You Don't Belong Here

Chapter Thirty One

Aychu sat in the gathering area of the dwelling as she listened to Dhadtoudi yelling from T'ahrou's quarters. She growled in annoyance as she wished her brother had let her remain in her hunting grounds so she would not have been forced to listen to the pyode-amedha's tantrums. And here I believed only one was irritating on its own...yet she is significantly worse when she is around others. She thought back to the time that they had traveled with Elder Tah'kath to the Ooman planet, and Dhadtoudi had become rather hostile toward the others of her kind. The trip had ended in a bloodbath and the honorary Yautja had returned with a sour taste permanently burned into her mind from the experience.

The young female Yautja sighed in blatant irritation while she tried to block out the one-sided "conversation". She leaned back in her seat and distracted herself with thoughts of her recent hunting trip. She had travelled to a nearby planet to hunt giant worm creatures covered in spikes, and she had made a point to send daily reports and vital updates back to the clan. She had been thriving in her newfound independence and had taken many a trophy during her weeks in the new territory, and her anger had been great when T'ahrou had arrived with human in-tow to bring her back to the mother planet.

"I've sent the reports, T'ahrou!"

"Nothing was received. If you had used your common sense, you would have thought to run diagnostics on all of your systems to make sure your ship wasn't damaged on entry." Aychu frowned at the thought of her elder brother's words, but the thought was soon drowned out by the sound of Dhadtoudi once again.

Since their return, Dhadtoudi's adoptive brother Zaiyu had worked to repair whatever technological device had been damaged during her less than graceful landing procedure, and he himself had suffered his own scolding from the human woman. Not long before Aychu had set off on her adventures, Zaiyu had departed on his own hunt and taken a female with him. This female was one he had been courting as a potential mate, and once they were alone on a foreign planet, the spent tireless weeks doing nothing but rutting, only stopping to hunt when they required nutrition. Because of his "distracting activities", he had simply failed to acknowledge the countless hails sent from his alien sibling and thus threw her into a frenzied panic. The blended expression of rage and relief on her face must have been priceless when she walked in on them red-handed.

The voices on the opposite end of the dwelling fell silent and Aychu growled once more; she knew what was to follow. She had smelled the tangy sweet aroma of the oils that T'ahrou had sneaked to his quarters earlier in the day, and she knew it would only be a matter of time before they were in a heated session of stress and anger-relieving mating. The female pushed herself to her feet and made her way to the exit. Dealing with the humans in a social setting was hard enough and she definitely didn't want to listen to their strange mating calls.
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High atop a tree the female sat on a branch, watching as tiny fury and scaly creatures scuttled around on the ground below. From time to time she would toss her throwing stars near a group of them to make them scatter in fear, tasting the scent of their emotion on the air. "You have nothing better to do, descendant of Yahti?" Her emerald eyes looked up as Zaiyu's form was revealed from the waning camouflage device. She snorted once before tossing another throwing star to the jungle floor below. "Why are you out here like this?"

"Your SISTER has invaded our dwelling for the hundredth time this week. I do not wish to listen to her Ooman screams anymore than I have already." Zaiyu clicked thoughtfully as he moved to sit alongside the young female.

"Dhadtoudi offends you?"

"Her voice offends my ears." A soft chuckle rumbled through Zaiyu's chest now. "Do you not grow tired of it?"

"I have learned to ignore it...to tune it out just as I would expect her to do so if the roles were reversed." Zaiyu watched as Aychu continued her emotional torment of the 'belly-crawlers' as he had so deemed them as a pup, and his amber eyes tracked her every movement from behind his optical shields. "Under normal circumstances the male would acquire his own dwelling, a proper mating ritual would ensue, and then the female would officially join him as his mate."

"I would not consider these circumstances to be 'normal'." Zaiyu shook his head in agreement with the female. "What does Ooman tradition dictate?"

"I do not know...our father was the only one with any sort of relevant information regarding pyode-amedha life. Though I have no idea as to how he ascertained this knowledge."

Aychu seemed to ponder a thought for several seconds before placing a firm fist rapidly against Zaiyu's bicep. "Let's take her back to the Ooman world! Let them figure her out!" Zaiyu's eyes blazed with fury behind his mask and Aychu seemed to be aware of the metaphorical daggers that were being cast into her skull. "I joke, Blooded One..!" A long, heavy silence passed between them as Aychu swung her feet through the open air. "Unless you believe it would work, that is...I need a break from all of the screaming."