Author’s Note:  This flash fiction story was written based on a prompt provided by NathalieErienne during a livestream.  I hereby transfer all story rights to them, with the caveat that it remain posted on this blog.  If you would like your own story, stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade during one of my streams and I’ll write it for you live!

Prompt: On a station orbiting a gas giant, what might happen if a seemingly harmless virus were to activate a long dormant gene from a person’s fey ancestry, and cause a possible clash of Earth magics in the sterility of a station near the edge of the solar system?

All he had for her was a subdermal injector filled with ten different kinds of sedative, all selected at random, because the entire research and medical team on the orbiter Djinn Miner 5 was now just throwing darts at the wall in terms of figuring out how to stop her. Briefly Jaxon considered tossing the injector in much the same fashion, but Katiga would elude it effortlessly, and they were already low on supplies.

Just five days prior she couldn’t dodge anything. Both of them had come out to the gas giant Djinn, a quarter-galaxy away from home, on research contracts with the mining corp, the only people still granting them now that humanity knew alien life was never more interesting than globs of saline inside cell walls occasionally learning to phagosynthesize with background radiation.

Katiga studied them, her globbies as she joked, pushing her glasses up her nose, accidentally opening and closing the programs displayed in their lenses, of which there were always at least five.

“This globby’s got some personality,” she would say, chipper, handing over a holoscan of the latest sample from the deepest layer of Djinn’s great hydrogen hexagon. All Jaxon saw was a pale blue cylinder awash in dye with a nucleus more plain than he liked his burgers.

“And where is it exactly?” She scoffed at him, pulled out another.

“You can tell what she’s like right?”

“She?” Katiga would laugh, like he was missing some kind of grand point: a dog that didn’t understand the park wasn’t the point of the city. “Look, you know all the corp cares about is if they’re infectious, and that’s my department.”

Except Jaxon wasn’t sure he had a department anymore, it had collapsed along with the rest of the city he hadn’t perceived. Katiga was small, hunched, clumsy, carried papers more than she held hands, and if you tossed something her way it would bounce off, with her always saying ‘ow’ even if it was a wad of paper. What did he miss? What escaped him that struck her and made her into this… thing that needed to be injected with enough sedatives to put down one of each subspecies of rhino.

His globbies, which he called Vitos, not that he’d ever admitted the terms of endearment to her, weren’t simple plant-likes or animal-adjacents. They most resembled viroids. Their structure suggested they were meant to infect larger cells and pseudocells, covered as their tips were with molecular hooks.

But there was nothing to infect. Not in Djinn’s hydrogen and helium layers, not back in their home cluster, not anywhere. God the biologists were bored, going on a hundred years now. All of their work was out of obligation, long-odd risks, and passions now in-name-only. To pass the time they needed friends, study buddies, and Katiga was his.

At lunch they tossed things back and forth. She lied with ‘ow!’ He loved it. He swore that love was in his mind, filling it up, pushing everything else out, when he made the mistake. He tossed her a sample from Djinn’s rings, a wispy crystalline thing packed with inert alien viroids. She didn’t catch it.

‘Ow!’ she said with a smile, even as it slipped out of its cover, left droplets on her bare skin. It was a breach in protocol, but biologists didn’t care anymore. None of the contaminants had ever contaminated, since before they started school. Quarantine procedure was a moist towelette.

The idea her first symptom could be connected to the exposure was absurd; she was instead accused of using the skin-growing matrices from the burn unit to make a fantasy costume. Her ears had gone pointy.

‘Ow!’ she said every time Jaxon poked them, but she didn’t mean it. In fact she smiled more than ever, and he worried it was someone else’s grin. Then the changes came like rapids. Now she was light on her feet, skipping as if in the gravity of Earth’s moon. Her hair sparkled, her laughter carried down every hall, and there are thousands of hallways and sub-hallways in an orbital mining station.

Chuckles alerted everyone, not alarms. Containment failed, twice. Cameras and robotic security stopped working around her. She would only talk to Jaxon, and only on his wrist comm. Drenched in responsibility, wracked with worry, of course he had joined the sweep team trying to locate her. Little taunts and clues led him to their tiny nature park and looped walking trail, itself like a photosynthetic cell under the reflected light of the gas giant Djinn.

“You were right,” she squeaked into his crackling comm. He heard it echo nearby. One step off the trail, into the trees that had been growing in neat rows just yesterday. Now they were a dense tangle that playfully, too like Katiga, grabbed at his ankles. “Your globbies were better.”

“I call it a vito,” he finally admitted. Laughter. Which way? Left.

“Vito, that’s great! We’re going to have so much fun when we get there Jaxon.” More left.

“Where are we going Katiga? Is that why you tried to change our course? You scared the captain.”

“We’re going to the realm,” she said, voice a ghostly promise on the last word. “That’s why all we find is scraps that do nothing. Everything they were supposed to react to went away, to the realm.”

“And what realm is that?”

“The Fey realm of course.” He believed it like a hammer to the head. Truth bludgeoned him, and reason shattered at his feet sharply, making him doubt his next step. Why wouldn’t he believe her? The viroid had made her into exactly that, some kind of host pixie that didn’t care if it was in an earthly glen or a sealed habitat in the vacuum of space.

“Old DNA,” he muttered. “Something always in you, non-coding. From before Shakespeare’s days. When the fairies actually played with… cave men?”

“Who knows,” she tittered, somewhere in the canopy above. “I will, very shortly. My body is making the magic, like a factory. And magic can get you anywhere. That’s how come all these globbies and vitos are so far out. The Fey used to stroll the stars.”

“And so do we,” he reminded. “We don’t want to go to the realm Katiga. Please come down. I’ve got some medicine for you.”

“No Jaxy, I’ve got yours. Ever seen a plant photosynthesize in reverse?” She laughed before he could answer, dove down next to him. There was only a second to see what her face had become: geode irises, snowdrift freckles still drifting, feathered hair, and a long neck just for peeking around corners.

Then her silhouette was too bright, too formless, and she disappeared into the surrounding flora. A powerful beam overwhelmed him on all sides, shot through the reinforced glass that fed Djinn’s light to the park.

Once his eyes recovered he saw the radiant arrow that had been his best friend strike at Djinn’s heart. A magic shock wave. An enchanted ignition. Layer by layer the entire planet was converted, the giant’s gas burning, ablaze in blue.

He dropped the injector. Like in her the knowledge came with time, even though he’d never seen one. He just knew. A will o’ the wisp. Big enough to show all mankind the way to the realm. Or to lure them in.

THE END