Kobolds From Space

It could hardly be called a space ship. It had an FTL drive, of sorts, in the form of a warp crystal that warped reality so that the speed of light just wasn’t a thing, among other effects, but it was suspended in the middle of the only room by four semi-elastic cords attached to rings set in the walls. That didn’t mean it provided any form of propulsion – the whole mess had been flung towards its destination with what the people on board, who could hardly be called a crew, devoutly hoped was sufficient precision to hit the broad-side of a planet. We had personal impellers, and could get out and push if the trajectory needed to be adjusted, but we didn’t have a navigator who could tell us whether that was the case so the point was kind of moot.

One of the other effects of the warp crystal was to mess with inertia. In transit, the outer hull had its inertia set very very high, making it difficult for anything to affect the trajectory. Shortly before impact, it was important to change the setting to make it very very low instead, or else the planet we were aimed at was going to have a very very bad day. An unfortunate side effect was that we’d probably shed the last dregs of our momentum in the upper atmosphere and have to rely on parachutes to drift the rest of the way to the ground. The very very low setting didn’t include the crew, technically – that was a different function where the warp crystal would momentarily negate the inertia of everything around it to prevent its own destruction when we ran into something. Which was important! Everything else could be replaced, but warp crystals were impossible devices and so could only be created inside the warped reality of another warp crystal. The urban legend was that the very first warp crystal had been the result of a botched demon summoning, but everyone knew that magic wasn’t real.

Aside from the crystal, the space… not a spaceship, but it was some sort of spacecraft. A spaceraft? In any event, aside from the crystal, it was mostly full of boxes and shaggy lizard people. Kobolds. Our six-month mission: to helplessly plunge into the depths of space and impact on a planet that, ideally, would already be habitable. If it wasn’t, the general-purpose fabrication unit packed securely in most of the boxes would be able to build the tools to build the factories to build the devices that might eventually terraform it – or, more practically, build some sort of sealed habitat for us to live in. The space raft didn’t have any form of life support, but the… biological cargo was capable of existing in a sort of low-power mode almost indefinitely, saving the precious atmospheric oxygen (we had a few extra cans) for when we needed a quick burst of energy. In the meantime we subsisted off a trickle of energy supplied by an internal perpetual motion machine, made possible by abusing the side effects of the warp crystal’s insane physics.

We were *much* better designed than the raft.

We were also, to a kobold, dead to what passed for reality in the vicinity of a warp crystal, letting the electronics clamped to our bodies immerse us in a virtual world instead, where moving and talking didn’t use up mission-critical resources and we could frolic and play to our heart’s content… as long as someone kept an eye on the timer. Specifically me. It was my job to keep an eye on the timer.

The main problem with Spots was that he was so conventional. He was in a lobby trying to decide what to do next, so of course he looked like himself, spots and all. He was even wearing his rig, which meant that I had to talk to a virtual simulation of the pixel array he used for a face – currently, a pair of eye-spots and a curvy smile for a mouth. His ears perked up as I materialized, then they flattened and his mouth became a horizontal zig-zag because I wasn’t in one of the shapes he liked.

I slithered towards him and coiled my sleek, scaly avatar around his, letting the bulge of my sheath press against his belly… then I switched to my fuzzy green otter before he could get around to actually complaining. He wasn’t really that fun to tease, so I had to do it sparingly.

A fuzzy green *female* otter. This was very important to him.

His arms wrapped around me, claws running through my fur, sliding down my back and leaving me all shivery by the time they slipped under my tail to cup my rear. “Rawr,” he said, his face briefly replaced by a picture of a gaping toothy maw before returning to its pleasant smile.

“Rar,” I said back, sliding my whiskers along the smooth plastic of his rig until I could clamp my teeth around his ear, gnawing on it lightly.

He only ever wanted one thing, but that was fine. I only went to visit him when I wanted it too. It probably helped that I usually wanted it. For scheduling purposes, I mean.

“Mmm, such a sexy otter,” he purred, squeezing and stroking my behind. “You had me worried for a second there.”

“Can we do this one co-op?” I asked.

He grumbled, and lifted a hand up to caress the back of my head. “That takes all the fun out of it. I’ll never understand why you like that mode.”

I liked that mode because it guaranteed a simultaneous orgasm, and I wasn’t enough of a jerk to leave after I’d had my fun, but after finding satisfaction I was usually satisfied, and finishing off my partner was kind of a chore. “Maybe I’m feeling super lazy and want you to do all the work for once,” I grumbled right back.

“If you want to lie there and take it, then lie there and take it,” he said, his eye-dots shifting into mischievous slants. “And we’ll see how many orgasms I can give you before you get me off.” The blank white of the lobby swirled into the not-quite-as-blank white of his favorite snowscape, and suddenly I was falling onto my back into the soft snow – not cold enough to hurt, but cold enough to make me really appreciate his warmth as it pressed down on top of me.

I moaned, and clutched my tiny otter arms and legs to his sides as he slid into me, and knew that the answer was going to be ‘a lot’.

Damn it.

We lay in the snow for a bit afterwards, letting it cool us down. I clung to his side like a fuzzy leech, watching the dregs of semen drip from his cock and vanish just before messing up his fur, because that wasn’t one of his kinks. My own juices were failing to smear against his hip-plate.

“You know, in three more days we’ll finally get to wake up,” I said, stroking a paw through his chest-fluff where it erupted from behind his chest-plate, making a game out of rearranging his spots. “It’s going to be really weird being back in my own body.”

“You’re cuter as an otter,” Spots said, the arm underneath me curling to stroke my side.

“Yeah yeah, I know,” I said. “I don’t like my body that much either.”

He rolled over and pushed me away. “Stop that,” he said. “You’re still cute.”

“But not fuckable,” I replied. He’d never made a pass at me in the real world. I’m not actually sure that I wanted him to, but it was still kind of embarrassing.

His eyes curled into upwards swirls, then spun around before turning back into dots. “Too much penis.”

“We all have penises,” I said, deadpan. “It’s part of the standard package. Just like you,” I curled my tail over between his legs, and prodded underneath his flaccid penis at the unbroken expanse of fluff. “Have a vagina. I don’t get it – you keep everything else about your avatar true to life but you leave off that?”

“We all have our ideal selves,” he said. “You want to be a cartoon otter –”

“Cartoon?!” I said, sitting up indignantly. I’d put a lot of work into my otter shape!

He booped me in the nose, making my face scrunch up involuntarily. “Real otters’ faces are not that expressive.”

So I bit his finger. It was an otter necessity.

“Wave. Wave!” came an overly excited direct message from Star. “You’ve got to come to the Garden. There’s an alien!”

“There’s no such thing as aliens,” I sent back, but teleported to the Garden anyway. It was a public hub, so no one would take any particular note if I showed up, or if I left after a few awkward minutes without saying anything other than rote greetings. I was in my current default shape, an androgynous pink dragon.

When I arrived, everyone was gathered around an avatar I’d never seen before, a small blue cartoon horse with feathery wings and a single horn. And by ‘cartoon’ I mean the head wasn’t even shaped like a real horse’s, and the skin was completely untextured. Whoever it was, they were also obscuring their icon – the horse had an icon of a moon on each hip, despite lacking a rig, but it wasn’t Moon’s moon and the system identified them as ‘Guest 1’.

“I am not an alien,” the horse said, in a haughty feminine voice. “I am a Princess of the Ponies, and you and yours do hurtle towards my planet with undue haste. Slow your approach at once!”

This elicited a wave of tittering laughter from the others gathered around. The pony princess stomped a hoof.

“Don’t worry, princess, we’re not going to hit very hard,” I said. It was always more fun to play along with this sort of thing.

“You are not going to land at all without our permission,” the princess replied. “You are to slow your approach to a speed that does not suggest that you mean to eviscerate our planet like a shot from a distant cannon!”

“Sorry, no can do!” Star said, giggling. They were using their icon as an avatar – they hovered in midair, a star-shaped crystal which rotated wildly every few seconds only to stop in a random orientation. “You see, we were shot out of a cannon…”

Everyone laughed, except for the princess. Even I chuckled a bit.

“Cease your lies!” princess shouted back. “If you can slow to land you can slow a trifle sooner to prove your peaceful intentions.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “We don’t have an engine. It’s the most expensive part of a spaceship, so we left it at home.”

“We could turn off the FTL?” Star suggested.

“Time dilation would smack us in the face and we’d arrive even faster,” I said.

“It’d be slower to her, though.”

I shook my head. “We’d have to switch modes at the same time, and that means two years for some random bit of space dust to throw us off course.” I also didn’t know how to switch off the FTL since that wasn’t part of the standard procedure I’d trained for. I would have had to find the Warp Crystal documentation and figure it out, and I had other things I’d rather do. And by things I meant people of course.

The Princess pushed past the others to speak to me alone. “If thou dost this for us, we give our solemn oath that we shall guide your ship safely to Equestria.”

I frowned a bit. I mean, obviously we couldn’t trust an alien at their word, even if they were a real alien and not someone’s stupid prank. But it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how hard time dilation would hit us. Maybe we were already travelling at the same subjective speed? If that was how it worked, then two days with the Warp Crystal turned off meant two days that all of us would be awake and breathing, and while we could probably manage that with canned air and water from our stores, it would put us in a bad place if we didn’t land on a habitable planet. Habitable by kobolds, not by ponies.

If it had been real, it might have been a good idea anyway since anything that could project itself into our virtual space from several light years out was probably not something that we should laugh at and ignore. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.” I summoned a giant cartoon lever labeled ‘FTL’ and pulled it to the ‘off’ position.

“Wave no! Stop!” Star screamed, hurtling themself at me. Their crystal spun, agitated. “What have you done?! You’ve killed us all!”

“What?” I said. “It was your idea!”

They spun more rapidly. “I didn’t mean it!”

The princess just frowned. “Why dost thou jest? Nothing about your ship has changed.”

“Look, Moon or whoever you are, I’m willing to play along with this game of yours but I’m not going to actually wake up and wreck the ship as a joke,” I said. “Do you even know what would happen if I shut off the FTL for real? Because I don’t.”

The princess looked confused. “You are lucid, and share a dream space, but you think me a figment?”

“No, I think you’re one of us pulling a prank,” I said. “Does the virtual space even have guest access?”

“It does,” Spotty said. In a direct message, since he wasn’t there in the Garden.

“What?” I sent back. “Are you spying on me?”

“Only when you’re in public!” he replied. As if that made it better. “But yes, we do have guest access. If an alien somehow managed to get a signal to one of our receivers, and interpret our network protocol, they could log on as a guest.”

“So… have they?” I asked. “You can check, right?”

Spotty just replied, “There’s no such thing as aliens. But let me see if… huh. There’s a guest login but no corresponding activity on the network.”

“So it’s a prank.”

“Of course it’s a prank,” he said. “Aliens? Really?”

I guess I’d zoned out a bit chatting with Spotty, because the next thing I knew a blue hoof booped my avatar. Reflexively, I bit it. The princess shook me up and down like a ragdoll, since I was set to allow that sort of thing, and eventually flung me into a bush.

“Know this – we are no prank, and no figment, and you shall make no landfall without our permission!” Then she left, with a flashy teleport effect that looked like her tearing a hole in space with her horn, large enough for her to walk through, head held high.

“Well, that was fun,” I said to the bemused crowd. “Anyone want me to go figure out how to turn off the FTL?”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Star said.

The next day I woke up in my own body, sore and stiff from six months in low power mode. Our space raft looked about the same as we’d left it – dark except for the grape purple glow of the warp crystal, and the varicolored glimmer of the icons and faceplates of the rest of the gaggle of idiots who’d signed up for this trip with me. My own were a deep blue, my icon a wave of course, but the rest ran the gamut from Star’s orangey-yellow to Prism’s rainbow. Still, there was more shadow than light, and at least I didn’t have to look at myself.

A countdown in the corner of my field of view gave an estimated time to impact – less than five minutes. “Which way’s forwards?” I muttered quietly, and my faceplate gave me an arrow towards one of the walls. I floated over to it and placed a paw against it – cold. I gingerly unlatched the shutter and cracked it open, making sure no burning rays of sunlight were lurking just beyond to fry my cameras.

I shouldn’t have worried. We were still well outside the target solar system. I couldn’t even make out the planets until I had my faceplate highlight them, complete with a dotted line indicating our trajectory. It looked so small… and I could see it moving towards us. Slowly, but perceptibly. I’d thought the recommendation to switch modes ten seconds out was cutting it close, but wow we were going fast – we’d still have to cover half the inner system unprotected, with any random bit of space junk potentially meaning the end of our mission.

I asked my faceplate to highlight the space junk, or at least the pieces large enough to see, and that was a mistake. There was so much of it. So much that it completely obscured my vision. There wasn’t an asteroid belt – it was more like an asteroid cloud, and the planet we were headed towards was in the densest part.

Eager to figure out how fucked we were, I dipped into a small simulation to model the junk surrounding the planet. It looked like the planet had cleared out a safe area around itself, at least… and there were only a few pieces that looked like they might actually hit us on the way in. All of them were potentially dangerous at ten seconds, but if I could switch us over at *one* second…

“You know what would be really nice? Being able to automate this shit,” I grumbled. But no – warp crystals refused to listen to anything other than direct requests from a living creature, and lucky me I was one of the ones that our warp crystal liked.

The countdown started pulsing subtly, reminding me that there were only two minutes left. It took thirty seconds to return to the crystal, because I was an idiot and forgot I had my personal impellers strapped to my tail, and did the whole trip the hard way. Still, plenty of time. I placed my hands against the warp stone, and leaned forwards to clack my faceplate against it as well. “Oh great and generous crystal, your pledged servant begs for an audience,” I said, envisioning the gaudy throne room I usually used to commune with the thing. There was a slight tingle in my neck, and the purple-scaled dragon in my imagination turned his burning eyes towards me. “I pray that you change the inertial mode from crunch to splat, but the timing is tight so you’ll need to do it quickly when I give the word.” I kept a close eye on the countdown, and added a diagram of our path to the other upper corner, with the dangerous asteroids highlighted in red. “Will you do that for me?”

The dragon nodded.

“Then at my signal, great one,” I said, and watched the countdown slowly tick down. Fifteen seconds. Ten, and my ears twitched, but I stayed silent. Five – and the first interloper shattered against our hull. Four, and the next one missed. Three, and oh god oh fuck where did the planet get a MOON and why was it accelerating towards us?! “SHIT!”

I felt the queasy sensation of the inertial mode shifting, and then something sent the whole space raft spinning, and I curled around the warp crystal and tried not to think about my friends being crushed by the unsecured crates. Dizzy and disoriented, I could have sworn I saw the moon jerk impossibly fast to catch us before we could go flying off into the void – but that was impossible. Moons didn’t do that. It must have just been luck that we still ended up hitting it at an angle, slowing only a little in its thin atmosphere before digging a long trench in the surface dust.

“What the fuck, Wave?” shouted Prism, from underneath a pile of boxes. They shrugged them off like they were made of Styrofoam, because apparently in my panic I’d somehow set the warp crystal to reduce inertia inside the raft as well. That couldn’t be healthy, but it was probably healthier than being crushed by boxes.

“Are we dead?” asked Star, from behind me, their face a spinning version of their icon which usually meant they were worried.

“Probably,” I said, trying to give a reassuring smile but pretty sure my faceplate wasn’t going to display anything that much different from how I was feeling. “I think the pony princess threw a moon at us.”