*Disclaimer: I own nothing but my original characters and ideas….and the plot bunnies in the corner. Please don't sue, I'm a poor college student that has no life and way too many video games.*

"Evil will always triumph over good because good is dumb."

-Dark Helmet

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Almost Human

Chapter Summary: Day 1289 – Same dren, different planet. This new universe is so different, and yet some things stay the same. The human race has spread out among the stars, like cockroaches. I wonder what that makes me.

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Solar Day 1289

Aguerra Prime

Aguerra System

The day had started off as any other normal solar day did. John awoke on the bio-mechanoid and proceeded to spend the next half arn hunting down his hygienic supplies. Rovhu had taken to ordering his little purple DRDs to hide them and John had never told him to stop even though it was an inconvenience. It kept the narl amused and the human was happy for any distraction, no matter how annoying.

Two cycles had already passed since they came to this universe. Two cycles of tracking down wormholes, two cycles of collapsing them, two cycles of no Moya and no Aeryn. Two cycles seemed like such a long time.

The planet he was on was colorful. The sand beneath his feet an auburn red, the sky an almost sea foam green. Decorative cloth hung from wires, shading the market in bright blues, greens, pinks, and yellows.

The people were even more colorful than their planet. They dressed in bright finery, material like silk dyed in every pigment imaginable. Some even painted their skin with it, intricate patterns and swirls that chipped away as it dried.

I could live in a place like this, Chiana would have loved it here.

He shook his head to rid himself of such thoughts. They did him no good now. His family was gone, truly in the sense that they were never to see each other again. Crichton doubted that their afterlives would intersect if they were separated by realities. And on some days that were darker than others, Crichton wondered if there even was an afterlife at all. He brushed a hand through his brown hair and sighed.

Not gray, there is no gray…why is there no gray?

Crichton was nearly forty, just a cycle and two monens shy. And yet he looked exactly the same as the day he had last seen the ancient fekkik that he had called Einstein. Many things had changed since that day, some better than others.

The blue was no longer out of control, scorching along his synapses as they flooded his vision. They came when called, occasionally when not, but they were always present in his dreams. Even when he dreamt of Aeryn, the blue was in her smile and the corner of her eyes. He hated that it poisoned his memory of her as he could no longer envision her without the blue.

It was always there.

Rovhu continued to grow, although not in a way that could have been predicted. At nearly four cycles old he was getting large, much too big for one person. Crichton sometimes felt like the father that bought a house for five kids that all grew up and went to college leaving him alone in this place too big for him.

The leviathan had five tiers that were accessible, another two that were not. John's favorite room had just been completed not even a monen ago: the observatory. It sat right in front of the ascendency canon, the glass dome giving him a near full view except for the door and small passageway beyond.

Crichton spent arns in the observatory, lying on his back as he charted stars into his notebooks. In the near four cycles that they had been hunting wormholes they had closed a total of three. It was a tedious task, finding the wormholes, and even more tedious in collapsing them.

With so much free time while they plotted courses and mapped systems, John Crichton decided to spend his days stargazing. It was because of this habit that he noticed the unexpected change in the leviathan. Rovhu had plates growing down his sides.

At each ridge along the spine there were segmented plating that encircled his whole body. The most startling fact was they shifted. Like an articulated cord, Rovhu could now move the front of his body independent from the back. It made wormhole travel a lot easier and Rovhu no longer needed the device that Crichton had designed to stabilize their flight.

At nearly four cycles old he was just over 500 motras long, over a third of Moya's length. John believed that in less than twenty cycles the narl would be larger than his mother…and still growing. Leviathans, like some reptiles from Earth, had indeterminate growth. Those with indeterminate growth never stopped developing, although once they reached maturity their growth slowed significantly.

Baby boy is gonna get big.

Pressing a hand to his temple, he forced his way past a rather rude native and made his way down a bright and busy side alley. At the end was the weapons shop he had been looking for. Browsing the wares, fingers ghosting of the hilts of small knives, Crichton lamented the loss of the hunting knife Aeryn had given him as a gift. He had been forced to sell it when they first came to this reality.

With limited provisions, Rovhu had orbited a nearby moon while Crichton docked the prowler on a commercial planet. It was there that they ran into their first few problems of many. The first problem, the translator microbes. This universe did not seem to have any.

Everyone seemed to speak several common tongues and though Crichton could understand them, they had difficulty understanding him. It sounded almost like English, but Crichton got the impression that it was as if they were speaking common English and he was speaking old English. It took a lot of getting used to, but Crichton learned.

The next problem was money. They used similar terms like units and credits, but they looked nothing like what Crichton had in his pockets. So in order to get enough credits to resupply he was forced to sell his prized hunting knife. Even two cycles later he still regretted that decision, but there simply had been no other option, other than selling one of Rovhu's DRDs which Crichton was extremely hesitant to do so. He was unsure what kind of life forms this universe had and he did not want to draw attention to himself if he ended up parading a new one around.

The knife he settled on was beautifully crafted, the handle wrapped in soft leather while the blade curved gently, deep gouges near the hilt on the back side that were sharpened to be used as a small saw. As he waited to pay, the guns lining the far wall caught his attention. They were the projectile kind, nowhere near the advanced technology of his pulse pistols.

One hand dropped to stroke along the grip of Winona as he toyed with the thought of buying a new gun. This universe had yet to have anything equivalent of chakan oil so his guns had limited supply. Thankfully he had had no call to use them since he arrived except for that one misunderstanding on Regia Sekc.

When he finally met the merchant, Crichton only paid for the knife. Though foolish, he still had hope to find something in the produce section similar enough to tannot root to make his own chakan oil. Thankfully he remembered the process from the one time that Jool had showed him when a long series of misunderstandings had forced them to make their own in order to survive.

Life seemed to revolve around a long line of misunderstandings.

Tucking the sheathed blade into his boot, he made his way back towards the center of the market. There was a rather unattractive and heavily scarred woman selling tools just off of the main street and Crichton found himself needing a screwdriver, or something that resembled a screwdriver enough to get the job done.

Rovhu's shields were down for the third time this monen. He had tried debugging the system and having the DRDs repair it, but the power output to consumption was just so far off that Crichton needed to see for himself what the frell was going on with the leviathan's circuits. Unfortunately, the access panel was located under a small hatch in command, beneath the treblin side consoles. It was because of this that he needed the tool as the hatch required a screwdriver or something similar in order to open it.

As he was haggling the price with the unattractive woman, movement from the corner of his eye caught his attention. Normally, in such a busy area as the one he was in, he would have paid no attention but something in him was screaming danger. In the end the lizard part of his brain won out, as it always did, and Crichton turned.

Four men were slowly making their way their way through the crowd, matching green uniforms and rifles slung across their backs. Settling on a price fifteen creds higher than he would have liked, the commander grabbed his purchase, an interchangeable screwdriver, and made a hasty retreat. It could have just been his paranoia but whenever authority and he tangled it never ended well.

His instincts were screaming at him to run, get back to Rovhu who was docked on the other side of the large market as quickly as possible and get off this rock. However two things stopped him from doing this. The first was that the men were coming from the direction that Rovhu was docked and the second was that two more had just joined them, cutting off his escape.

John's hand twitched towards Winona as the others came up from behind and surrounded him, but he restrained himself and resisted starting a firefight in the middle of the crowded market without first finding out what the men wanted with him. The leader of the group, a gruff man with a grey beard and large scar bisecting one eye making it milky white, stepped in front of Crichton and casually laid his hand upon his firearm as if it was an afterthought and not the threat that they all knew it to really be.

"Papers," his one word etched confusion on John's face. When Crichton did not respond the officer elaborated. "Your ident papers. We are cracking down on illegals and you failed to check in when you docked."

John swore loudly in sebacean as he finally realized what they wanted. He did not have any identification papers of any sort, and if he failed to produce any he doubted he would be seeing Rovhu any time soon. The group around him shifted as the series of clicks and hard consonants of the alien language rolled off of his tongue.

"Right, sorry," John smiled to put the men surrounding him at ease. "This is my first time traveling, let me just get them."

As he reached inside his long coat the others relaxed slightly and that was the opportunity he was waiting for. Snapping his arm back, his elbow connected painfully with someone's face and John was fairly certain he felt the crunch of the man's nose breaking. Before the others could fully react, Crichton had grabbed another's arm and slammed him into the man across from him, creating a hole in their group and Crichton made a break for it.

Another universe, another planet…and yet the same old dren.

Rushing through the crowd, Crichton weaved expertly between bodies and wares making his way to the east docks. Unfortunately Rovhu was parked on the west docks, but there simply was no way to get to him without meeting further opposition. Ducking around a vendor and darting through a side alley, Crichton took the moment to comm Rovhu as he tried to lose his pursuers.

"Rovhu, I'm in a little bit of a jam!" The leviathan's worried trills flowed through his open comm unit, drawing the attention of those nearby. Whispering frantically, Crichton tried to reassure the gunship that an armed rescue was the last thing he needed. "Detach and follow my signal. I'm gonna board another ship. We'll rendezvous at the destination."

Cutting the comms off so as not to draw even more stares, Crichton glanced around to make sure he lost the men chasing him and made his way down the east dock. Scanning quickly, he searched for a steady but not new vessel, one that was leaving within the quarter arn. If the ship was too new than they would have security protocols set in place that could work against him.

Just as he was about to give up and try to make it back to the west docks a ship caught his eye. It took only seconds to purchase a ticket and he darted up the ramp and into the passenger hold just as the doors closed behind him. People were climbing into upright tubes as crew members assisted them. Once settled, cyro-sleep was activated and the person was placed into a suspended coma.

Crichton had never experienced cyro before and he was hesitant to do so now, but it was far too late to do anything else but climb into his own chamber. Blue eyes glanced around as a man called Owens, a navigational officer, helped him get settled. Everyone looked so normal, so calm and sure…so human.

It was different, this universe. Smaller somehow, or so Crichton felt. He had yet to come across any other species then human. At first he had thought that they were sebacean, so used to being the only human, but he learned quickly that that was not the case. It was unsettling. Humans were everywhere, colonizing any planet they could, terraforming any they couldn't.

They're like cockroaches, the plague of the universe.

Sometimes, when he allowed himself to think about it, it bothered him that he now thought of the human species as they and not we. Because it simply was no longer we. Crichton had no idea what he was anymore, and as his chamber door slid closed, he allowed himself to relax back into the cushion as he pushed away the thought.

The cyro-drug flooded his system and Crichton blinked sluggishly at the locker at the very back. His eyes were beginning to become fuzzy, but he could still make out the words upon the glass.

Lockout protocol. No early release.

He found it curious to find a man chained inside, but he could think upon it no more as the drugs started to take hold. John blinked once more as the Hunter-Gratzner began to take off and as he closed his eyes one last time he felt his nictitating membrane slide out and into place.