A Vast And Endless Sky 5

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit but there's still a lot to see when you're in a new place. Comments, etc below please!

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The canteen was not far, but Thassiter ended up letting Rees ride him all the way there. Rees was still tired on top of hungry, certain he barely slept three or four hours in the Shiny Egg. The scales on Thassiter’s back were quite warm like the rest of the ship, but he didn’t hate the warmth, given he had no clothes on. Pressing into the large flat scales was unusually comfortable, if a bit firm. But the subtle life-sounds of a warm body beneath him were so soothing that Rees ended up falling asleep again.

When he woke up, staring up at the overhead lights, he was laying on a flat cushion of some kind, though the smell was much the same. He wondered why the smell was so distinct when suddenly the walls around him moved, and Thassiter’s face peeked down from above.

Rees was suddenly aware his sheath had given way as he slept, leaving him with a halfway erection, and he squeaked in painful embarrassment, covering himself up with his tail in the most obvious middle-schooler-manner.

Thassiter, for his part, didn’t actually seem to notice or care.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he said. “That is good, I didn’t want to discard the food I’d selected for you.” Then he turned his head upward and spoke something in that combination gutteral-and-sharp sounds that comprised the ssarith language. Within moments, three other ssarith peeked down into the cavity where Rees and his embarrassment laid.

Rees’s head felt so hot, between the shame, anxiety and terror, that the air and warmth of Thassiter’s scales hardly registered anymore. They were all so massive, looking and observing him like he was in some kind of petri dish.

They all had the same black eyes as Thassiter, though the slits where their pupils were shone a different color each—yellow, blue and white. Their heads were all different shapes, too—different sizes of scales, shapes of the nose, but more colorfully patterns on their hoods. Those ranged from large false eyes to ridges and rings like topography maps to simple blotches of subtle color. They all flitted their tongues like they certainly had not gotten enough of the smell while he was passed out.

“Are you all right to sit up?” Thassiter asked.

“I-I guess so,” Rees said, despite how conspicuous he felt.

“Let me help you.”

“No, no, I got it…”

Rees climbed to his paws—his tail still tucked awkwardly under him, and stretched his legs, pushing on Thassiter’s side for support. Despite knowing all of the eyes on him, especially with the ssarith clearly talking about him in their own tongue, he managed to get the blood flowing until his erection had mostly retreated.

“Rees,” Thassiter said as he was occupied, “These are my peers, Assußar, Trssl, and Sþor.”

“Nice to meet you guys,” Rees said, making absolutely no attempt to pronounce the names.

Then looking up at Thassiter, and noticing him in conversation with the others, Rees climbed up, all the way onto the table that they surrounded—low for them, quite high for a montrose. Peeking his head over the lip of the counter, he found a long tray with small, rather haphazard dollops of food along its length, each one as big as his head. It was the only thing on the table.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” Rees asked, looking up.

“We’ve already eaten,” Thassiter explained.

“I’d feel kinda awkward just eating by myself in front of your friends…” He eyed the pile of other ssarith. From up on the table he could see their tails piled over one another in the gel-padded booth, like a pile of rope on a ship’s deck.

“It is all right,” Thassiter explained. “We only eat once every two cycles on average. It is common to observe only one eat at a time while lounging.”

“Well, if you insist…”

Aside from the initial embarrassment, and the knowledge that these things could probably crush him in a single swipe of their claws, marching in front of the enormous reptiles was almost exciting. The way they just passively took him in, made no attempt to touch his tail like so many females, he almost felt respected, if more than a little like a zoo animal.

He squatted down to get a better look at the ‘food’ in the low light, expecting it to be some organic garbage, but it appeared like they did in fact try to identify things that he could actually eat. The combinations, however, left something to be desired.

“This is bacon, right?” he said, pointing at a slab of meat bottoming a pile.

“I believe so,” Thassiter said. “The cooking program attempted to reconstruct your foods from our observations.”

“It’s underneath a pile of pancakes covered in whipped cream.”

“Yes.”

Rees pulled the slice of meat out from under the stack, finding it free of sweetener but nevertheless overly thick like a steak, and still burned to a crisp.

“Is it not any good?” Thassiter asked with an inquisitive rise of his scales. He looked over at the dark-colored Sþor, who quickly made notes on a flat featureless computer, using his thumbs in place of the dual-paddles.

“There might be some useful meat in the center of this, but this isn’t how you prepare bacon.”

The ssarith consulted with one another in quite emotive tones for several moments as Rees picked at the slab of meat with his bare paws, finding it just too tough to tear apart.

Thassiter asked, “Then can you explain what ‘burn it to a crisp’ is supposed to entail?”

“It’s just an expression!” Rees said. Being male, he knew a thing or two about cooking simply because it was expected of his sex, like wearing makeup. In fact, he considered himself a disaster in the kitchen, but he could at least cook bacon!

“Look—this cut is supposed to be sliced thin. Like, two millimeters thin. It’s the part of the mok where the meat is most marbled, with the fat cutting through the muscle. You want to cook it well in this case because it gets crisp. Not… actually burned.”

“Crisp meat,” Thassiter said, tapping his talons on the tabletop. “Interesting.”

“Do you not cook your meat or something?”

“Oh, we do. But I will admit, refinement in our cooking is very different from yours. Our cuisine focuses most on the outer fragrance, because we do not chew our food like you.”

Rees tilted his head. “You don’t?”

“We do not have teeth.”

Rees had noticed, but he hadn’t put the facts together. In light of that, the ruined meat was an admirable attempt. He left that aside and looked for a way to eat the pancakes instead. “Um… utensils?”

Thassiter blinked—an unusual gesture, given his thin eyelids closed sideways. “Are those required? We thought it may have been redundant.”

“For some—you know what, nevermind.” Rees was getting very hungry and he just pulled a pancake off the top of the stack, finding it dry enough to hold one he scraped off a good option of the whipped cream to the next underneath. Rolling it up, he took a bite—then spit it out. “Gys, what did you do to this thing!”

“I do not understand. The recipe we used was followed exactly. Eggs, sugar, milk, flour… oh dear, was the milk bad?”

Rees shook his head, spitting half-chewed bits onto an empty portion of the plate. “No, that’d be obvious if you did. It tastes… coarse and springy, and like there’s almost no flavor…” He looked up at Thassiter. “What kind of flour did you use?”

“The ingredients were prepared the normal way, taking the raw materials and refining them until they were usable.”

“So you started with raw wheat?”

Thassiter nodded his head in an exaggerated style.

“Did you huskit?”

Thassiter blinked again, and got into another heated debate with his peers as Sþor wrote everything down.

“Are you just using me as a science experiment?” Rees asked. “Because I felt a bit like one to start but now the evidence is overwhelming.”

“My apologies,” Thassiter said. “It was the condition that my lord insisted upon if we were to keep you.”

“If you were to keep me? Like, a pet?”

“Better a pet than a lab animal.”

Rees’s tail sank.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the montrose study lab would treat you just as nicely. I just figured, since your arrival was unexpected, it would be better if you were to become familiar with one face rather than be passed by many.”

“Well, I guess so,” Rees said, his ears lowered. “At least you’re showing concern and not trying to, like, poison me.”

Thassiter reached in and very gently pushed Rees’s chin up with the blunt side of his talon.

“I apologize again, that might sound rude. But you aren’t an animal, you are a sapient being. You are not a pet, you are a…” he tried to think of something to compare it to. “You are to become my thane, and I your lord.”

“So I’m still beneath you,” Rees huffed.

“That is not what I mean to imply. The thane-lord relation is a special one among the ßarith. It is not greater or lesser than a relationship with peers, but it is one of understanding. While I will require services from you as part of this arrangement, it is my duty to see your needs are met and not overstep your comfort more than is required.”

“So, like… a friend?”

Thassiter thought about this for a moment, then said, “That is not the right word, but from what I know, your boss-employee relationships on Ar are not so suitable as I am trying to imply. So… yes, let’s go with friend.”

Rees smiled a little. From Thassiter’s expression, he got the feeling that the giant alien was trying to couch his words without promising too much—which was fine. Thassiter still needed to show a lot more such understandings before ‘friend’ was really on the table, but just the possibility alone made Rees almost happy, in a way. At the very least, less anxious, knowing he wasn’t going to be locked in a cage.

“Well, at least the whipped cream tastes fine,” Rees said, taking a large scoop with his paw and licking it. “Hardly a meal, but you got that part right.”

“Yes, it was made with the same fresh mok milk.”

Rees paused, and looked at the cream in his paw. “…Mok milk?”

“We had the mok available. Is that a problem?”

Rees looked up to Thassiter’s expectant expression, then down at the cream again, made from the milk of an animal that ate most everything, he could suddenly start tasting subtle… flavors that weren’t supposed to go in dairy.

He shrugged, and licked the rest up anyway. “Eh, close enough.”

—

As they left the canteen, passing through an external hallway that ringed the ship, Rees wanted to stop and take a look out the window that overlooked Ar.

“This is not really a window,” Thassiter said. “There are some real observation windows on the lower deck, this here is just a screen that shows an external view.”

But the resolution of the enormous screen was still so fine, and the surface cool enough to the touch, that it still felt entirely real, like there was just a single wall of glass between Rees and the vivid blue edge of the globe below. Clouds obscured most of the continents, but Rees could just make out the western coastline of Margald, and an expanse of the Sishuchan Desert. Cities cast in nighttime shadow sparkled with lights, visible from even so many hundreds of kilometers away. The cool blue looked so inviting he could almost taste the fresh water and the salty air.

“You could show anything here,” Rees said, dragging a finger around the curvature of the world. “Why show an exterior shot?”

“Because it’s beautiful,” Thassiter said, and he left it at that.