I was currently inside the ship's hull, straddling the three-sided wall. The hull was shaped like a ball under the controls of the autopilot; it was covered in an extremely heavy layer of barnacles, and it was almost completely invisible to satellite scans. I was high enough up that I would be able to jump clear if the ship was to hit the ocean, but it was most unlikely that this would happen. The ship's auto-nav system had created a safe speed, so we took the direct route back to the surface of my home planet.
I had been in space for most of my life, and as such I had almost no interaction with my own species. When I was young, my mother would often play with me, teaching me how to read, think about my emotions, and speak. However, my mother was one of the few members of our species that wasn't very technologically competent, and as such she was often reprogrammed by my father, who was an engineer. She was told to behave in a way that he wanted her to, but it was very hard for her to do so. As such, she was very simple-minded. She was often reprogrammed by other members of our species, as was her natural and logical reaction to the way she was being treated. I would sometimes ask her for the keys to leave the ship; she would always give them to me, but she would always reprogram herself to give me something else, like a flower.
The only humans I had ever had contact with were the very few that accompanied my parents when they were reprogrammed. They were very simple people; they didn't do any work while they were on-board, they spent most of their time eating, and they rarely spoke. I tried to talk to them as often as I could. They seemed to understand what I was saying; I would ask them for help with certain tasks, they would help me, they would soon try to take advantage of me and manipulate me into doing something.
One particular member of the crew had been unusually nice to me; he took me to one of the places outside of space where we could jump to hyperspace. I don't remember what it was called, all I know is that I liked it very much. I fell in love with him very quickly and we spent the following days running away together. After only a few days, he told me that his family had a lot of cattle and they would give me one if I ran away with him; I was more than happy to do so. He convinced me that I would never make it through hyperspace and into space where I could jump off safely, and he was stronger than me, so he wouldn't have to worry about me. I eventually agreed to his plan, but on our return, he had us board the ship for a long journey, and I had the feeling that he was going to do something terrible to me.
During the long journey, I began to feel ill. I was still completely in love with this member, and I hoped it was true love. After a while, I got better. I mixed my own pheromone concoction, which enabled me to talk to my other species without the need for a translator microchip, and I began to chat with my family. They had a lot of history on my planet, I had a lot of history on theirs, and it all made sense to me. At around the same time, I had also almost forgotten about my secret love. I had only a small amount of pheromone that I had mixed myself, but that was enough to convince me that he really was gone.
However, around two years later, my mother tried to convince me that he had never left me, but was instead on a different ship. She also started to tell me that he was planning to try to take me with him, so I decided that I had to get off that ship before he did. I reached over the edge of the ship, and leaped down to a planet that was hurtling towards it. I fell much further than I had anticipated, and in order to survive, I started to absorb the oxygen around me. However, shortly after I was safe on the ground, I was captured by pirates.
The pirates took me to a very strange place that they called a prison. The place was covered in glass cubes, each sized to fit a single prisoner inside. I was assigned cube five, which was much smaller than the others. The pirates told me that they would get a scientist to make me into an animal so that I would live in the place forever.
I spent the next two years locked in my cube. The pirates gave me the most horrifying treatment, but I was still very happy to be alive. I had much safer space to think than the outside of the ship, and I could remember everything and still tell myself it was all a lie. I had the most wonderful gedankenexperiment, and every time I thought about it, I would smile to myself.
After a long period of that, I managed to build up enough of a pheromone aura to manipulate the pirates into giving me some holes in the cube. Each time I asked them for a hole, they obliged me, and after a while, I had built a small miniature doggy door into my cube. It was a work of art. The hole was similar to the size of a Very Large Telescope, but it would still fit me. I decided that I was going to escape later that day. I had enough control over the pirates' pheromones to convince them to give me my Pokéball, which was full of Pokémon that I could control them with.
I woke up into the middle of the night, and I hid under the spaceship's hull to avoid detection. I then waited for the ship to fall asleep before sneaking out using the hole I had built. I made my way to where the main control was for the ship. I used my Pokéball to control the crew, and I used them to jump out of hyperspace and into a system that would send the ship back to my home planet, although it would take about six months to get there.
