Date Point 15y5m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Xiù Chang
Xiù is being given the grand tour of Wei’s offices in Vancouver, getting the full VIP treatment. She’s proud of her little-big brother and his achievements: who could imagine that they’d be able to 3D print Dizi Rats? Okay, so they go squish in the mechanism half the time but what an achievement!
Really, the only problem is that she really needs to pee but every restroom in the building is closed, or the door is hanging off, or just as she’s finally able to make her excuses somebody interrupts her and it’s almost like the whole world is conspiring to stop her from—
Oh.
She woke up and blinked at the ceiling. Right. She wasn’t in Vancouver, she was in Folctha, sleeping in the biggest bed she’d ever even heard of which still managed to be kinda empty even though Allison was right next to her. It was custom-made for three, after all.
It kinda sucked that their first night in their new house had been spent without Julian. The timing had just come together wrong that way. He’d wanted to be there she knew, but when ambassadors and governors and Given-Men had big meetings…
Akyawentuo and Cimbrean had very different diurnal periods, so if Julian was meant to be getting Yan and Vemik onto the jump pad for shortly after dawn local time, in Folctha the jump might be scheduled for nine in the morning, and the preparations had to start twelve hours earlier…
He’d persuaded them to move in anyway, rather than wait another day in the hotel room. What was the point of paying for a suite in the Statler when their own house was less than two miles away? It made sense… but Xiù had missed him last night, and so had Allison.
She rolled out of bed and slipped into the en-suite bathroom, trying to shake off the alien feeling of an unfamiliar house. She loved the place already, it had everything she could possibly want in a home and without the soulless too-clean, too-wealthy feel that she’d always got when seeing the houses of the rich and famous on TV. Big enough to be spacious, cozy enough to be a home rather than a mansion, and pleasantly decorated with their stuff rather than an assortment of expensive art just for decoration’s sake.
And the shower. God, the shower. And the kitchen—!
It was perfect, but after spending years living packed in like canned fish in room smaller than their new bedroom, the transition was…she’d need time to adapt.
And it had privacy. A quirk of the local terrain and architecture meant that there were very few angles indeed from which an outside observer might see in, and they’d mirrored the external windows for good measure. She didn’t bother to dress after her shower, just dried herself off, dried and brushed her hair, slipped on a pair of briefs and trotted downstairs to explore what morning felt like in her new home.
She made maple bacon breakfast muffins with fresh coffee, the smells of which never failed to wake Allison.
The stairs didn’t creak or anything though, so she jumped at a warm, soft “hey” from behind her.
Allison leaned against the doorframe. She’d only half-dressed herself, in pajama pants, and she leaned against the doorframe with her hair still bed-wild and untouched. “…Did I ever mention that I love you?”
Xiù laughed and took the pan off the range to hide her blush. “…Yeah, I think I remember hearing you say that.”
Allison grinned like a cat and sauntered into the room. “Whatcha makin’?”
“Breakfast.”
Allison snorted. “I can see that, wiseass.” She slipped a hand around Xiù’s waist and peeked over her shoulder into the pan. “I meant—”
“Sit down and you’ll find out when it’s ready.”
“Mmm. Yes ma’am.”
“Good g—”
Xiù’s phone rang. The house had a smart system that could divert calls anywhere but as it happened she’d left her phone charging on the coffee table last night, so she gave Allison a look that sad ‘get that for me?’ and tried to remember where they kept the plates.
Allison skipped over to the table and grabbed it. “Hello? …Yes, this is her phone…”
Xiù tried to listen as she served out their breakfast, but all she could make out was that there was somebody speaking on the other end, not what they were saying. Allison nodded and said things like “yeah” and “uh-huh” and finally. “…Right. One second please?”
She covered the handset and gave Xiù a sly look. “Well. The Mother-Supreme requests the pleasure of your company.”
“That’s Yulna?” Xiù asked, briefly wondering why Allison wasn’t just handing the phone over until she was answered by a shake of the head.
“Somebody called Sister Yiini. I don’t think the Mother-Supreme gets to make her own phone calls.”
“Oh.” That was a little disappointing. “Well… yeah! Of course! If Yulna wants to see me I always have time for her.”
“Thought you’d say that,” Allison grinned, and returned to the call. “Yeah, she’s available… Wow. Really? Uh… two hours, I guess?” She met Xiù’s eye and was given a nod. “Yeah, two hours…Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’ll come as well if I’m invited. Thanks.”
“I wonder what’s up?” Xiù mused as she set their breakfast down on the table.
“She’s sending a shuttle out for us, so I doubt it’s a social call…” Allison washed her hands before sitting down.
“The Mother-Supreme doesn’t get social calls…” Xiù sighed.
“That…doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s a whole… thing. Giymuy told me over those weird biscuits she liked, it’s not a job you can set aside. You can quit, but otherwise… in a way you are the Clan of Females. Yulna would never have chosen it for herself.”
“I always figure the people in charge shouldn’t want to be…” Allison said as she picked up her breakfast.
Xiù sighed. “Maybe… Yulna’s kinda like an aunt to me, but… between us, I worry if maybe Giymuy made a mistake.”
“Because of Daar.”
“Yulna was always one to, um… to do or say whatever was on her mind. Straightforward. Blunt. A lot like you, really. But, um…”
“Right. I’d be a shitty President.” Allison nodded and took a huge bite out of her breakfast muffin.
“Sorry.”
Allison shook her head viciously, still chewing. “Don’ gimme tha’. Iff I effer run fer preffiden’, pweaff hit me upffide the head.”
Xiù laughed. “You asked for it.”
Allison swallowed. “Hell yeah! I’d probably start World War Three inside a week. Like, I wouldn’t mean to and the other guy would totally shoot first…”
“Oh come on, you’re not that bad!”
Allison gave her a grin with a wrinkle of her nose thrown in for good measure, but whatever she had planned to say next got lost when the door beeped, clicked, and a whirlwind of dark gray-brown skin and blaze orange mohawk pounced in stinking healthily of jungle, leather and a pathological aversion to bathing with water.
Julian’s voice followed him into the room. “Vemik, don’t you break any of my shit!”
“I won’t!”
Vemik dumped a couple of armloads of art supplies on the ground and stood up to his full height, beaming mightily.
Xiù was faintly amazed at how quickly her fight-or-flight reflex had settled down once she realized who it was. “What did you get?”
“Sketchbooks! And colored pencils! And crayons, and markers, and—”
Allison cleared her throat and stood up to kiss Julian then vanished upstairs with a muttered “clothes” to explain herself. Xiù doubted whether Vemik even cared how much they were wearing—male or female, his tribe rarely wore more than a loincloth and often not even that—but she wasn’t on board with entertaining guests while wearing only her skivvies, no matter their species.
“Jooyun let me use mun-ee!”
“A credit card,” Julian said with a chuckle. “It’s technically a promise to pay, Vemik.” He ran a hand up Xiù’s back and kissed her. “Sorry I couldn’t be here. How was it?”
“That bed’s too big for just two… You should have told us you were bringing him here!”
Julian gave a wary eye towards Vemik and threw a troll-grin. “Hey now. Fellow tribe or not, I’m not sharin’ my women with him.”
That earned him an entirely deserved slap on the arm and a scowl, with a smile underneath it that promised retribution.
“Is okay!” Vemik said while enthusiastically ripping the plastic wrap off of his huge crayon box. He set it down then thumped his chest loudly with a trilling snarl that was the equivalent of a bragging laugh among the Ten’Gewek. “I too much man for you anyway!”
Julian rolled his eyes and chuckled. “Now you’re recycling Allison’s jokes, bro.”
“Recycling means what? No, wait… cycle again? …Use? Use again! Context!” Vemik beamed proudly and scattered crayons all over the table. The table was a bit high for him so he puzzled at a sturdy wooden chair for a moment, then decided to thread his tail through the rear and wrap it around the chair’s legs. “I’m right, right?”
“You are! But you still aren’t sleeping in my bed.”
“Okay.” Vemik only seemed slightly disappointed; he was far too interested in his new treasures. He held one up and examined it very closely, gave it a tentative taste and, having decided that crayons were not good for eating, turned it over and set to playing with shapes on the first page of one of his sketchbooks. The way the tip of his forked tongue poked out of his mouth while he concentrated super hard on drawing straight lines was…almost painfully adorable.
Allison returned with a T-shirt on and handed Xiù a bathrobe. “Our insurance covers cavemonkey damage, right?”
Vemik made a kind of hooting noise, the Ten’Gewek equivalent of a frustrated snarl. “I promised I would be good,” he said, this time a bit sullenly.
“She’s just teasing…” Xiù promised, putting on the bathrobe.
“Oh.” Back to coloring. There was an actual coloring book too but he was ignoring it for the moment. Allison raised an eyebrow at him, then aimed it at Julian.
“What the hell did the store clerk think of him?” she asked.
Julian grinned and headed for the fridge. “She spent nearly two hours showing him everything. Vemik liked the watercolors—”
“Fun but too messy!”
“…Didn’t like the pastels so much…”
“Break in hand, weak colors.” Vemik was carefully drawing a series of equilateral triangles using a painfully bright yellow crayon, all of which were linked together with shared edges.
“…Did we buy the charcoals, Vemik?”
Vemik rattled his head in the negative. “Break easy like ‘pastels.’ Also we can make ourself. No waste ‘mun-ee’ on burned wood.”
Xiù giggled at Vemik’s unexpected frugality while Julian clapped him on his bulging shoulder. “So yeah, I think she was kinda smitten, actually. Vemik had a fun day. We played some gravball, walked through the park, met Bozo—”
“WURF!” Vemik’s happy bark punched the air like a brick slammed into dirt, and was entirely too convincing to let go without a giggle. He reached for black and brown crayons, thought for a bit with his head tilting this way and that, and decided he’d rather go back to drawing triangles.
“That’s a pretty good bark, big fella!” Julian said, returning his attention to Allison. “It was a very busy day, lots of people to talk to. We ended the day wishing at the fountain…we ran out of time and hadn’t eaten, so we decided to grab some burgers at Best Brioche.”
“Blue cheese!” Vemik burbled happily. He picked something tannish and began to sketch a suspiciously bun-like shape. “Much better than mint!” he loaded so much loathing into that one syllable that Xiù sensed a story she’d need to hear later.
“Weird how he’s okay with blue cheese but hates anything minty…” Julian shook his head and chuckled. “Anyway, we know how to Vemik-proof our candy now,” Julian said matter-of-factly, grabbing a juice carton.
“Also, Jooyun’s mouth tasted like farts.” Vemik reached for a green crayon and drew a warble on his bun-shape that must have been lettuce.
Silence made a clanging noise as it descended. Julian closed his eyes.
Allison took a deep breath before breaking it. “….Julian?”
By then he had gone thoroughly red under his deep tan. “Uh… Turns out the Ten’Gewek have prehensile tongues. Ripped a peppermint right out of my mouth.”
“Huh. Well, thank Christ there’s a sane explanation…”
“Yeah…Anyway. On an entirely different note, Yan is going to be staying here too. We’re gonna camp them both in the guest room downstairs.”
“Who’s chaperoning Yan?” Xiù asked, inwardly reflecting that any room with Yan in it wasn’t going to have much space left over for anybody else.
“Hoeff. They should be back soon I imagine.”
“Right, well… we have a shuttle to Tiritya Island in two hours,” Xiù revealed. “Sister Shoo has a meeting with the Mother-Supreme.”
“Jeez, really?”
“We literally found out right before Puppy the Bouncing Bomb here smashed our door down,” Allison explained.
“I didn’t break it!” Vemik objected. He was deciding between greens for the pickle, apparently. “I pressed the button like Jooyun said!”
Xiù stifled a giggle. It seemed that Vemik was never going to quite get his head around Allison’s sense of humor. She was made doubly glad for the bathrobe at the sound of a truck door slamming from outside, followed by Hoeff and Yan’s voices approaching down the driveway. Yan actually blocked out the light from the window as he passed in front of it.
Hoeff opened the door without knocking while Yan squeezed through sideways behind him. He looked…tired. Mellowed out. And satisfied, somehow. He swaggered into the house as if it was his and looked around with interest.
Actually, that was unfair. By Ten’Gewek standards his body language was downright deferential and polite, right down to the low-down twitch of his tail. The problem Yan faced was that his ground state of being was to exude so much physical confidence that wherever he happened to be standing immediately seemed like his turf. He couldn’t not own a space.
“Big hut,” he said at last, approvingly. “Strong.”
Xiù had no idea how “strong” applied in this situation, but the floor didn’t creak too much under his weight, so it had that going for it at least.
Vemik beamed at him. [“I have a promise of things for the villages, Yan! Two ‘sketchbooks’ for each tribe. And other things too!”]
[“Good! Should make Professor Hurt happy!”]
“…Would you like a drink, Yan?” Xiù asked. “We have water, fruit juice, coffee, tea…”
Yan ducked his head cautiously. “Yes please.”
“Water and juice for us both, and a lot of it.” Hoeff sounded…drained, and looked worse.
“Water everywhere here,” Yan said, sitting down on his tail. “Lake, river. Heff says rain every night… foun-tain. Very new thing is foun-tain.”
“The town is named for water,” Julian told him.
Vemik put the finishing touches on his burger and broke out the blue crayons. “It is?”
“Yeah. ‘Folctha’ means ‘bath.’ That’s, uh… like a big bowl you fill with hot water to clean yourself in.”
Yan and Vemik both pulled the same face. Something about doing anything with water other than drinking it triggered a Ten’Gewek’s disgust reflex hard.
“Anyway, you two get ready for your trip. Yan I take it is going to need to stretch out?”
“…Yes. Adam play…hard.” The big Given-Man trilled softly.
“Right. We’ll keep busy. And we have a big day tomorrow anyway, they’re going out to the range to start their training program.”
“Wanna know what amazes me?” Allison asked, glancing out the window. “I don’t see a single journalist out there. You’d think we’d be manning the barricades to hold ‘em off.”
“ESNN’s star ET correspondent is ‘Horse’s ex-slash-sister,” Hoeff revealed. “An’ I swear there’s somethin’ goin’ on with her an’ Coombes too.”
Julian frowned. “…Ríos? And Coombes? He’s like twice her age!”
“Pretty sure I didn’t say they were bonin’,” Hoeff drawled as he accepted a glass of juice from Xiù. “If that rumour got started he’d have to explain himself to the whole unit pretty damn quick.”
He drained the glass like it was a beer and he was about to start a night of hard drinking, and set it down with a refreshed gasp. “Anyway. Between her an’ Sharman’s press corps, and the quick interviews we already did today, it’s all under control. Also, Yan.”
Yan turned slightly at the waist from the mention of his name. He was doing nothing more than sitting in the middle of the floor and looking around at things, but all by itself that little twist exaggerated the heroic shapes of his body and lent him a presence commanding enough to give anyone unfamiliar with him pause. Add in a head-to-tail blood red mohawk…
“Another new thing, these ‘reporter’ people. Ask many dumb question,” Yan smarled in an unmistakably annoyed tone. His huge fangs were impossible to miss.
“Well… okay. We need to get dressed and ready,” Xiù said. “I’m sure you can keep yourselves entertained.”
“Just… and Vemik, I’m sorry?” Allison gave the younger Ten’Gewek an apologetic look, “—But please keep him out of my workshop, Julian. I haven’t finished unpacking in there.”
“I will stay out,” Vemik nodded seriously. His page had a wild spray of blue color on it next to his burger art.
[“I will sit on him if he doesn’t.”]
“You dropped ten grand on those tools, you bet your ass I’m gonna look after them,” Julian promised.
“Ten…grand?” Yan was confused.
[“Ten ‘thousand’ ‘mun-ees,’ Yan. That’s four circles big, and it’s like a magic promise of Giving and Taking.”]
[“…Oh,”] he said, giving every indication he didn’t really understand.
Xiù ushered Allison upstairs before either of them could be overwhelmed by the urge to… well, whatever. That job could be Julian’s.
All in all, it hadn’t been the first morning in their new house that she’d expected, not at all. But it had definitely been their first morning in their new house. She was absolutely definite that nobody else had ever entertained a pair of iron-age alien tribesmen for breakfast.
…Oh yeah. There was one last detail of the place she’d forgot to love earlier. One that had taken quite a lot of time and money to fill. One that sang to the girly place in her soul that she’d had to regretfully pack away into long-term storage after her abduction.
But there really was nothing like a walk-in wardrobe full of clothes.
They took their time getting ready. By the time they were cleaned up and dressed appropriately for a visit with the Mother-Supreme, things had quieted considerably downstairs. Vemik had migrated to the guest bedroom and buried himself under a mountain of blankets right on the floor—they hadn’t furnished it yet, but he didn’t seem to care.
Yan meanwhile was lying face-down on the living room floor and making happy grumbling noises while Julian worked his palms against the big guy’s ridiculous back muscles. He was grunting with effort himself; kneading the kinks out of what was basically a slab of carved teak looked exhausting. Xiù gave him a sympathetic look and blew him a kiss as they headed toward the door.
Hoeff was stripped down to his underwear, passed out and sprawled akimbo across and up the entire couch. He was a solidly-built little man sure enough and these days could even be considered stocky, but how he managed to take up so much space on such a big couch was a bit of a mystery given that he was an inch or so shorter than Xiù. She quietly hoped he wouldn’t shed any of his copious blonde body hair on anything.
True to the timing they’d given, there was a Gaoian shuttle coming in low over the lake. It was a modified Dominion design, taking the classic dull gray cuboid and refitting it into something that actually looked like it could fly half-decently and which actually flew like a charm. Xiù hoped to get her hands on one in time—she absolutely wasn’t going to let Misfit be the last and only thing she ever piloted.
“So whaddya think she wants?” Allison asked.
“Hmm?” Xiù’s thoughts whipped back to where they were going and who they were seeing. “Oh, Yulna?”
“Who else would I mean, dummy?” Allison asked with her best teasing grin. Xiù stuck her tongue out at her.
“Yulna’s… a direct sort,” she said. “But she keeps her cards close to her chest. We’ll know when we get there, I guess.”
The shuttle settled on their forecourt. They didn’t yet own a car, so there was plenty of room for it to set down and Xiù smiled slightly at the notion that she’d finally got that flying car the future always promised.
“Well then,” Allison shrugged. “Let’s go find out.”
Date Point 15y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Air Engineering Technician Jack Tisdale
The warning about how Jack’s job wasn’t a dignified or glamorous one at times had been right on the nose but in fact the awkward moments were a pretty minor part of the job. Besides, once an operator had squeezed himself into his undersuit the least dignified bits were all out of the way.
Then again, Moho was yet to go through “Crush Week,” the seven-day ordeal where he and his buddies would be locked into their suits and given simulated missions for a whole week on the trot. Nobody was looking forward to that, even though the technicians by definition were getting a pretty insignificant part of the pain.
Jack and Miller had some of the synchronized work down beautifully though. It was Jack’s fingers at stake, so he called time and Miller did the heavy lifting.
“Twist, two, push, two, hold, two—” Here Jack grunted with exertion as he made sure the midsuit’s femoral bracing wasn’t caught on the undersuit’s hip supports “—three, four, push, two, click, release, time!”
Deacon checked her stopwatch. “Good! How was it for you, Moho?”
Moho released the breath he’d been holding to help them out. “Well, my dick ain’t cut off, so there’s that.” He bounced on the balls of his feet to get everything seated comfortably.
“No fear of that, I get a great view of it from down here,” Miller commented. She rocked back to squat on her heels and reached for her water bottle.
“How’d you rate it?”
“…Really?” She gave him a Look.
In return, Moho just grinned that wide-faced Cheshire-Cat grin of his until Deacon cleared her throat. “Points check,” she said. “Shoulders?”
Moho shrugged. The suit torso moved easily. “Good.”
“Armpits? Any pinching at all?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Waist rotation.” Moho twisted and bent until they heard a loud pop from his spine.
“All good.”
“Your spine’s a bit loose. Sounds like you need more time under the bar with ‘Horse.”
Moho grunted then bent forward to touch his toes, bent back with his hands over his head, then rocked from side to side.
“Tisdale? That look good to you?” Deacon asked.
Jack shook his head. “Lumbar flexion was good but it looked a little tight on the extension, right Moho?”
“Yuh. Couldn’t get past….here. Feels like I got a bar tied to my back.”
“Suit-related?”
“Yuh. Ran outta compression.”
“That’s the segmented support column,” Deacon commented. “The way they come they all need to be custom-machined to accommodate. Only way to fix it is to mark all the contact surfaces with bluing, suit ‘em up, machine down the surfaces that touch…and repeat.”
“That’s a lotta work with only three days to Crush Week. Better get you back outta there, Moho,” Miller noted.
“After we find out what else is wrong,” Jack agreed. “How’s your right wrist pronation? I wanted to add another row but I thought I’d better double check first…”
“Felt fine. Gotta say though, them gravball games earlier got me tight everywhere.”
“Well, then. Helmet on, we’ll check your neck again and then you can go enjoy a massage.”
Moho chuckled. “Lookit the little guy, all bossin’ me about an’ shit,” he rumbled, but obediently grabbed the helmet and mated it to the back of his collar with the peculiar J-shaped clicking motion unique to EV-MASS.
Jack and Miller took care of the two mandibular connection points, just below and in front of his ears, and Miller locked his mask on herself.
“Nice. You’re doing that twice as fast as you were a couple days ago,” Deacon commented after checking the seals. “Still five seconds off the record time, though.”
“We’ll get there,” Miller promised.
“Hell yeah. Best techs in the shop!” Moho encouraged through his mask. He tilted his head back and forward, swayed it left and right then shook it hard and rolled it round in both directions. “…Way better!”
Jack and Miller knocked fists together.
“Checklist from the top, then he can come outta there,” Deacon told them.
“Got it.” Jack grabbed the checklist. “…Occipital brace?”
Miller’s fingers probed the brace at the back of the helmet that stopped it from breaking Moho’s neck during high-G maneuvers. “…Check.”
“Subaxial brace?”
“Check.”
“Trachial plate?”
“Check, or he wouldn’t be breathing.”
Jack chuckled. “Hey, I didn’t write the checklist.”
“Nope, I did,” Deacon said archly. “That one’s in there because the Beef Trio can and have worn the Mass without that plate. In a rush they might not say anything and that’s valuable protection lost.”
“…Seriously?” Moho seemed genuinely nonplussed. “It’s hard enough to breathe with the damn thing.”
“Get a stronger neck, then. ‘Horse hardly notices when it’s missing. So, y’know.” Deacon gave Miller a look of minor reprimand. “Follow the list and check the plate.”
Miller nodded and re-tested the armoring on the front of Moho’s throat. “…Trachial plate, check.”
Jack nodded and ticked it off. “…Yoke support.”
“Check.”
The full checklist took a long damn time but Deacon had just ably illustrated why it was needed in full. Moho sighed when they finally checked off “Achilles support, left,” and shook his arms loose. “Cold water time?”
“Cold water time.”
“Okay.” Deacon closed her book and showed them her stopwatch. “Our target time for a full checklist is four minutes. You just did it in seven twenty-seven. I wanna see you shave at least a minute off by the end of Crush Week, and I want you both to be able to recite the whole list perfectly from memory. Moho, you should go see about that massage. And thicken that neck up, you shouldn’t have any problems breathing at all.”
She pocketed the stopwatch and loosened a touch. “Not bad, though. You got a ways to go, but you’re not doing bad at all. Keep it up.”
“Will do,” Jack promised. She favoured him with a nod, and left them to the business of de-suiting their Operator.
“Guess we’d better get to machining that support column,” Miller commented as she pumped the ice water into Moho’s suit. They ignored the way he grimaced and breathed slowly to tolerate it. There was nothing they could do about that particular necessary discomfort.
“Eh. It’s something to keep our hands busy while we memorize the list,” Jack shrugged as he wiped down and packed the helmet and mask.
Moho snorted. “Shit, Two-Seventy. You ever slow down?”
“Do you?” Jack retorted. He liked the unofficial nickname Moho had chosen for him—a personal best bench press of two hundred and seventy pounds was a joke next to a HEAT operator, but in the normal world that was a damn good lift and he was proud of it nonetheless.
“Hell no!” Moho grinned, then hissed and jigged uncomfortably as the freezing water worked its way deeper into the ever-less-pleasant recesses of his suit. “Fuck me, is there salt in this?”
“Grin and bear it, big guy,” Miller told him.
“If my nuts never come back outta hiding, I’m blamin’ you…”
Jack chuckled as he unfastened the gloves. “Please. None of you operators have nuts small enough to hide in the first place.”
“Bruh, your skinny ass can bench two-seventy. Don’t pretend you ain’t a stud.”
Jack, who’d yet to actually even kiss a girl, tried to let that pass by casually. Unfortunately, they both knew him pretty well by now and Miller caught his expression—or rather his careful lack of one—instantly.
“Uh-oh,” she muttered in a low sing-song. “I think you hit a nerve there, Mo…”
“I’ve just…not found the right girl yet,” Jack confessed.
Moho was utterly uncomprehending. “So? You don’t gotta marry a bitch, jus’ go to a bar, find someone pretty and fuckin’ smash, bruh!”
“Romantic,” Miller drawled.
“We need to get our little studlet laid, Miller. Ooh! It is Friday…down for a Project?”
“Oh God…” Jack lamented, but Miller was already grinning at him.
“I am so down,” she declared.
“…I don’t get a say in this, do I?” Jack predicted.
“Nope,” Moho asserted. “Now get me the fuck outta this suit before my dick freezes and snaps off.”
“Right.” Jack immediately set to work while Miller fetched the rack for the midsuit. “I can never get this bit…”
Miller reached over and twisted it almost effortlessly. “Y’know, you’re not any weaker than I am…”
“Bullshit.”
“No, seriously. I can’t bench two-seventy.”
“No, but you can explode a beer can in your hands.”
“There’s a trick to it, I bet you could too with practice!”
“Maybe, but—”
Moho hissed at them. He was legitimately shivering by now. “Guys, less dick measuring more suit-pully.”
“Right, right…”
They had the suit off in minutes and Moho stumped off to lurk near the heater while Jack heaved the midsuit onto the workbench and set about str ipping down the spinal assembly.
“What about you?” he asked Miller. “You out on the pull tonight as well?”
“Well, I would be but this young stud I’ve had my eye on seems to be weirdly immune to my charms…” There was an unmistakable glimmer in her eye.
“Oh. Uh, is he?” Jack could feel himself going red.
“Mhmm. Too bad. I think he needs a good breaking-in.”
“…‘Breaking-in?’ Really?”
“Yeah-huh. I once rocked a boy’s world so good he called me ‘daddy.’” Miller’s grin should have been a felony.
“Uh… look, I, uh…” Jack began. She shut him up with a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey. It’s okay. Look, Deacon has this whole ‘don’t shit where you eat’ rule,” she said. “I think she’s crazy, but if you wanna do things her way that’s cool. Just say so.”
“…Thanks.”
She smirked. “Let me know when you come to your senses.”
“God.” Jack rolled his eyes and giggled. “…Am I seriously that….?”
“It’s the accent. And your abs. And you’re good with your hands…”
“Ha!” Moho wandered back over having warmed himself sufficiently. “She knows what she wants! Which is why we’re taking you out tonight. We’re gonna find some cute airhead bimbo and she’s gonna suck you—”
“Moho!” Deacon hollered from across the workshop. “Massage!”
“Yes, Staff Sergeant!” Moho turned to leave. “See you tonight. Make sure he looks pretty.”
If Miller’s grin should have been arrest-worthy, her dark laugh ought to need a license. “Give me a difficult job!” she called.
“…Don’t make me regret this,” Jack pleaded as he finally got the segmented support out of its housing.
“Tisdale, I promise,” Miller replied, and picked up the checklist. “This will be a night you’ll remember fondly for a long time…”