Chapter 10

Preliator's life and legacy had just begun anew. He awoke with a headache of an intensity matched only in pain by the experience of having Ghaleran Omni energy injected into him. He mentally corrected himself on that point however; he had never actually had the energy treatment. Nor had his true name ever been Benjamin Powell; it had always been Preliator Acer. Ben was just the name that his family had decided to call him in public, when they were around humans. Obviously the name Preliator was not the most common name for a natural-born United States citizen.

Preliator looked around, barely able to move his head without causing a burst of even more extreme pain. He immediately noticed the four electrode appearing devices attached to his forehead, along with the four wires trailing from them. He reached up and plucked the electrodes off, the pain disappearing at once. Much better.

He slid slowly off the metal table he had been laying on, surveying the various electronic devices around him. Obviously, he was in some type of laboratory. From the configurations of the computers nearest to him, he guessed that it was a Liodammian laboratory, which would explain the fake life he had just been through. Liodammians, unlike in the dream world they had conjured for him, were very intelligent conquerors. They probed the minds of the enemies they were about to attack, discovering military secrets, and putting them through artificially induced scenarios to see how they would react. Of course, they would have never expected any other intelligent species on Earth except for humans. Finding Preliator would have come as a shock to them. Probably why they had let slip to him in the dream world that he was an alien; they wanted him to explain it to them. Unfortunately for them, he had been conditioned upon birth to keep a part of his identity and memory sealed off; the part that would identify him as an extraterrestrial. Even under the most heinous forms of torture available, he would never reveal that he was a Quevian- a non-corporeal being that could assume basically any corporeal shape that it wished.

Preliator's "locked" section of memory slowly returned to him, and he remembered that he had just gone to sleep one night like normal, and had woken up inside of the dream world. They must have tranquilized him before connecting him up to their machines. Too bad; if he had even had a split second of consciousness, he could have transformed and dealt some serious damage to these assholes. He was about to formulate a plan to get out of whatever the hell he was inside of when two Liodammians burst into the room.

He nearly laughed. Liodammians look exactly how they describe themselves in the dream world; three sharp legs and all. Except that they were barely a meter tall. Both of these tiny guards held plasma beam guns, and still managed to look entirely non-threatening.

And they looked even more non-threatening when they were suddenly faced with a massive brown bear. With one swing of his arm, Preliator had thrown the Liodammians into the wall, where they crumpled and did not rise again. He smiled as he shifted back into his human form, and headed out into the hallway. Maybe no alarms had been triggered. He might be able to just walk out of this place without further trouble.

A plasma beam chose that time to impact Preliator in his gut. He toppled backwards, a smoking hole in the black shirt he had morphed onto his body. It took him less than three seconds to repair the damage, a shimmer passing over the wound before it liquefied and re-solidified back into human tissue. He quickly rolled back into the laboratory, grabbing one of the unfortunate guards' guns before he stood up. He pressed himself against the wall, firing four beams down the corridor without looking out of the doorway. From the high pitched scream he heard, he assumed he had hit his assailant.

Preliator slowly peaked out into the corridor, looking around. One dead Liodammian was lying on the ground, and no one else was in sight. It didn't seem right though; he had figured out by the size and shape of the corridor that he was in a Liodammian ship. There should have been guards rushing to capture him the second they realized he was going to escape. It didn't make any sense.

Well, if it was a trap, there was nothing he could do about it; he wasn't about to just wait around here and do nothing. He briefly thought of just assuming his natural Quevian form and phasing through the hull of the ship, but he couldn't move all that fast through space. Since he could have even been in an entirely different solar system than Earth, he didn't want to take the chance of getting stranded out here. So, the best idea would be to steal a small craft from the hangar of this ship.

He flew down the corridor (quite literally as he had just turned into a pigeon), heading towards what he hoped was the aft of the ship, where the hangar might possibly be located. He didn't get very far however.

There was a loud hiss in front of Preliator as a door slammed down. He quickly reverted to human form, looking around. Another door slammed down behind him. He was trapped... or at least his enemies thought he was trapped.