Twisting by the Pool, Chapter One

When Mini-Flash Juniper stepped into the living-room on the morning of the second full day, there was more than one reason Flashsatsumas couldn’t take his eyes off her.

The first had to do with his being a boy. Gone was Juniper’s Earth-style school uniform which clothed her from toecaps to chin, and all of a sudden most of her was bare and porcelain-pale. They didn’t have bikinis in the galaxy Mini-Flashes came from, so Flashsatsumas didn’t know the word, but Juniper’s tiny brilliant blue one was an introduction to the concept he wasn’t likely to forget. Underneath her slender lissome arm a rolled-up towel was tucked.

“I’ll be nice to start out with a dip,” Juniper beamed by way of salutation and explanation, in a bright breezy way which didn’t fool Flashsatsumas for one microsecond.

And that was the second reason he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

A boy he was, and an expert on terrestrial botany he wasn’t. But he could hazard a guess as to how well the local vegetation stood immersion in hydrogen and chlorine.

So he stepped back, as if in courtesy, indicating to Mini-Flash Juniper she should go first. She made for the front door, and as soon as she’d passed him, Flashsatsumas thrust out a hand and clutched for her where she was broadest.

His fingers hooked under azure elastic and he tugged roughly, that Juniper stumbled back. Dual quivery marble-white globes were briefly disclosed to Flashsatsumas’s sight.

Mini-Flash Juniper rounded on him. “Flashsatsumas!” she cried.

She wasn’t so much angry as confused and hurt. Flashsatsumas knew the difference was that their adventures together had made them friends, yet he forced himself to harden his heart.

“Is that what you’re going to say to them?” he demanded. “When they try it?”

Juniper blushed all over, which Flashsatsumas was in the best position to observe.

“They won’t stop at what I just did, Juniper!” he implored her.

Part of his heightened emotion came of having to fight back the way in which that little unintentional glimpse was still making him feel. It was beyond Flashsatsumas why caring about one of the second gender should carry such a side-order of self-reproach and guilt. How comparatively restful must have been the lives of every generation before his!

“These creatures are cowards, Flashsatsumas,” Mini-Flash Juniper pleaded at length. “I’ve seen them run from Joe’s fire, even though it can’t hurt them here. As long as I stay shielded with something that can, they’ll hold off, and we’ll get nowhere. It’s not about using myself as bait. It’s about taking the next step in our mission.”

She was frightened and trying not to let it show. Flashsatsumas was struggling to control his breathing and anxious Mini-Flash Juniper might misinterpret why.

Feelings swirled and refused to subside there in the chalet’s front room.

Bikini-bottoms however were easier by far to settle, so Mini-Flash Juniper sorted out hers, making sure they were sitting snugly again underneath what they were supposed to.

“Don’t worry about me, Flashsatsumas,” she told him with an air of finality.

The one thing he was glad about was that she hadn’t added she was a big girl. Just then, such a reminder would have been redundant.

Juniper’s swimming pool of choice wasn’t the indoor one she’d seen on her first night, for as she explained to Flashsatsumas, a battle there would have put other bathers at too much potential risk. Flashsatsumas listened curiously to her unthinking compassion for beings he himself would have classed as non-existent, and wondered, as many another denizen of his home quadrant had done, just what exactly the Special Program were. The safest venue for room to manoeuvre and quick evacuation, Juniper continued, would be the big outdoor pool where the creatures had once kept Mini-Flash Pseudangelos prisoner.

It had been no more than a dusty rectangular pit on that day, but as with everything else at the camp, it now rose to ominous heights as the foul founders’ power grew.

Flashsatsumas fairly goggled on its twisty spiral spires and multifarious mechanisms for squirting and tipping, crude to his eyes yet fantastically convoluted too. The Earthlings built some elaborate shrines for their strange worship of water. Today was shaping up to be another swelterer, and Flashsatsumas had to admit he envied the spectral ones a little as they laughed and splashed about. All that sparkly spray looked cooling when you had to suffer in a containment-suit. That said, Mini-Flash Juniper had already started to scale with hands and feet a ladder of frankly petrifying altitude, apparently with a view to throwing herself off it, and Flashsatsumas was rather less eager about trying that part.

“Um,” he ventured to the blue bikini-bottoms which by now were at eye-level. It seemed he’d been having quite a lot to do with that bit of Mini-Flash Juniper lately.

She looked to him from above her smooth arm, as one whose memory had just been jogged.

“Comics,” Juniper declared.

“Comics?” repeated Flashsatsumas. He knew she was an enthusiast.

“Can you get me one?” she asked. “It occurred to me last night while I was trying to sleep. I’d quite like to know how they function here.”

Flashsatsumas promised he would, and set off for where he’d seen some shops the previous day. He couldn’t resist taking one glance back though, by which time Juniper was a shining alabaster statue at the top of the high diving-board, tall and straight and fair-headed in the sun. Nor was he the only one watching as she skipped from the lip and pushed her sky-hued skimpies at their element. A second later she plashed tinily into the deep, fingertips-first.

END OF CHAPTER ONE