“What’s a Military Exus Leader?” I asked.
“The equivalent of a ‘president’ on your planet,” his voice sunk lower when he said “president”. “In any case, I lead my soldiers into battle.”
“What the @$% are you?” I shouted.
“Calm down,” said one of the ductopi lined up on the left wall. One of the ductopi slunk over to me and pressed a button on the chair I was in. It slid out from under me, revealing a large black square on the floor out of which came what looked like handcuffs, only more high-tech to bind my hands (duh, ’cause I mean, handcuffs).
One of the ductopi coiled a tentacle around my neck and pulled me towards the door where another one of the ductopi gagged me.
“Come,” said the Military Exus Leader to the ductopi, “we’ll show him the ship.” The door slid open and the ductopi led me out of the room. The room we were in looked somewhat like an engine room. It had huge rusted gears all over the place and even worse lighting than the last room. The only lighting, in fact, was a blue glow coming from the center of the floor. I couldn’t see where it was coming from since the source was hidden from view by a ring of large gears.
The ductopi led me across a catwalk above the center of the floor and I saw the source of the blue glow. There was a large hole in the floor with an intense volcano of blue light flowing out of it. I tried to ask, “what’s that?” but with a gag on it came out more, “Mmphf, pmphf.”
The next room I was led into I vaguely recognized- I realized it was the cave I had been in earlier when I first met the ductopi.
“What is this place?” I wondered to myself. By now I had the impression that the whole ship was very old, due to the dim lighting, use of gears and mechanical stuff instead of electricity and everything being rusty. Yes, there was some electricity, like electric lighting and sliding doors, but most of it was powered by gears with little electricity.
They led me to a circular platform in the middle of the floor, which as soon as they stepped on made a loud “clunk” and some handrails came up from the floor and the platform started to rise. The electric lift took us up through several more rooms, some empty and some full of different ductopi with all the colors I had ever seen in their tentacles, plus more that didn’t look like anything I had ever seen.
We finally stopped in a room with average lighting, a bit stronger than the dimly lit lights in the other rooms but still not quite as bright as average lighting. For the first time, I saw a window. In fact, the whole roof was a glass dome with some of the windows fogged up and cracked and metal framework spiderwebbing its way across. It was nighttime, or so I assumed, because there were stars out. I was led over to the window to look down when I realized there was no real proof whether it was night or day or whether we were near a star at all. There was no ground near the structure, just empty space. The only things I could see aside from the wall of the structure were loud rusty clanky gears turning around near the bottom of the structure.
The Military Exus Leader came over and took off my gag and for the first time I was able to ask, “where am I?”
The Military Exus Leader answered, “you,” he paused for dramatic effect, “are in the deathbird.”