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The motorcycle whirred in thin air.
“It’s like a marine version of Tuscany,” thought Alien Babe as she observed the set of wet rolling hills lurching beneath her.
There she sat, soaking in the maritime wind and sporting her signature Adidas tracksuit. The muscles in her body were tensed as a tigers and the soft scales of her palms bundled over the pliable handlebars like the coiled ends of a dragons tail. Strapped up on the bike behind her were three enormous leather trunks that she knew to collectively contain the assembly of objects necessary for her to livelihood.
Although Alien Babe is perhaps best known for her adventures on planet Erf, she was this time headed into the vast expanse of the ocean on planet Earth.
“Fucking hell, I can tell the water levels are rising. I used to be able to fly only a few meters above here with no problem but now I feel like I’m about to be engulfed by ever damn wave that decides to rummage through the water,” she thought, steering her bike upwards from the surface of the water.
As her bike spiralled about in circular motions, the yellow light on her GPS began to blink. The speed of the blinking intensified until each miscellaneous blinking pixel drew together, forming a decipherable grouping of letters.
‘ATLANTIS,’ it read.
This was not to be the Alien Babe’s first time traveling to the underwater city-state. This was, however, to be her first time travelling to Atlantis with this much luggage.
“Remember, you can always freeze your eggs if you don’t like it there,” she said quietly to herself.
As she hovered above the spot, she prepared to be sucked in by the streams of water she had by now come to expect.
The moment before felt an eternity.
“There must be some scientific law stating that the more eager you are for something to happen the more intense the anticipation becomes,” she thought to herself.
Finally, after what truly seemed to be at least twice as many minutes than had actually elapsed, the liquid took her over in a short burst. Spurred from the sputtering immensity of the mist upon the waves, it rose slowly upwards from ocean level, crescendoing as the Loch Ness monster does in the mornings, awoken by the hint of golden sun playing at its reptilian eyelids.
Both the Alien Babe and her motorcycle were absorbed into the makeshift cleavage.
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Following the absorption, the rest of the way into Atlantis was similar to the tube system in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory‘. You know the one, it’s the one that August Gloop gets stuck in when Willy Wonka takes them on that famous tour. Her path led past the cheerful fish of the shallow aqua, lower and lower, till there were plankton and whales swimming peacefully beside her. Once the light from above had been sucked entirely from the setting , she spied to the south east of her a metal scaffolding. It was clear that this frigid, jaunty structure could in no conceivable way have come about organically from the rest of the deep, murky, slimy macrocosm.
It was Atlantis.
But this was by no means the end of her journey. Quite the opposite actually: it was now that Alien Babe began to gain speed.
Then, for a few measly seconds, Alien Babe lost sight of the lapping of the ocean. Speaking in purely geopolitical terms, she had arrived.
“I gotta tell Tri that they should put up a sign or something. No doubt that would be great for publicity on social media,” she considered.
Now past the invisible barrier, the pulsations of radiance originating from the city below her became pliable. But Alien Babe knew there still to be many straights and bends up ahead.
This was in fact the third time Alien Babe was making this journey and she was therefore quite familiar with this particular hollow transportation system.
From the distance, she saw movement: Atlanteans, crawling like ants in the heart of their over populated city. Although she would never admit this to Tri, Alien Babe secretly thought Atlantis to appeared similar to many of the other planets she had visited before. This was because, as also on most of the planets she had visited before, the city was mostly occupied by swarms of people carrying on with their daily business. There were Atlanteans travelling on shuttle buses as well as Atlanteans walking blue masses of unidentifiable proportions – Alien Babe had found out during her previous visit these to be deep sea jellyfish that were apparently kept by many here as pets. There were Atlantean children making their way to school, laughing and playing, singing melodic rhymes in the strange tongue that’s notes echoed up, up and away, to be arrested only by the iron within the metallic bulb covering the city. The Atlantean adults, on the other had, seemed all to be in a rush to make the deadlines of some predetermined duties. Their tall, slender figures marched swiftly ahead; it was almost as if the wide walk paths had been divided into moving queues that the Atlanteans had all agreed to tread along as part of some unsaid pact. Without fail, every single one of them kept their eyes low, refusing to meet the gaze of their fellow citizens. Alien Babe found this strange, but Tri had told her that it was customary. Some Atlanteans were even smoking underwater e-cigarettes that were long and lean and special only because they let off an iridescent white shimmer of ‘Purifying Mites’ (tiny machines apparently constructed based on an ingenious technology that managed to absorb and to clean the polluted bits of the air).
No matter what they were up to when spotted by Alien Babe, the Atlanteans all had several important features in common: they were all tall, slender and blessed with a cascading stream of golden-hued hair. To Alien Babe this meant, as it would also mean to many others, that the Atlanteans were on the whole incredibly attractive.
Moreover, the people of Atlantis also had something else in common in terms of their appearance: they all wore identical lycra suits of incandescent azure. These suits covered each inch of the Atlanteans down from the white collar at the neck, encompassing even the hands and feet so that one could not be certain whether the Atlanteans were wearing any shoes at all. Children had on light blue versions of these, teens slightly darker versions and adults the most opaque types of them all. Alien Babe had never during her visits had the pleasure to meet an elderly person, but she suspected that the suit of such would most likely be a hue of blue nearly resembling black.
This was to Alien Babe not a new thing and it had actually been one of the first facts she had noticed the very first time she had undertaken this same journey. When she had asked Tri about this he had explained, calmly and cooly as always, that the suit was reserved for the “Class of the Working”, who were the only types of people who could be seen roaming freely about the city. This get-up was apparently to be worn mostly for the sake of the stamp stitched carefully onto the neck of its wearer. Alien Babe had not noticed any sort of stamp on any of the Atlanteans before it had been mentioned to her, but after attention had been brought to it, she felt stupid for ever having missed it.. Furthermore, Tri had stressed there to be four main types of these tiny dark abrasions, each representing one of the four businesses to which every Atlantean was expected to belong.
The fact that the Atlanteans were all wearing the same sort of attire made the few tourists there appear ever more prevalent. They wore red and yellow and brown and green, sauntering awkwardly and staying in packs as if this would somehow serve to make them less conspicuous. With their photo-devices around their necks, they looked up instead of down. Alien Babe could tell that even despite the Atlanteans making direct eye-contact with them, they were being transmitting the most hateful welcome. Tri had told her that a large part of the tourists came from the planet Morr, but a smaller number also from QF3 due to the direct flight connections from there to the island nearest the sea spot in which we observed Alien Babe at the beginning of our story. Alien Babe had sometimes even seen these tourist boats ahead of her on her way to the spot, observed the flashings of their cameras. From her bike that was still reasonably far from their boat, she had sensed their disgusting excitement seething artificial curiosity into their harmless surroundings .
Aside from the people that could be seen in Atlantis, the man-made structures rising gigantically from the sea-bed were the real stars of the show. These were mostly white and seemed upon brief inspection to be made of clay. However, what they were truly formed from was a type of plastic that could only be made from the debris found in the deepest point of Marianna’s trench. The strength of the strongest metals on any of the planets around the Universes no where near matched this material; the Atlanteans best kept secret was how they managed to mold this special plastic into their pillared houses and their second best secret was how they were able to poke small but admittedly impressive windows through the walls of the house made of such material. These were the living quarters of the Atlanteans: it made sense that the buildings were also surrounded by small gardens of seaweed and coral, decorating the otherwise pearly forests of buildings.
As the tube continued onwards, Alien Babe knew she was now nearly upon Central Atlantis. Just as it had always done, the street leading towards it had purposefully been constructed to provide a peak of the glory to come before being faced completely by its quivering life-force. Here, the buildings rose twice as tall as in the residential areas and were shaped more miscellaneously. Some were pointed slabs, some pierced at the top with oval pods overlooking it all, others triangles that were decorated at the top by Atlantean flags, fluttering softly in the windless air. Still others that were simply rectangles stood up horizontally in relation to the street. Flashing lights were strewn about these different sorts of fortifications. Alien Babe’s eyes caught on an advertisement for sports wear in which a young Atlantean girl was wearing a pink top and skirt combination all the while gripping her tennis raquet – tennis was the national sport of Atlantis and Tri had been confused when they had first started dating and Alien Babe had admitted to knowing next to nothing about the sport. In addition to the colourful pictures that changed in an unfathomably rapid progression, there were phrases, words and letters written in a bright tongue that had always remained undecipherable to Alien Babe. Perhaps the reason Altanean enthralled her so was because it was so utterly dissimilar to any of the languages she had observed on any of the other planets she had visited during her lifetime. The letters were each visually abrasive vortexes, indented with several avenues of pigeon scratchings. Moreover, seeing them in this way to be blinking and lathered onto the walls of the Central Square made them all the more impressive.
Alien Babe was still flying along this tube and was beginning to grow tired of being accompanied solely by her thoughts.
“I wonder how much longer it’s gonna be from here?” she considered impatiently.
Right, right, left, left, led the tube. In the distance, the means for her expulsion. The pace of her trail quickened and quickened, till she began to close in on then end. Then, before being plopped out this portion of her journey for good, the outside of the tube became set in something opaque, projecting nothingness into the part of the tube Alien Babe was travelling towards.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the tunnel finished.
She was tossed out into the open and flew downstream. The fall was not far and she was momentarily seated with her back upright on a leather couch. After having sat on the sofa in question for a few moments, Alien Babe was startled to noticed it to be the colour of salted caramel. In a daze, she studied the rest of her surroundings. What opened up in front of her was a room full of patterns, furniture and accessories that could well have been taken straight from the 1970s. Past the leftmost and rightmost edges of the rectangular sofa upon which she the was now seated were two heavy sets of velvet blinds that hung dictatorially like the well-worn robes of a monk. Based on her previous visits, Alien Babe knew the insides of these velvet drapes to constitute dressing rooms.
“Could they have picked something slightly less menacing as a way of conferring privacy?” she speculated.
Behind her rigid back and the equally rigid sofa-back was a wall, made completely of mirror, in which Alien Babe was able to view her reflection when craning her neck and turning her head slightly sideways. From this awkward side view Alien Babe judged her pointed nose and beady eyes. She also recalled at once that she had recently dyed her hair are darker shade of blue, partly because she knew this to be the dominant colour in Atlantis and partly because this had become a new trend that had taken her home planet by storm. As a whole, her reflection was one that moved as uneasily as a caged animals terrified by the sight of herself.
“Maybe I should spend another moment practicing so I know what angles are better for me when the paparazzi catch us and put us on the cover of Atlantean tabloids,” Alien Babe thought dreamily.
Cocking her head upwards was not a good look; tilting her chin downwards was better.
“Chin down and don’t smile with your teeth,” had been the helpful advice according to which she had operated her whole life.
“I wish cameras came with a built-in mirror so you could see yourself before someone took a photo. I bet that’d make for much less stress as you could better manoeuvre positions to make sure you look good before the moment becomes eternalised,” considered Alien Babe.
As the wait turned from five minutes to ten, she soon tired of these semi-self deprecating thoughts. It was time to search elsewhere for entertainment. As always, she had been asked beforehand to leave her mobile phone with the rest of her belongings on her motorcycle, so going on social media and reading the news were both out of question.
She looked to the floor. It was marble and a large part of it was a yellowish colour, inlaid with boxes of green and still smaller regions devoid of any colour at all. It was like a foreign game of tick tack toe. Or not really, but imagination could be used to shift the shapes to this effect.
The situation would have seemed to anyone to be uncomfortable if Tri had not told her well beforehand that he would be a bit late.
While she was still busy counting up the number of egg-shapes in the ivy boxes beneath her toes, someone appeared in the mirror behind her. He was a young Atlantean, blessed with the same honey dew hair, buggy blue eyes and deliciously sun-toasted skin as them all.This one was not wearing any sort of suit but instead a clean button down with a crisp collar that’s edges were so sharp that they could have been fashioned from paper.
Once the picture was complete, the projection of the man took a big step to his left (which brought him to the right of the sofa) so as not to disturb the piece of furniture he had before then been behind. He was in position. Bit by bit, the holographic man bled from out of the mirror, becoming for a moment a ghost. He was not a ghost for very long: he began immediately to be pieced together by the force some strange unnamed energy. Alien Babe sat crosslegged, impatiently awaiting his arrival. Just as quickly as he had allowed himself seep into the realm of unreality, the man was again solid. The cycle was complete. There was not a soul in the any of the Universes that would have denied him to be completely real, a physical Atlantean with his feet set firmly in this realm of existence.
“Tri!” she exclaimed as she sprang up, embracing him and gaving him a quick hug and a kiss.
“Good to see you,” he said.
When it was time to let go, Alien Babe already knew the drill. She swept across the man, onto the other side of the velvet curtains and into the dressing room.
Hung on the silver hook on the right side of the space was a striped sweater and a pair of orange flares. It took her a while to unpeel the tracksuit from her sticky scales, but once she had partially managed this, the rest became relatively easy. Once this activity had been finalised, Alien Babe confidently chucked her ex-clothing into the hole boring its way through the wall at the back of the changing room. She knew this item would not be disposed of but later returned to her (in the best case scenario it might even be dry cleaned before she got it back). Finally, she took one last look in the mirror and fashioned the flower print scarf around her neck.
Alien Babe uncovered the blinds once more, emerging cautiously through the veil of the dark into the light. Her scaly fingers, that’s nails had been painted a seductive bright red, grabbed at the arm of her suitor. They tread together down the narrow marble corridor, out to a larger room with the same flooring from the waiting room. As the hallway shifted direction, they swivelled they bodies in a jerky movement to face the exit. Besides the heavy-set wooden doors comprising the egress were two ferns, each held in distinct white vases.
Once they became on the outside air, Alien Babe breathed it in with the thirst of a a traveller who had for days been lost in the desert. This was in part due to the fact that it had been stuffy inside the waiting room and in part because the Atlantean atmosphere was always spruced up with extra vitamins and minerals meant to improve the health of the residents. As they strolled ahead, the undersides of the soles of her feet contacted in a dull patter with the unsteady grey rocks making up the pavement of this part of town. As they walked down winding paths of homes, Alien Babe noticed the dazzling way in which their walls absorbed the lighted shadows of the neighbouring buildings. She had no time to recover from the effort required to follow this thought; they had already reached their destination. It was an amulet of colourful resistance, peeking out from behind the next major twist of the street. It stood bright yellow amidst a palette of azure, in a spot that would surely have been illegal were Tri not to have been the son of the King of Atlantis. When they were becoming so close to the car that Alien Babe felt as though she could nearly taste its lemony yellow lemon paint, Tri pressed a little button on a tiny key that he had, beneath the conscious knowledge of Alien Babe, been this whole time harbouring right there at the deepest point of his palm. The key chain was plastic and read ‘Ferrari’. This caught Alien Babe’s eye as she had heard on her planet’s news podcast a story of plastics having been outlawed in Atlantis, but mentioned nothing about this to Tri. She wanted to do everything in her power to avoid spoiling the moment. The button-press had an immediate effect, causing the roof of the car to shrink into the flowers of the fabric overlying the backrests of the seats of the car.
As they crouched into the open top, the boyfriend broke the silence:
“How do ya like this one?” he asked, “You can probably tell I’ve gotten really sick of the blue out here and am now more into the whole yellow, brown and orange scheme. Sorry you had to temporarily rid yourself of the tracksuit by the way, you know you’ll get it back though right?” he added, giving her leg a squeeze with his right hand while keeping his left steadfast on the steering wheel.
“Don’t worry, I’ve found this sort of sweater and jeans combination to be much more utile for the purpose of leisure activities. The tracksuit’s good for motorbiking and looks cool in photos, but it isn’t very good in situations where she needed to pee at rest stops or just to take off the clothing of the upper or lower half for some reason or another,” she replied, winking at him and using her left hand to give his an equally reassuring validative touch.
Soon they were silent and driving fast, listening to ‘Omara Portuendo‘ and particularly to ‘Marieta‘ by Ibrahim Ferrer because Alien Babe considered it romantic, foreign and obscure. The moment was ripe. All expectations had been fulfilled. As Alien Babe reflected on the success of the situation, her heart became a thumping ball of light energy that was at any moment in danger of swelling out from her chest. Despite her preconceptions, this had turned out to be everything she had hoped for and more.
“It’s going too well, I think we’re about to crash,” she whispered to herself.
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WAST WRTNG 