Tevun-Krus #35 - Best of '16

The House Always Wins - A Short Story by @krazydiamond

"Joe? Joe! Andromeda's hairy thighs, wake up boy!"

Joe? Who was Joe? Am I Joe? For that matter, who is Andromeda of the hairy thighs? I blinked, my vision unfocused, everything a mass of blurred shapes and colors. It matched the inside of my head. A hard shake did nothing to disperse that impenetrable fog but my vision started to clear up, and with it, a handful of realizations came into sharp focus.

I didn't know where I was.

I didn't know the glaring female in front of me other than she was not human.

I didn't know who I was.

None of these realizations were good ones, especially on the backend of what felt like a galactic sized hangover pounding through my skull. The pressure was too much. I groaned, pressing the heel of my palms against my eyeballs to keep them from exploding out of my face. A string of curses spilled off my tongue. Apparently, I was a foul mouthed Joe.

I peeked through my fingers at the glaring woman, her harsh features smoothed by apparent relief on her face. She was almost pretty, the scales were a bit off putting but I felt a definite stirring in my southern regions despite my pounding skull.

"Joe," she breathed, placing a claw tipped hand on my shoulder. "Thank the stars. How much did they take?"

I stared at her. It was a stall I didn't know how to answer, so I observed her instead. An old fashioned tricorn hat sat at a jaunty angle on her mead, the navy blue felt matching the velvet of her long coat. It complimented the turquoise hues of her scales quite nicely. This close I could see the individual striations in her irises in varying shades of blue and green, like a swirling solar system around inky slit pupils. I was foul mouthed Joe with a poet's soul. My reptilian lady friend was catching on though, her look of relief flickering between irritation and worry.

"Joe?" I could see the teeth in her mouth, all fucking thousand of them. Like a mouth full of hollow needles. My traitorous loins kept stirring. Foul mouthed Joe with the poet's soul had some interesting kinks.

"Sorry, do we know each other?" I flinched at the shock that flickered across her face. It was about to get worse. "I take it I'm Joe?"

She drew back like I'd slapped her, the horror clear even on her reptilian face before rage poured off her in palatable waves. I pressed against the rough surfaced behind, watching with wide eyes as she paced in front of me, kicking anything her booted feet could reach.

"Those cheating, greedy, lying sacks of rosh'tok dung!" She punctuated the last word by kicking a barrel. I watched her shoulders lift in heaving breaths before she spun on me, her face pinched with worry. She ignored my flinch as she crouched in front of me, her clawed fingers delicately tilting my chin to look me in the eye.

"You're a blank slate," she murmured, her expression hardening, "and absolutely no good to me in this condition."

A chill crawled over my skin at her words. "Please don't kill me," I said through my teeth. Did I know how to fight? Could I fend off those claws and terrible teeth if I had to? I certainly doubted so since my bladder twitched, ready to void at a moment's notice. Foul mouthed Joe was a bit of a coward.

She snarled at me, which was not helpful to my bladder. "I'm your captain, boy," she huffed, releasing my chin to straighten the embroidered cuffs of her long coat. "It's my personal policy not to eat members of my crew."

"How generous of you," I said faintly.

"For the love of--you've also lost your sense of humor. I'm going to murder those merchant scumbags," said through her teeth, a terrifying sight.