When I said the little fille was vindictive I meant it. The following day, I kept finding my personal effects all over the place as she tried to stall my leave. Mrs. Kaufmann got a kick out of it at my expense but she didn't let her daughter take it too far.

The matron hadn't been idle either, after the awkward parting at the dinner table she'd taken the time to fill up casseroles of food and food supplies. It was her way of getting back at me—by saddling me with groceries, cooked food and dairy from the farm. I rued the state she'd seen me in when I arrived at the Kaufmanns days ago. I couldn't refuse her offer of food she'd poured her heart into, especially that cinnamon pie.

When everything was well in hand, and I was sure I wouldn't find my toothbrush hidden somewhere in the cloak room, I bid my farewells. The grass was still dewy by the time we were leaving the house—Heidi clung to me like a koala, bawling as though her toys were being taken from her.

“Take care out there, will you?” Mrs. Kaufmann said, planting a kiss on the side of my cheek. “ And you Lu, I'll be expecting a call when you both arrive—”

“I will Mrs. Kaufmann,” I said

“Yes Ma—” Lucas grumbled as he gave his mother a hug. We gave tentative waves at the men of the house as we got into the SUV. Lucas' not one of the farm vehicles—the family had two, a city vehicle and a farm vehicle.

“So anything new lately?” he inquired once the farm was just a silhouette on the side mirrors. Headlights were tearing at dawn's mist as we traversed unpaved farm roads; I liked the crunching murmurs of pebbles and gravel coming from the tyres.

“Meant to tell you after that supper but you left me cornered by Heidi, ” I snorted. I'd had my hands full trying to placate a stubborn princess—Cass was not a very good influence on the girl.

Lucas winced,“ C'mon bruv—work with me here.”

“ Letters,” I murmured. “There's alien letters on the bars—and I think a number too,”

“Huh?” Lucas said as he steered us onto the tarmac. The sound of crunching ceased and the SUV purred as we accelerated. “ Can you tell me what they say?” he said as the wipers came on, making that swishing rythmic noise as light rain peppered the wind screen.

“ Would I have studied exo-Linguistics, I would have told you," I said.

“They have that?” Lucas gawked.“ Wait, that was meant to be sarcastic right?...right?”

“ Hmm…” I shrugged as I called the interface to the forefront. When it faded into existence, there were notable changes as it fuzzed as if unsure of its letters. But when it snapped into finality―

ν ////////// (+3)

Æ /////////

Whatever entity was behind this had a hell of a learning curve.

“ Something interesting happened?” Lucas said, eyes still on the road.

“ Yep, I have letters, a decidedly Greek letter V, “ I said. The other letter was familiar to me but I couldn’t place where I’d seen it. I borrowed Lucas’ phone and looked it up on the search engine . “ The other is a letter that does know whether its an A or an E, I think its called a diphthong,”

“ There is also a plus three on the upper bar, dunno what it means but the operator means an addition has been made.” I added

“ Hold on― Dip-what?” Lucas said with incredulity.

I was about to give a witty retort when it changed again. The plus 3 went away only to be replaced with a blinking, bracketed exclamation mark. Despite its relative size, it took up all my attention akin to those stubborn pop up ads with tiny minimize buttons; I was curious whether it was interactive when the whole thing changed.

“ Huh?”

“ What?”

“It’s changed, it has one of these symbols like the one on the dash,” I answered.

“ Which one?” Lucas asked

ν ////////// ( ! )

Æ /////////

“ I think it's a brake system alert,” It hadn’t been long since driving school and I prided myself in my memory,“ It's red but with brackets instead of the circle,” I said, squinting at the symbol. As if it had intuited my intentions, it expanded. Why wasn’t I surprised?

ν ∆

Dexterity: 5

Endurance: 6

Energy : 7

Vitality : 5

“ Uh…Dexterity, Endurance, Energy and Vitality, how is that even―” I sputtered. How could you quantify the body’s condition with hard numbers, how is that energy even measured? Joules?

“ Lemmi guess,” Lucas said as a shit-eating grin played at the corner of his lips. “ Stats?” he added chuckling before launching into a lecture about game mechanics and what stats affected which things. Again I searched for the actual terms on a search engine; Lucas didn’t have a dictionary or thesaurus on his phone. There had to be a context for the terms that the entity that shanghaied me was using but neither Lucas nor I knew what it was.

The only explanation is it was not actually omniscient because it had to learn hence the changes from yesterday. I just hoped I wouldn’t lose my marbles if whoever was on the other end of this thing was still tinkering with it. Thus far, they’d shown an uncanny ability to keep me pliable and accepting of whatever this was, almost as if I was under a thrall.

That I could even conceive of that fact meant I still had my free will and they could not directly make me their puppet. Speaking of which, I was still wondering what happened to the incident on the news. I was curious as to what had transpired in the Baltic Sea so I went to the Tube to see what had transpired―

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a film score by Michael Giachinno was playing in tandem to a star ship’s saucer section as it made its appearance from the bottom of a sea. I could not tear my eyes from what was happening on the live feed nor hear Lucas’ voice as he shook my shoulder. Everything had come to a close, the moment of truth had revealed itself before me and I was sharing it with the world.

Events came to a crescendo when the thrusters underneath the hull, the gray of gunmetal flared to life in a series of staccato bursts. You could even see the force of displacement rippling through the turbid water as the remnants of sediment sloughed off the craft and fell into the sea. Slowly and mechanically, the alien craft rose, hovering over the water. I couldn’t tell the front from the back until it turned out, orientating away from whichever camera was panning the view.

The reporter who’d been rapid firing a commentary at that moment realized something potentially explosive was about to happen as they watched large vent’s open with an accompanying afterglow. They’d barely yelled when blue flames akin to those you’d find on a gas burner burst once―the camera shook and tilted as white noise cut its feed short.

While the rest of the world might have been watching with a mixture of dread and awe, I was cursing out thinking why the situation had to turn this way. I knew it had been a long-time coming but pray-tell, why would an advanced alien entity violate their own non-intervention rule?

Or were we ants before mountains so much that something like the prime directive was non-existent to them? Something had changed and I was not so conceited to think I was the cause; which meant things had been set in motion way before I’d come along.

Before I could dwell on that, Lucas yelled, bringing me out of my funk. I started, pulling my eyes from the white noise on a video that had stopped broadcasting seconds past― tyres squealed on tarmac, and horns blared as Lucas swerved off the road into the runaway ramp.

The front of the SUV plowed into the sand, coming to a stop with a sudden lurch that jostled us against our safety belts. Thankfully the situation hadn’t been serious enough for an airbag deployment because it would have slapped the phone in my hands into my face.

Shaken, but uninjured Lucas and I caught our bearings and hastily extricated ourselves from the car landing onto damp sand. We’d run ourselves into the right side of the road; on the tarmac another two cars had come to a stop, rear lights flashing intermittently as they turned aside from the road.

It was the mist. I hadn’t noticed it was bad. It had gotten thicker so much it had affected visibility. And the consequences of that was a train of a couple rear ended vehicles on the right lane that had been the cause of our fender bender. Actually it was worse than that―

Dread like viscous oil pooled at the bottom of my stomach as I cast my eyes onto the roadway. I saw a familiar car sandwiched between two semi-trailers that had tried unsuccessfully to avoid one another but ended up twisting into an L shape at the pivot joints.

One of the drivers must have tried to overlap despite the poor visibility― Either way, they must have hit the brakes way too hard and too suddenly one of the containers had snapped from its hooks and the rest of the momentum carried it onto the car ahead of it―Cassandra’s car.

I was already moving before Lucas yelled out telling me to stop. Two bars, scarlet and blue, blinked into existence at the periphery of my vision as the world seemed to stagger ―