Wasteful creatures.
Bralix sauntered down the street in his shirt sleeves, his hands in his pockets, taking in the nocturnal urban traffic. Vehicles crawled in the streets, humans filled the sidewalks despite the late hour, and Bralix’s eyes scanned the oblivious humans with a rancher’s eye.
When Bralix had browsed the market on Gavora, he’d been disappointed by the general quality of the human breeding stock for sale. Generations of selectively breeding for superficial traits had produced a wide selection of human breeds, breeding for traits such as body type, size, athleticism, and skin and hair colour. Domesticating them had, in general, produced docile humans that sought out Nef’eal company and were easy to handle.
However, selectively breeding for other rare traits from an already limited gene pool resulted in humans with deformities that threatened their health and well-being. Sometimes, these deformities were even intentional. Humans with pronounced under-bites so bad that they struggled to eat normally; misshapen skulls that impacted their mental ability; miniaturised humans that were purposefully bred smaller and smaller until they were barely knee-high to a Nef’eal and needed surgery to remove extra teeth or to deliver their young. Dairyhumans with udders so large, they inevitably ended up with back problems, yet didn’t produce significantly more milk.
Even the cross-breeds that Bralix had seen at the market were unsuitable. The caged humans all had the broken, blank-eyed stare that left him cold; he didn’t want that in a pet he’d be training. There were Nef’eal who specialised in rehabilitating these rescues, but that was not what Bralix was shopping for.
Several humans were standing in line alongside a red rope strung between stanchions at an open door to a building. Loud music emanated from inside, making his heart thud heavily in time with the bass.
What drew him was the animated expressions of the humans waiting in line. Their eyes sparkled, and he could feel their energy in his veins. He stepped in line to study them. The translator symbiote in his brain followed their conversations, context filling in the words it didn’t know.
Their conversations fascinated him. Favoured topics among the females seemed to be mates and males they hoped would be their mates, their occupations, and other females. Females in line outnumbered males three to one, which suited his purposes; he would start with two or three females. Adding a stud would come later.
Right in front of him, a female on dainty, stiletto footwear stumbled as the heel snapped, her ankle wobbling dangerously, and she fell in Bralix’s direction. On reflex, Bralix caught and steadied her, and when she’d regained her balance, standing awkwardly on one unbroken shoe while the toe of her other foot touched the ground for balance, she smiled and looked up at him from under her lashes.
“Thank you,” she smiled flirtatiously, clinging more heavily to his forearm than needed to maintain her balance. “What lady doesn’t like being saved by a strong, handsome man?”
Bralix deliberately pried his arm from her grip and nodded, then deliberately looked away. She wasn’t what he was looking for; no use encouraging her attention. He didn’t want her to chase away other, more suitable females.
She slowly lowered her hands, and blushing brightly, she snagged the elbow of another female that had been silently watching this short exchange and hobbled away. His hearing, keen as ever, picked up a muttered ‘asshole’.From the context, Bralix didn’t think it was complimentary.
Sighing, Bralix moved forward.
When he finally entered the main room, the music surrounded him like a heavy, hot wet blanket, making his symbiote squirm in discomfort.
A number of humans clustered around a wooden counter. Behind the counter two humans, one male and one female, flitted about, serving beverages from various glass containers. Some humans took their drinks and left, returning to seating areas around the periphery of the room, while others stayed seated on raised seats to drink theirs and to socialise.
Movement near the end of the line of seated females drew Bralix’s attention.
This was the first female he’d seen all night that made him pause for a second look. She looked… healthy. A decent covering of flesh padded her body, lending enticing curves to her long legs, her hips and her shoulders, unlike the skeletal specimens outside. Her wealth of auburn hair, the curls tumbling well past her shoulders, appeared glossy and well-cared for.
He couldn’t hear what was said, but one didn’t become a human trainer without learning how to read human body language, and everything about her posture was telling Bralix that the male pestering her made her anxious. The male, probably unable to attract a female on charm alone, was resorting to intimidation.
She’d turned her shoulder to the male, obviously trying to avoid the male, and he stood right at the female’s hip, hemming her in at the bar. He leaned in, close enough to smell her, and loomed over her smaller frame. The male touched her arm with the back of his fingers, his knuckles grazing obnoxiously close to the female’s breasts, then leaned in to smell her fragrance behind her ear. She tried to shrug him away, but he apparently ignored her subtle, uncomfortable cues—if anything, he seemed to enjoy it when she glared up at him, her blue eyes flashing with anger.
Let’s see how you like it when someone does that to you, Phyrax thought, and moved to intervene.
Mirroring the male’s actions, Bralix hemmed the male in between him, the female, and the bar.
The male, taller than the female but still about five inches shorter than Bralix, looked up at him, annoyance clear at Bralix’s intrusion into his personal space. Bralix followed it up with a gentle caress along the male’s arm, grazing the male’s flat nipple through his shirt. The male frowned in confusion and tried to back away, only to come up against the bar at his back, and Bralix lowered his head to sniff the male the way the male had sniffed the female.
“Get the fuck away from me,” the male snapped, his face twisting in disgust. He shoved at Bralix’s shoulder, but Bralix barely felt it.
Snaking a hand up into the hair at the back of the male’s skull, Bralix tightened his fist around a thick hank of hair against his scalp and loomed over him. Their eyes were barely six inches apart, and Bralix growled in the back of his throat, projecting menace at the smaller male until he visibly quailed in the face of Bralix’s dominance.
Not pleasant when someone does this to you, is it?
“Sorry,” the male muttered to no-one in particular. “Please, let me go.”
When Bralix felt the fight leave the male, he held him for a beat longer to drive home his point before releasing his grip on his hair and stepping aside. Bralix jerked his head in the direction of the door, and the male fled.
He watched the male flee all the way out the club before turning back to the female.
With the other male gone, she visibly relaxed. She let out a breath, then looked up at him to see what he would do, and not wanting to make her uncomfortable, he kept a more comfortable distance between them. He leaned an elbow on the bar and watched her.
“Thank you so much for running him off; that asshole just wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
