Professor Ornery Dragon

She stared at the screen and sighed. She’d expected this, but having it in writing, staring at her, the blinking cursor waiting for her response, made it all come crashing down around her. It was an impossible dilemma… what one of the old women back home had called being “between a rock and a hard place.”

What the hell was going on? We had landed with no problems. The previous host had easily sent us on our way and the group commander was aware of our intended target. But now that we’d landed, it was almost impossible to move away from the landing sight. Under ordinary – well, for some values of ordinary – circumstances we should have been able to set up a base camp at the landing site and then almost immediately move out to explore the near in area before sending out larger groups of colonists into the further reaches of the new host.

Roses. What was it with roses and Gran? Lina stared around the kitchen. Between the paper rose in the front window, the writing over the door into the kitchen from the hall, and now this. She had accepted that there was something strange, even otherworldly about this house. Somehow, she knew it had always been like this, even when she was a little girl, living there.

I stared at the house. I had grown up in that house, but it held no happy memories for me. No, I didn’t have an abusive childhood. Rather, it was simply a neglected childhood. I’d been fed, clothed, and sent to school, but that was it. The people who’d raised me had done so out of some sense of obligation to my parents, but that was it. They’d agreed to look after my needs – you couldn’t really say ‘took care’ of me – until I turned eighteen and was a legal adult. They’d told me I could stay in the house until I’d found a job and my own apartment, but it had been made clear that that had to happen quickly.

Wandering along the ridge top, Mikhail admired the view. The chain of mountains stretched east and west, and the setting sun sent long shadows streaming across the canyon below on the south side. To the north, broad plains stretched away to the horizon. He could see the rising crescent of what the landing crew was calling Moon #1. Mikhail shook his head in bemusement. The landing crew was devoid of poets or any other creatives. Moon #2 would rise about one Earth hour after Moon #1. He decided that one thing he would do tonight, before sleeping was come up with actual names for the moons. He knew the landing crew would take whatever they could get.