37. THALIA

So did this crush of warm bodies make me being at the station more dangerous or less dangerous? Little old Human me, wandering around gawking at all the wares.

“How long?” I asked in Utilitarian while we perused the food shop. Specifically, the taproot ration bar aisle of the Gestalt equivalent of a giant box store. I watched as a 36A slowly cruised down the aisle across from us driving something like a forklift and loading up palettes of gel-form kibble sacks. She made little toot toot tugboat noises as she cruised towards checkout. Instead of colorful dots in fanciful colors, she had gouges cut out of her body to create indents like pox scars, and where the softer pattern of dust-size dots would have been, her body had been skinned and filled in with smooth ripples of flesh.

She glanced in my direction. I quickly averted my gaze back to Ahane.

But if I had a little Grim Reaper staring at me, I’d probably look at them too.

She kept looking like she wanted to get a view under my hood as she cruised by.

She was definitely meaner than the Grim Reaper. Maybe she was the Grim Reaper. Or an assistant. Like that got outsourced in this part of the galaxy. And she was wondering who the fuck I was, and I better not claim I knew the owner.

Ahane, attention more on searching the three-Ahanes high racks for a particular flavor of ration bar, asked, “You mean transit time to 25XA?”

“Yes.” The flight path we’d gotten was generic given we had no actual idea of what the shuttle’s model numbers were. Even if we did know, the kiosk wouldn’t had any of that on file. The flight path had come with a warning that since it was meant as a generic X marks the spot map, that it was going to send us to 25XA in a zig-zag fashion to maintain proximity to beacons and all flight time estimates were only educated guesses since it had no idea what sort of flight system we were loading it into.

So there was a stern caveat to pack plenty of food, water, fuel, and whatever else. It’d get us there. Eventually. And if it didn’t, to please report your lack of satisfaction to customer service.

The good ratings might be because all the unhappy customers hadn’t made it back to port yet… and never would.

“About thirty of your sleeps, although perhaps much longer.”

Then we were going to need lots and lots of those wet naps. Lots of them. Because even I wasn’t small enough to take a bath in the shuttle’s commode.

“No flavor,” I told him as he scanned the boxes of ration paste pouches on offer. I recognized a number of the flavors by now, even if the translator didn’t, and I didn’t want any of them. I could maybe choke down some of them once, but for a whole month, give me that flavorless moth wing experience.

There were all sorts of additives you could squirt into your pouches too, or dip your ration bars into, or pour over your taproot kibble. Most I’d never heard of, and had names that read like kid flavors on Earth, or some edgy energy drink.

The only NO FLAVOR paste in stock that wasn’t a small fortune came in polenta-like tubes. I picked up the sample tube and flopped it around. Edible dildo. “Weird.”

“The unflavored ones are more expensive because the ingredients are better quality.” Ahane explained with apology.

Considering they all tasted like dried moth wings to me, the cheap option was fine. Me thinking the mop water smelled good and possibly even like floral tea had led Ahane to believe Humans didn’t have expensive palettes to please but we were the galaxy’s garbage guts.

Several boxes of ration bars for Ahane, some assorted vitamin supplements so he didn’t scale rot and I didn’t get scurvy, and our grocery list was all crossed off. Then it was in for other camping supplies, two pillows, spare parts for the ship, and a pair of sandals for me. Like actual sandals.

I hadn’t had any sort of footwear since Earth. And these were little more than plywood and two braided straps, but they were footwear.

Ahane watched the crowd, scales thoughtful, like he was hoping to see someone. But he didn’t linger on it for long.

“I am going to take this to the ship,” he told me, pushing a trolly lashed down with all our goods like he had just raided a home improvement warehouse. “I don’t want to take you back out in the cold. Will you be safe here?”

I didn’t have the Utilitarian or Trader Common to ask what we had left to do. But I’d survived numerous unattended bathroom visits and rest stops along assorted New England turnpikes as a child. “Sure, sure.”

I moved off to wait in the corner by some generic looking ferns and watched the crowds while humming Wheels On The Bus. Staring off into space seemed to attract attention, straight up people watching attracted attention, but the combination of people watching plus nursery rhymes seemed to dilute my attention enough no one noticed.

This Humans are psys was very strange. Still didn’t know how I felt about that. Perhaps everyone else was slightly psy and I was zero psy, so my mind was a bull in a galactic china shop. Or maybe I was slightly psy, but Human psy was so unusual that it was like when cicadas emerge and everyone is like what the heck is that noise.

But the whole Humans are the most powerful and unusual psys in the galaxy was a bit much. I readily accepted Humanity was extremely odd. I hadn’t needed the Greys to tell me that. But being told I was a powerful psy from a race of psys so powerful they had no idea how powerful they were because to them it was just Tuesday… it was hard to get my head around.

Hehad never mentioned psy abilities. He had never even hinted I had psy abilities, or that Humanity’s abilities were of any interest. You would think in all that time it would have at least been mentioned.

Now the Hunter. The Hunter had definitely been a psy. And my brain had fought back. But I’d felt my brain fight back plenty of times.

No one noticed me, and Ahane returned in record time. He swept me close. I pushed back as a couple of strange looks got shot our way. “I’m fine.”

He was, however, carrying our little soap sack with the towel. He held it up on one finger and gave me a mischievous look.

Were we going to get to wash? I grabbed his bandoliers and shook him to communicate give me bath NOW.

The facilities were immediately to the right of us, and past the restrooms, around a corner, was another area that smelled of soap and ozone. A sign read Living Essentials Area. My translator just bleated [NO TRANSLATION] when confronted with the self-service kiosk available in every language.

Fuck the Greys and the fact they didn’t need sleep or toilets or showers. My translator had some obnoxious gaps in its knowledge and this place didn’t use signs as a failsafe. Why bother, when the kiosks knew every language?

Ahane consulted a list of options and selected one that had a price tag that made me raise both brows. We had some extra cash because he’d sold the salvage rights to the Hunter’s ship to the Site Master, but we’d agreed to be stingy. We had a long way to travel yet and couldn’t fit that much into the smuggle-shuttle and were relying on a your results will vary automated kiosk spitting us out the equivalent of well, you drive about three miles down the road to the big rock and make a left and maybe you drive oh, say, another two miles and the road splits you see and… directions.

The kiosk spit out a translucent bit of material engraved with a pattern.

Down a network of corridors and doors, into a small hallway with four doors, and to a specific door. Ahane gave me a playful swat with his tail and threw the door open.

I got stars in my eyes as I took in the wonder before me. It was a bathroom.

Like a family sized one. With a depressed step-in shower basin, and a massive tub, and a few other things bolted to the scrupulously clean walls that I didn’t think were applicable to taproots. The shower basin even had a square pedestal covered in fanciful tile so you could sit and enjoy the water.

A small chime sounded, and over the door a screen illuminated showing time remaining in the shape of a progress bar.

“We have time,” Ahane told me.

I tore off my clothes and grabbed the shower bag from him. The one good thing about having been with the Greys was most of my body hair hadn’t grown back. The Greys had decided armpit hair, leg hair, and pubic hair served no practical purpose in their highly sterile and controlled facilities, so they removed it.

They let us keep our other body hair since it did contribute to our proprioception, which was fascinating to them for some reason. He had decided to explore pubic hair because it was a stubborn bit of kit that kept cropping up in hybrids, so I did still have some, which I was glad for.

So the lack of a razor or other sharp implement to groom was fine, and I hadn’t turned into a wooly mammoth. Which I enjoyed, but I also would have enjoyed pissing the Greys off by going full-fur the rest of my life.

My fingernails and toenails, though, were still sad little nubs. My toenails were sad, wavy little ridges just beyond the cuticles, and my fingernails didn’t seem to have re-emerged at all.

“Hmm.” I studied my toenails as the water warmed up. “Guess those might never come back.”

Ahane shed his own clothes. “Why were they removed? My House-Sister had hers.”

“I used them like claws,” I told him. “So they removed them.”

“Was it painful?” he asked.

“I don’t remember. I just remember suddenly having no nails. And it was like… okay then.” By the time they’d taken my nails, it had been a trivial thing.

I sighed as I took my turn under the hot water.

A shower.

Ahane sat on the pedestal and watched, his expression still but his scales a soft rose of pleasure. I ran my hands over my face as the water poured and poured and poured.

Baths were great. Showers were the best.

“I haven’t had a shower since Earth.” I turned around so the water could get all of me. Ran my hands over my hair and squeezed. And the water was nice and warm. “Although what is the Gestalt’s aversion to hot water?”

Ahane had turned it up all the way and it was still only pleasantly warm. “We do not have an innate natural desire to be made into soup.”

I splashed him. “Eat me.”

He grinned and got to his feet, his cock swelling. “If you insist.”

I laughed as he joined me under the water, cursing at how hot it was, and he turned it down a few notches to tepid. He took the soap and rubbed it between his hands, and then ran his lathered hands over me.

“What, don’t think I’m getting clean enough?” I shivered as his hands ran over my nipples and then down the dip of my waist.

“So slippery,” he said instead.

His scales did not get slippery when soaped. They remained sort of rough and grippy. His cock, however, was soft. He wasn’t fully hard yet, and his cock was soft and heavy in my palm. I thumbed the ridges and nodes.

“It’s made for you,” he told me as he turned his own face into the water.

I gave his cock a gentle tug before releasing it. I so rarely got a chance to make him hard, and I would have enjoyed feeling his cock fill and engorge under my hand, but he was relaxing in the shower and it might be the last shower either of us got. “I don’t know how I feel about being told my pussy’s perfect cock has a little spike on it.”

He chuckled. “Why do you have to feel anything about it? Aside from enjoying it.”

Good question. The Gestalt had their own Rule 34 (“if it exists, there is porn of it, no exceptions”) and that Rule was if it can be used as a genital, it IS a genital, no exceptions. I watched as he soaped himself all over and grinned.

He slowly ran a soapy hand over his hardening shaft. “Would you like to enjoy it now?”

He was so cheesy sometimes and I loved it. “I think you read my mind.”