“She sounds perfect, sire.”
“She does, doesn’t she?”
Bang
"What the…”
“Hello, Ariel. You slept a long time.”
I don't feel as though I have slept even a second. I am fully clothed, standing upright, still with my uniform belt on, though my gun is gone. I don’t know where the balls went, but they're not here anymore. Maybe I dreamed them, along with the rubber ducky walls.
The voice which speaks to me sounds like the king, but I can’t see him. Not until I look up and see him towering above me. What I mistook for pillars were simply his thighs. I forgot how tall he was. I could suck his… without having to kneel.
I’ve managed to go three seconds without having a lewd thought, and that might be the only three seconds I manage to go in his presence without thinking dirty thoughts.
Looking at him now is like letting my eyes crawl up the side of a sexy skyscraper. I keep looking up and up and he just keeps extending away from me in a big regal, muscular plane.
He’s not wearing a shirt. I’m guessing it is hard to fit a garment over those hard ridges and plates he grows on his shoulders and biceps. His torso is… I could stare at it forever. He has a twelve pack of abdominal muscles, and lats to die for. I know men who have worked out their whole lives and downed more steroids than the average dairy cow who would cry if they saw the gains of King Brawn.
Then I get to his face, and I finally understand the meaning of the phrase ‘going weak at the knees’. My god, I feel as though I am going to buckle here and now, just collapse right on my face in front of him. This feeling also explains why it is a tradition in some cultures to approach royalty lying down. Makes the fainting seem sensible.
I manage to keep my feet, but I cannot stop myself from exclaiming:
“Holy…”
Brawn looks different here in his own palace. I guess I should have considered that maybe Earth’s atmosphere didn’t show him to best effect. He was like one of those deep sea fish out of their element. Here, in his own realm, he fucking glows with majesty. The rough scales of his arms and chest seem right here, regal. And the monstrous head which seemed oversized on my world is handsome beyond words, containing strong mandibles and regal bone structure, a sort of imperial elegance which is imparted through ridges and fangs.
Everything here is built to his size. The chair he could sit in if he chose is so large that I’d almost have to climb into it. And if I did sit on his throne, my feet would dangle, and I would look, well, ridiculous.
On Earth, I was a bigger woman. Here, I am the small one. I feel minuscule and weak compared to the might of King Brawn at full strength.
I still have the feeling I should be falling to my knees and bowing before him. The essence of royalty flows from him, like a real force. Like magnetism or electricity. I thought royals were dour people, dried up tea bags and attention whores. But Brawn shows me the essence of true royalty. It’s about power. Intense, overwhelming, massive amounts of personal charisma and drive. The refusal to submit to circumstances, and the absolute faith that your people will rescue you when you mow down an unsuspecting ferris wheel.
“Wow.”
“You are making sounds which sort of sound as though they should mean something, and yet appear not to mean anything at all.” He smiles a little, as if he is enjoying my general discombobulation.
“Who are you? What are you?”
When he was injured on the pier, he was just another weird thing that happened in the course of duty. Here and now, he is something else. He is… I wait for him to tell me.
"Are you looking for a word to describe us? A name, or something similar?”
“That would be a start, for sure.”
“The name of our species cannot be perceived by humanity. We exist in a greater series of spheres than you…”
“Okay, again, in English.”
“You are familiar with dimensions. Length. Width. Height. Time. Humans, and all life on your planet, exist in those four dimensions. We exist in those, as well as seven others. What you see of me is not the entirety of me. It is my projection into four dimensional space. To you, my species is, well, judging by the feedback we have previously gotten on your planet, something between an alien, a vampire, and an ogre.”
“An alien vampire ogre,” I whisper to myself, more than to him, though he can probably hear me anyway because of all the extra dimensions.
“And a plant.”
“And a plant?” Now I am confused. “You’re a monster! No. You’re the king of monsters!”