“Hi Muffin, how are you?”
“Pfffft, Muffin,” Ilrica snorted as she walked up.
“Hiya, Ms. Dyson!” Zurra greeted, her pink hands doubling in size as she waved them about like banners.
“Look, can I have a little privacy here, guys?” Gerald requested.
“Yeah, sure.” They all backed half a step away but kept watching intently.
Gerald sighed. His mother looked better than she had in a long time. Her face was clean, her hair was washed. Her skin had some color in it again. The sores on her temples and chin from constantly wearing the game helmet were healing.
“Mom, I’m happy to see you look well.”
“Shut up about that. Gerald, you need to marry this girl, you NEED to marry this Ssykes girl, like NOW. “
Gerald was flabbergasted. “There... are so many things wrong with that statement, I don’t even know where to begin. You do realize that we’re not even dating?”
Hey, we’ve been on one date, Cha’Rolette defended. That’s more than the rest of you, she said, glancing at the other girls.
Zurra ground her teeth.
Ilrica batted the tip of her tail, pretending not to care.
Gerald’s mom held up her finger threateningly. “I don’t care, you propose to her tonight.” Gerald’s eyes narrowed, “What did she do?”
Mary tried to look innocent. “Nothing, I’m just trying to be a good mother. She’s a very pretty girl, you know?”
“What did she DO?”
Mary looked around furtively. “Okay, I promised I wouldn’t say anything...”
I’m right here, you know?
“...but that girl, her company makes True Life.”
Gerald tried to keep his anger in check. “Yes, they do.”
“Well, she gave me a billion gold in game currency!”
“Game currency?”
“Yes,” she tittered, dancing in her chair like a little kid. “And complete Administrator status! Administrator status!”
Gerald dropped his head in embarrassment. “Mom...”
“It’s incredible! I can host events, I can set up tournaments between rival guilds. I can arbitrate marketplace disputes. I can ban anyone I want! I already perma-banned all those bums from Aphotic. You should see the message boards, they’re on fire!” qq moar nubs, qq moar!”
“Mom... I’m gonna call you back.”
The window folded up on the image of Mary pumping her fist into the air. All the other girls glared at Cha’Rolette.
Face it girls, you don’t have a chance, she said, flipping a ringlet back over her ear. With the resources my family has, I can outbid you all a thousand times over.
The other three girls looked at each other worriedly. “She does have a point,” Trahzi admitted. “In a normal war I could simply incinerate her, but on this battlefield, financial resources provide a distinct advantage.”
Looks like round three goes to me.
Zurra held up her finger. “Don’t bite the hand that puts your eggs in one basket.”
Gerald stood up. “Cha’Rolette, my mother has instructed me to marry you...”
Zurra looked like she was about to cry.
Cha’Rolette threw her head back snobbishly and closed her eyes. Don’t be so presumptuous. I’m a Ssykes. Just because you ask doesn’t mean I’ll accept you.
She cracked an eye open. Are you asking?
Gerald tried to be tactful. “Duchess, it might be different around here, but where I come from, the parents have little to no say in who the child chooses to marry.”
Cha’Rolette snapped her fingers. Blast.
Gerald breathed deeply to calm his temper. “And while I appreciate very much that you did something nice for my mother, I really wish you would have done it another way.”
Why? Didn’t you see her? She was ecstatic.
“She’s an addict, Duchess. Of course she looks happy, you just gave her more drugs.”
Oh.
Gerald scooped up his squawky chicken, grabbed his bookbag, and headed for the door. “If you want to do something nice for her, help her quit.”
* * *
“Please tell me you got this,” Priestess Paila warned as she scooped up the hem of her robes and her long furry tail and held them up like a frightened housewife from the 50’s.
“I got it, I got it. Priest Beren settled as he aligned the tripod in the center of the dusty room. There was a pulse of energy, a whiff of ozone, and then a blue wall originated on one side of the warehouse. As it passed, dust, cobwebs and Jinzell hives boiled away, leaving only clean polished surfaces behind. Priestess Paila closed her eyes and stood a little bit higher up on the stepladder as the wave washed over her. Once it had, she checked her mane and all her limbs to make sure they were still there, and sighed in relief when she found them intact.
Beren powered the device down, a satisfied look on his face. “Okay, now you can come in, Dyson.”
Gerald walked in holding an armful of cleaning supplies. The squawky chicken Ilrica had given him came wobbling in behind him. “Wow,” he whistled, looking around.
“That’s how we clean a room here on Central. Beats manual labor any day, doncha’ think?”
“Yeah, but now I feel useless,” Gerald said, holding up his broom and dustpan.
“Useless? If it wasn’t for your girlfriend, we’d never be able to open this second mission in the first place.”
“She’s not my girlfriend, she’s just a classmate.”
“Right,” Paila snickered as she hopped back down. “Because classmates donate industrial warehouses to the person sitting next to them all the time, right?”
“She didn’t donate it to me; she donated it to the mission.”
“Happens all the time, right?”
“Sure,” Beren laughed. “Just the other day a guy next in line to me at the hypermarket bought me a car. Said he liked the cut of my jawline.”
“It is rather striking,” Paila complimented.
“Thank you, my sibling,” he said, bowing in an overdramatic way.
“Okay, now we just have to pick out the layout we want, right?” Paila asked as she saddled up alongside Beren, her hand nearly touching his.
The floor rose up and reformed itself into a command console. Beren placed his palm on the sensor and it beeped in acknowledgement. A three-dimensional rendition of the warehouse floated up in the air around them, and he began scrolling through different internal arrangements.
“We’re lucky, there are a whole bunch of preset designs already setup in here,” Beren explained as he pulled out a cable and plugged it into the back of his neck. “Office space, living quarters, large industrial kitchens, all we have to do is select the elements that will most suit us and bring them together.”
“It’s good that we have such a canny and resourceful priest in our mission,” she praised, a little gleam in her eyes.
“Technology is not the enemy,” he explained as he began constructing the new mission in the air before them. “We use tools to do our chores faster so that we have time to do other things.”
“Yes, like the most important things,” she added coyly.
While they worked, Gerald used a hammer and nail to affix a placard to the entryway. His chicken ran this way and that across the floor, chasing something that wasn’t there.
Gerald stepped back and looked at the placard. In various languages, it read: ‘The Cha’Rolette Ssykes Central Exeter West Mission.’ As he looked at it, he recalled the angelic appearance she had during his vision. She was so radiant, so beautiful, but it was more than just physical. She had a beauty of spirit in that moment that he could not stop thinking about. “It was like she was a different person. “Was that the real Cha’Rolette, or just some effect of her powers that made her seem that way?” he mumbled to himself. The more he thought about it, the more his thoughts drifted to her long graceful neck, her rich pouty lips, her deep sparkling eyes. He wondered what it would feel like to touch that skin, to
feel those lips against his...
Gerald smacked himself in the face. “What are you doing? You’re a monk, get a grip, man.”
“All done here,” Beren announced. “Dyson, shoo! Go outside.”
Gerald stepped out through the open doors, then watched in amazement as the entire building reformed itself to conform to Beren’s design. Walls and partitions rose up from the floor. Light fixtures and air vents grew down from the ceiling. Rows of tables and seats grew up in the main hall, and beyond the trappings for a full-scale industrial kitchen, capable of feeding thousands. The tall, single-story structure cinched itself in the middle, creating a second story with office space, living quarters for the priests and acolytes, and a chapel room to hold the holy relics. When it was done, every inch of the facility was utilized. Dozens of small semi-permanent rooms filled every nook and cranny of the layout, meant to be temporary dwelling for the homeless, the displaced and the lost; each fitted with simple but private washing facilities, and the ubiquitous links to Central for entertainment.
Gerald applauded as he walked back in. The mission was unfurnished, but ready to go in every other respect. A pantry door slid open and his chicken poked his head out and looked around in utter confusion. The entire process had taken only seconds. “So what’s next?” Gerald asked.
Paila leaned back against the marble kitchen island which was now behind her and looked at Beren with a twinkle in her eyes. “Well, we figure since we cleaned the place and set it up, you can bring in the furniture.”
Gerald looked back at the seven loading skivs parked outside, full of donated furniture, the Ssykes logo posted all over them. “You’re kidding right?”
“No, get started,” they said in unison.
Gerald nodded and went outside. His chicken followed, crashing into one side of the doorway, then the other side, then finally making it out. As soon as they were out of sight, Paila tapped the wall control, closing off the doors to the kitchen and locking them. She then pounced on Beren and the two began kissing passionately.
* * *
“What do you want now?” Trahzi asked as the tiny puppy whined and rolled about in its bassinette. The noise it made was grating on her nerves.
The puppy whined even louder. Trahzi reached up and covered her ears. She had been around noises far louder than this. Once her people had even ventured too close to a supernova, which is one of the loudest pressure waves in existence, but somehow this tiny squealing noise was far more discomforting to her than any other noise she had even experienced.
“Please stop making that sound. We do not like it,” she said, trying to keep her emotions in check.
She looked over at the robot nursemaid and seriously considered turning it on, but Gerald had made her promise that she would only use it when she couldn’t be in her room with the puppy.
Trahzi tried to shove a bottle into the puppy’s mouth, but it turned away and spat it out.
Glancing at Gerald’s note, she checked the puppy’s diaper, and was rewarded with a face full of stench. She looked over at the waste basket, which was filled to the brim with dirty diapers.
“How can one little netsav puppy make this much poop?”
* * *
It was well past midnight by the time Gerald had finished unloading the last of the trucks. His aching muscles strained as he pulled the final couch down the ramp, only to find that it suddenly became too heavy to move. He wondered if his strength had given out, when he looked up and saw Zurra standing above him in her adult form, wearing a pink academy uniform.
“Zuri, this is private property, you shouldn’t be here.”
She thumbed at the sign posted by the front entrance. “Says there the Cha’Rolette Ssykes Mission is open to all. Even says it in English too, nice touch that.”
“Well,” Gerald groaned, pulling on the couch again. “We don’t open till next week, so you can come back then.”
“No-can-do, I’m here on official Academy business.” She plunged her hand through her uniform and into the cheek of her buttocks and yanked hard. Gerald started at her, bug-eyed, as she pulled free a handful of record keeping tablets. It was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen.
“Boy, you just literally pulled those out of your backside just now, didn’t you?”
“Where else am I supposed to keep them?”
“In a bag!”
She shook the tablets to remove any residue and handed them to him.
“These do look official,” he said, inspecting the holographic seals. “But this is the middle of the night.”
“Paperwork waits for no man,” she said, placing her hands up dramatically.
“That isn’t a saying,” he corrected as he scrolled through the first document.
“She shrugged. “You say, potato, and I say tomato.”
“You have no idea how true that is,” he grumbled.
Gerald glanced at the badge on her uniform. “Wait, they made you an office worker?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“They put you in charge of something? You couldn’t even take care of a hamster.”
Zurra jumped back and placed her hands over her mouth. “Oh, how dare you bring up Mister Blair!”
“The late Mr. Blair,” he corrected.
“Oh, you just can’t forgive me for that, can you? I was just a child, how could I have known that hamsters couldn’t survive in space without a suit?”
“How could you have known? It should be completely obvious. Don’t you have any common sense?”
She crunched up her face. “Cents? Like money?”
“No, not that kind of cents, the other kind of sense.”
“You just said the same word twice.”
“Look, I know they sound the same, but they are written differently.”
She waved her hand. “English is dumb. Hamsters are dumb. You are dumb. Just sign the things already.”
While Zurra turned herself into a giant hand and pushed the couch inside, Gerald squinted over the alien language.
“Standard is so hard. There’s like fifteen different ways just to say the word ‘is.’ Bill Clinton would have had a heart attack learning this stuff. What’s this say here?”
She rolled back over and glanced at it. “Oh it’s the health insurance policy.”
“Oh, okay.” He placed his thumb into the corner and the tablet beeped happily.
He shuffled to the next one.
“That one is the P.E. waiver.”
“All right.” He put his thumb into the corner and the tablet beeped happily.
“That last one is the field trip permission form.”
“Okay.” He put his...
“...wait a minute.”
Gerald examined the first paragraph more closely. “I know these symbols...’Formal union of Zurra Immestria and Gerald Dyson?’” he read. “This... this is a marriage certificate!”
She looked away. “No it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. You went to a judge and had this made up?”
“Aw, just sign it you big baby.”
“No.”
She petulantly took the tablets back. “Darn, almost had you that time.”
“I can’t believe you would try to trick me into this.”
“Trick? I’m not trying to take anything that wasn’t already promised to me.”
“What promise?”
She feigned being hurt. “Pray tell you must not have forgotten, we were but tiny moppets when we asseverated our quintessences to one other.”
“Stop trying to talk fancy. You don’t do it right. And I don’t remember anything like that. I do, however, remember you getting trapped in the dryer.”
“Oh, you would bring that up. It was a simple mistake anyone could have made. Your dryer looked like my litter bucket from back home.”
Gerald cracked a smile. “I remember... you came out of the spin cycle, your hair all poofed out like an Afro.”
Zurra smiled as well. “Tha
t was after I fixed myself. You should have seen me when your mom first pulled me out. My whole body was stirred up, like a blob of whipped cream.”
They both giggled. Then they both chuckled. Then they both started laughing.
“Oh, so many crazy things happened to us,” she said nostalgically.
“Yes, they did,” he said sincerely. “It was a rough way to grow up, for both of us.”
“Do you remember when that concrete wall fell on top of me?”
“Oh my gosh, yes! I was so scared. I thought you were crushed.”
She laughed. “I was. Thing splatted me flat like a bug. Good thing I don’t have any bones to break, eh?”
He looked away distantly. “So that’s how you survived. It makes sense now.”
“What does?”
Gerald’s face became a little flushed with self-consciousness. “Okay, well keep in mind I was just a kid. When I saw it come down I thought I had lost my best friend, so I... chanted a spell to make you better.”
“You chanted a spell?” she laughed.
“Don’t laugh. I was a kid, I was panicked, so I wiggled my fingers and made up some words like I saw in the movies.”
Zurra chuckled again and looked down bashfully. When she looked up again, she looked at him with her beautiful pink eyes. “You saved me,” she said thankfully.
“Well, it was your biology that saved you.”
“I don’t mean from that. I mean from everything else. When my world was destroyed in the war, I lost everything. My family, my people, my home. I had nothing. I ended up stranded on a strange planet with people who thought I was a freak. I was so sad I thought I would die. You gave me a home. You saved me.”
The way she was looking at him, with absolute devotion in her eyes, made his heart beat like a drum. There was something so pure, so beautiful in what she felt. Simple gratitude. His chest felt tight just to look at her. He had always seen her as just a childhood friend. Just some kid he played with. But for the first time, he felt like she could come to mean more to him than that.
Her expression became irresistibly steamy. She slowly reached over to touch his face. The memory of their last kiss lingered on his lips. So many times since then he had caught himself dwelling on the marvelous sensation. Her lips tasted different than a human’s. They had kind of a faint tanginess to them, like the zest of an exotic orange. He could feel his skin tingling, begging for more.
Kharmic Rebound Page 23