***This wasn't part of the original tale. I wrote it and added it because it was a little fun to write, trying to imagine the little scenes.
Besides, I realized that Abi was going to need somebody to do the wrenching on that thing. 0_o
***
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Ouna walked into the galley and Pob set the breakfast she'd made before her. Ouna said thank you and Pob nodded.
After a few minutes of silence, Ouna leaned forward and said, "You're not speaking to me?"
"I'm speaking to you," Pob said quietly, "I'm just not speaking to you much. You had your fun yesterday and then you gave me a song about one of your headaches. I can take a hint."
"Pobby," the larger one said, "I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I didn't mean to. I just wanted Reed to myself for a little while. I told him that he'd have to fit with us. He liked the idea."
Pob smirked as she cleared up her dishes, "Well you told him a lie then. He's all yours. I'm moving my few things in with Sandy and the T's."
She tossed her half-eaten slice of toast into the receptacle, "None of them have hooves.
And don't call me that anymore."
Ouna stared, "Hey, come on, ... we've been together a year."
Pob shrugged, "I'd rather invest a year in what we had and ditch it now than feel worse after ten.
I'm gonna fix those bad light fixtures out by the main bay. Sandy said he'd let me stand on his back to reach. That way, you can rest your back." She snorted to herself as she walked out the door.
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Florida
He watched them as they came, the girl and her large dog.
He'd seen them sometimes and he knew that she was here for flight lessons. In his line of work out here at the inner city field, he tended to see a lot of people come and go for similar reasons. He paid most of them little attention for the most part. She was different. She didn't look right through him. They had enough of a relationship to chat in a friendly way whenever they were within twenty feet of each other.
He liked to see her because she looked very pleasant to him, as though her coming here was a feature in her day which she enjoyed when she could. She was always smiling. He'd heard her voice often by now and he found the sound of it pleasant because it reminded him of some of the girls that he'd known back in Siberia.
Her blonde hair and her facial features didn't match his memories, since he was from a very small place where those things were seen rarely because it was way out there where blonde Siberian girls don't often go, unless they're doctors or social workers for the government, but the tone of her voice was pretty much there – if you discounted that she was speaking English. Living here placed Balna pretty far from home.
It was a better life, but it was very lonely. He had no friends and he knew no one. He thought his features made him look like a cross between a dark-haired Finn and a lighter-skinned person from Burma, and the Russian that he'd learned in school just confused everyone when he spoke English. It tended to make him shy. That tended to make him even lonelier. His sex life?
Thank God for Kleenex and the internet.
There were no others like him here, at least none that he'd ever seen. He didn't expect to see any either. He was a member of a dwindling minority population even back home. If you counted only the ones who still spoke the language and followed the old shamanistic ways, you'd be looking at about 1200 people, give or take. Worldwide.
But this finding a better life had taken him far from his origins, first to learn aircraft engineering on state-sponsored scholarships aimed at the minority indigenous groups and then to work his way here – only to find that his credentials weren't recognized. He worked here as a line boy.
He watched her until she stepped in through the glass doors of the flight center. He also watched as the dog went inside with her. He could plainly see that the animal was a male, but that didn't stop his errant thoughts from coming to him.
The sight reminded him of the strange dreams that he'd been having, though in them, the beings were females, and not dogs either. The overall shape had been what was evocative to him, that was all. He always recalled the smoke of a fire in the darkness as he worked his way to it. He saw them as they turned around him, large females as long as he was tall when some of them stretched themselves out before him. Longer even. He heard them as they asked for his touch.
They weren't built like humans, but he could speak with them. Every motion that they made seemed foreign to him, and yet incredibly sensual and wildly erotic to him at the same time. They'd slink around him so that he could feel their warmth against his hips as they sidled past him sultrily on their four long legs. They'd murmur to him in ways that excited him in those dreams. There was one that he'd see every time in each dream. She was always so happy when he came to the fire, and she spoke to him of hope for them. And then, ... once she'd seen that her magic was working, she'd –
"Is this gonna take ALL fucking afternoon?" the voice of the fuel truck driver asked, and it snapped Balna's head around as his reverie left him.
"Sorry!" he called over, "Almost finished," he fibbed, "Pretty girls, you know?" he smiled with a helpless-looking shrug. "Girls here come only if you have money. I don't have money. I can only window shopping."
The driver, who was Abi , made his answer with an 'oh-how-much-longer-can-this-workday-last' sounding grunt as he waited.
After a minute, he said, "I'd say that's the smart way. You're saving a ton of money."
Balna finished the fueling two minutes later, closing the lid and wiping the wing nearby carefully with a clean rag, though he hadn't spilled a drop. He got up to step down and handed the driver the fuel nozzle. The driver took the nozzle and held out a clipboard with a pen, "Sign here, buddy."
Balna looked up and saw the man's name embroidered over his breast pocket. The tag on the other one was the name of the fuel company. He signed and handed the clipboard back, "Thanks Harry."
The driver smirked a little, "I didn't have a clean shirt the last time that the laundry truck delivered. Harry's a little pissed at me for swiping one of his, but I don't give a shit."
He held out his hand good-naturedly, "I'm Jake."
The gesture took Balna by surprise, since most people here barely recognized his presence. He grasped the hand and shook it, "Bobby," he smiled.
It was the closest American-sounding name that he knew so he used it to get past the way that the people whom he interacted with would get hung up on his real name.
"Good to meet you," Jake smiled and looked at his watch, "Hey, gotta go. It's quitting time. I'll see you around. I'm here a lot these days."
With that, he rewound the hose faster than anything and was up into the cab. He started the engine and smiled over as he put the truck into gear, "You have yourself a great day, Balna. I gotta go."
With that, he was gone, grinding through the gears to get home. It took Balna maybe a minute after he lifted the cowling over the engine to check the engine oil to realize that Jake had called him by his real name.
The slightly disturbing part was that he was almost certain of it.
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"Well?" He asked.
"He is the one that I want," she said from the passenger seat of the truck in a tone which sounded as though she'd come to her decision.
Abi looked over and saw the being which sat hidden from human eyes there. Sha'senh was a lust demon and a bit of a misfit to her own kind. She'd come to his attention during one of his visits to her plane of existence. He was overlord of the place and there had been complaints regarding the way that she alone wasn't interested in the 'normal' things.
She was considered perverted and defective, and he'd been asked to oversee her execution. He saw at the time that right afterward, the rest had all planned to have a big fucking party to celebrate, the emphasis being on the second adjective, naturally.
He'd listened to the evidence and spoken to her as well, noticing that for what she was, there wasn't the slightest hint of offering in her words. He hadn't expected that. To adjudicate at one of those things was to have his patience tested at best. At worst, they always tried to take it into stupid as far as he was concerned.
A lust demon writhing on the ground before him moaning his or her desires was a pitiful exhibition to his eyes and a slightly disgusting way to beg for one's life.
But Sha'senh had been different. She knew what was at stake, and though she was regretful that he'd been asked to command her death, she wasn't begging.
She was resigned.
She never took part in the orgiastic parties which went on for weeks once they'd begun. He'd asked about that and she'd said that she didn't want to spawn afterwards from something meaningless.
Writhing, groaning bodies like that did nothing for her, she'd said, since they never got past the lust and the fucking into anything even remotely like fulfillment.
That statement had sure twisted his horns to hear.
"You want fulfillment, ..." he said in surprise, "Then why not do as your kind does? Seek out beings, humans for example. They have little ability to resist, most of them. Torture their sleep and take what you will, the same as all of your kind."
He'd laid it out like that as a very mild trap. But she'd stepped right over it and astounded him again.
