"So, that's a Xala!"

I think I have come to the first few of a great many surprises in this little adventure that I didn't want in the first place. They moved me into another room that they'd outfitted for humans, so that I'd be more comfortable. I'm still surrounded by metal walls, but they thought to put some woven rugs on the floor, and somehow they got hold of a rather comfortable bed.

But my first surprise came when I looked out the windows in the corridor as we went to the room:

See, I decided to take a glance out the window to see how far up we were, but when I looked down, the ground was so far away that the trees in the forest below looked about the size of my left pinkie toe! And as I leveled my gaze, I saw a cloud out the window. Now, trust me, I'm from the mountains, so I've been above the cloud once or twice, but we weren't just above this cloud, we were flying high above it and coming close to a higher cloud layer. I stopped dead in my tracks and my guide, the same weirdo that talked to me earlier, stopped with me.

Anyway, he explained that the facility I was in, and most of the housing facilities on Jed, were suspended in midair with some sort of anti-gravity system. He said he'd show me where the system is when we started the trip. (He said something about a ring with crystals.) Anyway, I caught my breath and got to my room, which itself has a massive window. I gazed out there for a bit to get myself used to the idea, and then a patch of cloud moved away, and I saw my second surprise.

Up in the sky was a huge object that looked a bit like pictures I'd seen of Jupiter, though not quite. Something about the bands was different. It was many times the size of a full Moon back on Earth, and I just stared at it up there for a moment. The weirdo pointed and said, "That is Coaxta." (I really don't understand the spellings they make me use: it sounded like "hyo-akh-tah".) Anyway, he continued to explain that Jed wasn't really a planet, the way we define it. It's a moon of this Coaxta, which is always in the sky because Jed rotates at the same rate it revolves or some such thing. (He said something about orbits and gravity but I didn't really understand it all.)

I looked for a few minutes until my guide left me, then I decided to close the window the way he showed me. There's this funny purple crystal in the wall that you focus on and it just does what you want. There's another one rigged up to the ethernet card on this laptop that they told me would send the signals to another one rigged to a router back on Earth. Anyway, the sky was really beautiful with all the clouds and that big planet up there, but I just thought I'd get used to the idea before I looked again.

The third surprise of the day, which almost have me a gigantic heart attack, and which made me dive for my laptop later to get it posted was yet to come. I'd just got off the pot. They'd put a toilet in my room "for my convenience", but I just kinda thought that was just them being odd and not realizing that it might remind people a prison cell. But as I zipped my pants and went to wash my hands, this creature came into my room.

It looked for all the world like some sort of dragon or dinosaur, with scaly skin, a sort of funny-shaped beak, and two folded wings where its arms should be. I can't write down precisely what I screamed, but it was along the lines of "There's a pterodactyl in my room!!" screeched at the top of my lungs.

Of course, the weirdo rushed in looking for whatever a pterodactyl was, and then started talking to the dragon thing in his own language. After he talked and the creature answered in a squawking, parrot voice, they both looked at me, tilted their heads up, and made a birdlike noise that seemed to signal a kind of epiphany. "I am sorry. I have made a terrible error of protocol."

He explained to me that he, the weirdo I had met first, didn't resemble the actual Xala. Apparently, he was a special one, what they called a yela'kaja (ye-lahk-kad-ja), which they told me means "the one that talks to aliens". It was hard to follow the explanation, but it seemed that he'd taken some sort of DNA samples on Earth and used some sort of machine to make himself look like a human, which explained his gender-ambiguity a bit. The creature, that dragon thing that came into my room while I was washing my hands was the real Xala.

If I ever come back from this, I'll probably have some mental problems either from all the weirdness here or from a stroke I had in encountering it.