Episode 1: Nectar of the Gods
Chapter 1 – Deathworld 101
Scene 1: "Green and Mean"
-Lyra Vonn
The lecture hall reeked of disinfectant and wet ozone—an olfactory warning that either the vents were overdue for maintenance, or something had recently melted. Lyra Vonn stood beneath a chandelier of nerve-like crystal orbs that pulsed in bio-sync with the building’s ambient systems. It looked like a jellyfish mid-seizure. She didn’t like it. She never had.
She adjusted her collar, tapped her translator pin, and stepped forward onto the platform. A hundred alien faces stared back—some with eyes, others with sensory stalks or full-body echolocating membranes. The noise of the room softened as the translator pin synced across dialect clusters.
She cleared her throat. “Begin transmission.”
A soft chime confirmed it, and her voice now echoed gently, converted into dozens of harmonics, modulations, and colors, depending on who was listening.
“Welcome to the Cultural Xenobiology Exchange. I’m Lyra Vonn. I’m from Earth. Also known as Deathworld Three.”
A beat passed.
Then a ripple.
Tentacles froze. Wings flicked. One student's antenna coiled tightly around itself. Somewhere in the back, a gas-based being emitted a soft whooping trill.
Lyra raised her brows. “That’s not a nickname. It’s a classification.”
She tapped her pad, and the giant holoscreen behind her lit up with a color-coded galactic map. Earth pulsed in red, a bright spot surrounded by an alarming amount of warning glyphs.
“Category Three Deathworld. Chemically aggressive biosphere. Hyper-evolutionary cycles. Persistent multi-vector predators. Unstable weather. And, uh—”
She flicked the next slide.
“Plants.”
A few students blinked. One leaned closer.
Lyra nodded. “Yep. Plants. You might think of them as decorative. Passive. Benevolent oxygen factories. That’s not... how it works on Earth.”
The screen now displayed a high-definition slow-motion video of a Venus flytrap snapping shut around a drone probe. The trap pulsed, digested, and vibrated menacingly.
“This is Dionaea muscipula. We call it a flytrap. It reacts to electrical signals. Memory. Timing. Lethality. All without a nervous system.”
The next slide showed a tangled mess of vines spiraling up a tree, coiling with an almost predatory grace.
“Kudzu. Looks harmless. Grows a foot per day. Chokes ecosystems. Covers cars. Has partially eaten three barns in Arkansas. Some rural communities fight it with goats.”
A student from the Kirellian biocluster raised a translucent appendage. “The vegetation... competes violently?”
“That’s one word for it,” Lyra said dryly. She clicked again.
A stinging nettle in macro, needles glistening.
A gympie-gympie tree—Australia’s worst-kept secret—its leaves covered in microscopic hairs that delivered neurotoxic pain for weeks. The next image was a warning sign: DO NOT TOUCH. Beneath it, a ranger in full hazmat gear stood beside the tree, giving it the finger.
Someone in the third row whispered something. Lyra’s translator pin translated it as: “Does your world punish curiosity?”
She tilted her head. “Earth doesn’t punish curiosity. It rewards caution.”
A high-resolution time-lapse played: a massive rafflesia bloom opening like a wound in the jungle, stinking of rotting meat, attracting swarms of flies in frenzied spirals.
Another student murmured, “Your planet deceives to consume.”
Lyra arched a brow. “Only if you’re dumb enough to smell like carrion.”
There was a pause as that sentence propagated through dialect trees. Then: ripples of disgust. A few recording devices clicked on.
She smiled tightly. “I’m showing you all this to emphasize a key point: on Earth, survival isn’t about domination. It’s about staying alert. Constantly. Forever.”
A blinking alien—spherical, blue, and vaguely gelatinous—wobbled. “And this is considered… normal?”
“For us?” Lyra shrugged. “Yeah. These plants are part of everyday life. Some are medicinal. Some are invasive. Some are considered pets by particularly weird humans.”
There was a long silence as dozens of alien minds processed that last bit.
A feathered voice floated in: “You domesticate the dangerous?”
“Sometimes they domesticate us,” she muttered, more to herself.
She switched slides. A time-lapse of ivy tearing the bricks off a building. A child laughing beside it.
“That’s the flora. But to really understand Earth…” She tapped the pad. “You have to see what happens when you give this environment to animals.”
The screen dimmed.
She stepped back, her voice dropping just enough to change the atmosphere in the room.
“We’ll start with a small mammal. It’s not genetically engineered. It doesn’t have venom. It doesn’t even weigh more than twelve kilos.”
A clip flickered to life.
A small, scowling creature emerged from behind a bush. Short legs. Black eyes. White stripe. Unimpressed with existence.
Lyra crossed her arms. “Meet the honey badger.”
A hush fell. Even the floating echobeings stopped undulating.
“You’re going to want to pay attention,” she said.
And hit play.
Scene 2: “The Honey Badger Doesn’t Care”
-Lyra Vonn
“I’ve cued up the footage,” she said into the room, her voice cutting through the renewed shuffle of alien limbs and whispered translator adjustments. “But fair warning—this is where it gets weird.”
The screen flared to life.
A honey badger appeared in a clearing. Short, thickset body. Beady eyes. Expression: permanent scowl. Its fur bristled like uncombed static. A deep gash of white stretched across its back, stark against the dark, oily black of the rest of its body.
“No narration needed for this one,” Lyra murmured.
The video played.
The badger strutted past a lioness, completely unbothered, then shoved its head into a hollow log like it was late for a dinner reservation. From within the log came the hiss of something venomous.
“Oh no,” muttered a student in a raspy methane dialect. Lyra’s translator helpfully converted the gasp of dread into: “He enters the den of death?”
The camera zoomed in.
A puff adder coiled, struck—the fangs hit square on the badger’s snout. It jerked back, staggered a few feet… then keeled over like someone had cut its puppet strings. Limbs splayed. Tongue out.
Gasps and clicks echoed around the hall.
Lyra just crossed her arms and waited. “...Wait for it.”
Ten seconds passed.
The badger twitched. One eye opened. It rolled onto its feet, shook its head like a drunk shaking off a hangover, and promptly dragged the snake back out of the log to finish what it started.
A reverent silence filled the room. Then:
“…Is it possessed?” asked a feathered student from the Maelisi Compact.
“Do they reanimate their dead through venom symbiosis?”
“Wait—are they immune to death?”
Lyra leaned into the mic. “Nope. That’s just how they are.”
Another hand—tentacle—appendage shot up. “What about their young? Are they born with rage preinstalled?”
“Rage and sharp teeth,” Lyra deadpanned. “They’re not trained. They just… don’t care.”
The screen shifted again.
A new clip began: the badger now facing off against a pack of hyenas. They circled it warily. One darted in, snapping at its flank. The badger spun, snarled, and leapt—claws out, teeth gnashing, pure chaos wrapped in fur.
“Some Earth scientists call them ‘little devils with claws.’ Others go with ‘fur missiles,’” Lyra added. “Personally, I think of them as violence given shape.”
“Do they fly?” asked someone in the front row.
“No,” she said, and added under her breath, “Thank the stars.”
There was an intensity in the room now that went beyond curiosity. Several students were recording the footage on their own devices. Zurrg, hunched over his desk with antennae trembling, had abandoned note-taking entirely and now muttered into his translator like it was a confessional.
Lyra couldn’t help but notice it was the same behavior he displayed during last week’s segment on human warfare. Except this time, he was sweating—at least she thought it was sweat. His exoskeleton was... glistening.
“They're just animals,” she said quickly. “They live in holes. Eat snakes. Raid bee hives. They’re not magical warriors or biomechanical death units. They're stubborn. They’re wild. And no, we don't export them.”
The damage had been done.
“Do they have a queen caste?” someone asked. “Do they guard the nectar?”
“What nectar—”
A student raised two appendages. “The honey. From the hives. Is that what gives them their power?”
“Oh stars no,” Lyra groaned. “They raid hives because they like honey. That’s all.”
“But honey enhances aggression, yes?”
“No!”
A silence.
Then Zurrg stood.
Lyra’s stomach sank.
“Requesting permission to cite this species in my thesis,” he said formally. “Hypothesis: selective consumption of Earth nectar by an apex-forager species created a new class of predator immune to conventional mortality. Further hypothesis: this nectar may be a biochemical accelerant unique to Terran flora, and could serve as a catalyst for… transcendence.”
Lyra blinked. “You’re… kidding, right?”
Zurrg didn’t blink. His people didn’t have eyelids. “I will call the paper Mellivora Ascendant.”
A slow hand raised in the back of the room. The same Maelisi student who’d asked about possession. “…Can I try some of this nectar?”
“No!” Lyra snapped. “You can’t eat—”
“Does it come in paste form?”
“What?”
“For those of us without tongues.”
“No! It’s not a drug! It’s not a miracle! It’s just honey!”
The class had devolved into a murmur of speculation. She heard “nutrient-dense elixir,” “golden aggression enhancer,” and one chilling phrase: “Ritual ingestion before battle.”
Lyra rubbed her temples. “I am so getting a call from Admin for this…”
Then the door buzzed. Class dismissed.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
The students filed out like they were leaving a sermon, reverent and energized. Some were still whispering about “the honey beasts.” Others muttered excitedly about trial imports, cultural field trips, and one brave soul was googling “Earth wildlife permit loopholes.”
Zurrg lingered by the door, casting one last look back at Lyra.
His mandibles clicked in a way she didn’t understand, but his translator whispered it in her ear:
“They do not fear death. Perhaps they have never known it.”
Then he was gone.
Lyra collapsed into her seat, her head thudding against the podium.
“This is why Earth never gets invited anywhere twice,” she muttered.
Scene 3: “Buzzed”
-Zurrg
Zurrg’s wings twitched with anticipation. His stylus clicked uselessly in his trembling hand as he buzzed down the polished corridor, still high on adrenaline and half-formed hypotheses. He was supposed to be headed for the cafeteria—a perfectly programmed nutrient pod was waiting in Slot 72—but instead, he veered left.
The botany dome called to him.
It was a modest sphere of glass and synthetic atmosphere, tucked into the northern spire of the Athenza Prime Academy. Inside, exotic flora from over a hundred inhabited worlds bloomed in climate-controlled groves, humming under the soft UV pulses of artificial suns.
Zurrg entered, his chitin clicking quietly against the floor, mandibles flexing with curiosity. Earth’s section had been freshly stocked, the signs still tagged with warning glyphs. Even now, a cautious cleaning drone hovered nearby, wiping what looked like sap from a bench with tongs.
Zurrg paid it no mind.
His antennae twitched as they caught the faintest hint of something sweet. Not cloying, not manufactured. Something real.
There it was.
In the far corner of the dome, next to a squat eucalyptus tree and what he assumed was an Earth vine (its last label read: Do Not Touch – Vine May Bite), a small box-like structure sat humming faintly on its own stand. Transparent casing. Inside: a miniature hive, complete with honeycomb lattice, a few buzzing figures crawling between cells, and a barely visible sign that said “Apis mellifera – Observation Only.”
Zurrg crept closer.
Inside the hive, a bee danced.
A real Terran bee.
He knew this was probably unauthorized. He knew the dome monitors were active. But knowledge demanded action. Discovery required risk.
He reached forward.
The bee sensed movement and darted out between the slits. It flitted, once, in a lazy circle—and landed on Zurrg’s upper forearm.
A sting.
The pain was sharp, concentrated, almost ritualistic. Zurrg let out a mechanical chirp and staggered back. The bee tumbled to the soil and buzzed away, apparently disinterested in murder.
Zurrg stared at the welt forming on his exoskin.
And then—light.
Not literal, but internal. A glowing warmth coursed up his arm like fire and nectar had shaken hands. His legs lost rigidity. His mouthparts began vibrating in harmony with a sound he couldn't identify. Music?
Is this… emotion?
He fell backward into a bed of Terran clover. Lying there, gaze unfocused, he began to hum. Not speak. Not chirp. Hum. Like he was part of the universe’s engine.
Within moments, another student wandered into the dome.
“Zurrg?”
It was K’thel, a polydactyl amphibioid with translucent skin and an emotional regulation implant that was blinking red.
“Zurrg, your limbs are… not aligned.”
Zurrg raised a single hand and smiled—an act previously assumed impossible for his species. “Have you… have you ever felt the hexagon?”
K’thel blinked both sets of eyes. “The what now?”
Zurrg reached toward him like a priest offering communion. “The bee chose me. The nectar speaks.”
K’thel looked down, spotted the fallen bee, and did what any logical student would do in that moment: he touched the sting with one of his many fingers and instinctively licked it.
A beat passed.
K’thel’s feet lifted one inch off the ground.
He giggled.
Zurrg joined him.
More students began to drift in, alerted by an interspecies group text that translated loosely to: “Zurrg’s discovered an emotional field. Possible psychic event?”
A green-skinned triplet bonded triad entered together and immediately collapsed into synchronized laughter after licking a sap smear on a nearby leaf. A methane-breather sprayed vapor from his nose tubes and shouted, “I see time!”
It was chaos. Beautiful, sticky chaos.
By the time Lyra Vonn arrived, someone had managed to disassemble the hive casing. Two students were arguing over whether to paint their faces with honey or drink it directly. A third was reciting Terran poetry backward while climbing a trellis.
“Oh no,” Lyra muttered.
She shoved past a floating K’thel—who winked at her with uncoordinated pupils—and reached the wrecked hive.
“Zurrg! What did you do?!”
He turned toward her, eyes glassy, wings gently humming a dissonant chord. “Lyra Vonn. You… you were right. The honey doesn’t just come from the beast. It is the beast.”
“What?!”
“I am one with the flavor,” Zurrg whispered. “It is a truth medium.”
Lyra grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. “That’s not how biology works!”
Zurrg only smiled.
Behind them, a voice cried out: “I see the hexagonal heart of the galaxy!”
The hive shook. Another bee took off—only to be greeted by a dozen eager hands trying to be stung. Someone ran through the dome screaming, “FOR THE HONEY!” like it was a war cry.
Security bots entered, paused, and retreated again. The system had no protocols for “nectar-based spiritual awakening.”
Lyra stepped back, stared at the madness, and said, quietly, “I’m going to be expelled. Maybe extradited.”
A soft buzzing filled the dome, blending with humming voices and student laughter.
In the corner, Zurrg whispered to himself, eyes closed.
“The honey badger… doesn’t care. And neither do I.”
Scene 4: “Misheard. Misjudged. Mistake.”
-Captain Zarn
Captain Zarn sat cross-legged in the food court of Athenza Prime’s orbital commons hub, gently slurping kelp noodles through a straw. His left eye—mechanical, twitching slightly from a poorly configured firmware patch—flicked through multiple newsfeeds as he chewed.
His ship, the Grain of Ambition, was docked and charging. His smuggling permit was in order. His stomach was full. And most importantly, Zarn was bored.
That was dangerous.
He was scrolling past headlines like "House Jernok Sues Itself in Mating Dispute,” and “Shipwide Gravity Failures Linked to Budget Cuts” when something peculiar caught his glitchy eye.
“Deathworld 3 Exchange Presentation Goes Viral: Honey Badger Declared Apex Example of Terran Resilience.”
Zarn’s eye zoomed in. A still frame showed a scowling, furred creature lunging at something off-camera.
“Huh,” he grunted. “Ugly thing.”
He tapped the video.
A young human—female, unimpressed—stood at a lectern, gesturing to a screen as a small, aggressive mammal snarled at a snake. The translator voiceover filled in the blanks:
“...immune to venom... fights lions... doesn’t care...”
Zarn leaned back, slurping slowly.
The feed shifted: a clip from the same presentation showing alien students asking about nectar consumption, ritual honey acquisition, and—most intriguingly—a voice asking:
“Do they farm them for defense?”
Zarn’s good eye narrowed.
He switched feeds. The next article pinged into focus.
“Black Market Honey Surge: Earth Nectar Fetches Record Prices in Outer Colonies. Unregulated, euphoric, possibly metaphysical.”
He dropped his straw.
“Wait a minute.”
The word honey badger appeared again—this time in a forum thread where alien users debated whether it was a title, a caste, or a divine guardian.
Zarn’s processor kicked into overdrive.
Badger… honey... guardian...
He stood up abruptly, noodles forgotten.
“They’re not animals,” he whispered. “They’re keepers. Guardians of the source.”
He pulled open his data slate and began typing furiously. Earth import regulations. Faunal classifications. Agricultural loopholes. One line in particular stood out in the standard Terran import registry:
“Category C-6: Faunal Class – Minimal Restrictions. Non-endangered, non-sapient, non-invasive.”
“Minimal restrictions…” Zarn breathed. “It’s legal. Technically.”
He grinned. His sharp teeth glinted under the fluorescents. “I could corner the market. I could be the first.”
He flipped open a tab labeled Galactic Commodities Speculation, typed in Earth Nectar (unrefined), and watched the price tick upward.
Some poor trader had recently been detained trying to smuggle six jars through customs, singing hymns to “the golden drip.” That only confirmed it.
He needed a supplier. No—he needed the source.
“Not just the honey,” he muttered. “The guardians. The... badgers.”
He imagined it vividly: a small enclosure on the Grain of Ambition, housing a live honey badger. Possibly two. He’d construct an artificial hive, simulate the conditions, and harvest fresh nectar under their supervision.
Or whatever it was they did. Honestly, the details weren’t important.
The branding, though? That was gold.
Raw Wild Honey — Hand-Harvested by Terran Apex Beasts?
Zarn tapped into the registry again and began a procurement requisition request. Field Expedition. One (1) acquisition license. Destination: Earth – Sector Terra Nova, Southern Hemisphere preferred. Status: Independent Study – Faunal Trade Prospecting.
Approval estimated: 36 hours.
Too slow.
He copied the request, rewrote it under Emergency Biological Cultural Study, added three obscure citations to “nutritional diplomacy,” and refiled it.
Approval estimated: 9 hours.
Much better.
Across the commons, a holoscreen was now replaying Lyra’s presentation. The phrase “honey badger” echoed out again in the translators.
Zarn watched it one more time.
He didn’t see an animal. He saw opportunity.
Power.
Gold-tinted salvation in a jar.
His eye twitched again. “I’m coming for you, little monsters.”
A ping sounded from his data slate.
EARTH FAUNAL LICENSE PRELIMINARY GRANTED – PENDING CONFIRMATION OF PLANETARY ENTRY PERMITS.
He cracked his knuckles and let out a breathless laugh.
“Oh, this is going to be sweet.”
Behind him, another patron glanced up from their meal as Zarn muttered something about “weaponized nectar” and “enslaving bee-warriors.”
The patron quietly picked up their tray and relocated to another table.
Scene 5: “The Glitch”
-Lyra Vonn
The lecture hall had gone still.
The buzz of multilingual chatter, translator chirps, and awkward shuffling that always marked the end of her Earth Culture presentations had finally faded into the station’s distant hum. The last of the students had left nearly an hour ago. Not that Lyra noticed.
She sat halfway down the auditorium, elbows on knees, watching the dim projector screen pulse softly in standby mode like it was trying to breathe. The silence was nice, after everything. No questions about badger caste systems. No chants of “honey communion.” Just silence and light.
She rubbed her eyes.
The honey riot in the botany dome had earned her three official warnings, one direct call from Interstellar Health Services, and a snippy message from the Earth Consulate about “misuse of mythic terminology in biological pedagogy.”
She hadn’t even made it to lunch.
Lyra sighed and stood, walking back up the stairs toward the lectern where she’d left her datapad. Her boots clicked against the synthetic stone. The moment she reached the desk, the screen behind her glitched.
It was brief.
A flicker.
She stopped.
The projector—still linked to her pad—blinked once, twice, then dissolved from standby haze into something else entirely. The familiar blue-gray presentation background warped. Lines spread across it—six-sided, delicate. Like a honeycomb.
A hexagon appeared. Then another. And another. It wasn’t random.
It was... patterned. Organic.
At the center of the design pulsed a faint gold dot. It flared once, then again. Each pulse came with a soft tone—barely audible. Not music. Not static. A kind of rhythm.
Lyra leaned closer. The hair on her arms lifted.
She didn’t remember saving anything like this. No file names. No embedded glyphs.
The hexagonal pattern shifted again.
For a breath, the image on the screen looked less like a hologram and more like—
—stone.
Ruins.
Faint, overgrown shapes etched into something ancient. A wall. A temple? Symbols flowed across the surface in delicate arcs—more hexes, interrupted with swirls like vines coiling into geometry. Then the image glitched again. The pattern warped—like it was turning in on itself—and the screen cut to black.
“…What the hell,” Lyra whispered.
She reached for her datapad. It was on, yes, still synced to the projector. But there were no files open. No running applications. The media window blinked: Input Signal Lost.
She tapped the pad.
The screen returned.
Now it was back to her last slide: a freeze-frame of the honey badger gnawing on a bone, looking like it had just been kicked out of a bar fight and was planning to return.
But the pattern—those shapes, that pulse—was gone.
Lyra stared at the projector, then down at the pad, and back again.
Her fingers trembled slightly as she pulled up the system cache and scanned for anything unusual. A flicker in the signal log caught her eye. She enlarged the timestamp, located the anomaly… and paused.
The signal had been real.
Not local.
She scrolled further and found a spectral signature tagged with an old Earth frequency range—something used pre-Federation, pre-unification. It shouldn’t have been reachable. Certainly not from a Galactic Academy system.
She tapped the signal’s snapshot and zoomed in on the pulse pattern. The rhythm wasn’t random. She recognized it. Somehow, impossibly, she knew what it was trying to say:
Six in. One out. Repeat. Echo. Listen.
That made no sense.
But the feeling didn’t go away.
Her breath hitched as a memory surfaced—old and blurry, from when she was barely six. Her father, hunched over a weathered console in a forgotten Earth observatory, muttering the same phrase over a recording that had been deleted before she ever learned what it meant:
“Six in. One out. Listen to the echo.”
She shook her head.
No. It couldn’t be connected. It was probably just some cross-wired academic glitch. Or maybe one of Zurrg’s hive-cult fanatics uploaded a virus.
Still… she opened her holocomm and snapped a screenshot of the last clear pulse frame—the gold dot in the center of the ancient pattern.
She opened a secure channel.
To: Professor Elias Vonn (Father)
Subject: Weird projector thing
Attachment: img_HIVECORE_01.jpeg
Message:
Is this real? Because it looked real. It… felt real. And I think I’ve seen it before.
Call me. Please.
She hit send.
The screen dimmed again.
Lyra stood alone in the empty hall, staring up at the place where ancient geometry had bloomed just minutes before. There was nothing now—just the faint echo of the room’s ventilation system and her own heartbeat.
But in her chest, she still felt the rhythm.
Six in. One out.
Repeat. Echo. Listen.
And for the first time all day, the honey badgers didn’t seem like the most dangerous thing Earth had given the galaxy.
Scene 6: “The First Case”
-Gal-Com Customs Clerk (Minor POV)
The graveyard shift at Orbit Terminal 47 was a study in monotony.
Customs Clerk Harlan Jex leaned back in his chair, chewing the end of a stylus that had long since given up the ghost. His eyes drifted across the row of dim holo-panels glowing soft green with clearance codes and cargo scans. Nothing moved except for the occasional flicker of a flagged anomaly—a mislabeled container, a botched declaration, the usual.
He was halfway through his third cup of rehydrated coffee substitute (no caffeine, no soul) when the quarantine chime chimed.
It wasn’t urgent. More like a suggestion.
Jex sighed. “Let’s see what fresh idiocy you’ve brought me tonight.”
He tapped the notification.
Entry Flag: Merchant Freighter ‘Long Harvest’ – Dock 38B
Manifest Conflict: Organic Cargo (Unregistered Substance)
That sounded more interesting than the usual off-world produce smuggling. He flicked open the details.
A crate marked as “Botanical Samples – Apiculture Grade” had tripped the scanner. The attached scan showed six small glass jars—no labels, no barcodes—filled with a golden, viscous liquid. The kind of thing you’d find in a Terran farmer’s market, if said farmer’s market were trying to pass as a front for a cult.
Jex snorted.
Another click brought up the customs incident report. The accompanying video feed played in muted color.
The trader stood at the inspection desk, antennae twitching erratically, eyes dilated to the size of small moons. He swayed on his feet and kept humming some kind of melody—no recognizable tune, just a two-note loop that rose and fell like a heartbeat.
At one point he tried to lick his own antenna and declared, “The gold glows backward through time!”
Jex raised an eyebrow.
Inspector Note: Trader claims substance is “sacred Terran nectar.” Was observed speaking in hexametric rhyme. Seizure nonviolent. Detainee now asleep in holding. Hive motion minimal.
“Hive motion?” Jex muttered.
He looked again at the jars.
One of them was pulsing.
Not shaking. Not glowing. Just… pulsing. Faint, rhythmic, like it was breathing through the glass. He leaned forward. The scanner logged nothing biologically active. No heat signatures. No EM fluctuations.
Still.
He made a note in the file:
Confiscated honey exhibits low-frequency harmonic oscillation. Flag for future scan if more samples appear.
He clicked the classification menu and hovered over the dropdown.
His options were slim:
? Biohazard
? Nutritional Product
? Unregistered Pharmaceutical
? Religious Artifact
? Non-Essential Medical Concern
He shrugged and selected the last one.
It was Friday.
The form auto-submitted with a chirp.
Jex glanced at the camera feed again. The trader was curled up in the corner of the holding cell now, smiling in his sleep and occasionally whispering, “The hive sings through me.”
“Yep,” Jex muttered. “Definitely not getting overtime for this.”
He logged the file, printed a physical tag for the honey crate, and slid it onto the storage conveyor.
Behind him, the confiscated jar on his desk gave one final, subtle pulse.
Barely noticeable.
But the shadows in the room shifted—just slightly—as it did.
Jex didn’t see it.
He was already moving on to the next case: an illegal shipment of Martian fermentation spores hidden in ceramic mugs.
He yawned.
Somewhere deep in the customs archive, a new file was quietly stamped:
Incident 00001-A: First Recorded Response to Earth Nectar – Alien Subject
Classification: Closed.
