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Sullivan
Something tells me this is Thorn.
I am looking at a truly monstrous alien. He has long dark hair and a beard, very dark brows quirked harshly over golden eyes, with two narrowed, vertical slits both focused on me. He is wearing what looks to me like the skin of his enemies as pants. The pattern and hue of the leather does not match that of his upper body, which is red and golden.
He is larger than almost all of the other saurian aliens, and he is already much smarter than they were. He’s asking questions, for starters. Questions are the domain of smart people and things. He has an air of responsibility about him. He looks dominant, but not aggressive like the others. He also looks faintly confused at my presence here, which makes sense.
“I crashed my ship into your planet,” I explain. “I came here to ask if there was a port somewhere around the place, but the people here tried to eat me instead. So I dealt with the situation, and they decided to make a swift exit.”
“What caused the hole in the wall?”
“Chaos Fish.”
The look he gives me tells me he doesn’t know what a Chaos Fish is. That’s fine. If he doesn’t tread carefully, he’ll soon find out.
“Sounds like a translation error,” he says. “Or a strange local dialect. It sounded like you said Chaos Fish.”
“I did say Chaos Fish.”
“Alright.” He puts his hands on his hips and looks at me quite sternly. “Where did the Chaos Fish come from?”
I grin as I answer that question in a way I know he won’t enjoy, softening my tone to a gentle explanatory one more appropriate for a bedtime story. “Well, when a Chaos Fish mummy and daddy love one another very much…”
“You are flippant,” he interrupts. “You are calm. You are dangerous.”
He makes those assessments very quickly and quietly to himself more than to me. I enjoy his opinion. He seems to understand me quickly, and unlike the idiots who first met me here, he is not trying to intimidate me. He has more confidence in his sheer existence to do that, I imagine.
“I’m just a lost little human trying to find her way home, sir,” I say. The tactics I used with the idiots are not the same as the ones I’m going to use on this guy. This guy wants to be respected. I can see that in every line of his bearing. He’s used to everyone reacting to him like he’s a saurian god. So my little respectful act should get him right where I want him.
“Where is the crash site of your ship?”
“About twenty minutes walk that way,” I say, pointing in the direction I came from. “Big, steaming crater. You won’t be able to miss it.”
Thorn
There is something about this human. Something besides the simple fact that she is female and smells fertile. There is a dancing intellect behind her eyes. Every word is calculated, every expression carefully schooled. She’s trying to manipulate me because she thinks I am of limited intelligence. I can imagine that her interactions with the patrons of this establishment created that impression. I decide not to correct her misapprehension. If she thinks I am a big stupid lizard man, that works for me.
“You will need to come with me if we are going to find you a ship off-planet,” I say. “The ports are not located anywhere near here. I can give you escort.”
She cocks her head to the side and looks at me in a way that suggests she is trying to work out whether or not she can trust me.
“You’re a lot more reasonable than the guys here suggested you’d be. I hope you’re not trying to lure me into some kind of trap so you can eat me. I’m not as helpless as I look.”
“Evidently.”
“I want a ship to get off the planet. I mean, I don’t need a whole ship for myself, of course. It’s not like I’m some kind of pirate…” she laughs at what must, for some reason, be a joke to her. “Could you possibly escort me to the nearest port? I’d be ever so grateful.”
She asks for what I have already offered. I wonder if that’s some kind of conversational gambit, or just a personal oddity. Regardless, I am definitely taking this human with me. Not to a port, but certainly to my home. As alpha, I have a very large compound in the city, large enough and secure enough to keep her contained. This human strikes me as someone who needs to be behind walls, if not bars. My instincts are telling me to keep her. Cage her. Tame her.
“This is not a safe place,” I tell her. “You’d best come with me. The port is in the city. We’ll need to perform a few formalities first, however. There’s documentation around crashes and things. We can’t just have aliens landing all over the place.”
“Yeah. I crashed. It was an accident.” Her words could be terse and impatient, but she grins when she says them. Almost like she’s proud of herself.
I don’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth. She doesn’t look like she has a scratch on her. She doesn’t look like she’s had a bump, let alone a crash. But the truth will come later, when I have her safely contained.
“Are you hungry?” I ask the question. “Bar snacks don’t go that far, do they?”
“Do you have anything besides bloodied meat?”
