©2025 SammyC

We were a kilometer underground in a sprawling, seemingly vast city constructed with unimaginable technology. Merlyn and I were ushered into the tube-shaped conveyor that had stopped in front of our temporary lodgings. Greeting us with a big smile was Alvin. He pointed to two empty seats next to him.

Before we sat down, we noted the members of our traveling party seated in a row behind us. They were all wearing identical “coveralls” (that’s what Alvin called these short-sleeve, one-piece outfits), albeit in a rainbow of different colors. I had chosen pink. Pink was not my favorite color but Merlyn insisted that pink was a feminine hue, appropriate for a princess to wear. As if on a signal, we all burst out in laughter, seeing how odd and silly we looked in these drab clothes.

“What’s so funny,” Alvin asked, bewildered at our raucous outburst.

“Except for the bright colors, this clothing makes us look like the wretched souls who’ve committed heinous crimes that we’ve placed in prisons far away from the general populace.” I giggled but then stopped short when a thought crossed my mind. A very distressing thought. Almost stuttering, I turned to Alvin with pleading eyes.

“Tell me again that you’re not what Malcolm said you were…”

“What? Cannibals?” Alvin laughed. “Princess Rani, perish the thought. We’re not cannibals. It’s merely a convenient fiction we’ve allowed them to believe so that we can rescue their abductees and, at the same time, provide them with some necessary goods, implements, and seeds. It goes back at least to Senshi’s grandfather’s time.”

I leaned into Merlyn’s arms and let out a sigh of relief.

“No, we’re not having you for dinner. We’re taking you to dinner, at my mother’s house. She’s very anxious to meet you all. Especially you, Princess Rani.”

Merlyn stood up and almost fell over me as the tube stopped at a crossing. She remained standing when the tube resumed its progress.

“It’s very courteous of you to introduce us to your mother, Alvin, but I insist.” She raised her voice. “Take us to your leader!”

“My mother IS our leader, Merlyn. She’s been our city’s Mayor since I was a toddler.”

“Oh, well, never mind.” Merlyn sat down. I turned to her and whispered.

“What was that all about?”

“An old—”

“Saying? Sometimes, Merlyn, you embarrass me.”

“Well, at least now you know he’s not going to eat us, and he’s not introducing you to his mother as his intended.”

As I looked away from Merlyn so as not to let her see my smirk, I noticed something that should have been obvious the moment we stepped into the tube.

“Where’s Amos? Did you forget to pick him up?”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. We, of course, saw the rather crude splints on his arms and sent him to our medical facilities. By morning, his arms should be as good as new, with no hint that they’ve ever been broken. Don’t worry; our medical staff will take good care of him.”

“This city, your machines, the technology!” Merlyn cried out. “You are not human! You can’t be. Even the science of our home planet had not progressed to such an extent.”

“Perhaps they are the original people of this planet, driven underground by some natural disaster or foreign enemy,” Luna suggested.

“We are humans, the descendants of the colony that arrived here centuries ago, just like you. My mother can explain all of this during dinner. My stepfather has prepared an old family recipe. It’s delicious. You’ll see.”

The tube came to a gentle halt in front of a house that resembled all the other houses we had seen in our short time underground. Nothing gave notice to the passerby that this was the home of the highest-ranking official in the city. No sign with the seal of her office. No family crest. No flags waving in the slight breeze that freshened the air.

Alvin led us into his mother’s house. It seemed as if we had stepped out of the underground city and into a different reality. Alvin’s mother’s home was furnished and decorated in much the same way homes were in the pictures Merlyn had shown me of our home planet—quite a contrast with all the geometrically aligned surfaces around us.

“Very 22nd century modern,” mused Merlyn, just as a woman we assumed was Alvin’s mother walked in.

“Welcome to our city and my home. My name is Georgia. As my son Alvin must have told you, I am the Mayor of the city.” Turning to look directly at me, she said, “And you are Princess Rani of the Eastern Kingdom. Alvin was quite correct when he spoke rather glowingly of your beauty. Is it true that you are betrothed to Prince Kelvin of the Western Kingdom?”

“Yes, Madam Mayor, we were on the way to the Western Kingdom for the wedding when Senshi and her men tried to abduct us. I must thank you for offering us shelter from both the rain and our rabid pursuers.”

“Please just call me Georgia. Though I have been elected Mayor by our citizens, I am simply an equal among equals. There are only 350 of us in the city. We manage on a first-name basis,” she laughed.

“Mother, dinner is ready to be served.” Alvin waved his hand toward a room behind him. “If everyone will follow me, we can take our seats.”

Once we were seated at the long table in the dining room, with Georgia at the head and Alvin seated to her left, a metal cart with dishes and bowls on three shelves rolled into the room…by itself! It stopped some feet to the right of where Georgia sat. Seconds later, a tall, husky, gray-bearded man of indeterminate middle-age strolled in, a broad smile on his face. Almost in the same instant, three voices filled the dining room.

“Father!” Luna cried.

“Luna!” the man exclaimed.

“Eric!” Merlyn screamed, as if seeing a ghost.

Eric and Luna rushed into each other’s arms.

“Father, can it really be you? But how? We thought you had been—”

“Killed by outlanders? Very nearly, my child. We ran into Senshi’s father on our geographical survey through the hinterlands. We tried to fight them off, but ultimately, only Reynard and I survived. Reynard was badly wounded. My wounds were only superficial. Nevertheless, they traded us to what they called ‘the underground people.’ We were assured by Senshi’s father that the underground people were cannibals. You can imagine our fear—”

“Eric, you were quite surprised and relieved to discover we were not cannibals,” Georgia noted.

“Yes, gladly surprised. Unfortunately, Reynard’s wounds were too severe. He died moments after we entered the city.”

“But, Father, why didn’t you return home? I held out hope for months that you’d walk through our door at home, safe and sound.”

“Luna, dear, your mother had passed two years before and you were already an adult woman. You didn’t need me anymore. No one did.”

Through tears, Luna protested, “Yes, Father, I needed you. You were always my rock. My mentor. My best friend—”

“Nonsense, Luna. I can see Merlyn has guided you well in life since I embarked on that fateful survey. You’ve been chosen to be part of Prince Rani’s traveling party. That’s an important assignment. By the way, why isn’t he here? And who is this lovely girl who favors him so much? If I didn’t know better, I’d swear—”

Lowering her voice, Luna spoke into her father’s ear, trying to appear as if she were overcome with emotion and embracing him.

“Father, I’ll clue you in later. Right now, just play along. It’s Princess Rani. He’s a she now. It’s complicated.”

Clearing his throat, Eric announced, “Dinner is served!”

On command, the metal cart stopped by each diner and two metal arms emerged from its sides to place dishes and bowls in front of them. Another metal cart entered, bringing two large serving platters filled with medallions of some kind of meat and two huge tureens of vegetable soup.

Eric himself placed on the table several carafes filled with wine made from fermented berries that Merlyn says resemble grapes on our home planet.

As we tucked into our sumptuous meal, Eric’s confusing identification of me seemed to have been forgotten, replaced by amiable social banter, mostly between Merlyn and Georgia. Just before Georgia started to explain who the underground people were and how the city came to be, I interrupted their conversation.

“Georgia, this is delicious. What animal is the meat from? It doesn’t taste familiar to me.”

“Oh, I thought Alvin would’ve have told you already—”

“Well, no, Mother. I didn’t think Rani would like what I told her…” Alvin lowered his eyes from my gaze as he spoke.

“Rani, it’s Rumperdon. Slow-roasted with several important spices, it’s marvelous. I’m glad you liked it.”

I had to suppress the urge to regurgitate my dinner. Holding a napkin up to my mouth, my eyes teared up. Alvin lied! They are cannibals! How could they eat Rumperdons? Those docile, gentle giants who genuinely love us while they endure so many heavy and dangerous tasks, all for our sake. Oh, the humanity! As Merlyn would say.

“Almost two hundred years ago, in the midst of the second Great War that divided our colony into the Eastern and Western Kingdoms, my 4th-grandparents and a dozen or so other couples, who were all engineers, doctors, and scientists, decided to escape the internecine and seemingly endless conflict by taking as much high-tech knowledge and instrumentation as we could carry among us and search the continent for a new home and a new start on this planet.”

“Like Moses in the desert after fleeing the Pharaoh, it took us almost 40 years of living like nomads, moving from place to place, never staying anywhere for more than a few years, before we chanced upon this underground city—”

“So you did not build this?” asked Merlyn.

“No, Merlyn, we might have had the knowledge to build something like this but, alas, we had neither the people power nor access to the material resources needed. To be blunt, we lucked into it.”

“So, you see, Rani. We are humans. This underground complex is not of our construction. It’s….”

Georgia interrupted her son. “Alvin! Who’s telling our origin story? You or I?”

“You are, Mother.” Alvin grinned when he turned to me. My stomach was still gurgling and he mistook my dainty burp for a return smile.

“As I was saying. When we came upon the dome that’s on the surface, the doorway was broken, and the detritus of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, was scattered all about the interior. However, the elevator to the city below miraculously still worked. In fact, there was power in the city. It looked like it had been abandoned just the day before yesterday, for all intents and purposes.”

“Apparently, it was built by an extraterrestrial race that, like us, had come to mine rare earth minerals. It couldn’t have been built by the actual natives of this planet. In my travels across the continent, we never came across anything more advanced than stone structures—” Eric interjected.

“We stayed in one of those stone structures, Father, on our journey here. Malcolm told us he was quite familiar with it,” Luna shared.

“Malcolm? Oh, yes, Senshi’s little brother. Nasty little fellow.” Eric harrumphed for added emphasis.

“Oh, he’s not really evil like his sister. There’s a good side to him,” I declared.

“You like him just because he called you the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He didn’t think twice about handing the rest of us over to cannibals,” Luna sneered.

How dare Luna upbraid me like that in front of Georgia and Alvin. After all, I’m still royalty. I’m a Princess!

“As Eric was saying,” Georgia continued, “the age of this city is unknown, as is the identity of its builders. What we deduced from the evidence is that they were a race of beings at least a third taller than the average human. The apparent eye level of all the instrument dials, screens, and door windows we found show that. Also, they were built rather wider than us. We had to replace all the chairs with ones that fit our form factors. Although we did find their beds to be delightfully roomy.”

“Over the years, we learned to use their technology…to some extent. There are still some mysteries among their machinery and processes that we might never solve. After all, we’re only human.”

Alvin piped up. “There are some machines that look like educational devices. You know, devices to essentially inject knowledge into our brains—”

“Miracles upon miracles!” Merlyn shouted. “Lead us to them! Now! Perhaps you need a subject with a higher intelligence quotient. I would gladly volunteer—”

Eric placed his hands up like a wrangler trying to stop a stampede of Rumperdons. “Merlyn, the first person who tried to use the device, suffered a stroke and died. No one has figured out how to safely use the device since.”

“Well, it was just a thought,” Merlyn demurred. “Carry on, Georgia.”

The screen behind Georgia lit up, and an earnest-looking young woman’s face appeared. She seemed to be in a large, well-lit room with blinking lights and machinery surrounding her. Several people were moving about behind her.

“Georgia, there’s a group of outlanders in front of the entrance wishing to speak to you. I’ve deployed the drone. I’ll patch you in right now.”

Suddenly, the screen showed Senshi and her dirty dozen riders seated on their Hobnobs. On the ground in front of them was Malcolm! His hands were tied, and a rag stuffed into his mouth. All he could do was shake his head vigorously. A rider on either side of him aimed their crossbows at him.

Georgia spoke loudly and clearly. “Senshi, this is Georgia. What do you want?”

Senshi addressed the drone as if speaking to Georgia. “Your Excellency, we have come to make an exchange with you. I know that you are in possession of the traveling party from the Eastern Kingdom. I must inform you that it was I who secured them in order to make our customary trade. However, my idiot brother tried to make the trade himself and steal my glory. Unfortunately for him, he is now a chip I can trade to you in exchange for Princess Rani. One for one. Fair price, no?”

“No, you can’t do that, Georgia!” Merlyn stated rather too loudly.

“Shhh, Merlyn. I don’t intend to do any such thing.” She turned back to the screen. “Yes, that sounds like a fair trade, but, unfortunately, we can’t make that trade.”

“Princess Rani is such a tiny little thing. My brother would make a much better meal—”

“Sorry, Senshi, we already ate her. And she was quite delicious, even in such small portions. But, since your people and my people have dealt in good faith for so many years, I’ll tell you what I can do.”

“I’m listening, Georgia.” Senshi prodded Malcolm with her spear. “Stay still, you idiot.”

“I will gladly receive Malcolm in exchange for our usual packet of goods, seeds, and implements. Just wait by the eastern ravine, and my truck will bring it to you. In the meantime, before you go, push Malcolm through the opening in the entrance that will appear in just a few seconds. Nice doing business with you again.”

The screen went dark, and Georgia laughed heartily as she turned around to face her guests.

“I must go up there. He’ll need to see a friendly face,” I said, standing up from the table.

“You seem to be smitten with this savage, Princess. A bit of motherly advice. Stay away from men like Malcolm. He’s a schemer and a narcissist. He’ll say anything to you to get his way. End of advice. Now, Alvin will go up with you. We’ll have to find out what Malcolm is really up to.”

His hands roughly tied together and the rag still stuffed in his mouth, Malcolm’s eyes grew large when he spotted me coming out of the elevator. He made some noises through the rag.

I wish I had changed back into my riding outfit. These coveralls, a lovely shade of pink though they were, made me look almost like a boy, not the “most beautiful girl” he’d ever seen.

I took the rag out of his mouth as soon as I reached him.

“But they said they’d eaten you already! And why are you dressed so strangely?”

“I guess you don’t think I’m the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen anymore.”

“I didn’t say that!”