Codename Alpha: Intervention

Chapter One - Paranoimia

I leaned back to the best of my ability on the cafeteria bench, and looked around, trying to avert my eyes from the admittedly bright laptop screen before me. It was fairly late into the afternoon, after dinner, so everyone else in the mess hall with me wasn't here to eat. As such, it wasn't too crowded, and there were only a pawful of people scattered about. I was still pretty distracted, both thinking and trying not to think about the bizarre line I had just read, so I wasn't really paying attention to who the people in here were. We were currently over the day side of the planet, and the odd perpendicular angle we were at gave a nice view of an endless ocean below. If my very limited knowledge of their geography served, it was probably the Pacific.

I looked back down at my laptop, and adjusted the brightness so it was no longer frying my eyes, looking at the image on my screen carefully, preparing to try and read the sentence that derailed my train of thought once more. 'The Complete Encyclopedia of the Animal World,' as it was called, was proving itself to be... something. I wasn't quite sure what, specifically, it was. It was also odd to navigate to a specific page, since the language barrier also meant that our word for hyena and theirs didn't start with the same letter, so I had to go off images I saw between brief flashes of me scrolling through.

Earlier, when I did eventually find the page for hyenas, it, like the rest of the book, proved itself to be a whole lot of indescribable something. I was greeted by the image of a spotted hyena on all fours, looking startlingly familiar, despite being obviously a wild animal. I didn't really know how long I simply stared at it for, but I do know for certain that it just felt very off. I did find it interesting how both our cultures had the same name for what I was, or rather, that animal - spotted hyenas. Scrolling below, I also found the section about gray hyenas, but nothing for striped hyenas. Confusingly enough, they called their gray hyenas striped hyenas.

Nonetheless, I sighed once more, and scrolled back up to the section about spotted hyenas, and began to read, skimming through to the bit that freaked me out earlier.

'Hyenas have a genetic lineage dating back twenty-six million years, to the early Miocene...'

It was still unbelievable. I was a hyena, and the head of the creature I saw in the image certainly looked like one as well, but the rest of the body was quadrupedal. It just didn't make sense how something like this could exist.

That amount of time was magnitudes larger than the entire fossil record for all intelligent life on Valdera. The leading theory that a meteor destroyed most fossil records about seven hundred or so thousand years ago was completely blown out of the water by this. Some quick mental math revealed that these animals had been around for thirty seven times longer than the earlier primitive Valderans, and probably more than eight hundred and sixty six times longer than even the earliest civilizations we had. Granted, these animals obviously didn't have organized civilization, but the implications brought about by their apparent age were disturbing.

I was brought out of it by the calmingly upbeat voice of my friend Falco, a gray cheetah, greeting me. "Heya, Brownie," he said, as he sat down across from me. I wasn't particularly fond on the nickname he gave me, but he liked saying it, and at the very least it wasn't Connie. Brownie was certainly a far cry from my actual name, Conrad. Granted, his name wasn't actually Falco, rather, it was Valko. "What'cha been up to? Your leg doing any better?"

During the disaster which brought us here, I had ended up falling at a strange angle, hurting my ankle. All things considered, that wasn't the worst that could've happened, judging from the other injuries I saw afterwards. Nonetheless, it did still hurt occasionally. I was a bit distracted when he asked, so all I got out was a pitiful "Yeah."

I continued reading about this planet's hyenas as Falco spoke more. "That's good," he said, then being quiet for a few seconds. "So, are you excited for tomorrow?"