The Numenskal

(8843rd year of the Numenskal Alliance, Glory to It )

He is at the helm of the hellship GOODBYE: Plated with woven metal crystals born in the hot bowels of the dawn-demon Tiamat and extracted from the forbidden mouth of Kingu, this ship, gunless, destroyed the Shin fleet in six seconds and kept going, driving through planet Nykus Wanbee like an ice pick through an eyeball. Thirty leagues long, it was not forged as a weapon, but as a vessel to withstand the winds of the underworld. GOODBYE was a mining ship.

The ectoplasms and dark materialites that radiated from decaying shadows produced fuel for entire stars systems. Only the Numenskal Alliance had learned how to tap the secret energy of death to sustain life across galaxies. If interstellar travel was hellish, even for the Numenskal, then travel in the underworld was a superbly horrifying experience. The scale of the deepest underworld passages is boggling, stretching the credulity of the traditional label “caverns.” Navigation is only possible via radio beacon, for there are no stars to move by. But they are indeed enclosures and what lies beyond the shell of the caverns is still unknown.

This week, the job is dinosaurs. He tries to remember what a dinosaur looks like, but he draws a blank. What planet were dinosaurs from again? Because the captain is not a religious man, he cannot recall these details. He imagines a bat-like creature that he saw as a child in a puppet show. Something like that, he thinks. But all he has to go on are coordinates. The ghosts of the dinosaurs have, in their seventy-seven million years of waiting, slunk very deep into the caverns.



After three weeks, the GOODBYE has found them. The captain, who is a uniquely stoic man and has spent much of his life in the employ of the Numenskal Alliance as a ferrier in the underworld, can attest that platonic types are products of the cave. It is the way of organisms to join with their species types in the underworld: as ghosts, they gravitate naturally towards those that share their old forms, and when tens of millions of years are passed in discussion with their cohort about a shared end, much individuality is lost. That is why, when the GOODBYE found them, the dinosaurs were already massing: they were just sitting there in a big pile like discarded toys, hovering amongst each other with nearly imperceptible slowness.

They may have grown bored quickly, or perhaps the commonality of their disaster was just too overwhelming. Their shades could provide a lot of energy – perhaps enough to have kept Omega Tauri from falling apart, the captain wonders as he releases the hatch. A siphon the length of the GOODBYE extends; it swats and sways its way through the morass and attracts the saurian shades into a holding field. In twenty minutes, the dinosaurs have all been sucked up and crowded into the hull of GOODBYE.