Page 16 of I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com (Cosmic Chaos #1)

Ah. I’m drowning again. It doesn’t hurt, which probably means I have a concussion. Which is not ideal, clearly.

But the water cradled me like an old friend, and my body was just so tired. For a moment, just a sweet, blissful moment, I let my eyes close. Sunlight warmed my skin as I sat with Toto under that oak tree. I ran my fingers through his mane.

“Is this how far you want to go?” he asked.

I leaned my head against the tree, letting go of the weight of my burdens until I felt nothing but that beautiful sunlight. “Spare me the pre-death parables, would you? I was ready to give up and die on the beach but you insisted on seeing how far we could go. I went. Now I’m tired. Lemme rest.”

The lion stretched, letting his head loll on my lap. “I’m not stopping you.”

I bit my lip. “Why would you say it like that?”

There was a trace of laughter in his voice that ate at me. “I didn’t say it like anything.”

“Liar,” I snapped, sitting up. “You think I’m giving up too early. Like I give up on everything else.”

“Do you think you’re giving up too early?”

“So what if I am?! What difference does it make? If I opened my eyes right now, I’d still be drowning on an alien planet. I’d still be trapped with a madman who poisoned me while Sol gets the snot kicked out of him and Lok is god knows where about to put on poison armor. Even if I swam to safety, what then? I don’t have a way out of here, and the only people who can understand me are either locked in cages or a damn villain! I’m not the hero type. This isn’t my big moment where I find out I have witch powers or I’m the child of an adulterous god with no concept of safe sex and magically save the day with a sassy comeback.”

“Who said you had to be?”

“I…Nobody. But that’s not the point. The point is, I am not built for this shit. If the Biwbans wanted a test subject that was willing to solve political disputes, they should have abducted a CIA agent or something. Instead they got the girl that films the dramatic retellings of the lives of meerkats.”

“All right. Lie back down.”

“Maybe I don’t want to lie back down, ever think about that?! And you know what? This is all Osid’s fault anyway! Of course you need every hand on deck just to keep the herds out. Who builds a settlement right in the middle of a migration path—oooooooh.” The realization came flooding in all at once. If the Rumbling, as Lok called it, happened once every year, then this settlement was probably just in the way of a yearly migration. Animals as big as sauropods probably couldn’t graze in the same area for long without depleting their food source. If they were also dealing with triceratops and other herd species, then it was probably similar to the great Serengeti migration, just on a much larger scale. I had only gone to see the event once before, but I couldn’t imagine trying to build a camp right in the middle of a million-strong feeding frenzy.

Toto merely grunted.

“Shit!”

“About time.”

“You know, I could do with less judgment, Toto. You could have just given me the answer in the first place.”

His side-eye was scathing. “Dory, this isn’t real. I’m literally a figment of your imagination. You’re drowning, remember? Wake up and tell that idiot king to move his settlement.”