by S E Zbasnik
"As I was saying, the sun was cresting above my head as the morning rose."
"You are married early in the morning, interesting."
"Well, it was the only time we could book the rotunda. Anyway, a small child sang a haunting aria as I stood before the five and the other witnesses gathered behind us. My jacket was a succulent crimson with golden embroidery across the sleeves in the manner of rising flowers."
"Does just the groom wear red or did Variel walk down the aisle in a crimson dress as well?" Brena paused in her furious writing.
"Uh, well, traditionally..." traditionally red represented all that virginity busting both parties were supposed to be getting to right after the five families waved their switches of holly atop their heads. A lot of the modern couples among their lot preferred a mauve or pink to keep within the same color palette but not put everyone in mind of the wedding night -- at least not until half the sacramental wine was gone and the disco ball dropped. "Traditionally, people do a lot of different things. This was a military wedding and all, lots of high ranking stiffs about, so..."
"I do not understand. You are uncertain what your bride wore?"
"She was in her military uniform, the dressy one with the pleated things on the end," Marek coughed out. All grey, not a strip of red anywhere to be found. It was a false wedding to a woman he could barely stand to look at, but it still felt shameful as hell to admit his bride couldn't even pretend to be a virgin on her wedding day. As if she thought it was somehow no one else's right to know the state of her hymen.
"I see," Brena said, sketching 'pleated things?' into her book. "Please continue."
"Terrwyn, we...we're not supposed to see each other before the ceremony. I won't lie, I felt immense trepidation. Would she show? Would she skip out on the agreement? Could I be a man left at the altar?"
He let the terror hang in the air but Brena only waited politely before ushering him on with an, "Evidently not, or we would not be speaking now."
"Right," the dulcen threw him off his game. Most other girls would be quivering, gelatinous cubes by now. Elves were a shrewd lot. "I stood beside my mother, who picked up my finger and poked it with the ceremonial stick pin. Terrwyn's mother in turn did the same. Then they tied our fingers together and tossed the bloody rag into the fire. Oh, there's a burning brazier we're all circled around. I probably forgot to mention that earlier but it's important."
Brena put down that they used flaming undergarments to discard of bandages. She had many questions to share with her fellow bards later.
"The priests spoke of devotion to family, to love, to life, to all those unknowable, unseeable tics of life. Then they each in turn took our hands."
"The bleeding ones?"
"What? No, they stopped bleeding during one of the songs."
"There are songs?" Brena ran her finger back through her notes.
"It's a wedding, of course there are songs. Everyone uses that Musket in C, and then reads about how not greedy love is. Point being, the priests clasped our hands together and placed a seed inside them. Then they spoke of the plant of promise, how the love was the seed and it could only grow with the help of trust, compassion, caring, intimacy."
"I'm going to vomit all over my shoes," Ferra muttered behind them. She turned her head to the sound of the door opening and another soul entering the kitchen.
But Brena ate it all up, her fingers aching as she tried to capture each word from his mouth. Marek licked his lips as he continued. "Then the priests collapsed our hands and a rose bloomed between them."
"You do simple magic tricks at your weddings?" the voice of the male elf dropped across the floor as his deep tones failed to find a whisper.
"It is symbolic of the promise we just made," Marek enunciated over the growing peanut gallery. "But weddings are not all joy. Like everything that must pass from one life to the next, we finally turn to the dark specter of the future. They peer into our eyes from behind impenetrable cloaks and judge the chances of our future. Lifting the rose, they remove a single petal."
"Do they wish a souvenir?" the orc asked as he joined into the conversation from the bridge side.
"It's another symbol," Marek rolled his eyes at the constant interruptions, "that love is precious but not indestructible. Anything from time, to a wandering heart, to a lack of care could pluck each petal 'til only the stem remains."
"I shall join you vomiting into the sink," Taliesin said to Ferra.
Marek ignored them all as he scooted closer to Brena. "It touched me, that moment, as I stood there beside my blossomed wife. We may have entered into that room as little more than two strangers bartering to make a deal, a future we would be forced to share, but I," he shifted, half covering his face with his hand and dropping his head down. Marek's voice dropped to a whisper as his lower lip trembled, "I'd hoped for so much more. That we could...that I could convince her to love me." As he looked up at Brena a tear rolled down his cheek.
She patted the hand he placed upon the table as the others in the room shifted around, each planning on tackling the ass to the ground if he so much as touched her. But Brena smiled to herself as she closed her book, "Thank you for your story, it could prove quite useful to me."
As she rose from the table, Marek blinked furiously trying to let slip a few more false tears he built up. "And as a bit of advice from a professional to an amateur," Brena still smiled as she looked down at the human, "when faking sincerity, do not quibble one's lower lip. It is best reserved for pain or serious emotional discomfort. Here, it only looks as if you are cold or about to soil your trousers."
The audience erupted into cheers as the bard rose from the man sputtering in shock at his bluff being called. "All right, Brena!" Ferra nodded her head, all animosity between them forgotten.
She in turn blushed at the attention but smiled wider. The bard only thought she'd been privy to a very small rehearsal and not that the human had anything untoward in mind. He would not have gotten much further in life if he'd tried anything anyway. Taliesin was not the only one in the family with certain life altering skills.
Her brow knitted in confusion as a thought gripped her mind, "What of the fifth family?"
"What?" Marek asked, still trying to piece together where he went wrong.
"You explained the need of the parents, the priests, and the future in the ceremony; but what of the lordling family?"
"They're mostly there to get hammered and pretend to deflower the bride and groom," Variel said as she walked into the room. "Some traditions die hard. I see we're all here except Orn."
"Nah, I'm just hiding behind ol' smokey," the dwarf's voice crested around the djinn hogging up most of the exit to the starboard bathroom. No one knew what Gene did in there and no one ever wanted to ask.
"If we're all quite finished reliving the excitement of my ill spent youth," Variel said to her crowded crew, "don't you have a ship to be operating?"
The others grumbled, shifting in their shoes, but it was Orn's cheerful voice who called out, "Not particularly, unless you want us to drift in a fresh clockwise manner to spice things up."
Monde joined in, "There are no injuries sustained within the past week that require my attention. Amazingly."
The dulcen duo looked to each other, sensing this was another one of those human things that required a delicate touch the elves were supposed to be renowned for, but neither was much in the mood. "Is there someone on board who requires the multi talented services of an assassin?" Brena asked for her brother.
Variel didn't answer even as Brena pointed towards Marek with a jangle of her finger tuning rings. Instead, she glared at Ferra who was stealing a sliver of bread off the cracking loaf and gathering up her tools, "Wha? I was just getting to it."
"This was the human way of asking you all to leave us alone," Variel said to her gathered crew of aliens.
"Why didn't you simply enunciate it?" Brena asked.
Monde twisted his grey head about, itching the n
ubs protecting his auditory nerves, "A human come out and say what they want? They galaxy would cease spinning."
"How many humans does it take to screw in a light bulb? I don't know, they're still arguing about it," Orn cracked as his hand also cracked across Gene's backside. The djinn puffed a bit but continued to stay nothing.
"Got that out of your systems?" Variel said, "Good. Now go," and she waved her arms in the direction of the exits hoping they'd all finally take her heavy handed hint.
Ferra popped her clean tools into one apron pocket and some more of those goblin crackers into the other. Crawling in the ducts was exhausting work. Slithering her fingers around her husband's collar she yanked him away from the captain, "Come on, I need you."
"Duty calls, my cosmos love," Orn said as his wife pulled him out the door, "What do you need from me?"
Ferra's voice echoed down the hall, "To stand very quiet and hold things."
Brena smiled softly at the humans before dropping her notebook into a bag stitched together from other bags found unworthy. Her warm eyes shifted up to her brother as she motioned out the door to let the humans have their time, but he wasn't paying attention. Sighing, she slipped a tuning ring over her finger and prodded him in the side.
A very un-roguish squeal escaped from Taliesin and he jumped back, his calf knocking into a cupboard and rattling the few remaining glasses on the counter. "Come," Brena said, her skirts filling the doorway as her brother followed, massaging his side and glaring at the unforgiving world.
Monde turned about in the rapidly dissolving group and made a break for the first door he could find. Unfortunately this led to the bridge, a section he had less than anything to do with, but Gene blocked off the mistake as soon as the orc realized he made it. Well, Monde thought, perhaps I can get some reading done by starlight.
"And then there was one," Variel said, surveying her husband.
Marek rubbed his face, the gristle upon his chin grayer than she remembered, and he yawned midway through his speech, "If you were trying to impress me with your commanding presence, I don't give a shit."
"There isn't a single atom in this galaxy that could get you to give a shit," Variel said leaning against her kitchen counters. She unwrapped the packaging on the coarse goblin crackers smeared with a facsimile of peanut butter. It wasn't really peanuts and it wasn't really butter, but for a human that hadn't seen home in five years it was close enough, "So, what's the word?"
"You think this is easy?"
"Sitting on your fat arse and chatting to guys named Thick McRunfast?" she wiped the not peanut butter off the side of her mouth and lifted one shoulder, "Yeah, I'd call that the definition of easy."
"Then you do it...oh right, despite you being the lauded Knight of the realm, keeper of the sword, and queen of all she throws her weight over, you can't."
"Here," Variel threw the second cracker in the package at him. "You haven't eaten a thing since you got on board."
He caught it and stared at the morsel. "I'm not hungry," he said putting it down on the table.
"You know, if I wanted to kill you I have about five hundred better options than poisoning."
Marek didn't respond. He didn't need to consume anything but minimal liquid for another 78 hours according to the guy he talked to. His contact insisted it was perfectly natural, no dangerous chemicals or nothing involved. That you felt like your face was restricting into your brain was perfectly normal and nothing to be concerned with.
He wished he could be anywhere but trekking along in the frozen vastness of space. Space? Ha, even its name meant nothing. What do you have when you're without furniture? Space! His feet belonged safe on the ground. At this point he'd take any ground as long as it didn't have any orcs, goblins, those ghost things, or walking dead. The necromancied were okay as long as they stayed sitting, their arms far away from any cutlery or people's skulls.
"Anyone else who knew you would have sworn upon their mother's grave that the great Terrwyn Yates would never abandon her post. She'd crawl through broken glass dumped into lava before losing that sword. Yet here you are, on this fine, upscale barge running errands for overtly damaged people too stupid or scared to do it themselves."
"What's your point?" Variel asked folding her arms and dropping her head. She'd do that every time he insisted upon how necessary an upgrade in the living arrangements was, or when he stumbled into the profitable world of snail customizing. Time and her face may have changed, but she could still perfect being a colossal bitch.
Marek knew he wouldn't get an answer out of her. He didn't even care to get one either. He just liked watching her squirm. Smashing the cracker with his fist and grinding the crumbs into the table he said, "No point. Just makes you think. All that work, all that time, all that arse kissing and here you are." A smile better suited upon marine life flashed upon his face. She grumbled while he tried to wipe his now crumb-coated fist across the edge of the table.
As he etched the last of the peanut butter across the yellowing coating of the table, a blurp bounced off his open fist. He shifted his eyes up to see if she noticed, and resigned to his fate, flipped his hand up. A bit of white text projected itself onto his forehead, quickly autofocusing.
"Looks like you have a message," Variel said as he scurried into his glittering pockets for the plastic extension to make a PALM readable and secret.
Marek grunted, pushing a few of the projected buttons as he flipped through the long messages from an insane bunch of paranoid twoners. Apparently slipping both unicorn and that ogre weed Thatch under your tongue at the same time causes a person to taste time, and permanently lose all sense of security.
"What's the damage?" Variel asked, not looking over his shoulder.
He was surprised that she could contain herself and let him flounder on his own. Marek never noticed the glistening napkin dispenser hanging off the wall in just the perfect spot to reflect his personal missives. "Umai's agreed to sell to me. But there are a few conditions."
Variel snorted, "Of course there are."
"One, the coin needs to be in dwarven bits."
She tilted her head, unsurprised by the request. Dwarven bits were the only fully untraceable currency in the galaxy. Even the piles of limestone and granite trolls traded in could be dated to their quarry of origin. The bits were nothing more than small beads crafted out of plain recycled material stuck inside flat plastic chips. As ordinary as something you'd get in a Big Boy Meal, but also impossible to duplicate. Only the mint knew the exact amount and substance of the beads so they'd glisten when shaken.
"How much?"
"Two, we have to smuggle the drug off world ourselves when the transaction's done."
"Marek, how much do they want?"
He flicked his fingers around in his palm and twisted in his chair. Holding up his hand he showed Variel just how screwed they both were. She sucked on her teeth, the squeaky sound she'd make in the middle of the night when he'd wander past her room and find her hunched over a few console screens running sims. His wife had to have destroyed the entire orc armada thirty times over.
"And how much of that incredibly large number can you contribute too?"
Marek licked the bottom of his own teeth before jamming his tongue safely in a cheek, "Well, it's been a challenging year. What with the stock market in flux and..."
"And no one wanting to by a box of vampire steaks, right, got it. Can you contribute anything?"
"Ten, maybe twelve..."
"Dollars?!"
"Percent," he scoffed. "Give me some credit."
"I'll have to give you a lot more than some," Variel ran the math in her head a few more times and kept coming up with a lot of exclamation points. "Where is this rendezvous supposed to happen?"
Marek scrolled through his hand and gulped down hard, "It's...it's in the desolate zone."
"Makes sense."
"Makes sense?" He threw his hands up at his calm wife, the dread pit in his stomach momentarily dislod
ged.
"Contrary to all those 'Breaking Reports' the desolate zone isn't a lawless waste from which only untold terrors escape. They do have laws, it's just they sort of make them up as they go. Which station, Hungermunger? Potash? The Irrefutable Land Of Nog?"
"Land of Nog?"
"Oddly, not a single person named Nog lives there."
Marek knew very little about the solar systems humanity expanded out to, even the names of the few planets circling near Arda's star slipped his mind from time to time. He had no idea what constituted a space station, as opposed to a colony on an asteroid, or a full planet in the area declared free for all by every race just to give their lawbreaking citizens somewhere to get it out of their system. "It says here it's Virginand."
Variel whistled, "Shit, Virginand? How in the hell are we getting down to that scum hole planet and then back up without losing our kidneys?"
"I thought you said everything about the desolate zone were all stories. They had their own laws."
"They do, it just happens that in Virginand when it comes to organs it's finder keepers, losers bleeders." Variel rose away from the table, pacing as half a plan formed in her head before a small chunk of information landed in her lap, "Oh, and of course the desolate zone is all 'No Pinch.'"
"No pinch?"
"Klarta's left nipple, did you just roll in on the turnip transport?" Variel glared at her nearly lifelong gravity trapped husband. "Pinch, pinch the wyrm. You know, zipping from one section of the galaxy," she pointed her finger at the spot near his nose before elaborately stretching her arms out, "all the way to the other. What makes all this space stuff even possible."
"Then how do we get to Virgin land?"
"Virginand," she corrected absently. "Pinch to the passageway and hop onto it. Shouldn't be all that busy this time of year, no major mob reunions now." She ignored the confused look crossing her husband's face and called out, "WEST."
The computer momentarily blinked onto the screen, his carrot nose filling the view as it dodged and weaved before rotting to a limp black. "My baby!" it shouted and shut the onboard comm system down.