Got nothing to say today.  I need to sleep like a sunuvabitch.  Zzzzzz.

Content Warnings:  Vomiting, Environmental Despair, Heartbreak, Inequitable Class System, Misogyny, Sci-fi Racism, Sex Work, Violence, Threat of Violence, Surveillance, Abduction, Drug Abuse, Self-harm, Slavery, Delusional Fandom Behavior, Abusive Relationship, Weapons, and Gun Threats.

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CENTENNIAL HILLS CONTINUES

by Bébé Mélange

Pep awoke in a terrible state.  His jaw could barely move, his face was half swollen, and a surprising amount of his body was in pain.  As part of his rejuvenation routine, he spent a lot of time with his personal trainer, and microdosed on human growth hormone.  He had faced greater physical challenges before, almost every week for the last several years, but somehow none of that had prepared him for this moment.

The room was dark and he couldn’t see the insect-like creatures racing over his skin.  He brushed them off frantically, and then took in the scene.  His jedi master was sitting on his bed with his back to the billionaire, a light source in front of him.  The lightsaber?  No, that was on the nightstand.  In fact, if he wanted to, Pep could walk right over and take it.

But if he did that – if he took the path of the Dark Side – he’d never get anywhere.  He had to admit, the Dark Side wasn’t completely unappealing to him, but there was no sith lord in sight.  The only person he’d ever seen with powers was Master Komber.  But what was he doing?

Pep stood quietly, not wanting to alarm the surly creature, and tread carefully in a wide circle around the foot of the bed to behold him.  The alien was using something like a butane torch lighter to heat a glass pipe, melting crystals within to produce an acrid narcotic smoke.

Suddenly, the komber noticed Pep and jumped in place, almost losing its pipe.  It dropped the lighter, which continued to burn, scorching the floor, and dragged the lightsaber into one hand with the Force, blazing it to deadly light.

“Grgkkk krdwok drzz,” it said, before putting the weapon away.  Then it nonverbally offered him a hit of the pipe.

“Will this substance awaken a sense of the Force within me?”  He didn’t hesitate, stooping to accept the sacrament.  Master Komber handed him the pipe and he took a medium depth drag, his lungs more shy than his will.  He instantly vomited, a white hot ripping sensation suggested there would be blood in the heap.

The komber vibrated with mirth and rose, waiting for the man to finish turning inside out.  Then it grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him toward a basin, where it brusquely hosed him off.  It didn’t allow him to get a full mouth of the nasty water, no matter how he gasped at it, twisting his head this way and that.

Then it hosed itself off, not letting its padawan learner move a muscle when he sheepishly feinted at anything that could wash the acid from his throat.

At long last, Master Komber left Pep to his own devices for a minute, and he hosed out his throat.  In the calm after the storm, he realized he was seeing wriggling sparks everywhere he looked.  Midichlorians?

Then the alien called out for him with a trumpet-like exhalation.  Pep ran to stand at attention.  Master Komber made him watch as it put on its footwear one at a time.  Were those black leather cowboy boots?  Of course not, but a remarkable resemblance to such.  It picked up a little hand mirror from the nightstand, and a tube of something.  Then it squeezed ointment onto its mostly bald head, and used that to slick down the sparse setae there, checking its handiwork in the mirror.

“Should I be..?”  Pep didn’t know what to do with himself.

Master Komber tossed the ointment and mirror down near him, and stood up.  It was clearly time to go somewhere.  Somewhere with slicked hair, leather boots, and lungs full of molten rock.  They stepped out.

 

Tmai nibbled mediocre ufbug puffs as offered, bought lidium suckers as offered, but merely pocketed them for ostensible later use, and generally paid the minimum fee to not get kicked out.  The crowd thickened, and sexy alien time began.  Erbinians didn’t need chairs and tables as much, and the fact the bar had so many of them should have been a hint it was catering to a more exotic element.  The diversity of aliens in the place was high.  Were they really all into all of the species on display?  The sexy ones moved among the crowd, offering light caresses and overpriced consumable commodities.  The house lights were lowered.

Then they saw it.  The slentous komber.  It was wearing much the outfit it wore in the poster, but as of yet, its central orifices remained concealed.  It attracted a lot of attention and a lot of weirdos laying down credits for a little taste of that slentous company.  Tmai couldn’t compete with their pocketbooks and bided their time, though they did intend, at length, to purchase a little of that company for theirself.

The being was easily the largest alien in the room, the only one close to justifying the height of the ceiling, and ten to twenty times Tmai’s weight.  It was the same green as the zigilous caste, but its dorsal and ventral surfaces were a lurid pearly violet color, with a variety of fleshy protuberances, all bedecked in shiny tassels and such.  Its face had a lot of mandible, all coated in glittery wax that it left on alien cheeks and shoulders in little streaks as it did the rounds.

At last, it was Tmai’s turn, and they weren’t surprised to find it was fluent in Ainavian, using four appendages to total the requisite number of fingers to convey the full meanings.

“Hey, sweet one,” it signed.  “You must be a space captain, hm?  What do you move?  Chemicals?  Must be terribly interesting.”

“I’ve heard your kind like the mental sciences.  Think you can figure me out, or is that just a stereotype?”

“Stereotypes don’t come out of nowhere.  I live down to it, I’ve got to admit.”  It caressed him with its spare appendages, oh so gently.  “I forget where Ainavians like to be touched.  Let me know if it’s too hot.”

Tmai waved their computer at its computer to transfer the typical number of credits for that kind of moment, as near as they could figure. “I admit, I’m not interested in hot, but I am interested in something.”

“Ooh, intriguing.  Did somebody tell you slentous kombers have what it takes to soothe the savage mind?”

“I don’t need therapy.”

“You look like you could use therapy.”

“Have you seen any zigilous kombers in here recently?”

Her hand signs became more choppy and terse.  “Would I work a place like this if I wanted zigiling?  If you see one, you can have one.  Leave me out of it.”

“Understood.  I had an uncontacted alien with me, and my zigiler ran off with it.  I’m losing sleep.”

“Baby, that is not a problem that I can help you with.  Sorry.”  It raised up to its full height, big violet rump slipping past Tmai’s face.

“I’d be terribly grateful.”  They waved their computer unsubtly.

“Not even worth it, sweet one.  Keep your credits.”

Tmai slumped.  Had the creature been honest, or would the zigilous komber appear?  They returned to checking the local net for rumors, but a hopelessness gripped them, a falling sensation.  A bouncer got the idea they were done spending money and started in their direction, which snapped them out of it.  They slid off of their seat and walked out with no need for brusquerie.

Outside a greenish rain began to fall and Tmai leaned their head against a soggy post, using it to shield their computer screen.  Passively waiting in a given location only worked if you had a surveillance team.  Tmai could be spending all their time on one street while the komber zigiled down the next block, just out of sight.  Public surveillance was publicly available, but there wasn’t a convenient way to cycle through all the feeds rapidly, and even if they could, they might miss a small detail on the small screen.

Societies throughout the galaxy generally reduced crime by reducing criminalization.  Most vices were legal, most services as well.  But there was still room for scum to fill in the cracks, and it did.  An open secret among Space Transit pods was that these things could be useful in their line of work, and the pod resource program had a useful AI buried in its recesses for just such a thing.  Tmai loaded it up, then signed at their computer’s camera.

“Find a privacy invader on Erbin 2.”

 

Scuzz became too weary to move and collapsed, crying little tears again.  The crowd pressed in to prod her, but the big man kept them all at bay, and had her brought close.  He issued commands to fetch her a huge cushion to rest upon, wet towels to wipe her clean, food, and water.  It wasn’t exactly living the dream, but it was restorative.  More importantly, it bought time in which Tmai or Snar might return, and save them all.  She looked pleadingly at the monsters, but didn’t even know what she was pleading for.  It wouldn’t be long before they expected her to sing again.

Night was drawing in, the skylights muted to a dull greenish-brown, then black.  Jdurtozh, Jdibitong, and Jdibitong’s main squeeze Googhi had kept her captive, only able to see Eliza or Shammy at a distance in glancing moments.  But the conversation had become at least a little interesting.  Googhi had brought out a holographic design computer which facilitated visual communication.  As long as they could imagine a way to represent what they meant to say, they could manipulate the three-dimensional light show to illustrate it.

Googhi gave Scuzz the, “tell me of your homeworld, Usul,” and she obliged, pushing around the lights to show a happy sun and trees, and herself walking with Pep.  She tried to demonstrate that Pep was gone and it made her sad, and felt pretty good about her efforts.  Pictionary win.

Then it was time for the reverse.  Scuzz asked Googhi about Erbin 2, and she pondered the question for a moment with her jewel-like front eyeball going unfocused and darting about.  Then she settled on a children’s book, summoning it with a quick net search.  Cheerful and simple holograms appeared, less crude than the customizable ones they had been using, and told of a world with near endless sea.

The shallowest reaches had aquatic forests and plains with great densities of life, crawling, swimming, drifting, or rooted, and swaying in the currents.  The happy little Erbinians used their tentacles to make tools, to cultivate their environments, build structures to keep them safe from elements, to kill predators and make life safer.  But the Erbinian cities had fewer and fewer organisms, and the cities grew and grew until there was no room left for anything else to live in the shallows.

All the while the deeps were exploited as well, with great trawling nets sweeping up all the organisms there to feed to the thronging masses of Erbinians in the shallows.  This culminated in a diagrammatic display of the variety of life, in thousands of differently colored and shaped forms, dwindling to only a handful of organisms.  A friendly Erbinian appeared to give the kiddies a little explanation of why that’s bad and sad, before ending on the hopeful note of the depauperate fauna beginning to slowly diversify again.  To the future!

Scuzz thought about her singing brussel sprouts and she knew with certainty they had been among the casualties, among the horrifying losses of the hobbesian war of all against all, and she felt even worse than before.  She collapsed and sobbed terribly.

High Jdibitong gave a disapproving glare to Googhi and stepped in.  He’d tried being nice with the Earthling, now it was time for a firm hand.

From behind walls of veils came Shammy and Eliza, looking a bit ill from a day of alien food and saltwater.  One of their guards caught up and made apologetic gestures at his boss.  “They just took off running and I don’t know why.”

“Scuzz?  Oh no!”  Shammy had come running because the young lady had begun to wail, and now they knew why.

High Jdibitong had put her into a golden cage, like a giant pet bird.

 

Tmai had posted a message to a cyber hangout for scumbags, where they used coded communication to do business, pretending to be nature enthusiasts.  The clever Ainavian AI knew all the jargon, so they didn’t even need to understand the slang they were using.  Privacy Invader needed immediately.  Willing to pay for speedy delivery.  An Erbinian named for an extinct organism in combination with a sex act responded, and after some direct communication, was on the job.  It was going to be expensive, and Tmai was already in the hole.  Their career was set back ages over this whole misadventure.  One busted stabilizer.

Paleosex told Tmai that if they had even rudimentary programming skills, they could have done it theirself – facing condescension part of the price they were having to pay.  Still, within a few moments, they had a street, and were headed that way.  In the wet, their borrowed Earthling garments twisted around their skin, and they wondered why they still bothered.  Maybe one in twenty aliens wore garments in the neighborhood.  Erbinian natives didn’t.  But the snakeskin pants had loops which held up the gunbelt, and it seemed more of a nuisance to wriggle out of the mess in that moment.

The gun.  They had to be very careful.  Pep had brought one as well – no doubt a similar weapon to the one that had punched a lot of holes in Snar.  Between that and his erratic behavior, and the komber and its weapon, who knew what would happen next?

 

Jdunazh had been out sick with spliz crystals again, but she heard Jdurtozh from downstairs was possibly angling for her job with the alien singer situation, and she’d need to power through the pain to show she was not easily replaced.  She fired a blue-green laser into her rear eye, where it could interact with her zenom canal and ameliorate the pain a bit, then she let herself into the new clinic.  The lights were low and nobody was in sight.

“Hello?  Dr. Snar?”

She felt an unsettling sensation in her legs, like the building was subtly throbbing, which took a moment to register as Ainavian music.  She didn’t have time for the spookshow and just charged right in with a brisk step.

Through the half-open door to the doctor’s quarters, she saw them sprawled out on a couch, a test tube loosely gripped in one hand, big eyes swimming with blobs of silver sheen.  They were naked, which Jdunazh understood was normal for them, but she couldn’t help but feel offended in the moment.

When Dr. Snar noticed her, they dropped the tube.  It bounced and spilled a few dubious drops between the floor tiles.  They flopped a moment in confusion, but settled back into a more relaxed pose.  “What did I do to deserve this intrusion, madam?”

“You took a job, Dr. Snar.  What have you consumed?”

“This?  That?  Nothing.  Don’t worry about it.  How are you?”

“Unamused.  I am Jdunazh, personal assistant to High Jdibitong.  How often do you feel the need to get high?”

“I’m not high.  Who said I was high?  You’re high.”

“Doctor, you’ve had more than enough time to rest since your arrival, and those creatures you brought with you have made quite a scene.  While there is nothing medically urgent that requires your services, I assumed you would want to know about your creatures.  Once I had been informed of the situation.”

“Are they dead?”

“No.  Why would you think they were dead?”

“Why would you think I’m high?  Who knows why anybody thinks anything?”

She tightened up.  “You know what?  I’m done here.  Enjoy your… whatever this is.”

“Thanks, Jdunazh.  Pleasure making your acquaintance.”

She was already gone, the only sign of her passing a faint perfume in the air, and the slight motion of the doors settling into place.

Snar remembered the situation vaguely.  The bgrudjh wanted Scuzz to perform for him?  If it didn’t involve sex or violence, Snar figured the Earthlings were getting off easy.  Give it another day, see how I feel.

But the memory stood there, hovering in the air above the swirling morass of their eyes, and refused to move.  In time, they would remember to feel guilty about it, but they weren’t there yet.

Snar cranked the beats and pondered mixing up another tube.

 

The rain was picking up into a low-key storm, but the air was too muggy and thick to really move.  The air pressure just jumbled around in place, the vapor in the air jostling like a crowd of boring ghosts commuting to ghost work.  Another lane of brothels and strip clubs and casinos and arcades, and combinations of one or more of the same.  There were not many people present, foot traffic outnumbered by the sexy creatures milling around outside the establishments, passing out handbills and adverts.

Tmai saw them at a distance and followed until they were at a darker end of the street, then crossed boldly to make their move.  “Logah!”  They had tried Corsimine and Palishaw in their first encounter; this time they used Megodite, which was more popular in another stellar cluster.  Who could say where this particular komber hailed from?

The zigilous creature turned in place slowly, and cocked a mandibular element in a sneer.  Pep recognized the gummy smack and pop of the Ainavian voice and shook his head as he turned to see the captain.

Pep spoke first.  “I can’t go back.  I have to do this.  You can’t understand.”  He was weary and sad, but devout.  Tmai was the voice of the devil, but a tender sort of evil.

“Beb.  You gum widh me.  Gum widh Scudz.  Is bad.  Blease?”  The green rain and dark of night washed the pink out of their shirt, everything clung to them like a starlet with no nipples.  Raindrops flowed over their infinitely black bulging eyeballs, tracing the outer contour of them in tiny slips of light.

The komber clicked and rasped in a language Tmai didn’t understand, and drew its laser sword.  Tmai drew their gun, and Pep drew his.  Sheet lightning hung between utility poles and thunder muted their words.

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