“Are you freaking kidding me?” Lily interrupts.
Ken’s gaze darts back to her, and I take a step closer to her, wanting to protect her from what’s sure to be his fury.
“Now you’re plugging merch?” she asks. “Unbelievable. What is wrong with you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ken tells her glibly. “I’m not the one who programmed myself. You put the artificial in front of my intelligence.” He encompasses us both meaningfully in that ‘you’. Though thinking machines have long been banned from my planet, Lily’s planet I’m not so sure about.
“Wedidn’t have anything to do with you,” Lily spits at him, almost hissing mad like an animal I once saved from the quicksand on the riverbed near the village where I was raised. Lily fights nearly as fiercely as that animal.
“Thank you for the gifts,” I tell Ken swiftly, trying to appease the indeed psychotic AI. “I’m sure everyone at home who is watching will be grateful to learn they can buy whatever it is you’re selling.”
Appearing slightly mollified, Ken pats the collar of his oversized fur coat and jerks his chin at the bird’s corpse behind us. “The meat from that bird is your reward, and within the baskets you will find everything you need to prepare a meal worthy of your adventure. Though I’m sure our viewers would appreciate it if you didn’t scare the next challenge to death. But hey, I suppose that’s the reason they call them chickens.”
Laughter echoes in from all sides, and Lily and I take a moment to look at each other, completely perplexed at where the sound is coming from.
“A freaking laugh track,” she says, throwing her hands in the air. “This is absurd.”
“Well, absurd is getting us viewers,” Ken says, winking at something I still cannot see in front of the dead animal.
I sigh and rub my eyebrows with both hands, shaking my wings slightly to try and settle myself.
“Well, right on, Ken,” Lily says, her voice dripping with sarcasm that I’ve come to know all too well. Strangely, I find hearing it directed at Ken to be a complete relief, it means Lily is functioning and that she’s more annoyed with Ken than she has been with me. Delightful.
“And on that note, we’ll leave you two to it." He winks at… nothing.
Lily throws up her arms in pure frustration as Ken ignores her.
"Don’t worry, there will be more challenges to come.”
“And how the hell do the challenges work, Ken? How do they work? How do we win? You are the actual worst game show host of all time!” She’s screaming now, a vein ticking in her forehead.
“You survive them and then get to live to see the next one.”
With that, he winks again at nothing, and then the hologram disappears, Lily still staring at the spot where Ken winked.
When I finally turn my attention back to her?—
“What the fuck?” she says, dropping her hands and stomping over to the dead rooster, as she called it. Cock, according to my translator.
Probably the biggest tragedy of all my life was that mistranslation.
“We’re just supposed to eat it? Now? How? Look at how many feathers are on here.”
She starts to aim a kick at the dead animal, but then she ducks, screeching as the feathers explode off of the carcass in an explosion of whistling horns, blinding lights, and incredibly strange noises.
“What the actual shitballs? I mean seriously, have you ever seen anything like this?” Lily says, but some of the bravado has leaked from her voice, her hands shaking slightly.
My poor human mate.
“I do not know the actual fuck,” I tell her seriously, attempting a soothing voice. The feathers disintegrate before they hit the ground, sparkling slightly. “It appears this place has physics different than any other I have ever visited.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she says, eyeing the feather that’s landed near her foot before it disintegrates into sparkles.
“My name is Zan-De’Eer,” I remind her. “Not Sherlock.” But I’m not angry. I know she has just been through a lot, what with the exploding chicken, and perhaps the fall from the snare has addled her memory.
“Oh, shit,” she says, leaning forward, eyes narrowed, so full, so focused on the sight before her. “Well, at least we don’t have to butcher that thing. I wouldn’t even have an idea of where tostart. I might know how to take apart discovery for a trial, but I’ve never taken apart a chicken. Get it?”
She grins at me, and I’m so caught up in the transformation of the smile and the fact that it’s aimed at me that I don’t bother telling her I have no idea what she’s talking about.
