Chapter three: The adventures of Rita
– Part one –
“What do you mean my little boy can’t play with the gamma-ray-gun!? You let those needle-mouths use them, and my son is so much more smarter than they are!” Rita angrily exclaimed.
“They’re basically semi-sentient fish! My son is a true-blood Terran! How dare you deny him his toys!”
Klrri, the quartermaster, blanched at this. Not only was this Terran screaming at him in his own armory, but Xenophobia was pretty much extinct in the Alliance.
The few individuals that displayed it were not only frowned upon, but quite quickly taken aside for a talk, lecture, or at times some psychological evaluations.
“Well, councillor, first of all – I mean no offence – but your son is barely more than a toddler, not a highly-trained soldier with years of experience handling extremely dangerous weaponry. He could seriously hurt himself or others, if he would be handling a gamma-ray-gun, or any other weapons in my armoury. Secondly, calling the Korlags needle-mouths is an extremely offensive term for them, and I would seriously caution you against doing so where a Korlag can actually hear you. They’re not the most forgiving of crewmembers.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about those needle-mouths! They’re not Terrans, so they’re dumb and beneath us, and so are you, you scaly chicken! Now, are you going to give my son his toy back, or am I going to have to talk to your supervisor!?” Rita screamed.
“I know the captain, I do! He’ll be extremely upset when he hears how you discriminated against my son!”
Klrri felt himself get very, very stressed at this. He was already having a bad day due to a newly acquired crate of power-cores that had turned out to be counterfeit, and completely useless.
Usually, when a Rlep felt stressed, their colleagues knew enough to leave them alone to calm down, or at least understand when the Rlep had to make a hasty exit and find a quiet spot to hide in for a bit.
This time, though? Klrri felt more and more tempted to fight every single instinct he had to get away from this walking stress-bomb.
“Well?” Rita demanded, as her pigment turned red and her voice took on an almost painfully high timbre, further exacerbating Klrri’s frustration and stress levels.
“Am I going to have to talk to the captain? Is that what you want? Hmm? Over those stupid needle-mouths? Are ‘they’ worth the ass load of trouble you’ll be going through?”
She poked Klrri in the chest with a finger, then looked at it, made a face and wiped her finger on her skirt.
A strange calm came over Klrri, as his stress-levels peaked.
It would take him a while to regenerate, probably at least five cycles or so, but it would so be worth it.
“I’m sorry,” Klrri said as his eyes glazed over, “But I’m afraid th-“
That was as far as he got, before gently exploding himself all over the screeching Rita and her crying five year old son.
Sure, he would most likely get into a lot of trouble with his supervisor for this.
But not for the next cycle or five.
– End of part one –
– Part two –
Rita sat in the mess-hall, angrily staring at her iced triple-caramel no-foam soy latte with extra cinnamon. These damned protein-sequencers could never ever get it right.
“Hey! Does anyone here know how to fix these stupid sequencers? They keep getting my order wrong!” she yelled.
A few heads turned towards her, and as a friendly Terran ensign was about to stand up, one of his tablemates covertly reached out, and pulled him down.
“Don’t bother Brad, no matter what you do, it won’t help. Especially not if she’s in a mood.”
Brad looked confused, but didn’t try to get up again. He was new here, so if his superior Lirrip says stay put, staying put it is.
“I see how it is, you’re all too dumb to fix a protein-sequencer, is that it!?” Rita exclaimed, not having noticed a very large, almost monstrously bulky Korlag approach her.
“What seems to be the problem, councillor?” he asked in a rumbling voice.
Rita suppressed a yelp, jumping back a few inches.
“Well, uh, this stupid machine can’t get my order right!” she said, fairly flustered.
The large Korlag, Dugllg, tilted his head, making sure to look as kind and polite as he could, as he was already towering over the Terran councillor.
“It’s a protein-sequencer. It can, literally, make anything in the known universe, as long as it gets the proper instructions and sufficient power. Why don’t you show me what you do, and tell me where it goes wrong?” he said, looming slightly over the steadily more red-pigmented Terran councillor.
“I, ehm, I input my order. Like this. ‘Iced soy latte, no foam, triple-caramel, with extra cinnamon, with the ice on the bottom’ and, look! It always gets it wrong!”
As far as Dugllg could tell, all Terran foodstuffs looked and smelled the same: Absolutely disgusting.
“What’s wrong with it then? Is the taste wrong? Is the structural balance of the drink corrupted? Is the temperature incorrect?”
“No!” Rita said, while managing to get even more red, “The ice isn’t on the bottom! I specifically ordered the ice to be on the bottom, not on top!”
Dugllg blinked with all four of his eyelids in slow succession. Did this Terran woman really just .. ?
“Councillor,” he said, “Ice floats in a lot of liquids on pretty much every planet of every race in the entire Alliance. If the ice sinks, it’s most likely not the ice you wanted, or not the drink you wanted, and you should be very, verrry worried about what is actually in your mug. Unless of course you’d like a hefty amount of alcohol in your, what was it, ‘latte’?”
He cocked his head the other way, as he could smell her confusion grow. Then, remembering a certain event a cycle or two ago, he bent slightly towards her.
“But even dumb needle-mouths know better than to drink on the job, now don’t we.”
Slowly smiling widely, revealing his numerous long and almost translucent rows of spike-like teeth, he sauntered away from the councillor.
A few tables away, Lirrip surreptitiously pointed one of his thumbs at the Terran councillor, who was radiating irritation, hatred and embarrassment.
“And that, dear Brad, is why we don’t bother. We leave it to those who can handle that level of stress, like our friend Dugllg.”
Just on the edge of his hearing, Brad could hear the councillor mumble “..I still think the ice should be on the bottom.”
– End of part two –