Chapter Text
Darkmos is a sort of disgusting planet. It’s a good thing the rest of the krawl will be here soon, slavering to devour this sorry rock. I hope they leave no scraps.
Boughs of healthy but dead looking trees overshadow a shallow, sticky, stinking swamp of dark purple sludge and corrupted fossils. I had hoped for something nicer. I liked the two seconds I spent on Daichi, before I had to go. It was only a few hours but it felt like I had made it to heaven. Green hills, weird rock formations. I thought to myself, “What a nice place. This one I feel a little sorry for, even if I’m just getting a little nibble from it before that patrol officer comes.”
That cannon orbiting Fons did a number on me. I had to regenerate my entire outer layer. Stupid. Stupid. I can’t believe surviving an orbital laser got me demoted. Now that gloating green worm gets to be second in command. Ridiculous. I shouldn’t have to take orders from him.
For now, I wait. I wonder when Rallen will get here. I have a surprise waiting for him. Perfectly healthy dark spectrobes, raised outside of an incubator. That talking gravitational anomaly doesn’t wield any spectrobes. He can’t do as good a job as me. I’m a better leader than he is, too. This is ridiculous. I might develop a central brain just so I can have an aneurism about it.
He's taking forever.
No.
Wait.
There he is. Sucking, wet footsteps, turning the corner. I bet he doesn’t like the mud either.
Rallen is about my age. Barely an adult, suckered into his high rank by fate. Bright orange hair. Cute face. Decently tall and toned. It’s a shame I have to kill him for real this time. He isn’t ready for this next fight, even if he thinks he is. Dirty gross swamp planet is unfortunately my home turf. Pinska is submerged behind me, waiting to surface. She’s been getting more and more antsy. Makanoto has been sluggish, almost depressed, perched in the canopy above me. I don’t know what to do about that. I think she just hates being on this planet as much as I do.
In his best hero voice, he shouts, “Maja! What are you doing here!?”
“Hi Rallen.”
His stance softens. “Oh. Um. Hi?” It certainly seems like he wasn’t expecting this. Oh well, his guard being down just makes my job easier.
“Let’s get this over with. Makanoto! Pinska!” My beautiful girls dismount their perches cast in the forever twilight of this dimmed world and rise from depths so violet they seem black.
“Wait!” The boy soldier sticks his hand out as he yells, cartoonishly animated.
Pinska is nervous, I can sense it. Why is she nervous? “Yes?”
“You look… sad,” he says. I do not! Makanoto looks at me and slow blinks, agreeing. That’s not fair.
I sigh, and concede. “It’s not my fault. I just got demoted.”
His little hero stance softens. “Because I shot you with a giant laser?”
“Yes, because you shot me with a giant laser.”
He almost looks ashamed. “I’m sorry about that.”
I harden my voice. And wipe that silly, sad look off my face. “You look stupid just standing there. Are we going to fight or not?”
“You look really out of it. Are you sure?”
“I don’t know. I’m bored.” And sad. “Can I at least whoop your butt? ~It’ll make me feel better.~”
“Okay!” He might be a little cute. The prizmod glows, his warrior beasts taking his side in a shining instant. For a moment, it’s the prettiest thing on the planet. The glow dims, crystal origami folding back into his wrist mounted future tech. “Iku ze!”
His spectrobes barely have time to react, wrong elements and everything, before my girls set upon them. Runty weaklings retreat into his still glowing Prizmod near immediately. His jaw drops.
“What!” Is he just going to be surprised? Not terrified? He should be running.
“Yeah, yeah. Now shoo, before I change my mind about sparing you.”
He considers it for a second, looking back in the direction of his ship. Someone is yelling over his comms. That girl with pink hair. Jenny? I don’t know. It’s not like I ever see her. He turns back to me, voice shaking a little as he asks, “You invited me to join you and stuff before. Um. Do you want to get out of here? This planet stinks. We could go out for food? I think I know a place that isn’t closed for repairs. Repairs from when you attacked the planet.” Silence from his earpiece speaks volumes. She’s can’t believe it. Really, what was her name? “Do you like food?”
“Are you asking me on a date, little boy?”
Nodding, he affirms, “Yes.” He says it with such conviction that I almost believe him. Jessie sighs very loudly and barks something. “It can’t be on Kollin,” he adds.
I smile, hair curling around me. “Yes it can.”
“Okay,” he concedes. “It can be on Kollin.” Gina goes wild.
Their ship is air conditioned. It also smells… like machine oil and the beach. How does it smell like the beach? He tends a lot of flash [Spectrobes: Beyond The Portals], I think. Maybe that’s it.
Jeena, whose name I have now learned, is glaring at me from her seat in the cockpit. “Don’t even think about trying anything, you monster.” Hm. I guess I am a monster.
Rallen, not looking away from the road, chirps, “Don’t worry, Jeena! Everything will be okay. Maybe we can get her on our side! She’ll be a great ally to the NPP.”
Pinska it sat next to my seat, the auxiliary one that smells like Aldous. She likes looking at the stars fly past. It isn’t every day she gets to see them, most planets we eat are missing theirs. Entire systems carved out, populated only by krawl hordes.
Makanoto purrs like the rumbling turbulence as we fly through a minor nebula. She hums to the overbearing whoosh of the portal I opened to this system.
The pink haired one with no name mutters only to her companion, but I can hear her even under her whisper volume and the roaring engines. “I really, really don’t like this plan, Rallen. Has the commander signed off on this?”
“Hey, it’s not like she can do much. She’s in our custody!”
“You just got creamed! And you’re avoiding my question about the commander. This is a bad idea.” She makes a point of catching my eyes. “Look at her! She’s smirking!!”
“I may be smirking a little,” I admit. “I promise I’ll be on my best-est behavior.”
Pink hair makes air quotes at me. “Your ‘bestest?’”
“Humans have such a hard time grasping their own languages. I was making fun of you, kid.” I flip my hair, which is gorgeous. “For being human.”
Jill scoffs, pretending to be doing something on her console. “Kid? We’re the- Rallen, we’re all the same age, right?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Rallen almost looks like he wants to ask, but stops himself and whispers to Jessica, “It isn’t proper to ask a lady her age?”
Whirr. Whirrr… This is taking a lot longer than going through Krawlospace usually does. He’s a pretty competent pilot, though.
“I’ll ask then.” As she looks at me all polite-like, I peep at her screen. Okay, she’s actually doing something. I stand corrected, faced with the cold and harsh reality of the [Spectrobes: Origins] statistics tab. “Maja, how old are you?” Oh right. She was trying to talk to me.
“I was given form after you killed Thoraxa. A little after, I think. Krux doesn’t have clocks.”
“That was like, two months ago!”
Jenna throws a pen or… something… at me. “Are you sure you’re not the youngest here?” Pinska grabs it and gnaws on it, which seems to be permissible.
“Am not,” I huff, crossing my arms.
Rallen’s hair bobs as he giggles. It’s pretty nice hair, I’ll admit. “Are too.”
Gronos had better be handling things. I may or may not be gone for a while. Is it bad that I’m excited? Who am I kidding. Eff that job. I can take a day off if I want to, but I do have a schedule to adhere to. “How much longer until we’re at the lunch place?”
Jeena checks the map. Click clack click. Whirr. “Just a few more minutes,” she assures me.
“I’m gonna starve to deaaaath.” I clutch my stomach for effect. I also do it because being hungry hurts really bad.
He cranks the accelerator. He’s very literal. I appreciate his concern. …A normal amount.
We soar much faster now. He’s a real daredevil, huh? It only takes us a second to enter the portal, then we’re weaving through asteroid belts with ease. Using gravity to get more speed on our exit, using gravity as an additional slingshot. The ship almost sounds like its having fun, catapulting around Ziba. Then Nessa. Then Kollin’s orbital rings. We dock on the outskirts of the capital, where the skyscrapers nearly pierce orbit. Where the building dedicated to the end of my species sits towering, glittering, a wonder of the world. Pinska decides to stay on the ship. I understand. Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t want to come either. I wonder if I look out of place? I’m purple. Although, the NPP wouldn’t know me by face yet. Rallen doesn’t carry a camera on him.
He keeps his military stride outside of combat and uniform. His gait is purposeful, always so sure of himself. Sure of his destination. Even when he doesn’t have one in mind. It's a little hard to keep up with him, actually. I would warp but I think that would dampen my disguise. I had to leave my cape on the ship (which I’m not happy about) but in exchange I did get a very nice wide brimmed hat. It’s extremely large, I think they give these out to sharpshooters or something. It was in Rallen’s closet which mean it’s mine now, seeing as how we’re going out and all. My pigtails have been shrunken to simply be purple hair, the brim obscures my face and krawl patterning, and I am technically incognito. It’s not a very convincing disguise but Jenny insisted on it. We leave the docking bay and descend like ten blue glassed elevators before we finally hit the city. It’s very bright out today, and the smell of public parks and light based technology is a very welcome change of pace compared to where I was like literally twenty minutes ago. I wonder if anyone is going to check on my post. They won’t, but I might get called back sooner than I hope.
We descend, and descend, and oh my goodness there are so many elevators on this stupid giant city planet. How is there so many?? Is there not an escalator? A staircase? A ladder of any kind?? I have to walk to a lift just to get into another lift and it takes us like, more time in lifts than it does walking to get where we need to be going. A child sitting under a weirdly placed tree looks at me funny and I try not to glare at him. Rallen doesn’t slow down though, so I can’t refrain from glaring for too long. Kid probably deserved it. All humans deserve it. Ooh, look at me, I age and I can sit down in the shade and eat ice cream whenever I want oooh. It makes me sick. I barely notice that a hand is on my stomach before I realize Rallen is trying to decide whether or not to tap me on the shoulder. I’d probably try to absorb him if he did. I hope I haven’t been leaving sunken in footprints this whole way, that’d be embarrassing.
Rallen visibly decides against poking me. Good. “Miss Maja, we’re here.” The storefront looks the same as nearly every other amenity on Kollin. It’s a nondescript sliding door with no signage or anything. Plain white plaster with doors in them for miles.
“And what kind of restaurant is this anyway, boy?”
“It’s food. You know food, right?”
“I understand that cooked animals and plants are eaten in places where humans live. I haven’t tried anything like that since…” It is at this very moment I realize I don’t have to call my master ‘Master’ because he isn’t here right now. “Krux…” HAHA. KRUX. “…let me have a slice of bacon that fell on the floor one time.”
“Krux eats bacon? I thought he was a krawly thing.”
“He eats the same thing every day.” And it’s awful. “He’s awful.”
“No wonder you want to switch sides. He didn’t even let you try a fresh piece?”
“He treats me like a pet. It’s…” Awful. “…unpleasant.” How come Krux gets to wear a huge cape and I don’t? I bet he’s wearing his huge cape right now. I bet he’s relishing it. I feel very nude without my cape, especially considering that it’s a part of me. I wonder if it’s begun to attack Jeena yet. That’s her name, right? I don’t know. It isn’t like I asked her on the ship.
The doors of the Food Place slide open and I realize with astonishment that nobody is here. Rallen must see the look on my face because he starts to comment on it. “I figured you’d feel more comfortable if it were only us eating. You can take off your big hat if you want. Sit and relax, you’re a confidential informant of the NPP now.”
“Your sentence was full of so many incorrect things that I don’t even know where to start. I will sit, but I will not relax. And I’m not the government’s little krawl lap dog now, okay? I’m just on a little vacation. You’re on my side, and I only play for my own benefit.”
Pulling out my chair for me, he nods, “Ma’am yes ma’am.”
“That’s more like it.” It’s an alright chair. These standard issue manufactures are never tasty and it seems they aren’t supremely comfortable either. “Now, what do they have to eat here?”
“It’s all stir fry. It really depends on what you want stir fried.”
“You’re useless. Just get me whatever you get. I’m sure it’ll be tolerable.”
He gives me a look, confused by my overwhelmingly nice compliment. And then he goes over to the tablet and inputs his order and mine. The vending machine style edifice whirrs very loudly for four minutes of awkward silence, and then we have lunch. It smells… really good.. Noodles in sauce, I think. That’s wheat, and chicken egg, and water. The sauce is molasses and peppers and sugar, I think. The machine listed these ingredients when he took it out, didn’t it? I’m not as literate as I’d like to be.
I regard the silver instruments wrapped in paper that sit beside my plate. These are utensils? I am to use these to consume my share of the meal. I poke at the mass with my prongfork, slice without any real purpose with my sharpknife. I scoop up the pieces, poorly cut with these tools that are foreign to me, with my bluntspoon.
Is this how I’m supposed to attack this? The bits, jellied soft by their cooking, try to stack, sticking on the spoon. I’m a bit too forceful, clumsy with my tools. I’m covered up to my wrist in a smatter of sauce. I’m not supposed to eat through my skin, right? I raise my wrist to my maw, to lick at the mess with my tongue.
The boy asks, “Is the food okay? You look uncomfortable.”
I halt, tongue stuck barely under my skin, trying to catch a flavor. “It’s adequate. As I stated previously.”
“That was before you’d tried it-“
“It’s adequate. Thank you for the meal.” With this, I put my hand down and sit still. The sauce, trapped in the cavity of my mouth, sizzles away into my body slowly. I use my tongue to spread it across a wider surface area. I don’t swallow, my esophagus only leads to a lung I use to speak with.
“If you say so.” Rallen looks back to his food, twirling noodles around his fork. With remarkable agility, he lifts the bite to his lips and puts it inside. He chews, to break down the noodles into paste, he swallows, to dissolve the noodles with acid. He swipes at the corner of his mouth with a thumb, tracing brown sauce along the path of a little smear. It goes in with the rest. He’s enjoying himself. I think it was a mistake to come out for this. I could suggest we go do something else, yes?
Jealousy spills from my mouth. I don’t like how sticky the sauce is, coating the roof of my mouth and folding over itself in the space between my cheeks and teeth. “What does it taste like?”
He looks at me, then to my nearly untouched plate. He understands, even if he still has to willfully consider how to put the flavor into words. “The sauce and the noodles are different. The noodles are, do you want me to tell you about the texture? The mouthfeel?” He doesn’t like the word ‘mouthfeel.’ His face scrunches up.
“All of it.” Please. I wouldn’t debase myself by asking him ‘please.’
“The texture of the noodles is gummy, it springs back when I press on it. The albumen in the egg and gluten in the wheat are rolled and flattened together, then cooked without too much real development. Just the proteins cooking is enough to make a noodle that stays together when dry, but turn back into looser strands when heated and hydrated.”
“When you grind it between your teeth, does it turn to paste?”
“Not really. It cuts really cleanly into little bits, the machine always cooks the noodles al dente.”
“Al dente?”
“To tooth. The phrase is Italian, even though the noodles are Chinese. It means you can bite through them all the way.”
“Mhm.” He’s weirdly prepared for this. Did we have to go through the humiliation of making me try to eat before I got to hear what eating is supposed to be like?
“When they come into my mouth, I pick the size of my bite with my incisors. Once cut, the rest falls back to the plate or fork, and I use my tongue to bring the portion to my molars, where I chew. Or most people do. I use my incisors for all of it, I don’t like how it feels in the back of my mouth.”
“And after you chew, you swallow.”
He nods. “Yes.”
“And the flavor?”
“Of the noodles or the sauce?”
“Noodles first. You gave me the noodle texture first. I’ll try the sauce after.”
“It’s mostly wheat and salt. The egg, once cooked, really lacks any input in the way of taste. The wheat is all starch and a little tiny bit of a few alcohols, it’s flat and um. I feel it really vertically on the tongue. The salt, you know what salt tastes like.”
“I do. Now for the sauce?”
“It’s the most complex part. Most sauces are water, sugar, and spices. This one follows that formula, but it’s got darker sugar in it than most: molasses. It’s all the gunky stuff left over from cane sugar, the plant we refine white sugar from. Back when things were scarce, humans found ways to use every waste product they could to avoid starvation. This is one of those things. Molasses has this smoky flavor under its sweetness, mostly a byproduct of the grinding heat and metal of industry. It’s nice. I like it.”
“I guess that’s the reason for most flavors in cuisine. ‘It’s nice, I like it.’”
“Well yeah. Why would you eat something you don’t want to?”
“Krawl eat anything that Krux tell them to.”
“Them, not you?”
“I have more refined tastes. Control towers and machinery instead of dirt. The hearts of surprisingly handsome young men, for example. He sends me out for sabotage.”
With a twinge of disgusting concern he asks, “Have you eaten something you liked before?”
“Hmm. I have a taste for concrete.”
“Any kind of concrete in particular?”
“As with most preferences, it was my first. I was buried under Nox. They, whoever they used to be, used a lot of limestone in their slurry.”
Talking with his mouth full, he asks, “So you have a taste for acidity?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“I’ll try and bring you something next time, to try.”
“Aw,” I whine. “He’s trying to bribe me.”
“I don’t have to bring you anything at all.”
“Mm. That’s better. Why do humans chew everything they eat?”
“Most greater life, um.” He catches himself, questioning his inherently supremacist language. “More complex life?”
I smile. “Am I not complex?” Really got him there.
“It’s just the term, I’m sorry. Complex cellular life, plants and animals, have differentiated cells. Our bodies grow too large and complex for every cell to break down food and still effectively serve its purpose, so we put food through a series of processes that break them down into base nutrients, to be dissolved into the blood and distributed through the body. The solution which our cells ‘soak’ in is pumped through the body by the heart from our intestines from our gut from the mouth. Digestion isn’t as streamlined as we’d like though, so we have to cook and cut and chew our food before introducing it to the stomach at all. An enzyme in human saliva, amylase, breaks down big carbohydrate chains into sugars as we chew, a little bonus to efficiency that also keeps the microbiome of the mouth clean.”
“And so, you chew. I absorb and dissolve. My enzymes are diverse enough to eat nearly everything.”
“Why can’t you taste?”
“I just can’t taste with my mouth. It’s inefficient to, I don’t eat through there. My mouth is for speaking. My teeth aren’t hard enough to chew, they only need to be firm enough for my tongue to stand on. I can smell really well at least, most of my chemoreceptors are along the track of my fake breathing.”
“Is there anything else in you that’s differentiated?”
“No. The opening and closing of my cells are used to make structure. The surface of my lung is always closed, I can’t really change that, and my nose is always open. I have a tongue, but I only use it to talk. There isn’t anything else inside me. Even my eyes are ornamental, every cell has a big cluster of photoreceptors in them. It’s why I turn black when the holes in my body open to eat.”
“Is that why Krawl are weak to light?”
“Yes. We don’t have enough protection from it to keep from being torn apart through the visible radiations. Our skin is too thin, it’s meant to welcome things in and never stop. We’re too greedy for our own good, it’s been engineered into us.”
“By Krux?”
I lean forward, trying to be guarded. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to be guarded before, even in conversation. It feels good, being able to defend myself. Teeth and claws and tensing up. “Watch yourself. That’s a sensitive subject.” I am almost like an animal.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re able to talk for such a long time about chemical make-ups and cooking chemistry. How long have you been planning an outing like this?”
“Not a long time. I just know all the biology stuff because I’m a biologist.”
“Does that make me one of your special little research subjects, spectrobes master?”
“No. You’re just important.”
“Boring answer.”
“Sorry. I meant to say, I’m going to study you for as long as you’ll let me.”
“That’s better, soldier boy. For king and country?”
“For the good of the universe. …nowadays.”
“So you can extinguish my people.”
“So I can stop the war.”
“How noble.”
“I don’t like to fight,” he insists, holding his little knife like a sword despite. “Or, I don’t like to hurt people. Fighting is fun. I don’t like to do war, I was a scientist before the last guy died.”
Oh right, that boring nobody I ate. “So I might have killed your successor?”
“I killed yours.”
“Then we’re even. Doesn’t it feel nice to be even?”
“What’s your plan now?”
“I needle you with questions until you react in a way that makes me laugh, forever. Are you done eating?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to get out of here? We could go back to the ship.”
“I don’t sleep on the ship. There also isn’t a sofa in there.”
“Oh?”
“It’s just not very good for conversation. And Jeena is going to be there for a while.”
“Hm. How long have you been hoping this would happen to you?”
“I um-“
“Am I everything you were hoping for? I’m the woman of your dreams, aren’t I?”
The fork clatters down to his plate, blood draining from his face. Pale is a bad color on him. “Uhhhh. I don’t. Know. Is it everything you were hoping for? Do you want to do this again?”
Obviously the answer is yes. But I can't let him know that right away, can I? I lean back in my seat, reclining to consider. “Yes.”
“When we get back to my apartment, can I look at your mouth? I could help you grow some accurate teeth.”
“Is there a catch?”
“No. For king and country, like you said. I want to give you what you want, so you don’t have to eat planets anymore.”
“For a selfish and self centered reason, I’ll do anything.”
“Okay! Let’s go, then.”