REFORMATTED

This depicts graphic interspecies hip-dancing between a human dude and T'vaoan Kig-Yar girl (Skirmisher from Halo Reach) -if that bothers you, go scram before you dirty your blouse. On the contrary, if you're into that sort of thang', then boy have I got good news for you...

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Featherkisser

1

"Aren't the voices of birds so pretty when they sing? What about when they sing out of joy? What about out of PLEASURE...?"

"This isn't the right grip." Yamva snapped, his voice ringing metallically within the cauterized interior of his head's prison. "I even spoke slowly that time. Repeat it with me; Size-Six, Teeth Number Sixteen."

He made sure to duck below the edge of the vent arch as he leaned back to further his beratement. The spines sticking from his head didn't make it easy.

"Six. Sixteen. The words even sound the same. They're simple. They're quick. They're common too. Don't tell me you haven't-" Yamva stopped himself. He was using too big of words again.

After a pause, he took a second to lick his fangs, and quirked a musing, yellow eye in the darkness of the night.

"…Ah," He chuckled into the crisp wind, forming the edges of his snout into a leery grin. "-this was all part of the plan."

"Plan~?" –Came an excited trill from his south. Yamva felt his veins freeze, and ground his teeth inside his maw as a result. "What plan you mean? There no plan! Plan bad! Plan what Old People used to do! I never have plan for that reason."

"Ah," Yamva- still refusing to make eye contact with the other speaker –nodded sagely in the cool air. His spines quivered with anticipatory guile and his fingers twitched against the edges of the vent portal. He glanced at the machine and tapped his talons. "…yes, yes I know."

"Plan always bad." His shrill sounding companion squeaked, ripping the wrench from his claw without so much as a flinch. "I reason it like this; keep throwing part and part at it, until one part fits, and problem solved."

"So you consider yourself a chancer?" Yamva scratched an itch under his jaw, quirking a yellow eye at his only company with a disparaging glow.

"Chancer and lucky." Yamva couldn't outwardly tell, but he had known Taptap long enough to be able to discern when the little Unggoy was smiling. Right now, the edges of Taptap's rebreather mask were at just the right tilt, and so that meant it was undoubtedly so. Taptap was beaming, oblivious, as he shoved the grip-wrench back into the box, and tugged out a fresh one. "Try this." –The Unggoy chirped.

"That isn't necessary." Yamva tiredly grinned.

"Why?"

"Look at the handle for me."

"It say… f-fer… four-t-teeee- Sixteen~!" The Unggoy stuck the wrench back in his face, waving it like it was a children's toy. "See? I can do good still."

"You are a dimwitted imbecile." The Kig-yar engineer spread his chops, and grinned with the viscosity of an appeased predator.

"Thanks, Yamva! I respect you too." Taptap nuzzled at him underneath his mask. Anyone else would've taken the little gas-sucker's words with a heavy dollop of flavored sarcasm. But Yamva knew better. Taptap was entirely too serious.

To Taptap, Yamva was always the patriarch. He was always the kind-hearted hero, the supporter, the guide through thick and thin. Yamva held no doubts that he could've literally shot the Unggoy in a non-lethal method of targeting, and Taptap would've stood right back up, dusted himself off, wrapped the wound and said- 'Thanks, Yamva~!' –without hitch or pause.

As Yamva glowered at the diminutive little alien before him, he found his eyes wandering with opaque interest to the space directly behind Taptap's position. The Kig-yar's smile faltered, and he felt his beak twitch. The opportunity was almost enough to illicit an avian-born chatter from his teeth.

All it would take was a kick! Just a little kick. Then Taptap, bane of his world, would tumble down the basalt cliffs and never be heard of again.

As if the water was beckoning him, the lime-run falls seemed to roar louder in the backdrop, and the yellow waters below shimmered like gold. The heavens could not have influenced reality any further to seduce him into the act.

But who would hand me my wrenches?

"Get yourself better eyes." The Kig-yar gingerly dipped one of his claws into the toolbox, and retrieved the proper fit that he sought. A little silvery wrench, with the text reading Six-Sixteen –etched into its handle. "I'll ask you this, and- don't lie to me –have you been reading those pages?"

Yamva gripped the vent portal and stuck his head back inside the cauterized, funny-smelling interior of the burn tank again, not waiting for the Unggoy to conjure a response.

"Pages… confuse." Taptap knelt by the toolbox, and he firmly placed his chitinous claws on his narrow little hips. Yamva could hear the tension in his trilly voice. The Unggoy hadn't been doing what was requested of him.

It is like mending a hatchling, the engineer realized with an annoyed grin as he turned the wrench. The moment your eyes linger, will the chicks bite, tumble and defecate in all the wrong places. Reminds me of home.

Was that a bad or a good thing? Yamva honestly didn't know. Though, there wasn't much incentive for him to care, anyhow. Yul-Bi was a time of past-pleasures and a past-life. That asteroid habitat didn't have anything for him anymore. Taptap was more of a crux than it had ever been.

How disgusting.

Modern racism dictated that the two of them should have hated one another. But the workings of fate were strange, as it seemed. Yamva wasn't about to be rid of Taptap anytime soon, and the isolated, semi-brainwashed Unggoy didn't appear to mind that matter. What use was there in undoing the last eight years?

None. Yamva grit his fangs and twisted, until the metal lurched, and the interior plate was rigid as stone. I have to keep telling myself that. Why do I keep telling myself that? I tell everyone things they already know. Just like I keep telling them that these burn-tanks are bad. They're really bad. They're expended. They die too easy.

"-and they would be cost-effective to fix…" –He grumbled out loud, his voice echoing around inside the burn-tank's crusty hold. "-But what does Yamva know? Yamva knows nothing. Yamva's just the Grunt-Herder, and the Methane-Whisperer. Yamva has no expertise. None at all. Yamva has no-"

Clunk~! –he bumped the back of his narrow, tannish skull against the upper rim of the vent portal. It bent some of the spines there the wrong way and made him grunt.

Taptap didn't seem to process the origination or purpose of the following torrent of Kig-yar-tongued vulgarity that slipped like a trail of proverbial sewage from Yamva's teeth. The burn-tank clanged and thrummed as the reptile alien climbed out of it, and slammed the vent portal shut with an audible swing of his palms.

Bang~! –went the rims of the hatch. It drowned out the climax of Yamva's cursing, even though he knew Taptap couldn't understand a word he was saying.

I hate pale-speak.

"You okay, Yamva?" The Unggoy squeaked behind him.

"Peachy." Yamva slapped his chops afterward. He had been hoping to feel slick for his dexterous usage of humanity's idioms, but for some reason, the word had sounded… wobbly. It didn't belong in his mouth, he figured. Or maybe he had finally suffered a fair concussion from hitting his fat head on the portal.

By Sul-Yiig that had freaking hurt! Not that it was within the point.

"I am fine." The engineer licked his fangs again, looking down at the smaller alien by his backward-angled heels. Taptap only came up to his wiry, gobbly chest, and did not go higher in terms of headroom. The triangular standard-issue tank protruding from Taptap's back, however, almost completely matched Yamva's stature. The Kig-yar craned an eye at it with menace.

I consider it second nature that I can fantasize what would happen if I ripped it off of him.

"You are best, Yamva." The Unggoy dumbly chirped, picking up the toolbox by his cloven foot.

"I know." Yamva smiled. He was internally cackling. His made-up avatar of Taptap was writhing on the ground as the last of the methane in his mask ran out. The little fucker was suffocating. It was like listening to a field-rodent being pulled in two at the hip.

The squeals, mmmha-ha~….

"That last burn-tank." Taptap's pudgy little fingers were dancing on a holo-pop slate tied over his armored wrist. Yamva thought about screaming at him and throwing him into the lime-falls below them, but saw to his chagrin that the slate was coded in Taptap's native rune-alphabet, some bastard-language from Balaho of ages' past. "We done now! We get them all."

Taptap lowered his arm and beamed at the engineer again.

"We best." He marveled quietly.

"I know." Yamva smiled wider. Licking his teeth, the Kig-yar sneered at the burn-tank as it began to hum and growl. For good measure, he gave the vent hatch a switch kick, causing a metallic thwack~! –to echo around the chamber and over the yellow water. "That should keep the machine from dying on us. Read my teeth; I cannot promise that."

"I read." Taptap nodded eagerly whilst the two of them turned to start back the way they had come. "You not fear height much, Yamva?"

"No." Yamva kept his balance, casting a long glance over the side of the natural bridge they traversed. The rocks were mossy enough that it was fortunate of them to possess cloven heels in the case of Taptap, and barbed toes in his own lobby. If one of them slipped and fell, it was a nearly sixty-foot drop to the yellow lime-waters below, and that was assuming they reached the water itself without plowing into the myriad rock formations sticking from the waves like angry guardians.

Listening to the salty spray of the mineral pond made his hearing-holes itch. Yamva was more of a man to find consistency in blaring techna-tunes from his homeworld, not the soothing whisper of nature. Though, he supposed the music would simply distract him on jobs like this. He didn't want to die, and so nature and its eccentricities would have to do.

There's always that chance.

Yamva chewed his reptilian tongue as he eyed the Unggoy's back and imagined it submerged in the water.

Just a kick.

His foot itched.

This was all Kuhaga's idea anyway.

The Kig-yar's teeth chattered in a momentary lapse of control. He scratched at his ankle, taking care to not lean too far in his bids for balance.

All part of that plan, he eyed Taptap again, waddling on the mossy walkway of natural stone, much like a fat toad. Everyone in this dig hates me.

-Except for Taptap, ironically, that gas-sucking little shit couldn't get enough of the engineer.

"Yamva my buddy!" He'd squeak at the other diggers, making them snicker, laugh, cackle. All Yamva could do was walk away and hide. "We best friend."

Parasite.

Yamva chattered again as the walkway began to draw to a close. It wavered out triangularly for a dip in a spanning, developing plateau. They passed over a crag of subterranean coastal cliffs that scabbed down to the wavering, yellow waters below.

Maybe the rocks would do it.

"Plassy-stuff flow good again, right, Yamva?" Taptap gazed at him quaintly over the pyramid-shaped tank bolted to his rear harness. For just a moment, the Kig-yar engineer was distracted from his consistent thoughts of homicide, and conceded a tiny grunt.

"The plasma is fixed," He paused, and looked back at the little natural bridge they had crossed, and were leaving behind. "for now."

Gingerback Cave sprawled like a vast dome around them, its ceiling dark, and toothed, much like a shadowy leviathan's mouth. Cramped ulcers and divets worn into the limestone high above birthed consistent and constantly whispering falls of tinny, piss-colored water. Sometimes, even the steam wafting from where these falls made contact with the mineral-waves below was yellow too. Everything in here resembled sulfur to him, and was indifferently ignored by Taptap.

What sort of name was Gingerback anyhow?

Ginger-back?

Human terminology escaped him.

"Yamva?" The Unggoy continued to pester him as they walked.

"What?" He lazed his yellow eyes up at the ceiling, staring at the yellow falls, and the yellow-tinted limestone, with an emotional tint that he would describe as… yellow.

Everything was yellow these days.

Too much damned yellow. He hated it here.

"You quiet." Taptap observed, his little cloven feet patting onto the mossy earth below him. "Tell me another story!"

"Pirate Queens of old, listen here; I am in no mood for stories." Yamva squinted at some of the steely, iron-tinted pipes that snaked like serpents among the giant cavern's roof, down some of its flanking walls, and into the yellow mineral waters below. They hummed and thudded silently in the din of the falls' many utterings. "Don't you get enough stories? What a hatchling! Who listens to this many stories and cannot feel sick about themselves afterwards?"

"…Erhm…" Yamva almost bumped into the little squatter for how much he'd slowed down. The Kig-yar clicked his avian tongue. Evidently, he'd spoken too fast for Taptap again.

"Find another hobby." Yamva cruelly simplified, his long snout highlighted oddly by a cluster of pylon-shaped worklights that had been stabbed via stake into the earth nearby. "By most standards, you shouldn't even be here, forgetting any stories I may or may not tell."

"…By standard," Taptap took a second to clear his throat, but he did speak with calculation- albeit improperly, with butchered English –to the Kig-yar. "-galaxy say we both hate each other. Old People say, we meant to hate each other. I say, I disagree that."

Yamva was so surprised by the Unggoy's words, that he squawked, and the bird-like caw echoed around the entire cavern.

That was perhaps the most socially rebellious, intelligent thing he had ever heard the Unggoy say in his entire life. Yamva almost cooed in agitation. He was a man who had always based his experiences on vivid memories, in that, important, altering events were always branded in his mind to the very end.

The tree that his father had first beaten him under when he was a hatchling, and the grove surrounding it, all permanently embroidered into the proverbial silk of his soul, for example. The hut he had lived in for twelve whole cycles, with Rykol, his former mate, another thing branded in his brain's eye.

Now, the first time the only companion he had left, had first shown guile. It was yet another unpleasant environment, in an unpleasant place, painfully and unpleasantly scalded into his scalp, much like a scar.

Yamva had been grinning, but that expression died in place of a sour scowl.

He had brief periods where he forgot how much he hated his life. They were the most blissful seconds he had ever managed to snatch out of the doomful haze that was his existence in this galaxy.

That is what I receive for chasing the money.

He looked down at Taptap, and now it was his fingers that were twitching. There was a sidearm latched to his equipment belt. It was a plasma pistol, an older model from the Pre-War years. It was a damned antique, but he knew the thing still worked. He wondered what sound Taptap's head would make if a bolt hit it. It would probably be like watching a ripe melon pop.

"You're not as dumb as you look." He said out loud.

"Thanks, Yamva!" Taptap chirped, lugging the little toolbox with him.

"You need to read more of the pages." Yamva berated a second later, swatting the Unggoy on the back of his fat little head. Taptap yipped. It almost sounded like he was giggling. "A youngling could read these tool labels better."

"Yes, Yamva." Taptap nodded.

"And stock your tank," Yamva roughly shoved the top of Taptap's triangular spine-mount. "you're alone out here, and you'll run out."

"Yes, Yamva."

"And finally," The Kig-yar picked at an irritation by one of the spines jutting from his arm. "-tell no one of our discussions."

"Yes, Yamv-" Taptap paused. "-Why?"

"Because," The engineer shivered, like a cool gust of wind had brushed off his leathery skin. "it's embarrassing."

{👾}

Gingerback was accessible through the Crag Belt, a cavernous trench that was wrought for approximately six thousand, four hundred and forty-five miles up and down the western hemisphere. It was the largest of the planet's trenches, and the widest, being thirty-six miles wide at its biggest tectonic gap.

She didn't have to watch over that much space, however. The digsite did not extend that far. It only covered Gingerback, Spine and Alpha, three chambers, separated by a tumbling gap of a mere mile over an endless pit of nothingness. It was all black when you looked over the sides of the many natural walkways, ridge highways and peninsula bridges. But looking ahead, everything was brown, and scabby, patterned almost like a gigantic wall made of shag-carpet, or perhaps animal fur.

Kel-Yn-Gor could never decide on her own facts of the matter. She supposed it was up for interpretation. Inside the scope, the cliff walls opposite her position looked furry. Outside of it, and they looked cleaner, slab-ish and scaling.

Of course, this was nearly a thirty-six hundred foot drop from the planet's surface above. She could look up, and the gray, colorless sky only managed to wink at her in the form of a tectonic slit decorating the blackness above. It was like that for as far as the eye could see west and east, at least, until the trench curled or swung serpentinely and cut off its further reaches from view.

The air was stale, and the temperature was dropping. Kel snorted and looked up at the only sliver of the planet's heavens she could see.

Night is falling.

Her knees ached and with a tired huff, she shifted off of her kneel and formed to a squat. Her feathers quivered to their quills and her shoulders wiggled beneath the duress of a shiver.

She hated nighttime here. It was too damned cold for her taste.

It's just until the plasma tanks are full.

-She hadn't said that to herself mentally, for it was a recollection. She was remembering what someone else had told her not too long ago throughout these dragging periods of… what exactly did one call this?

Boredom? Uneventfulness?

Utter blackness, Kel decided, leaning forwards to slip her gaze over the spine of her mechanical charge and the rocks she was squatted behind. The rim of the natural plateau dropped off right under her snout. It was nothing but a rolling fall from that point on. Just dark. It was all black. Nothing, nothing… nothing…

Kel's taloned fingers twitched around the hilt and handle of the weapon in her claws. She purposefully removed one of her palms and slipped it down the vibrant mane of black, white-skimmed feathers that sprawled like a tumbling mountain range down her back and neck. They still shivered and bristled, fluffing themselves.

Her world was very much about that. This self-sensitivity she usually had. She didn't like it and so she was prone to judgmental opinions of those around her instead of herself.

Take this one for instance, her amber eyes were centered with thin daggers of black ink for irises. These narrowed when her unnaturally keen sense of perception locked onto something on the other end of the trench. I know that hide.

Kel cooed with interest, and the crimson, bubble-like broach of her throat quivered with a slight purr. The T'vaoan winked an eye shut and brought up the rifle in her claws. She thumbed the safety rune on its display off and lined the scope's screen with her sight.

The Needlerifle granted her an ability of omnipresence. Just in a second, it took her closely to a tunnel mouth eating through the cliff face across the black gap, nearly a mile away from her.

It was the entrance to Gingerback, the largest of the three antechambers they were mining for the mineral waters inside, to convert the molecules charging the liquid into refined plasma strains for harvesting. Her scope at first made her heart leap, for what it showed her… did not belong.

At least, this was true if she was taking into account the vast majority of genetics that were present here.

Can I shoot it? –She immediately wondered, but then sighed in disappointment when the scope filled with a green-padded, squat and lumbering little thing that she knew all too well.

Of course I can't, she snorted, her skull-fashioned facial features laxing with disinterest. Engineer Yamva would throw a fit.

Kel smirked her exposed fangs as she lifted the scope from the waddling Unggoy assistant, and perched it right over engineer Yamva's head. The Kig-yar looked… dubious, almost like he was really distracted as he walked beside his stout companion. His yellow eyes were darting around, bird-like; but then again, it was something very natural for him, that paranoia.

Kel liked to think of herself as calm, and collected, and a creature of those traits. Yamva was a nervous raven in comparison, always flicking his tongue, chattering his teeth and looking about the place, like someone was about to kill him for the corpses he desperately wanted to pick at.

Space-chicken.

The T'vaoan giggled through her beak. Again, she was remembering the words of someone else. Though, the racial slur could've been used directly at her, she had recently discovered a passion for slinging mud at everyone else around her when she knew they couldn't hear her.

Her own kind, even other genetic offshoots, were not excluded.

To her, Yamva was what he was.

He was a fucking space-chicken. A vulture. A bone-picking scavenger.

If someone had a problem with that, than they could kiss her back-end feathers.

-Of course, though, as she watched the two workers trudge from the depths of the natural cavern, and walk onto an open-faced plateau jutting seamlessly from the cliff face wall, she had to remember that all of this high-end toxicity in her mood was brewed specifically for Yamva and not just everyone.

She never had liked him. She hadn't liked him the moment she had met him. During the fall-back procedures, when her and the rest of Kuhaga's company were consolidating the digsite, and setting up the landing platform for Tollen's boys, Yamva had been in charge of setting up the work-light systems and the circuit arrays.

Plasma generators deep in Spine Cave powered the entire site. Yamva had been a prude and a bully in his efforts to organize the mechanics. He was the lead engineer, because, truthfully, Kuhaga had hired him due to the fact that he lacked anything like him beforehand.

No one else in the company had a grasp on Covenant-era tech like Yamva did.

-But, then again, that changed little for her.

Smart or not, quick with a wrench and welder-pistol or not, Yamva was still a raging, awful and conceded cunt to her.

She didn't like Taptap either. The little bastard squeaked and barked like a dog all day, and sometimes, she'd worried about him gripping someone's leg in an effort to make love to it. But she was much more tempted to shoot Yamva instead of him. His head in her scope's center was deliciously tempting.

Her talon twitched on the rifle's trigger.

"…Pckeeww~…" –She mimicked the blast of a weapon under her own breath, jolting the barrel of her rifle slightly upwards to simulate a back-kick. Yamva was obviously unaffected. There he was, still lurking around in her sights.

Eat it, space-chicken.

Kel sighed and lowered her gun, her backward-jointed legs adjusting in her sniper nest. The T'vaoan crooned quietly as she watched the two engineers leave the cave. Just barely, over the silent din of the trench, she could make out Taptap's faint squeaks and chirps echoing distantly. She sighed for a second time, elbowed the boulders in front of her, and laid her snout in her palm.

Credits almost aren't worth this.

She ran her long, thin tongue over her teeth and smacked her chops. For a moment, craning her gaze up at the trench's fallible sky, she wondered about the insults she was using.

She'd only seen holographic pict-captures of chickens before. She knew they were a bird that humans cultivated, or, at least, used to cultivate. Somewhere in the galaxy had they done that… maybe… somewhere in their home system… Mars?

Were chickens native to Mars?

"Yo."

Kel didn't even glance when some gravel crunched, and footsteps emanated from directly behind her. Someone had walked up onto the plateau of her sniper nest.

"Yo." –The T'vaoan awkwardly returned with disinterest, still craning her eyes up at the impossibly high top of the massive trench surrounding her. The alien word sounded strange coming through her raptornoid teeth. But then again, the English language was strange enough, as was Chinese, though, she only knew some words in the latter and couldn't speak it formally.

"Nothing's happening?"

Kel dismissively arched an eye to her flank when the other person grunted and laid on their belly beside her, mimicking her lowness to the earth.

"You look dreadful." He told her.

She crooned at him and sunk her snout deeper into her palm. Her mind was still running circles. Those chickens…

"Is that Yamva and Taptap?" He asked a second later, and the air crackled- literally –as he played with something wrapped in foil.

"What do you know of chickens?" She asked suddenly, tapping her talons on the spine of her Needlerifle. Over the trench gap, Taptap was flinching as Yamva snapped something loud enough at him that the faint after-thought of the bark was heard from where they were.

If he kicks the Grunt over the edge, I can use that as an excuse of him going rogue, Kel thought with hunger. 'He attacked site-personnel, and so, I was forced to engage and take him out'-

What a beautiful scenario… kill two birds with one stone. Well, a bird and a precipitously egregious swamp-midget.

"Are you serious?" The man beside her chuckled.

Kill a chicken with one stone. Cluck-cluck…

"I brought you another bar." He told her when she didn't look at him. Kel's nostrils flared. She smelled it right as he told her. "So, why exactly do you want to know about-"

"Gimme'." The T'vaoan croaked in her straw-like voice. One minute, a black-gloved hand had been enwrapped around the length of a long chocolate bar. The next, and Kel had snatched it from him, turned around, and bitten into it.

Seconds later, the silence was permeated with wet, tiny sloshing sounds as she chewed noisily.

Talner Tolworth chuckled again and sat up on his knees, smiling at her.

"I'll never get why you people like chocolate so much." The human grinned in wonder, observing the Kig-yar's snout, balled at the cheeks from how much of the large bar she'd shoved in her maw at once. "I'd tell ya' to take human-bites, but, uh…"

"Chickens." Kel muffled, peeling the rest of the paper off the bar, before opening her mouth- and making him grimace at the brown slicks of sludgy remnants still clinging to her teeth –before popping the rest of the bar in and chewing again. "Tell me about chickens, Talner."

"…Earth-bird, two feet, two wings," Talner grew mischevious, he reached over and stuck his hand into the feathers splaying down the back of her neck. "-they got these too."

Kel gave off a tiny- 'Wrawt~!' –like sound and pushed him farther away from her with one of her taloned feet in his chest. She unceremoniously discarded the candy-bar wrapper over her shoulder, and listened as the wind took it away to fall into the bottomless blackness below and over the boulder barricade behind her.

"What else?" She swallowed, and nursed her rifle in her lap, scrutinizing him expressionlessly with her two, lizard-like eyes.

"Chickens are farm animals." He shrugged, running a hand through his brown, clean-cut hair. It was almost stubble, on top of his scalp. She looked at it and felt her feathers bristle. It was such a contrast, the things that grew out of both their scalps. Though, she would always try to shield her prolonged observations of Talner's youthful features with some uninteresting excuse, she knew deeply inside that she did so for reasons all her own.

"People eat them, use their eggs, keep 'em as pets… And they come from Earth." The man finished explaining with a slight smirk.

"Not Mars? They are not native to Mars?" She blinked.

"No, why the hell would they come from-" Talner laughed at her, and she shrugged. "Earth. They come from Earth. Though, I guess people on Mars have 'em now too. They got everything else they got on Earth on Mars these days."

"Have you ever been to Mars?" Kel-Yn-Gor settled on her rump and asked him. She always sounded like she was croaking when she asked him questions. She never asked anyone else in the company questions.

"Naw'." Talner waved a hand at her, digging into some of the pouches hanging off his belt, until he came out with another candy-bar. "Sol System was never on my bucket list. But I went to Alpha Centauri. I dunno' if that counts for ya', honey."

"Tell me about Alpha Cent-Tor-Eee." –She mispronounced in broken English. Talner, her…- acquaintance? Maybe? Whatever he was to her –laughed.

"Not a lot there. Mostly space-habitats, asteroid colonies and trade outposts." Talner shrugged, picking the wrapper off the bar. He sat in the dirt and noticed with a grin as she fixated on the chocolate in his fingers. Her tongue swiveled over her visible fangs. Sometimes, her face resembled the visage of a skull to him. "So, anything new?"

"Nights here are too cold." Kel said, doting on the spine of her gun. "Kuhaga has said nothing to you or me."

"Kuhaga says nothing to anyone." Talner shook his head, munching on the top of the bar. He hadn't even managed a second bite when Kel looked back up and centered her gaze on it squarely.

Talner swallowed, blinked, took one last bite and handed her the rest. The T'vaoan crooned at him with delight and snatched it from his hand. Another wrapper was lost on the wind over her feathered head a second later.

"I told you, we just have to get the last of the plasma to fill the tanks, and we're outta' here."

"That will take a long time." Kel swallowed the last of the bar and smacked her chops. The red, globular organ capping her throat always flexed strangely whenever she swallowed. Talner watched it with an innate fascination. "The burn tanks keep breaking. Yamva always has such work cut out for him." She snickered venomously.

"He bothers you that much, eh?" Talner chuckled.

"I hate Yamva." She squawked, rolling her boney mandible, doting on her sniper rifle. "He is not worth the expenditure of air or currency. Dead-fingered, I say. He puts his claws in every nook they do not belong in and he revels in that."

"You called him something once," Talner folded his arms over his padded cuirass, smirking. "-something real nasty. I almost pissed myself when you-"

"Yamva is a raging, awful, conceded cunt."

Talner snorted so loudly that his throat hurt.

He doubled over and started laughing. His seeing the Kig-yar so casually make the remark was too much.

Kel- in response –blinked and shrugged, her feathers ruffling at the sight of her incapacitated human friend.

"What? What did I say?" She croaked.

{👾}