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Pick your brain.Carrion and carcasses—delightful.
Move it or lose it.Violent, direct, and yet humans seem to use this phrase with staggering casualness.
And my most favorite for the sheer gore:Keep your eyes peeled.Remarkably disgusting.
And that’s just the English ones!
“It means that I’ll behave if you stop being so strict, Rhygel. We all bring something different to this group. And you have to let us be ourselves.”
“He does,” Barbas defends. “But you seem to derive joy from making him angry.”
Eh, that was fair. “All right, I’ll let you have that one, Barbas. But my point stands. Loosen up a little, Rhygel.”
His only response is a rumbling growl.
Perhaps it wasn’t fair to ask that of him. Keeping a group of dominant egos in check while staying on mission couldn’t be an easy job.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt him to have a little fun once in a while.
“Be quick and efficient.” He retreats, his essence flowing into the corners of the host’s mind.
Thirteen medium-quality souls later,I can no longer ignore the hunger pangs in the host’s body.
“She needs to eat,” I say and steer us in the direction of an eatery.
Usually, we’d take the host home and feed her whatever she already has, then switch to whoever’s turn it was next and start fresh. But since I was good with humans, and I’d remembered to put that piece of plastic that allows her buy things in her pocket, I take us to a shop close to her house.
“Hey, back again? How’d you like those wings?” The man behind the counter smiles at us, and I’m thrilled at the chance to show off just how much I know about human customs.
Wings? I quickly scan through our host’s recent memories to get up to speed and am happy to find she enjoyed them a great deal.
“Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” I reply with a grin.
The cashier stares blankly at me. “Um, right. Well, I really appreciate you cleaning up the display. Most wouldn’t have bothered.”
I replay further back in her memories, stopping when I see her picking up bags from the ground and putting them back in a large, garish container of sorts. I give him a quick nod.
“If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.”
The cashier seems confused. Perhaps he isn’t bright. “Right, well, I’ll be right here when you’re ready to check out.”
“Okey dokey, artichokey.” I turn on a heel and set about collecting sustenance. A few moments later, I set all the items on the counter and pull out the plastic rectangle from the host’s pocket.
“Is this everything?”
I nod, inferring the cashier didn’t mean it literally, for it clearly wasn’t everything in the store.
He pushed a few buttons on the machine in front of him and then recited some numbers, which I knew was my cue to wave the plastic thing in front of the small machine before me.
I did and, like magic, the machine made a beeping sound as the message APPROVED appeared across the screen.
“See ya next time,” the cashier says, handing me the bag of items.
“Not if I see you first,” I say and walk out of the eatery.
“You’re an idiot,” Typhon scolds in the link as I open the strange container of something calledCup O’ Noodles.
“Only someone who doesn’t understand the intricacies of the English language would say that.” I poke a finger into the cup, surprised by how hard the contents are. Could human teeth handle this? They must, if it’s sold as food, so I take the hard cake of pale worm-like things and bite into it.
