helped me roll onto my side—that really hurt—so I could relieve myself into the bucket.

Simba covered me back up with the blanket and took the bucket outside to dump it.

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XjYU2YwUBRYyWfFIYXP11D3WEXQ-akB4f43uQavdWnY/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?