Madeline Beaufort and the Moon Thief

Ooo oo what's in the garage? SHIPS? ROCKETS? ROCKET SHIPS?? we gotta see

Madeline had always wanted to see a spaceship up close and to her chagrin the security protocols at the N.N.A.S.A had always prevented her parents from bringing her up to the rockets. When it was bring your daughter to work day, she would only ever get to see them from the viewing platform. Naturally Madeline was interested in the garage-hangar.

“Can we go to the hangar please?”

“Sure thing!” Responded James. “It’s connected to the far end of this room.”

Crossing the Command Center, Madeline took the opportunity to absorb as many details about the beings at work here. Some were at work on screens that seemed to display complex mathematical questions, while others were wearing VR headsets. They passed by a large ape-wolf hybrid being that didn’t to have any eyes at all, using what seemed to be some sort of telegraph machine. Shortly after, James exchanged waves with a snailman, who seemed to have no set-up at all, until Madeline noticed the computational elements poking out of it’s shell. Most humanoids had the same uniform desks, but those beings with more unusual bodies had special desks accommodating their size or particular stature.

“The humans are pretty good at supplying all the off-worlders with what they need to work here.” Explained James.

This brought Madeline to enquire about James and The Abyssal’s cohabitation. “Is that why you two share a suit?”

“Kind of. Ours was a special case, it’s not like we couldn’t do our work without this arrangement. Yeah, the company set me up with The Abyssal here, but this suit is actually specially made. The big guy and I share because it’s mutually beneficial. He has some trouble communicating telepathically with others through the suit, as his thoughts conduct more efficiently through liquid. As for me... Well, I guess you could say I’m a bit agoraphobic. Luckily if we get sick of each-other there are some rooms that accommodate us aquatic based lifeforms.”

“Oh.” Said Madeline, she wondered that if James was agoraphobic it meant he considered The Abyssal his home, but didn’t ask because it felt too personal.

Finally they reached the other side of the room. They proceeded out of the command center into a short hallway which they promptly crossed, placing them in front of another large set of white doors. The Abyssal pressed the button and they entered a containment room nearly identical to the one from before, minus the cart and track of the previous room. Evidently, they did not need to start the containment process to leave the core of the base, and the second set of doors opened after the interior ones were closed.

“Welcome to the Garage-Hangar” Said James “Not sure why you wanted to come here of all places, it’s kind of boring.”

James was right, much to Madeline’s dismay, there were mostly just cars. There was an outcropping in the floor and ceiling where you could see multiple other levels of the parking lot. On some of the higher levels, there were aircrafts, but mostly jets and helicopters. After Madeline had scanned the car park and realized the distinct lack of cool spaceships she noticed some familiar looking agents standing around suburbans smoking.

“What! We could have just driven down here? Why would we take the stupid rollercoaster here? Why is there even a rollercoaster that takes people into the secret base? And.. AND WHERE ARE ALL THE SPACESHIPS!?” She yelled, thoroughly upset.

“Whoa kid, calm down.” Chided James. “I don’t really know why you took the back entrance, now that I think about it. The railway shaft is just there for optimizing ventilation and emergencies, as far as I understand it. The Rex has always been something of a showman though, and I imagine it has something to do with that. But, if you want to see a spaceship, you're kind of out of luck, most of our ships were on Moon-base Theta...” He trailed off. “Except, if memory serves correctly, a colleague of mine is refurbishing a retro model in one of the laboratories if you want to have a look!”

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Spoiler>_ Go see the spaceship? Any questions on the way there?

no, let's go to the communications room and send prank telegrams

> Oh yes, let's see the retro ship.

no way! if we're riding in a spacecraft it needs to be in state-of-the-art modernist style, not a rusted out bucket

Let's go to the cafeteria. I wonder what kinds of foods they serve there.

Madeline didn’t need to think. “Yeah let’s g-” She was interrupted by her stomach which let out a large growl. “...On second thought, do you think we could go to the cafeteria first? I just realized that I never finished my breakfast”

“Sure thing” said James, then turning to look down to his cohabitant who was wiggling more than usual. “The big guys is also hungry, apparently.”

The three went back through the white doors. This time the containment process did get activated, irritating Madeline’s eyes once again. They walked back through the hallway, but took a turn in another direction, away from the command center.

They entered a medium sized room, significantly smaller than the others of this facility she had been in, save for the hallway. The room had a dozen or so tables filled with occupants eating off of metal trays, and a short line of humans and aliens trailed off from the counter at the far end of the room. Unlike in the command center where everyone was hard at work, a few of the room’s occupants noticed Madeline and stared. She would have asked James about the attention she was getting, but he was seemingly engrossed in a conversation with his partner. They entered the line which moved quickly, and moved up to the cook, who was a being made of crystalline rocks.

“Don't mind the rest of them.” The cook said gesturing to the rest of room, who quickly averted their gaze once pointed out. “You are today’s gossip. Not often we get kids down here. And we never get to meet coworker’s kids. Heard a lot about you from Donna and Alexandria. Only good too. They are such proud parents.”

“You know them?” Asked Madeline, connecting the dots. “I guess I'm just realizing they must work here.”

“Well, I’ve known your parents for years. Since they were practically kids. Long before they worked here in any capacity. They are really more of independent contractors. Working officially with the N.N.A.S.A. I am Cook, by the way.”

“Well it’s nice to meet you Cook.” She responded, marvelling at the utilitarian nature of his name.

“I figured you might be coming this way. I prepared you Mac and Cheese. Just in case. Donna had me make it for you. She would home to you a sometimes. She’s a terrible chef.” He made a noise that sounded like laughing, but Madeline couldn't be sure.

He grabbed a tray from under the counter, a plate of macaroni and white cheddar, one of her favorite meals. Her mother had always lied to her and said that she had made it herself, which Madeline knew wasn’t the truth, because as Cook had said, Donna was a terrible chef. But while Madeline had known that it was a falsehood, she never would have been able to grasp the truth of where it actually came from before this moment.

"Thank you" She choked out.

The Abyssal grabbed a canister from the counter and screwed it into the suit. A puff of red dots filtered down the fishbowl-like headpiece. The little flakes ended up flying into James’ face like a glitter bomb. He did not look amused.

“Come on man! Can't we even sit down first” James flitted around the food as best he could while the abyssal grabbed out at some of the dots with his tentacles.

They surveyed the cafeteria. There was one empty table, a table of human agents, one with a mix of humans and aliens but no room for James and The Abyssal, and one with a silver metallic humanoid eating alone. The rest of the tables were entirely filled.

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Spoiler>_ where should we eat? (if you pick the mostly occupied table, James and The Abyssal will eat with some coworkers.)

go brood with the lonely robot(?)

Doesn't really matter. You wanna get to know these two better!

Madeline decided it didn’t matter where they sat, as long as it was with her new acquaintances, so she sat down at the table with the one silver humanoid brooding by himself. As they approached him Madeline could see that this man had silver hair which covered his body, some places with more hair than others. He had an almost wolf-like quality to his appearance, while still looking distinctly human, more so than many of the aliens she had seen up to this point.

“Hello!” she said, greeting the man as they sat down.

“Yeah, Hi.” The man mumbled, a mouth full of a bite he had taken out of a tin can, which he then placed back on his tray.

The four of them sat in silence as they ate. Madeline eventually piped up. “So James, where are you and Mr. Abyssal from?”

“Oh! Well I was actually born and raised in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco... California?” Madeline responded, dumbfounded.

“Yeah, well technically in the San Francisco bay. Plenty of non-humans are born on earth. It’s more common for the Greys to spawn their young here since they reach adulthood fairly fast, but it happens with other offworlders on occasion, and the company will house them in a facility like this. I’ve been part of the company since I was born, though it’s gone through significant changes in my life. It’s much more mellow than it was even ten years ago.”

“Wow, so technically you aren’t even an alien!” Joked Madeline, laughing.

“You’re making a joke, but I don’t really consider myself to be one, no. Of course I could never participate in human activities like some of the reptilians and greys can.”

“Oh, That’s too bad, I bet you would have made lots of friends. What about Mr. Abyssal? Where is he from?”

“The Abyssal is from my species homeworld. That planet has two dominant forms of life who generally exist in separate spheres, The Abyssals in great depths, and my people floating above that. Although, my particular ancestral genetic traits made my kin smaller than most of our fellow Selachii and gave us the adaptation to survive in higher pressure systems which is why me and the big guy can live in the same little fishbowl here. Selachii have a very diverse genetic pool, though we’re pretty much always carnivores.”

“Like the reptilians!”

“Hm yes, although they have a really wide genetic pool for different reasons than us. For the Selachii, our ecosystems are highly isolated from each-other, so over many generations we adapted to our particular environments, giving us distinct features and genetic abilities while still giving us the ability to interbreed with other ‘races’ of Selachii.”

“Why is that different from the reptilians?” Inquired Madeline.

The silvery wolfman interrupted with a fierce energy “Because the reptilians forcibly convert any lower carbon based life forms that fit their genetic specifications... And they have the audacity to call it ‘Uplifting.’”

James looked uncomfortable, “Yes, well, all the different species do what they have to to survive... You should know that as an Alloian, your traditions are as steeped in survival as any.”

The man snapped back angrily “Do I look like a full alloian, you little fish? I never even completed a full rotation on my planet. I consider myself just as human as you consider yourself earthling.”

Madeline attempted to stop another argument before it broke out, counteracting the negativity with a chipper attitude. “Wow! Inter-species politics are more complicated than I could ever imagine!”

The silver stranger was shaken from his bout of rage by this and agreed, “You don’t know the half of it.”

James nodded, “It’s why we’re all here, at the end of the day. An endless quest for homeostasis.”

Apparently the group was collectively out of things to say, and they sat in an another awkward silence. The alloian finished with all the metal items on his tray lifted it up to his mouth and took a bite crunching loudly.

Madeline attempted to break the awkwardness, “So... Why was this place built under Grand Horizons anyway?”

The alloian found this to be an entertaining question and put down his meal, “Ha! Well, the western governments of earth figured out deception a long time ago. See, back in the forties, when the Americans were trying to hide some new piece of technology, they would dress their soldiers up in gorilla costumes, put them in a bowler hat and hand them a cigar so that anyone who happened to see the pilot of the newest top-secret jetfighter wouldn’t be able to describe the incident without sounding insane. Any rational human might believe that the government is sending stuff into space from Area 51, but who is going to believe a that a theme park is housing aliens and launching rockets?”

“Probably conspiracy theorists.” Said Madeline.

“Exactly, and then it gets buried with the other thousands of insane theories. Really, this place is kind of optimal for the company. For one thing, the regular fireworks shows are a great way to disguise the launches, and the sounds of the roller-coasters are perfect for masking any loud testing coming from down here. Also the base’s proximity to the local airport is right in the median of being far away enough that nobody thinks the rockets are being launched from there and close enough to it to make the helicopters coming from the base a little less suspicious. And if anyone of the ‘visitors’ happen to wander out of the base on accident, the average human will just assume it’s park related. Hiding things in plain sight is the name of the game.”

“This is all so interesting, I can't believe how much I’ve learned about earth and the universe just in this morning.”

“Yes, well I think it's about time to go. It was nice to meet you Madeline.” He abruptly got up and walked away, leaving the half eaten tray at the table.

Madeline looked surprised at the mention of her name “Man news really gets around here fast, I’m astonished at how many people know who I am! Who was that?”

James looked puzzled, “Honestly, I don't really know, I haven’t seen him around this base before. I would have guessed he was an offworlder, but there aren’t too many half-humans out there... Oh, I almost forgot, we can probably go see the spaceship before I have to take you to the combat room. But we’ll have to hurry. Do you still want to go?”

Madeline shoveled the rest of her mac and cheese into her mouth. Energetically exclaiming with a mouth full of food. “Yeth, pleathe!”

Leaving the cafeteria, they arrived at a laboratory after winding down a veritable labyrinth of hallways.

Opening the door james exclaimed, “Well this is it!”

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Spoiler>_Describe Spaceship (I'm thinking something like a retro classic saucer, but have fun with it!)

it's actually the roller coaster

The saucer has stuff that looks like spaghetti on it. Spaghetti platter.

it's caked in mud so it has thermal camouflage

Madeline was certainly surprised by the sight, but this was more confusion than excitement. She couldn’t make heads or tails at what exactly she was seeing.

Noticing Madeline’s expression James turned to look in the room. He ran into the room quickly. “Oh shit, shit, shit.”

A pile of mud, ooze, and long noodle like vines writhed around slowly. She stared at it, trying to discern what this was. Underneath the vines she could see something metallic. It was a classic flying saucer, sleek and silvery and the vines were slithering out of the open panels on it. It almost looked like a platter of spaghetti with sauce when all paired together, but terrifying.

A small bug-like being stood at the far end of the room, cut off by vines. “Oh thank Gods you two are here! I was just going to ping the nearest biologic specialists to the lab”

“How did this happen even happen? We’ve ran the tissue specs a hundred times!” James questioned the insectoid.

“I don’t know! I just left for a few minutes, and when I came back the organic matter was starting to grow disproportionately. When I used the containment spray the growth accelerated to this!”

“How long ago?” James asked, sounding desperate.

“No more than a minute!” The bug man responded.

James' orange fish face practically went white, and the undulations of the abyssal increased exponentially. “At this rate it could flood the whole ward.”

The vines surged and began to envelop the bug-like being. He screamed, “Abyssal! Jame-” before being pulled underneath.

The duo rocketed off towards the vines, pushing a large mass of them up and out of the way, while wading through others. The two in the large suit looked frantically for their comrade.

Madeline, thinking of others as always, chimed in, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

James yelled at Madeline, “No! It’s too dangerous! Stay in the hall!”

“The hall isn’t going to be much safer in a minute here! Your hands are full, what can I do?”

“...Christ, the Rex is going to kill me.” He paused and sighed, “These fibers are being powered by the ship! We need to power it down!”

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Spoiler>_What does madeline do?

make friends with the spaghetti. just because it's not humanoid doesn't mean it's not a pal

Look for some kind of power source you can disconnect.

“How do we do that?!” asked Madeline, in a slightly less calm manner.

“The cockpit! There’s a big button, you can’t miss it!”

Madeline took a deep breath and ran towards the rope-like tendrils. It should be fine, she thought, just because this thing isn’t humanoid does not mean it's inherently dangerous, it probably is just reacting on instinct. Madeline waded in ankles deep, walking slowly towards the ship. She felt a sharp tug at her feet and it almost entirely threw her off balance. She retreated quickly out of the writhing mass like a child who had been splashed by the cold of the ocean. Ok, ok! Madeline realized, Instinct can be dangerous!

Madeline looked around. James and The Abyssal were still searching for their coworker, using a metal pole yanked from the wall to push some of the mass back. There were a few desks and a shelf full of equipment which she could not discern the purpose of.

Madeline got an idea. Throwing her full weight into it, she pushed over the shelf into the wriggling thing, then climbing up on top of the shelf. Walking forward carefully as to not lose her balance from the undulations, she advanced slowly toward the ship’s cockpit. Just like surfing, or walking through a bounce house, she thought. Finally she reached the edge. Madeline’s heart sank upon the realization that she wouldn't make it in without some forward momentum. She was going to need a running start. She shimmied down the shelf, and took off towards the top. Before she knew it, she was sailing through the air.

The thing was, Madeline was never any good at surfing, or bounce houses for that matter. Almost perpetually, Madeline would eat a good chunk of the floor anytime she did anything that combined motion and balance.

FTANGG!

For a split second Madeline didn’t feel anything. Then the moment passed and she began to grasp for air, the wind knocked out of her. The last bump from the thing under the shelf overshot her jump, and she had hit the metal corner of where the cockpit and outside of the ship met square with her stomach. She slid into the cockpit and curled up on the floor.

She inhaled sharply shuddering with oscillations before letting out a quiet and drawn out “Owwwwwww.”

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Spoiler>_ What now?

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Feel sorry for yourself later, there's people counting on you!

just sit there like a lump and cry

She experienced the kind of pain that even a tween would cry from. As stoic as Madeline thought herself to be, she would have let loose a few tears if she was capable of doing such at that moment, but all that came out were a series of dry heaves. Maybe, she thought, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I just laid here for a little bit to get my breath back. For a brief moment, this is what she did.

Then suddenly a wave of resolve came over her. No! She thought, James, Mr. Abyssal and that bug scientist guy are counting on me! She frantically looked for the button, but saw nothing of the sort.

“J-james?” She called out.

“Yeah? Are you alright?”

“I'm fine!” Madeline choked out, “Where is the button?”

“It’s a big black circle, protruding from under the main thrust controls... The tube things that look like you can stick your hands into.”

She saw tubes which contained some sort of whiskers growing out of a viscous liquid and deduced these to be the thrust controls, but the button she was looking for was nowhere to be seen. What she could see however, were the noodle-like appendages covering the wall of the cockpit and more were descending towards her.

“Oh no.” Madeline uttered.

Before she knew it she knew it, she was knee deep in the squirming vines. Pushing through the fibers she moved her hand around blindly, feeling the walls behind. As she desperately searched for the button, Madeline perceived a flash of a shadow hanging over her. Before she could react, a wave of the tendrils cascaded over her head, submerging her in the wriggling conglomeration.

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Spoiler>_ Things look grim for our hero! How will she get out of this?

Kick the button at the last second

Bite the nearest vine and flail for your life, kid!

> Remain calm, and you should be able to get out, somehow.

Panic set in. Madeline kicked and thrashed wildly, even trying to bite the vines. She attempted to surface, but amidst the tendrils she could not get a hand or foothold as they would slip and slide along themselves downward. The tendrils were practically airtight when grouped in such a mass, so try as she might, Madeline couldn’t breathe.

Exhausting her fight and flight response, Madeline became still. In this moment, she realized she was going to die. In the stories Madeline had read, when people were about to die they were supposed to have their life pass before their eyes. So she thought it was strange when instead, her mind was taken to a single memory from her past.



She was five. Her mothers, Donna and Alexandria Beaufort had taken Madeline to the beach. It was one of those days where there was no real good reason to be at a beach; The sun was out, but the sky still seemed grey, The water too cold to dip your feet in, much less swim, and set up right next to the Beauforts were an extremely rambunctious redneck family. But, the Beaufort family had packed for the outing so Donna and Alexandria figured they would atleast give it a good hour or two. Madeline didn’t seem to care anyways, as she ran up and down the beach blowing bubbles with a bubble stick.

Madeline had decided she was going to build a sand castle. Paying special attention to detail, she created a mound while simultaneously taking sand out around it, building a trench. She stuck her bubble blower into the top, serving as a flagpole. Careful not to touch the ocean directly with her feet, she dug a channel out of the sand extending all the way into the wet sand, and when the next wave rolled in the water filled her her moat.

A sea star was swept in with the tide. Madeline was pleased that her magnificent castle now had its first inhabitant.

Caught in a kind of uncomfortable situation a person might find themselves in with a stranger, Madeline’s parents were distracted by an old woman selling trinkets on the beach. Had they been properly focused on their child, events would not have played out the way they did.

A boy, red faced and covered in band-aids performed a running jump into Madeline’s castle.

Reacting as if the castle were an irreplaceable masterpiece, and not something that took her ten minutes, she screeched. “Hey!”

The boy ignored her, “Oh, look! Starfish!”

He grabbed the five-armed fish out of the water.

Madeline only had a minimal understanding of marine biology at this point in her life, but she was pretty sure starfishes needed salt water to live. “Put it back!”

“He's my pet now! His name is... Batman!” He waved it around like a toy airplane, making whooshing sounds.

“It’s turning purple!” Screamed Madeline, distraught. “Let it go!” She clawed at the boy’s face, failing, as she was incapable of reaching his height.

“What are you gonna do about it?” Taunted the boy.

He had a point, and Madeline was at a loss, what could she possibly do? Madeline felt weak and useless, a tiny girl against a giant. But then, something changed within her. Without any apparent cause, all her feelings and emotions washed away as the wave broke and receded back down the shore.

Dictated by some instinct, Madeline grabbed her bubble blower and pointed it at the boy. She blew a bubble and it drifted slowly towards him. It touched him, and then popped. The boy didn’t move.

Madeline’s emotions returned to her. She felt disappointment, as whatever she had thought she was doing had no effect. She anticipated some sort of retaliatory remark from the boy, but he said nothing. Not even a scoff or a smirk. He stood there, perfectly still with the starfish held high above his head and the same defiant look on his face. The boy achieved an eerie level of stillness. The whole beached moved on, even Madeline shifted her weight, but the boy didn’t move at all. Something seemed off and though she couldn’t understand it, it was irrelevant. The starfish still needed her help.

She pushed at the boy, and he fell sideways, still in the exact same position he was in, landing in the sand with a THWUMP. Madeline grabbed the defenseless invertebrate out of the boy’s hand and ran to the ocean, placing it in the freezing sea. She watched as it’s red-orange color returned to the aquatic animal and it was swept back into the sea.

Now she grew worried about the boy. She went back to poke at him, but before she could, he began to move. It took him a moment to process what had happened, and then began bawling.

His face covered in sand and tears running down his eyes, the boy ran back to his family, which were the obnoxiously loud rednecks. In unison they all turned to the Beauforts with a look of scorn. The mother, a skinny woman with a trucker hat began accusing Madeline of harming her ‘precious little boy’. It took only moments for the whole redneck family to join into the uproar. They apologized for their daughter and the Beauforts packed their things and left as fast as they could.

Madeline never really figured out what she had done to the boy on that day. Over dinner conversations in the Beaufort household that day became known as the time Madeline beat up a boy twice her size at the beach. The story had been told so many times by her parents that she had forgotten the anomalous nature of what had actually occurred.



A curious calm washed over Madeline. No longer did she focus on the pain, or fear. One thought was all encompassing. She just needed some space to think.

A sphere of light expanded out of Madeline’s chest. Curiously, it expanded through the ship’s metal lining while the vines were pushed out of the cockpit as the orb increased it’s size.

She made the most she could out of the fortuitous situation, and got back to the objective at hand. Searching behind the thrust control mechanisms, Madeline found the button right where James said it would be and forcefully pressed it. The ship never made any noise when it was powered on, but a slight vibration slowed to a halt. The fibers overhead that were held up by the strange orb fell limp onto a pile. Following this chain of events, The orb disappeared suddenly like a light when its switch is flicked off.

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Spoiler>_ What now?