Caveman - Part 2

[tekuno]

I finished part two early. Part three should be along no later than Sunday. (Best not to promise a daily update...)

(This part sets up, but does not actually contain, muscle growth. Oh, and yes, the exact nature of the caveman is intentional. All Will Be Explained, eventually.)

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Caveman
Part Two

This story has been completed. Content warnings and general description are included with part one, general commentary will be after part twenty.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten | Part Eleven | Part Twelve | Part Thirteen | Part Fourteen | Part Fifteen | Part Sixteen | Part Seventeen | Part Eighteen | Part Nineteen | Part Twenty

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"The war, captain, never happened. It was a... misunderstanding."
"Never happened?" said Vimes. "People got killed!"
"Quite so," said Lord Vetinari. "And this suggests, does it not, that we should try to understand one another as much as possible?"

-- Terry Pratchett, Jingo

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Panic is a perfectly normal response to a number of things: being awakened by a stranger who somehow knows your name, finding a stranger in your house when all the doors and windows were closed and locked, being touched on the face without your permission, suddenly discovering that you are alone in a room with an enormous hairy guy at least twice your weight. In this case, I was confronted by all of these at once, and so I panicked.

I jerked back, away from the caveman. I kicked against the blankets and pushed myself towards the other side of the bed. As I fell off the other side, the blankets came away with me. The caveman walked with a loping gait around the bed and reached out towards my face again.

Surprisingly, I had enough presence of mind to throw the blankets over him. Then I scrambled to my feet and took off. I could hear rustling, followed by thudding footsteps behind me as I ran through the house. Oddly enough, aside from the sheer terror of being pursued inside my house by a prehistoric monster, I found the time to think, "man, first I managed to climb up that hole, now I'm probably breaking some kind of speed record; if only my gym teachers could see me now!"

I flew down the stairs and headed for the front door -- I'm not entirely sure what I thought I was going to do, since I was already out of breath and the nearest other house was a quarter mile away, but at that point "away" was my one guiding principle. In practice, it didn't matter, because the front door was in a double-height room with a gallery on the second floor. As I started across the room, the caveman jumped down from above directly in front of me, landing with a thud.

Once again, he reached out, and once again I ran. This time, I headed to the kitchen, where I pulled open a drawer, grabbed a knife and whirled around, panting. The caveman walked into the room and gave me a long look. Very calmly, he reached out towards the knife, grabbed the blade with his hands, and pulled it right out of my grip. It was only then that I realized that I had grabbed an icing spatula, not a knife. I fainted out of sheer terror.

When I came to, I was face down on the floor, with my arms behind my back. There was an incredibly heavy weight on my back, which I supposed was the caveman. I tried to roll over, and couldn't.

The caveman's enormous hand came into my field of view again, and touched my forehead. Suddenly I heard the pitchless, timbreless voice in my head again.

"Are you ready to listen, Mitchell, or are we going to have to go through that farce again? I assure you, whatever you may think, in the open I can run a great deal faster than you can. If I wanted to hurt you, I would already have done so. Now, if I get up, will you promise not to run away? Just nod."

I nodded. My arms were released, the weight was removed from my back, and I was lifted to my feet. I turned to face the caveman.

Once again he reached out and touched my cheek.

"I'm sorry to keep touching you, but for the moment this is the only way I can communicate."

"Huh?"

"I haven't learned your language yet, and I'm not sure my voicebox can handle it unassisted, so I am using a crude form of telepathy. But I need to touch your head to talk to you."

"You're pretty fluent for someone who doesn't speak English."

"Ah, the actual words are chosen by a computer. It then manipulates portions of your mind to make you think you're hearing a voice."

"Wow!"

"A party trick, but occasionally useful, like this."

The caveman gestured at the TV. It blared into life:

*bzzt* "---ld Electronics Group: 'Using mysterious technologies to build the future.' Also sponsored by Whirlwind Moto--" *bzzt*

With another gesture, the TV shut off.

"My main computer is working on an implant which should allow me to speak your language, but for now, we'll have to make do with this."

"How do you have computers? You're a caveman!"

"That takes some explaining. Will you come back with me to my home?"

"Oh, all right. It's not like I could stop you from taking me."

"Excellent. It will be faster if I carry you."

The caveman picked me up like a baby -- and between my small size and his huge size, I might as well have actually BEEN a baby -- and carried me, apparently without any effort whatsoever, to the back door, out into the back yard, and into the woods.

In contrast to my clumsy navigation the day before, we moved incredibly swiftly. In ten minutes, we arrived at our destination. As far as I could tell, it was the location where the hole had been before. But instead of a slight rise, there was a huge boulder, probably about 50 feet tall, and at least twice as wide as that. It had obviously been forced up out of the ground -- there was dirt and grass on top, and trees had been pushed aside.

Set in the side of the stone was an enormous door with a rounded top. The caveman pressed one hand to my forehead and said "you said I'm a caveman -- well, behold my cave!" It was incredible how clearly the sarcasm came through with such a strange voice.

He set me down in front of the door, and we walked in. Inside, dirt gave way to stone, and then to tile. The caveman gestured again, and lights came on, revealing a passage which sloped downward. He walked downward, and I followed.

Eventually, we reached an enormous room with a vaulted ceiling. He reached down and touched my cheek.

"The computer says the implant is ready. I would like to get it installed immediately. You may want to look away."

The caveman lay down on a platform next to the wall. Metal arms popped out of hatches in the wall, tipped with various ugly-looking implements. I hurried and turned around. Various nasty sounds came from behind me for a few minutes. And then:

"...hneh... ock... gllll... unh.... ah, yes, that seems to work. You can look again."

I turned around. The caveman was sitting up on the side of the platform, and got to his feet, once again towering over me.

"I suppose I ought to introduce myself properly. My name is... hmmm... actually, I see that your species' voicebox can't actually pronounce it properly. Let's stick to 'Gary'; that's close enough."

He held out his enormous right hand. Startled, I took it and gave him a handshake. I must admit that, odd though it may be, I was starting to find the caveman -- Gary -- attractive. Now that I could look at him as a person, rather than as some kind of monster, his body was almost incredibly attractive -- tall and lean, with bulging muscles. He was clothed in a sort of combination loincloth and toga which wouldn't have left anything to the imagination anyway, but which did very little for his modesty because, well, he was so well-hung that he dangled out past the bottom. His body hair, too, made him look incredibly masculine, with a shaggy mop of black hair on top. Now that his incredible body was linked up with a deep, resonant, smooth voice, the effect was... intoxicating. I found myself starting to get a hard-on.

"I'm, er, Mitchell. Mitch Hammond."

"Yes, I know."

"I've been wondering about that; just how DID you know my name?"

Gary smiled, and pointed. Lying against the wall was my backpack.

"I fed your notebook to the computer, and when it was finished figuring out your language and getting pronunciations from broadcast media, it pronounced your name for me. It also found a lot about you while it was doing the research. I haven't met any others to serve as a basis for comparison, yet, but you're very small for a modern human, aren't you?"

I could feel my face going red. I was halfway between embarrassed and angry -- on the one hand, I was being hit right in my sore spot by someone incredibly sexy, and on the other I was being treated as a sort of anthropological specimen and immediately rejected as inferior.

"Yes, I'm pretty small. And weak."

"And obviously embarrassed about it. Sorry about that. Well, as thanks, how about if we do something about that? Hold still."

Suddenly I felt a prick. I looked down and saw another medical-looking arm retracting into the wall.

"Wh... what did you just do to me?!"

"Oh, it's just my way of saying thanks. I had the computer cook up something to fix your size problems. Don't worry, it's entirely beneficial, you'll start feeling the effects in a few hours."

"How...?"

"Oh, well, you homo sapiens have very similar body chemistry and genetics to mine. And since I started tapping into your wireless Internet last night, the computer has been pulling down all sorts of information about all sorts of things. Since it can retain everything at once -- unlike a real doctor or researcher -- and has much more historical information to work with than any single one of them, it now knows more about your biology than anyone of your own species. In fact, it knows almost as much about your biology as it knows about mine, now."

"Um..."

"Was that not in order? I just wanted to give you a boost, since you're the one who woke me up. Another few decades and I might actually have died!"

There was just too much going on; I was rubbing my arm and trying to take it all in. I decided to just ask straight out.

"Gary, what the heck ARE you? You look like you stepped off a time machine from half a million years ago, you're even dressed for the part, you live in a cave -- yes, a very nice cave, it has all the amenities including hot and cold running surgery, but it's still a cave -- and then you've got computers and god-knows-the-fuck-all technology like I've never seen anywhere! Are you really a caveman, or are you some kind of alien?"

Gary smiled down at me.

"Both."

Next Part

[renbear]

"Veni, Vidi... Vetinari."

<3 <3 <3

[tattcub]

I am enjoying this one...

I have a suspicion about our Caveman friend here....

TC

[tekuno]

Okay, after a day in which the water gradually crept further and further across the basement floor (there's a drain at the lowest point, but even with the sump pump going nearly continuously the water was still building up) it looks like things are starting to go back to normal. The pump is only going off sporadically now, and the water never actually got beyond puddles (and I made sure to have the walls built with mildew-resistant drywall, and used anti-mildew primer, when I was fixing up the basement, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem once things dry out) so I'll just have to do a bunch of mopping... and carry everything back downstairs. Could be a lot worse. Let's say the next part will be up no later than Monday.

Phew!

[bikebot2100]

I understand about the delay. I live in Chicago. so much rain they actually let the Chicago River empty into Lake Michigan like its supposed to. I'm excited that you promise to have the next installment to us soon. thanks.