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“I’m not afraid of you!” Gar is not having these threats. They seem to be pissing him off more than anything. Every time he opens his mouth, I see large, flat teeth. Craning my head around to look at the blue dude inside, I see much sharper teeth in his mouth. I’m watching prey defy a predator. I wonder if they’re the same species. I wonder how they came to be at all. They all look like the results of an alternate timeline where dinosaurs didn’t evolve before people, instead they evolved around the same time and fucked them.
This is far from the weirdest kind of alien I’ve ever seen. Life is weird. The universe is basically a random animal generator with only so many ideas to start with. I’ve seen sentient slugs with faces that look a lot like people faces too. They goo everywhere and have a horrid fear of salt. In comparison, the saurians seem pretty reasonably constructed.
“You should be. Go home.”
Gar huffs and puffs for a bit, but then seems to decide to take the other saurian’s advice and lumbers toward a bike. I watch him as he starts it. The technology doesn’t seem difficult to master. Just need to turn a key and wrench a grip on the handlebars, and the machine throbs to life with a roar that seems very disproportionately loud for its size. A cloud of gray-blue smoke chokes out of a pipe toward the end of the bike and after a bit of awkward wheeling around, keeping his tail carefully out of the way of the wheels by wrapping it around his waist, he is gone.
I watch him disappear in a cloud of rage. All I can think about is how much fun that looks. The last thing I had that went as fast as that on land was, well, I guess the shuttle. But it didn’t go that fast for that long, and it did end up much more compact in the impact. So.
It’s no doubt dangerous to go inside this place. It’s clearly occupied by very large saurian aliens, all of whom subscribe to an outlaw vibe. But I don’t really have much in the way of choice. I don’t see any other buildings around this area, and I need help. Or at least directions. Cowering in the bushes is only going to get me so far. It is definitely not going to get me off this planet.
Pushing the front door open takes all of my strength, but I manage to shove it around on its hinges enough to get inside. I step inside the bar, finding a haze of smoke floating about two feet above my head. For a moment, I go unnoticed, as all the patrons look at the place they’d expect someone’s face to be. It takes a minute for them to collectively direct their gazes downward and see me standing there.
“Is that a fucking human?”
“It’s a human. Not currently fucking, though,” another voice chimes in.
“We could change that,” someone in the back says, grossly making it less than three seconds until the first threat of violence. This is why I always ran an all-female crew. This bar stinks of male. If there’s a single female in here, I’d be shocked. It has that stench of unwashed pits, groins, and semen dried on unlaundered clothes that presents itself almost universally in places like this.
I ignore their various comments and instead cut straight to the chase.
“I’m looking for a ride to the nearest ship dock.”
Apparently that’s a hilarious statement, because every saurian in the place starts laughing. Yes, there’s some mocking laughter, but there’s also some deep belly laughs too. I smile along with them.
“No ship docks? No rides? What’s the deal?”
“You’re in Thorn’s territory, meat.” A male with a relatively unthreatening demeanor tells me. He looks like he might be older than most of the others. He’s wearing a heavy, faded blue shirt and pants that cover him almost like a decent set of human clothing would cover a human. His beard, because yes, he has a beard, has a good amount of gray in it, and his eyes seem to twinkle as he calls me meat. Man, I must be hungry for some wholesome interactions, because this ain’t it, and yet I really want it to be.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you won’t be leaving without his say so. And more likely, you won’t be leaving at all, tasty little talking morsel like you. You’re an appetizer.”
I am, certainly, a small person made of meat surrounded by carnivores. Though their faces are rather human in aspect, their eyes, and more importantly, their teeth, indicate carnivorous feeding patterns. When they speak, sharp canines and even sharper front teeth flash in front of my eyes. There are baskets of food at every table, and most of them drip with that red substance that they always tell you isn’t blood when you buy meat, but really looks a lot like blood.
Logic dictates that if they were going to eat me alive, they probably would already have done so. That means they’re fucking with me. That makes sense too. The only thing a predator likes more than hunting is toying with its prey.
“Alright, where’s Thorn then, if I need to speak to him?”
Another round of laughter goes around the bar, more intense than the last time.
“Meat doesn’t get to see Thorn — unless it is on a plate.”
I give a little shrug. “Alright. Well, thanks for your help.”
More laughs, but less amused this time. More predatory.
I turn to leave, but my way is blocked. Even without making aggressive moves toward me, they are clearly trying to intimidate me. Walls of scaled flesh, fangs, and claws, thick tails that whip behind them, showing their excitement. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was about to be torn apart.
That’s what they want me to think. They want me to freak out. Want me to panic. Want me to react to them. But I can’t, see? I can’t because there’s a little chip lodged deep in my brain that activates whenever I might feel fear and neutralizes it. I quite literally cannot be scared.
There’re a few side effects. I’m also not great at feeling guilt anymore, which helps in my chosen profession. And a couple other things. They’re not important. Not compared to the edge I have in places and times like these from being able to be truly calm.
I shrug and sit down in the nearest empty chair. I’d like to sling myself into it casually, but it is is very large and built to support the weight of one of these monsters, so there’s sort of a skip and a jump required to get my butt onto the seat. Also, the arm rests are high enough to be incredibly awkward, so I can’t rest my arm on them, though I try for a moment, so there’s a small period of time in which I am trying to rest my arm in such a fashion that it is over my head. It’s awkward, basically. Kind of the opposite of what I was going for.
More toothy smirking follows this action on my part. They clearly don’t know quite what to do with me. They know what I am. They speak the same language I do. There’s probably pictures of creatures like me in the textbooks they give their scaly little offspring. Now, does that mean any of them has ever actually met a human? Unlikely. There’s no alliance treaty or trade pact that technically allows cross border visitation between humans and saurian species, mostly out of fear on the part of humans that we might end up eaten and farmed, or farmed and eaten. Regardless of the order of affairs, it’s not a great situation for us.
Now I know, logically, and overtly, that the odds of me walking out of this place alive are vanishingly low. I’m like a chocolate marshmallow who just rolled into the middle of a birthday party screamingeat me, eat me!But I’ve gotten out of worse situations than this before, and I have more than a few tricks up my sleeve — and down my pants. The first one of these creatures who wants to touch me is going to regret it.
