Perdition's Child

Chapter 14

Of course there were details to iron out. He'd had to borrow a com to call Dakei and give him the barest details. Mostly just that he'd decided to stay for a short while and had found a ride home. Darkrei had been strangely silent at Mehk's decision, rather than arguing like Mehk had expected. He assured Darkrei this was a completely different situation than the last time he'd joined a group and hoped this wasn't going to come back to bite him somehow... Then Tes had put him through some further tests in her lab. Meanwhile, a team had gone to scout out a few possible locations for the apartment complex he'd been brought to. He'd been night-blind at the time and didn't know what the building looked like on the outside, but it had an orange and gold entrance hallway and was pretty big.

Vega, the youngest member of the group at sixteen, and apparently a scrawny sixteen at that by human standards, bought a bunch of cookies and went door to door at each of the two-hundred year old buildings Quara had looked up. He pretended to sell them until he was turned away at the ninth location by a brusque lellian with cold yellow eyes. He'd caught a glimpse of orange walls and reported back after taking some discreet pictures; now the group was sitting on cheap furniture piled into one corner of the living room and devouring the boxes of sweets.

There was thirty-odd feet of feathered theropod taking up the rest of the room.

Mehk found that he particularly liked the ginger snaps, and since no one else was crazy about them he ended up with most of the box. The cream-filled ones were good too, but competition was fierce for those. He took his allotted one and refrained from entering the deathmatch-style competition to earn more lest it be taken as an invitation for the entire group to beat him to within an inch of his life.

He'd always been taught that his species was fairly aggressive compared to most aliens, but absolutely everything this group did seemed to devolve into some kind of violence eventually. He couldn't be sure, but he suspected most individuals of most species could eat snacks without feeling the need to stage elaborate competitions.

The commander, Derak, Tes, and Nii'Lara didn't bother with the nonsense, but the younger members happily practiced their murder skills on one another. Maybe it was a mercenary thing rather than an alien thing.

Mehk mostly sat on the sidelines. He was rather amazed they tolerated his presence at all, instead of locking him up or something. If they had been lellians, he'd probably have been killed under the circumstances.

He did attempt a few arm-wrestling matches for peanut butter cookies, but his long skinny limbs put him at a severe and unexpected disadvantage against the stockier aliens. The only one he managed to defeat was Bob, which wasn't a real victory at all.

"This one hypothesized that the foreign biological unit would undergo stress as a result of repeated failure in a competition setting, possibly hindering later performance. This one is poorly built for this leverage-based contest, allowing victory for the foreign biological unit in the interest of team cohesion."

Mehk nibbled on his cookie and resolutely ignored the sniggering behind him. "Thank you, Bob..." He thought about that and sighed.

Irika, he'd noticed, had turned her attention on him every time he went near the death-match corner. If they were lellians he'd know what he had to do. You couldn't disrespect the rhoha of the pack without consequences, and even if aliens didn't function quite the same this was recognizable enough. If the parasitic bug could take one for the team, so could he; he stood and walked to the cookie line like a martyr.