🌻Fuque you / Pay me🌻

Well if this is a case of lusus stealing something, that might mean fending it off. After stumbling the first few steps clear of the buggy, he pulls the big heavy candlestick out of his strife deck and holds it tightly. Sure, yeah, Remele’s a tough blue and she’s probably maybe killed people, but a weapon at the ready is a weapon at the ready.

“Yeah I guess..” he mumbles again as he tromps along behind her in the snow. “I kinda like puzzle games sometimes. Maybe I’d do okay.”

She pats his shoulder as he approaches, happy to see him armed. “Good show, but hopefully it’ll be sleep. Keep that close and follow me.”

“No, I got i-” Clack go his horns, trying to get out without thinking slid the top of the buggy door neatly into the gap between his main horn and secondary horns. “I don’t got it.”

Embarrassed, his face lights up pure yellow. Slowly, methodically, he frees himself from the buggy door, steps out, rolls the window back up, takes several steps back, and nudges the door closed with his foot. Okay? Okay. Okay he’s out, he DOES got it.

“Yeah I guess. I still don’t feel like I’d be particularly good at it…” he finally says in response to the conversation after all of that.

“Oh you got it? Great!”

The comment about the table is lost on him as he thinks about that first bit. “Yeah I guess, I mean. I’ve seen the way people talk on pirate anime forums about what they’d do if they FLARPed and had their own ship. Lot of people really like to jerk themselves off over how they’d have the BIGGEST ship with the MOST cannons, but it. Um.”

He clears his throat, waits to be told to shut up, adjusting again to get his horns out of the window. “I mean uh. It won’t be able to turn for shit, and one huge ship is just gonna be a target for a BUNCH of people in smaller ones…”

Rem laughs, high pitched and mocking. “That’s because those weebs only have FLARP ideation. Talking about what you think you’d do is totally different from actually sailing around and completely owning losers on the high seas. People who haven’t played don’t know what kind of split second decisions you need to make.”

He barely fits inside the buggy, but he doesn’t care. He’s hanging out with his pirate pal, she’s talking with enthusiasm to him, and he’s going on a hangout adventure. This is gonna be great!!!

If he hadn’t sworn off writing altogether, he’d be taking notes about this for a story. “Thirty whole people…” he mumbles, awestruck. He’s practically got stars in his eyes thinking about it. The smell of the sea, the sound of cannons, Remele yelling orders… man. Imagine.

“If I had the caegars I’d buy a cannon..” he muses, wedging his head in the least uncomfortable spot in the tiny buggy. “But I don’t know how much they cost, they’re an entire cannon. And I don’t know what I’d do with it either. Probably just have it. Put a flat top on it like a table.”

“Haha, 30 isn’t a lot. Most people drop stupid money on fullsize ships instead of scaled down sizes, and those can hold waaaay more than that. I just work efficiently.”

Remele tries to give Zebede as much room as she can on the bench seat, before noticing the angle his neck was at. “Here, I’ll roll the window down. You can hang your horns out. Sounds like a waste of good iron to just have a canon table, but I appreciate the indulgent aesthetic of it all. You could even have it locked and loaded and ready to shoot at rude guests. I mean, that’s just the logical progression of having a weapon as a table, right?”

“You have an actual BOAT????”

His face lights back up again as his pan races. “Oh wow, that’s so cool.. I thought you were talking about a wall decoration…” An actual boat. Imagine that. A pirate ship. And she did piracy.

“Does it have cannons? Is it multi-deck? do you have swivel guns?” He doesn’t stop talking after shutting and locking the door, right to the buggy and inside it. “Do you actually keep and use chain shot like in the movies or is that not a thing anymore. Is it all lasers now?”

“What, did I not mention that? It’s just a little sloop, which is all I really need.”

Remele doesn’t show it at first, but her excitement gets the better of her when he starts asking questions. She follows him out the house with a grin, talking as she goes to her scuttle buggy.

“Of course it has canons! I have one on each side, plus a swivel gun on deck with me. All breech-loading, of course. It’s got two levels, but when I say ‘little’ I mean it. She only holds, like, 20 people? Maybe 30 if we were really cramped. It’s much easier to sneak up on someone that way, and way easier for one person to manage.”

He’s pulling his big winter coat on before she’s even finished speaking.

“Do you, uh.. is that literal?” he asks as his tugs ushanka down over his head. The flaps still don’t pull down right, and with them sticking out at such jaunty angles he looks about as threatening as a human toddler. “Is there a lusus actually sitting on it. That would break it, right?”

“I mean, not literal-literal. I’m sure sitting on it would be uncomfortable, but it’s a lusus. For all I know the stupid thing could be chewing on it.” Ugh, that would ruin the finish on the wood. She grimaces at the thought. “Anyway, I can’t do my usual rounds if I can’t steer my boat, clearly.”

Her frown is replaced with a smile and a snort at the crooked positions his hat flaps take. She didn’t need him to be scary, she just needed a bit of extra muscle. Just in case!

He is, in fact, busy. Busy with a freshly bubbling, delicious-smelling pot of chili capsaicin gel on the stove crisprange.

Does that bother him, though? Not in the slightest. A friend showed up, completely unannounced. The notion of nobody liking him and nobody wanting to visit is hard to shake after nearly nine sweeps of living like that, so confusion quickly melts away to excitement.

A friend showed up!! He didn’t even have to ask!!!!

“No, I’m not busy.” he lies, turning the crisprange off and moving it into the fridge thermal hull. “I’m, glad you’re here!!! But.. uh.. why. ARE you here?”

She watches him drop everything he was doing with glee. “Oh good! It just so happens that I need a teensie bit of help. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours. That smells great, by the way.”

Remele’s grin is bright as she strides up to the open door of Zebede’s hive, the look of suprise on his face not even triggering a moment of pause. She moves right past him and into his home, speaking quickly and curiously assessing his various belongings.

“Wow, this place looks really different when it’s not full of various assholes, huh? You’re not busy or anything, right?”

She feigns concern at him for a split second, but it’s clearly a little too late to worry about him being busy or not.