Aelyce's Wonderland

she had startled you a bit; you'd been daydreaming about music, which you'd just discovered, and rather liked. you'd heard it from a little house while you snuck in and stole their sheep.

but you knew the sound of fear, of being followed. you'd been chased too many times, you knew what it looked like. the rapid jolt of fear.

you smelled her then; cinnamon and onyx, and perhaps that was what had blinded you. perhaps your mouth was just watering. whatever the case, you waited until she had fled back into the forest; and then you waited a bit longer. in her wake, a garrison of men, their hands rough.

oh. so they were not knights. they were just men chasing a young woman through the woods. perhaps they did not even know a real princess had been running from them. well, that was a relief. you are not good at fighting with knights, who have swords instead of cudgels. these were just men, so you rose from the water in the quiet way you'd learned from the fish. they did not hear you coming.

and besides. proper dragons do violence so well.

___

once you had smelled her you could find her, although such things have always been easier for you than for the others. you spend a great deal of time studying things - it allows you to analyze them. you have tried to explain to the other dragons that sometimes it is best to slow down, but of course no dragon should be slow.

at first you did not understand the confusion of the people's umwelt. they relied so much on their communication (only words and actions!) and what they could see with their eyes. you and the other dragons did not use these as much; but you liked prying out the little sonic differences between hello that means "i like you" and hello that means "i don't like you."

so it took you a while to learn that you were responsible for what had happened to her. men had gone missing, and even bad men going missing makes a big fuss. (you know that if it had been girls missing, it would be okay. many proper dragons steal girls because it will not bring a knight to their door). for a while she had been trapped on the palace grounds. it was determined that it was no longer safe for her to be just a princess, she must undergo some human transformation and become a wife.

even so. you had gone looking for her (only to study, of course, so you may know how to snatch her best). but that night you saw her descending from the window of a castle, quick and agile, moving like a whisper, clad almost entirely in black. you could see her quite well of course, although you were not seeing her; but instead her heat and her smell and her sound and all the other sensory noise all humans give off.

you followed her, keeping yourself in a cloud so you appeared as if mist. she stole off into the woods. you were interested in that, and watched her scuttle - although of course you could have taken her then, you wanted to study your prey as best as you could. she did not seem to do much in the woods, only run around cry into her little hands.

she appeared to be looking for something. she did not get far that first night; scurried back to her bed. over and over this happened - she would run as far as she could, only to go back again. it seemed rather boring to you, but of course you had been free your whole life.

and then one night - finally, she arrived at the lake. she sank to her knees then, her hands pressing into the water. her head tilted to the sky. her dark hair spilling in a caught breath behind her.

this is how you heard her voice for the first time. when she came again the next night, she did so more quickly, more assured. straight to the lake, as if it had called her.

she had skipped a pebble over the surface of the water. this action was dangerous, because it almost hit the sail of your wing. you had structured yourself very finely to look like a rockslide.

"three months." her voice was like her: it was deep and smooth and dark, a low violin string. "they want me to marry that bastard in three months."

and then she cried into her hands again, and the sound of it almost broke you.

you followed her maybe more than a proper dragon should, after this. more than just back to the castle and her bed. you hid along her daily walks and watched her in the throne room and saw her out riding horses. she was good with dogs and nice to her people and very much a proper princess, although you had heard it said a proper princess ought not to slip out at night and run around barefoot through the woods.

you discovered she is terrible with directions. you have often had to make a path more clear so she could get home again. she cannot hunt better than an egg; you have had to kill fish and push them subtly up to the shore.

but she appears to love the lake as much as you do. you have seen her read by candlelight (how foolish. the entire woods saw her each time). you have seen her build little paper boats to float along the surface. you have seen her strip her many layers and dive in, have seen her lay with her belly to the sky, floating like she is suspended by the hands of darkness itself.

oh. so she loves the stars, as well, then.

__

you must go in. she will be married tonight. that is a human thing, but you have since learned what it has meant. she will go to somewhere else, and you will not see her again, maybe ever. and then how will you be a proper dragon? go!

you have made yourself in the form of a gargoyle, hiding in the white stone. you can see into her room; and the tapestries that seem unlike her. everything in her room is very bright, which is bad for a proper dragon. there are many knights in the hallways and in their rooms, and their smell is itchy and repugnant to you.

her dress is white, which does not seem like her. you have only seen her wear black. she is sitting at some kind of desk, and she is crying again. she smells of cinnamon still, but moreso of grief. you can feel the heartbreak in her as if it was inside of you.

you cannot watch her cry anymore. you have watched too often without moving. that is shameful.

you nose the door open. you can move quiet, because you are not very big. she is within a cave of you, then a wingtip, and then she is standing up, looking into your eyes.

"it's you." her hand on your jaw is warm. "i thought i was imagining you, you know. i turned around that day. i saw what you did to those men. i have been looking for you since. i told everyone that i had an angel to protect me. they locked me in here anyway."

you are not an angel, you are a dragon. you have to keep your wings locked tight or you would explode the walls of this place. it makes you feel big, suddenly. you are not used to that sensation. you do not like to be locked in a tower. you believe maybe the princess does not like to be locked in a tower either.

you take her in your jaws. she is very small, and does not resist you. although you are not a strong flyer, you must take off in a single push. any other movement would be too slow. you must also hold your breath so you do not smell her, the clove and cinnamon and little bird of hope. your mouth would water and you would drop her.

against the full moon, you do the thing that is impossible. you stretch yourself out all the way, a bold and beaming arrow, and you fly. you can hear them cry about you now, loudly. a banner that would strike pride even into your father: dragon. dragon. dragon.

on the eve of her wedding, you snatch the princess from her tower.

an arrow whisks for you, and then dozens, and then hundreds. you are not afraid of pain. you have learned long ago how to fly with holes in your wings. you hold her very gently still, and you push past the smell of your blood.

in the night you are a star. someone somewhere could look up and see you and make a wish.

there will be another lake, you decide. you can find another lake. somewhere very, very far from here. however long you must fly, however long you must hold your breath: you will take her home, because you are a proper dragon.

___

sometimes they come for her, your treasure. you have built her a little castle here, deep in the forests off the map. and of course for you: a silver round lake like the shift of her iris. you bring her books and she brings you bugs to study. you let her saddle you, and together you ride through the clouds and fog banks. she is a shadow on your back; a warm and velvet thing. she makes you music and lives the way she should; free in the night like a promise.

but they do come. you have stolen a real princess, and they do not want her to be a princess. they want to make her into a brood mother, or into bait, or into prey. they always look into the caves first; into the places proper dragons stay. they are real knights, not just men with sticks. they are loud and their smell still makes you itch.

but she has made you brave now, and cunning. if a dragon is not big, it should be cunning. and since you are a proper dragon, and since your treasure is your most precious thing, you lay in wait.

let them come. you will let the light drip off of you, and then you will pour through them.

afterwards, your princess will tell you a story around the fire. she will patch your wounds as she did that first time. she will sing to you.

The specific brand of bullshit the group was dealing with on that particular day was a “team-building laser-tag battle” pitting the three main divisions of the orbital branch against each other: Accounting, Sales, and Innovations.

To be frank, it didn’t seem like a very fair fight. Accounting was the largest branch by far at twenty-seven heads. Sales lagged behind this a great deal with seventeen members, still absolutely dwarfing R&D’s mere four.

The rules of the game were explained by a cheery corporate speaker, aided by pictures presented in something that was dishearteningly close to a power-point program.

First, each player would be given an infrared phaser, and a tag suit. The suit itself was surprisingly high tech for a toy, freezing limbs if they got hit, and paralyzing the person entirely if they were struck somewhere vital. After receiving their gear the three groups would retreat back to their offices and strategize for the next fifteen minutes. When the time was up, the station would begin to decrease its spin, lowering gravity from a comfortable one-point-two G's down to zero. The match would then proceed in the low gravity environment until two teams were eliminated, with its end being signalled by the return of gravity.

“Any questions?” the speaker finished, chromatophores flashing a nervous pink as the room remained silent.

“Haha, I’m gonna take that as a sign that I did a good job of explaining things! Alright everyone, back to your offices! And remember: We’re all part of a greater whole!”

Brisinj smirked, jagged teeth on full display. There was a moment of slow motion horror as Shiloh, Earl, and Valrose all realized that he was about to “whisper” something under his breath.

Brisinj’s equivalent of whispering was still more than enough to be heard across the room.

“Hard to. Be greater hole than. Sales. Even if. Hole is. Asshole.”

As seventeen heads swiveled towards him in disbelief he did the only thing he could that would make the situation worse.

He made eye contact with them and kept going

“BET THEY FART. LIKE. AN AIRLOCK. OPENING.”

Spittle foamed between the gaps of his jagged teeth as he forced air between them, the hiss he made literally filling the room.

And it just kept going.

And going.

And going.

Disgust morphed into disbelief as Brisinj continued to make the noise, eyes bulging, face flushed, before his lungs mercifully gave out and the hiss died with an artfully strangled gurgle.

Earl couldn’t help it. He guffawed. Shiloh’s disappointed and betrayed expression broke his heart, but he couldn’t help it. That final gurgle had been a masterpiece.

Valrose was the one that wound up taking the initiative, his hydraulic musculature giving him the strength to gently manhandle the cackling duo out of the room. Shiloh tried his best to give an apologetic wave as he followed the pseudo-crustacean out of the room, but the raucous laughter of three people behind him scorched that bridge like a leaf on the sun.

With a defeated sigh he ran to catch up to his coworkers.

---

“So… What do you think the odds are that sales decides to storm our little lab first?” Shiloh asked.

“Oh, 100%,” Earl replied offhandedly, his attention focused on rummaging through an old toolbox.

“Those are chances,” Valrose corrected, “Odds would be zero to one. But yeah, they’re definitely hitting here first.”

“I. WOULD BE. OFFENDED. IF THEY. DIDN’T.” Brisinj intoned at his standard just-below-deafening volume, “THAT HISS. WAS. PERFECT.”

Shiloh ran his claws over his scalp.

“Shit. They’re gonna slaughter us.”

Earl seemed to have found the tool he was looking for and was now rummaging through the LED drawer, gathering a collection of bulbs that he seemed promising to him. His tone was amused, even if he didn’t look up long enough for his facial expression to be read.

“Calm down. Slaughter is for real wars. Worst thing that happens here is they paralyze us and draw dicks on our faces.”

“That’s still not pleasant!” Shiloh protested.

No one argued that point.

The silence stretched on for a minute or so longer. Earl gathered his collection of bulbs before moving to the power testing lab, leaving the other three in the quiet. Valrose gave in first and pushed himself up, claws failing wildly as he got his four legs beneath him.

“So what are we gonna do? What’s our grand plan to avoid having to pretend to be dead for the next hour while the sales bastards make us into doodle boards?”

Shiloh shrugged.

“Make them work for it I guess? We could start by moving our shelving units, trying to funnel them through a choke point. Could give ourselves some cover while we were at it.”

Earl chimed in from the power lab.

“I got an idea, but I’m gonna be a little dramatic about it and make you wait to see it. Just uh… Cluster em’. The more of em’ you can pack together, the better. Even if it means making some cover on their side of the room.”

There was a slight sideways pulls as the station’s retro-thrusters activated, the rotation of the great craft gently pulling to a complete stop.

The game was starting, and Earl still hadn’t made his way back from the power lab. Brisinj was not pleased with this.

“HEY. EARL. DONE YET?”

Earl’s voice came back a few seconds later, strained but chipper.

“Almost!”

They could hear banging on the walls, the telltale sound of people launching themselves down halls in the zero gravity environment.

The noises were getting closer.

“So, uh, how ‘almost’ is that almost?” Valrose asked, his casual tone betrayed by the nervous twiddling of his manipulator claws, “Cuz I’m hearing a lot of boots hitting the walls and four wouldn’t be enough to hold them off, least of all three.”

Even without a person around to witness it, Earl still shrugged before answering.

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing: Four ain’t enough. Only way we’re winning this if I can get this party trick in working order, so just... Hold the line. Alright?”

Valrose clutched his pistol tighter, still feeling exposed in the pillbox he’d made from old shelving units and cardboard. Brisinj wasn’t pleased with Earl’s absence, but even that nuisance wasn’t enough to ruin the joy he felt at even this imitation of a fight. Shiloh just kept his sights on the lone entrance to the lab, hoping he could get the timing of his first shot right.

He did.

There was the black flash of a sales rep rocketing down the hall. He landed on all fours, limbs splayed like a tree frog, when Shiloh’s beam hit him in the back. He’d been too busy absorbing the shock of impact to begin his secondary launch, and as all four limbs froze at once from the registered vital shot there was nothing he could do but await his doom.

Apparently, doom chose to wear a grey suit that day. Another sale’s colleague had been following close behind him, and simply lacked the time to change direction. With no way to change course he slammed into his paralyzed comrade with a muffled swear, the two sent spinning into the open space of the research lab.

Brisinj picked the flailing survivor off with a casual snipe. His species was adapted for hunting and he didn’t even need to use the sights of the gun, firing from the hip like an old Western. The flailing stopped, but the accusing glare remained.

The second batch of sales workers seemed to have learned from the first, recognizing the challenges of rushing the choke point. There was the sound of scuffling in the hall as they struggled to position themselves in the 3D space before the first wave launched themselves out of the blind corner.

There were five of them, and they weren’t just smarter than the frontrunners, they seemed more physically capable. There was another sharp-toothed biped of the same species as Brisinj, and the two quickly locked themselves in a duel. Brisinj’s stationary position gave him an advantage in accuracy, but the speed that the other one was moving at made him hard to hit.

Brisinj let out an involuntary hiss as one of the shots hit him in the arm. His opponent’s eyes narrowed in fury at the sound, and the moment of distraction was enough for Brisinj to swap the gun to his functioning hand and take out one of his opponent’s legs.

Unable to position his landing well, the clerk hit the next wall and glanced off, spinning. Valrose took a careful shot at his chest and the flailing of limbs stopped, giving him the appearance of a shuriken as he whirled off in the direction of the power lab.

Still, his efforts gave four of his comrades enough time to get to cover unharried. As they began to fire at the entrenched trio, they gave more of their friends time to get through the door and set up.

Valrose was able to put up the best fight here. His head barely poked out of the pillbox, the only part of him truly exposed when he fired was whatever arm happened to be holding his pistol. He simply ran through them like an assembly line, one pincer passing the pistol off to the next as his arms took hit after hit.

He managed to get a chest shot against an upper levels sales manager, but the real gains of his strategy were in the way he took fire off the other two. Brisinj’s sharpshooter accuracy had gone down to mortal levels after swapping to his non-dominant arm, but he was still able to get two cocky reptilians through the chest when they tried to leap for better positions. Shiloh himself seemed content to take limb shots, whittling the sales team down slowly. His reptilian comrades weren’t particularly good shots, but they made up for it with their default ambidexterity. It was the real sharpshooters, the mammalian bipeds and greys, that suffered the most from losing their dominant limbs. For a moment, it looked like they could manage to hold their positions indefinitely.

The moment couldn’t last.

Two shooters made a bullrush for Valrose. The first, a reptilian, was taken out easily, but Brisinj only managed to get the second’s leg before he dove in through the entrance slot. There was a muffled curse before Valrose was evicted from the box, limbs splayed.

A chest shot.

Shit.

The pillbox was positioned behind both Brisinj and Shiloh. Having it captured didn’t just mean that they’d lost their main distraction, it meant that they were about to get caught in a crossfire.

Shiloh may not have had the quickest body, but he had a lightning mind. Before Valrose was even shoved out of the slot he was launching himself out of cover. He had his knees bent in front of him like a shield, sacrificing them midflight. If he’d been aiming for a wall, he’d have hit the ground frozen, unable to push off, but he knew better: There was a water pipe hanging off the wall he could swing around like a gymnast on, repositioning his trajectory on a beeline for the power lab.

Brisinj himself realized a half second later what he needed to do, but his superior speed made up the difference nicely. He dug his clawed fingertips into the carpet, weaving serpentine down the hall, more of a climbing motion than anything else. It was working beautifully, beams of infrared traced all the places he would’ve been if he’d been foolish enough to move in a straight line. He’d almost made it the full length of the hall before a lucky shot grazed his hand, the remaining arm locking tight. Dropping the last pretense of strategy, he simply kicked as hard as he could off the wall, launching himself towards the door he’d just barely seen Shiloh disappear behind.

It worked. He barreled into the lab, just barely managing to twist enough to land feet first on the wall instead of bouncing around the room like a 140 kilo rubber bullet.

“EARL! THEY GOT. VAL. ARE YOU. DONE. YET?”

Earl turned around, a wild grin on his face. He’d built… something. There was a breadboard covered in crudely soldered chemical batteries, a handful of resistors, and most importantly, an LED. A matte black cone of plastic was wrapped around the top bulb, focusing the light from a radial burst to a much more concentrated cone.

Brisinj was good at circuits, but the whole thing was so rushed and messy he could barely tell where the on switch was. Shiloh, on the other hand, seemed to understand immediately.

“Does that LED emit in the same wavelength as the pistols?” he demanded, almost gleeful at the prospect.

“Close! We’ll see if it’s close enough to fool the sensors.”

There was no time for self-congratulating speeches. The sales team had begun to follow them down the halls, eager to finish what they’d started.

Earl braced himself by the doorway. Behind him laid his wounded teammates...before him laid destiny.

And what human would he be, if he had not laid with destiny?

He launched himself across the room, body parallel to the ground even as he fired the cone down the hallway. He didn’t have the expert precision of Brisinj, or the fast thinking of Shiloh, but he married both in a way that lent itself beautifully to movement. He only needed to be good at dodging, his homemade infrared blaster was basically miss proof.

It was a massacre. The infrared cannon froze everything in its massive, continuous cone, combining the best traits of both a machine-gun and a flamethrower. You couldn’t pray for a better room clearing device. Earl was able to clear out the entire corridor with a flick of his wrist, paralyzed salesmen drifting through the zero-gravity environment like frozen corpses after a hull breach. There was something eerily beautiful to the scene.

The effect was ruined somewhat when the drifting “corpses” started whining about rules and blatant cheating, but Earl was far too busy not listening to them to bother listening to them.

Using the floating bodies as jump-off points, he rocketed down the hall, the cone making a gentle figure-eight sweep as it cleared every point in his field of vision. Limbs froze at awkward angles, as people tried to fire from behind cover and those that tried to move for a better vantage point, desperate to make sense of the chaos, found themselves cast adrift.

It took him a little under four seconds to wipe out the remnants of sales. It took him longer than that to spot Valrose, buried as he was under a pile of four clerks.

It only took him one bounding leap to reach his friend, and two great heaving pulls to send the clerks flying off into space. Val was currently face down, and he took a moment to steel himself before turning his friend over.

No.

They’d got him. There were four dicks on his face, each from a different species, with a level of anatomical detail that Earl found both frightening and educational.

Huh. So that’s what they look like.

Val’s expression was as inscrutable as any shrimp’s, and his casual tone wasn’t helping.

“Give it to me straight Earl: How bad is it?”

Earl placed a gentle hand on Val’s shoulder. They were both men here. He deserved the truth.

“Val… There are four dicks on your face. Like, full on dicks. Dicks with veins kind of dicks.”

Val’s face twitched a little, but he kept that calm, stable tone that everyone on the station knew him for.

“I see. Earl, could I ask you a slight favor?”

It was probably the result of seeing too many cheesy war movies, but Earl didn’t think he could refuse a comrade that had, in a way, given it all in pursuit of duty.

“Anything man. Just name it.”

The temperature seemed to drop, so cold was Val’s response.

“Avenge me.”

---

R&D solved its vengeance problem the same way it solved all of its problems: By breaking its solution down into easily replicable steps and then moving on to mass production.

It took Earl only a minute to print out a halfway decent penis stamp, time that Shiloh and Brisinj spent figuring out how to act as the other’s limbs. They were far from graceful, but they could get by. With no time to lose they began clumsily navigating the open spaces, moving from body to body, a flurry of stamping, jumping, and laughter.

Earl himself spent his time getting situated in the pillbox. He wasn’t sure if he could beat the onslaught of accounting, but it was worth a shot. Even in the worst case, his goal could be to just buy time for Val’s vengeance.

There was time for two people to get stamped before the first accountant poked his head around the corner. Earl recognized his face, even if he didn’t know his name. He was a fellow intern, green as a sapling. A quick pulse of the blaster was all it took to turn him into a statue, a fate he seemed surprisingly at peace with. Even as a casualty he continued to relay information to his teammates. It seemed that he’d been chosen specifically as a sacrifice.

“Alright everyone, you’re not gonna believe this, but the lab boys actually managed to eliminate everyone in sales.”

Even muffled by the blind corner, there was still an audible wave of surprised hums. It seemed that they’d massed just out of sight, taking the slow and steady approach. Classic accountant move. Their patience and general willingness to strategize didn’t bode well for R&D.

The intern spent a few more seconds analyzing the room before relaying back even more info.

“They’re uh… they’re graffitiing the sales branch with genitalia. I can see Val, it looks like he’s been out for a while. They’ve got Brisinj and Shiloh helping each other out, but they’re both missing the use of two limbs, they’re not very combat effective. The only one that seems intact is Earl, and he’s got a little fort made at the end of the room. Hi Earl!”

Earl gave him a little wave. This was… oddly amicable. If he could pull this bit out longer, it would be a lot simpler than fighting.

“Hey! Sorry, I forgot your name. Always been bad with names. Who are you again?”

The paralyzed accountant didn’t seem very bothered by this.

“I’m Velen! The thing in your hand isn’t a phaser, so I’m assuming you made your own weapon?”

Earl’s eyes widened in alarm. Huh. Well, that element of surprise burned out real fast.

“Eh… Well… Yeah.”

He was already tucking the weapon away, but it was too late, Velen was already passing on more recon.

“Earl’s made a phaser! Lots of batteries and a large LED! It’s got a cone shaped barrel, probably covers a wide area continuously. Anyone got any ideas on how to handle that?”

Earl couldn’t hear the voices too well, but there were suggestions of various shields, ranging from using a wall of interns, to coffee tables. The winning suggestion came from a reptilian voice, recognizable by its faint lisping accent, identical to Shiloh’s.

“...I think there’s a large mirror hanging up in the lobby? We might be able to reflect the beam back at him.”

Earl considered this. If he waited here, there would be the substantial delay of them traveling down to the main docking area, then traveling back, then making their slow and steady charge. He didn’t have a good counter to it, but it would at least be a slow style of victory.

Alternatively. He could charge, right now. He might get shot immediately, he might win, hell, he might do neither and just succeed in delaying the inevitable a little more staunchly.

What the hell. He still had some fight left in him.

He braced his legs on the back of his pillbox, blasting himself out of the narrow entrance slot like an ICBM leaving a submarine.

Velen startled a little before continuing his play-by-play.

“He’s pretty fast! Hey, he’s making a run for the hall. You guys might want to pull back a little, or you’ll end up like me.”

There was the ominous banging of twenty-five points of shoes bouncing off the walls before Earl even rounded the corner. He froze, unsure of what to do, when he heard that same, old reptile speak.

“Not bad! After what happened on your colony world I thought you’d be taking things slow. War of attrition. Glad to see that you’ll gamble on victory!”

Earl launched down the hall towards the voice. The lizard that he saw was old, older than Shiloh. He’d braced himself at the edge of another blind corner, shooting a wink before launching out of line of sight.

Earl followed in hot pursuit, gun held on in front of him. The lizard was damn fast, always just a few steps ahead. Panting, he rounded a corner just in time to see a green tail whirl into the bathroom.

He grinned.

The little guy was fast, but he’d cornered himself there. Earl pushed quickly, eager to catch the lizard before he realized his mistake.

He rocketed in through the door, blaster on, and immediately realized that the lizard wasn’t the one screwing up. He was.

Mirrors.

He froze as the reflective surfaces in the room bounced the beam back at him. He drifted silently through the empty space, hoisted by his own petard, before he saw a familiar spiky head pop up from one of the stalls. Now that paralysis wasn’t on the line, the lizard’s movements were a lot more relaxed.

Earl spoke first. It was really all he could do, frozen as he was.

“I don’t actually know your name, but may I just say that you pulled this off beautifully?”

The lizard grinned.

“Ha! I’m Petrunko. I’ll take that compliment, today was probably the most I’ve used my brain in the last ten years.”

Earl tried to shrug, the suit reducing the movement to a neck twitch. He laughed at himself for trying, the excitement of the last few minutes wearing off, leaving him happy and tired.

“You sound like my boss. Get too good at your job and it gets boring, huh?”

Petrunko wiggled his hand a little, the surprisingly universal sign for kinda.

“Your job doesn’t really change, but your view of what you’re a part of does. Imagine if one of your cells became self-aware and you’ve got a good idea of what my life is like.”

Earl winced. That sounded like an existential nightmare.

Petrunko caught the expression and held up his three fingered hands placatingly.

“Whatever panic your ego has right now about feeling small and insignificant will be replaced when you get older. You’ll want to be part of something bigger than yourself. Give it time.”

Earl grinned at that. The advice was good but beyond that…

“Psh. Went from sounding like my boss to sounding like my dad.”

Petrunko crossed his arms, more amused than annoyed at the jab.

“Wonder what your dad would say about your little art project back there. Those canvases are a bit pricey for dick stencils.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, we only defaced two of them before your nerd squad showed up.”

Petrunko laughed. The noise was only cut off when a distant hum began, the ion thrusters on the hull giving some faint warning that the station was about to begun rotating again. Apparently, the other accountants apparently had seized the opportunity to finish off Brisinj and Shiloh.

The game was over. Earl felt himself gently falling to the ground, arms and legs suddenly free to move once more. Petrunko offered him a hand up, and he took it gratefully.

“Hopefully your friends got a few more with the delay you bought them. Sales has always been hard to get along with, but they’ve been mean bastards for the last four years."

Earl dusted himself off before offering a handshake. Petrunko clearly wasn’t familiar with the gesture, but he got the hang of it quickly.

“What’s it mean?”

Earl paused, processing. He was still getting used to explaining body language, to expressing so much in only words.

“It’s got a couple of meanings, but right now it means ‘You beat me, and earned my respect.’”

Petrunko concentrated for a moment, clearly trying to commit it to memory.

“I like that. I hope I get the chance to shake your hand next time, Earl.”

Earl had a moment of startling clarity: He’d just made a friend. A good one too, it seemed.

“Well, we’ll see if I can earn it. In the meantime, we should go check the other science boys. I’m curious to see how they’ve managed without me.”

Petrunko shrugged.

“I’d point out the strangeness of the newest person here trying to mother people with three, four times his expertise but… I do want to see what they managed in your absence. Come on, let’s go.”

And together they left, walking down the halls that just moments before they'd flown through.

In the companionable peace of things after the battle, Earl had one final thought: