Topsoil
Chapter 2: Gravity
by Lulucille
Tags:
#cw:noncon
#D/s
#dom:female
#dom:male
#f/f
#pov:bottom
#sub:female
#bondage
#cw:drug_play
#cw:dubious_consent
#cw:kidnapping
#cw:personality_death
#cw:presumed_death
#cw:surgery
#dom:nb
#Human_Domestication_Guide
#humiliation
#petplay
#scifi
Gravity is what keeps us grounded. Without gravity Terrans would struggle to do even the most basic things, like walking around, without putting in a lot of conscious effort. Let’s see if our little Terrans understand the gravity of their situation~
Disclaimer I published this at like midnight there will be a lot of bad spelling in here :)
————— Extra-Sol Space, 3 hours prior to the Charter Asteroid Disaster —————
Verdalin’s eyes glazed over his computer monitor. He was not best pleased with its content, beholden to the fact that he had just been presented with a requisition request for the sum of 83 units in one operation. A thin green vine reached down and scratched the manager’s leafy ‘chin’, his brow furrowed into a frown.
“Do they not care for our standards?” Verdalin bellowed (using his best ‘inside’ voice) “A most preposterous notion indeed.” he huffed, this time managing to keep his thoughts in his head. Eighty-three in one go, they’d gone mad. Mad indeed.
From the corner of the room something stirred, catching Verdalin’s attention. “Oh, little one, I am so terribly sorry-”, his booming voice had inadvertently woken the creature, nestled in a set of leafy blankets in the corner of his office. The alien animal blinked repeatedly while looking up at it’s Owner, this was not appropriate waking hours.
To a Terran, the idea of an alien was not a novel concept. Having already annexed the Rinan community’s territory decades prior, a Terran could understand considering another xeno species an ‘animal’.
The aforementioned ‘animal’ opened its mouth to speak, but any and all protest it had was quickly met with a hushing vine against it’s lip. The quick slip of a quilled flower into it’s neck and a vine resting gently on its head was enough to send it back to the land of slumber.
Xenodrugs were used by the Affini to do all sorts of things to the sophants in their care. It could help them sleep, remove pain, even cure some diseases. But xenodrugs needed to be species specific. Without proper research and testing, their most advanced technology could even cause harm to their adorable little sophants, which just wouldn’t do.
It wasn’t enough to have most of the work done, they were always missing the last little piece of information that would make xenodrugs for a new species safe and effective.
And the Affini, the race that Verdalin belonged to, were encountering new races constantly.
His body composed almost completely of vines and flowers, Verdalin usually contorted them into a bipedal body. Many of the xeno species that the Affini were in contact with found the bipedal form to be more palatable than the mass of plant matter that they truly were.
Verdalin was almost like a type of tree. His sturdy branches supported heaving vines, and his face was adorned with oaky leaves for facial hair. The occasional yellow flower betrayed his softer side, and the xenodrug grafts he had attached to his body were purely for ease of use, much more simple to wrangle unruly sophants when the injector is on the end of a vine.
“Eighty-three… What am I to do?” the gentle giant muttered to himself. “Eighty-three…”. Verdalin almost felt weary, were he not an Affini he likely would. This much work would be far too much any sophant. It wasn’t even an idea that the Affini could entertain.
Verdalin checked that his pet was sleeping soundly, gently closed the door, and made his exit. Trudging tirelessly through the corridors of the ship, he thought only of the stack of paperwork that awaited him at the Cotyledon department.
————— Extra-Sol Space, 2 hours prior to the Charter Asteroid Disaster —————
The ship slowed. The ship wasn’t supposed to be slowing. Why was the ship slowing? The ship definitely wasn’t supposed to be breaking so fast that it was juddering!
Luris checked her smart glasses- dead, she was sure that she charged them before she left. The lights flickered and then re-engaged. Having been on countless similar journeys before, Luris knew that none of this was normal. They weren’t at the Neptune docking stations, of that much she was absolutely sure.
Despite having just been jolted awake by a feeling of great unease, Luris had enough wits about her to know that it hadn’t been 8 hours yet. Her glasses floated away from her face, they weren’t exactly designed for the zero-G environment of space.
The shuttle had totally stopped, and judging by the nature of this stop it didn’t appear to have Smooth Assisted Breaking™ enabled either. These days that could only mean one thing- they were stopped in dead-space.
“Ugghh, this is going to take hours, the warp drives on these craft take hours to reset after a dead stop!” another passenger exclaimed, unfastening the tie from around his neck. He was a business traveller, he was able to make the same deductions as Luris after all, and he was one who still wore a suit at that. Luris may have been a management fucker but this guy was an absolute weapons grade business twat.
To him this was an inconvenience. Probably a large inconvenience by his standards, but only a mere inconvenience nonetheless. In his mind there was no possible outcome other than one in which he safely arrives at his destination (albeit slightly delayed) and screams at a minimum wage customer service rep, before demanding a refund for a trip that his company most likely paid for anyway.
Other passengers began to look around. The cabin crew hurriedly scrambled together around a terminal, floating in zero-G, checking automated readouts. Luris noted that they all seemed to float with their feet towards the ground. It was space, there was no reason that they couldn’t have easily floated upside down or horizontally if they felt like it. It kind of makes sense that they’d all stay ‘right side up’, at least then they share a common plane… Luris was distracting herself with hyper focus. She hadn’t fallen into that habit for years. This was not a good sign.
Ships, at least charter transporters, didn’t have captains these days, and they certainly didn’t have a pilot. Cost saving, “streamlining the transport process”, reducing overhead. In any case there was nobody on board the craft who could point the ship in a direction and press the big red go button. The process was supposed to be automated. At any rate, pilot or no, the business twat had been right- it would be hours before the warp drive was done recalibrating itself, especially since they stopped in dead-space.
After a brief minute of inconspicuous, inane tannoy announcements asking ‘all valued customers to kindly remain seated’, gravity kicked back in.
“Oh Stars” Luris exclaimed under her breath. Gravity doesn’t just ‘kick back in’. Gravity is a function of mass over distance squared. That meant that it got stronger the closer you got to an object, but the change was gradual. Not on/off. Not binary. Not like this.
No Terran structure could manage anything beyond microgravity, using spinning portions of the vessel to simulate the acceleration of gravity. No, whatever was happening wasn’t planetary gravity and it absolutely wasn’t Terran. There could be no spaceport, not even a mobile one, between any deep space jump point and either Terra or Neptune. This was either outside of Terran technical abilities or enormous on an incomprehensible scale.
r u n
Every part of Luris body was telling her this was wrong. Her mind was overloaded with information. Her muscles twitched in anticipation. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Her breathing was erratic, her heart rate elevated. She expected her implant to warn her of her condition any second, but the familiar tone of the health warning never came. Her vision narrowed. Luris was barely even inside her own body, knuckles white from gripping her seat’s armrests.
None of it made sense. The early stop. The dead glasses. Oh Stars her implant wasn’t working either. The lights disengaging. The textbook tannoy announcements. The gravity. There was a missing piece. There was something wrong. Luris was in danger. Luris had to hide. Luris had to run.
The doors of the craft opened with the satisfying whoosh of air that accompanied any other spaceport. Golden light bathed the interior of the craft, as the cabin crew urged the passengers to disembark slowly into the port. Luris had no intention of disembarking, instead silently standing from her seat and filtering past the small stream of travellers.
She headed straight for the back of the ship, frantically pushing past anyone and anything in her way. Her eyes scouring the interior of the vessel, looking for any half-decent hiding spot.
Could she hoist herself into the overhead bins? Probably, but they didn’t unlock from the inside.
Perhaps there was a way to sneak into the baggage store? That would essentially be trapping herself into a corner though…
How about under a seat? It could be a good vantage point but limited manoeuvrability. It was the best she had, and at least this way if her fears were unfounded she could just pretend she had fallen asleep during landing.
It took the young woman a good few minutes to calm down, and another quarter of an hour to start trying to back herself out of her decision.
“What on Terra are you doing Luris? This is insane! What are you even hiding from? You’re at the space port on Neptune, you’re going to get off and get pissed up and have creepy management people hit on you. Just like every other work trip to Neptune.”
Despite her excellent attempt at diplomacy over herself, Luris remained crouched between her chosen seats. Despite willing every muscle in her body to just do what she’d done a hundred times before and get off the ship, she knew that something was up and something was dangerous.
At that moment she heard two voices in the distance, coming from the direction of the shuttle door. The staff were probably coming back to do their cleaning, yes, that was it. They’d find her and she’d pretend to be asleep, and that would be that.
At least eight foot tall. Walking. Plant. What the actual fuck?
Walking plant. Walking plant? There was only so many times that a person can think the words “walking plant” to themselves without at least briefly considering that they had gone absolutely insane. Luris felt her jaw physically smack against the floor. Utter disbelief washed over her face and transitioned into a stomach-sickening churning.
The walking plant had a friend too, on the other side of the gangway. They were walking plants. Two. Walking in unison. The other one must have been slightly taller, as it was significantly stooping to be able to walk inside the vessel. The first one was only undertaking minor stoopage to be able to fit.
The one closer to Luris was draped in vines, adorned with colourful little flowers. It had a humanoid look, but she didn’t dare check to see if it had a face. “Plant with a face” Luris shuddered. She couldn’t make out much about the other one, but could see dragging red thorns adorning its unruly, unkempt, tangle of vines. It’s a surprise that it wasn’t tearing up the carpet just by existing within an arms reach of it.
Inches from her face, the two passed by. Undetected, Luris’s mind raced to formulate a plan. If she wasn’t having a stroke and there really were plants on this ship, then Luris wanted no part in it. A great escape was in order. On the off change that she was having a stroke, then it very quickly wasn’t going to be her problem to deal with anyway. “Win-win”, even the eternal optimist’s own thoughts dripped with sarcasm.
Crawling quietly from her position, she might just be able to sneak out past the plant-people before they reached the back of the ship and turned around. If she could make it to the door then… well, what then? She knew nothing about the situation. She needed intel, fast.
She made it three steps before the plants heard her. Stupid flat feet, Luris would have to remember to curse out her parents in the afterlife for giving her such shitty genes. She turned to face the plant.
“Oh Stars it does have a face.”
The plant was definitely feminine, by Terran standards. It had short trimmings of grass for eyebrows, and it’s face shifted and moved in a very un-Terran manor. And- the plant looked offended? Almost indignant? And also the plant was attractive?? What the f-
”I am most certainly not an it.” it she replied, in Terran.
Luris had seen a lot of things in her lifetime. Some good, some bad. Some brought tears of joy to her face, some were traumatising. Nothing in the world could have possibly prepared her for an 8 foot tall plant lady talking back to her.
She fell back, onto the ground, scrambling and kicking hopelessly against the floor to get away from the creature without taking her eyes off it for even half a second.
The plant, who some observant readers may have recognised as an Affini, felt guilty about bringing such fear to such an adorable little Terran sophant. Really, it wasn’t the poor thing’s fault that it had never met another non-Terran life form. Czarina Winguard, Third Bloom, on the other hand, had met many xeno species in her life. For her, this was just one of many first encounters, although it was rare for her to meet a sophant who had never even heard of the Affini.
As Luris’s desperate reverse-crab scramble on all fours hadn’t gained her much ground between herself and her flower-besotted adversary, it would appear that the figurative ball was now in the plant’s court.
Vines moved at a breakneck pace to engulf the salaried management consultant, tying her wrists together behind her back, and wrapping her arms and upper body tightly in gentle vines.
”You caught one!” the thorny mass shouted from across the room, “That makes 83 right?”.
”Absolutely, this little morsel must have been hiding. Did you suspect something was wrong little Terran?” quizzed Czarina.
The Terran responded with wriggling and struggling and grunting, barely even acknowledging the question she had been presented with.
”Oh well, I guess this one’s not as smart as we gave her credit for, she can’t even speak!” both Affini laughed.
”I can speak, and I can definitely speak better both of you stupid plant fucks!” great job Luris, rrreeeeaaallllll original insult. You could pick any plant or alien based pun or insult in the galaxy and you call them fucks? Smoooooth.
Czarina slipped a vine side-ways into the humans screaming mouth, holding her still like she was putting a bit on a pony. Not that Affini actually knew what a pony was. The Terran struggled against the vine for a minute, before settling down and accepting that she was supposed to bite down on it. It was actually quite firm, definitely too tough to chew through, almost like a tree trunk or root.
“Sorry, what was that sweetheart? Do you still think you speak better than I do?” Czarina cackled, she was having far too much fun with her new Terran friend, “Now, I don’t want any more language like that, do you understand?” her question was met with more thrashing from the now slightly tired Terran.
”I know I should really stop you from bullying our newest Cotyledon, but maybe it’s best that you don’t take your vine out of her mouth, the other Cotyledons are still in orientation, they haven’t seen us yet”.
”Us?” Luris replayed their use of that word in her mind. “Haven’t seen us yet? They called me a codylamon or whatever, and they said that the ‘others’ were as well… That means! The other passengers- They don’t know that this is a trap!”
There has been a lot of worry about the fate of Luris, especially owing to the tags of this story. I’d like to take a moment to reassure those of you who may not enjoy such heavy plot lines, Luris will go through some challenges, but the ‘personality death’ tag definitely does NOT apply to her.
This was a lot of fun to write! Luris is absolutely a small ‘thorn’ in the bum of the Affini, it’s going to be interesting to see how many spanners she can throw into the works!