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Dirt, endless dirt. Pile after pile of blocky granules stretched on for miles beyond Talterra’s vision.  The ​An’gora ​ gave her little reprieve from her daunting task of shoveling soil. They were the cruel,  ruthless creatures that they seemed to be, with their ashen-mavelic xortas jutting out from their  crawkry necks and their devious, cunning witts encased within their malevolent, devlictal  craniums. She’d stumbled into this world only a few months ago, a lanky teen with no real  aspirations or ambitions. Now she was filled with a single-minded purpose, ​survive ​.  Drik’alkra, as its inhabitants seemed to have named it, was a small planet. Talterra wasn’t even  sure if it genuinely was a planet in the first place. Covered in ugly ice and awful dirt and encased  in a silvery dome, with little variety of life, Drik’alkra could be anything, perhaps a comet or dwarf  planet, possibly a ship of some sort. She didn’t much care. Knowledge no longer felt quite so  essential; it held little value so long as it did not pertain to dirt and its transportation.  Four months- or at least what she thought was four months- before, Talterra had gone out for a  drink on her homeworld of Iluise, and her curiosity had bested her. She’d stumbled, drunkenly,  from a glabellar to the Optics building. Then she’d hacked into their organization’s mainframe and  hitched a ride on an explorer pod, without a guide or training, out into the rest of the Andromeda  galaxy.   It had been pure chance that Talterra landed on that accursed space rock. Her fate was now no  longer in her naive, foolish hands. All she had left was remorse.  “Ac’ache shiv loregn” One of the An’gora stumbled past her.  Then, right before her eyes, materialized one of the elusive, graceful creatures of the strange  world. One of the ​Frelskells ​as the An’gora seemed to call them.   “Aleia feldun deskali?” Talterra sensed the Frelskells eyes on her back and started shoveling at a  faster speed.   So far as she could see, she was an anomaly in this world, an alien to the aliens. When she’d  arrived in the strange light of the rock’s three blue Lightgivers completely confused and delirious,  the creatures had merely stared at her in something akin to shock. Unwilling to pass up free  labor, Talterra had been shoved by her brute like captors into a pit with the rest of their underling  workers to shovel dirt into large piles with whatever tools she could scavenge. Why she knew  not.  They fed her a strange mulch like substance encased in a chalky paste. The flavor was so  foreign, Talterra could not even begin to describe it. The creatures seemed to make it out of  nothing, but it was edible, and it sustained her, so its origins did not matter. She drank the water  she mined from the dirt. Its quality was questionable, but hygiene and health were pointless  endeavors.   The world’s gravity was another anomaly. It seemed entirely manufactured. Throughout one work  period, the gravity seemed to shift; heavier in early hours and lighter in later ones,  Other than that, things were eerily similar to Talterra’s planet. The atmosphere, or the world’s  dome’s regulated conditions, were almost identical to those of her planet. Though she couldn’t  be entirely sure, and she likely never would be.   She felt fortunate that they’d yet to cut her open and examine her in a lab. Considering that their  technology was far superior to her planet’s and that they seemed to be even more confused by  her than she was of them, it was a miracle that she wasn’t chained to a slab of rock being  dissected like an unfortunate frog.  “Aleia feldun deskali?” the Freskell repeated in a haunting, dulcet tone.  “Trakta frtha. Se’e feltha dev run.” the An’gora responded in a seemingly hesitant manner.  “Eldeun feleush tiviali dega yele. Ale’e d’vrun anda An’gora. Delv’e ten.” the Freskell’s tone now  seemed almost warning; it glared at her again.  As the aliens continued to converse in their unintelligible language of harsh grunts and melodic  lilts, Talterra felt an impending sense of doom. For the first time since her arrival, she understood  the meaning of true panic.