#barton ngunal

“And what about them, exactly?” he asks, making little to no attempt to hide the fact that he hasn’t heard a word the other purpleblood’s said. Barton makes some violent hand motions that almost suggest he’s gonna call a cunt out on it, but calsm down, seemingly passionate enough about the subject to repeat himself.

“We got a fuckin crisis of faith happenin with all our bloody purple mates--” the taller, pastier purpleblood starts, before being quickly cut off by Abissi again.

“We do?”

“What? Yeah! Whensa last time you saw a purple chick wit her face bare?”

“Ionno. Think there was one at the last game I played at. But juggalette’s abeen doin’ that since always, ay?”

Barton practically spits ash five feet up the walkway the pair’s trekking along.

“Then they’re not juggalettes!”

“What?”

“You scuttle around with your face naked, you don’t get to be a down fuckin ninja, do ya?”

Abissi scratches his chin, then looks down at his fingertips to the sight of a distinct lack of white dust on their pads.

“We got our faces naked right now, mate,” he posits, wiping a stray beard hair off on his trousers. Barton scoffs, and a second volley of veritable cigarette-born fireworks sprays the gravel beneath the pair’s boots.

“Well, ‘s’not as important when we’re just ‘round ants, ay? They ain’t got a concept of nakedness.”

The ants he’s referring to, of course, are the Gracilites native to the colony world they’d both been assigned to work on all those sweeps ago. But Abissi’s pretty sure they do have a concept of nakedness.

“They wear pants.”

“Not on their bloody faces!”

That’s true! They don’t wear pants on their faces. A trio of lowbloods pass them by, pointedly also wearing pants, and also shirts. The one at the front makes a lazy attempt at the traditional Alternian three-fingered salute, but the other ones largely just avert their eyes. Abissi gesticulates back in their direction as they pass on by.

“Those guys have a concept of face nakedness,” he says. Barton grits his teeth, and flicks a barrage of half-scorched space tobacco half back over his head and half into his hulking monster of a mane.

“Yeah, well. We’re off duty. Doesn’t matter.”

The Dignoh scratches his chin another time. He isn’t sure that really changes anything. Why couldn’t purplebloods watching his footy games be off-duty? Barton doesn’t seem to bothered with the munitiae, though, and throws his cigerette underfoot to be replaced with another one before continuing his rant.

“Anyway, as I was fuckin sayin,” he says through an inhale of purple smoke, pausing to shoot it back out through his nostrils. Are they even actually off duty? Abissi’s pretty sure they’re officially on patrol, at the moment, but he’s not invested enough in the argument to try to interrupt Ngunal mid-spiel.

“We got a bloody crisis happenin in our own family, losin hemos every other wipe - you hear about Oggote? He jus’ up and left last sweep.” Abissi’s not sure you can just up and leave the governmental clown cult. Actually he’s almost sure Oggote died. But now he actually wants to hear whatever shit Bart’s trying to come out with here.

“And all the while, we got these lowblooded cunts tryna act like they can be clowns! Like they’re tryna sneak in while we’re at our weakest, or somethin. It’s jus disrespectful, if y’ask me. Borderline mutinous.”

Barton takes a long, deep suck of the durry, and closes his eyes as he lets it escape his respiratory orifices over the course of maybe thirty seconds. The pair comes to a roadside stall, and there’s a few minutes of pause in the conversation as Abissi fumbles around his pockets for his wallet so as to buy them both a drink; palm nuts hollowed out and filled with a sweet mixture of palm juice and cockroach milk. Another few minutes’ silence follows as they continue on their way, mouths busy drinking, before Abissi finally comes around to articulating a response.

“Ain’t it a good thing?”

Barton barely dignifies him with a response, just grunting without so much as removing his reed straw from between his lips. Abissi shrugs.

“If our mob’s leaving the post, jus seems like only good can come from there bein that lot around to take over what’s lost. Innit?”

Barton frowns, face scrunched up half in thought and half in concentration on the last dregs of palm shake he’s sucking up from the bifurcated husk in his hand. As such, the frown only becomes half as intense once he throws the shell off to his side into the foliage.

“Not their position to take over,” he says after a moment’s consideration, dusting seed hairs off his hands.

Abissi chews his lip, catching one golden ring piercing between two of his teeth and scraping the metal against the sharp points as he thinks.

“Then who’d you rather have take over?”

Barton puckers up his lips in a sour sort of manner, clearly unsure how to respond.

“Rustbloods?” Abissi quips again, finishing his own drink finally and taking to attemps to rip the shell in half with both hands.

Barton groans and throws his arms up, perhaps not in defeat but in another indication that he’s at an impasse.

“Well fuckin obviously not! Rusties can’ be clowns. Fucksakes, Dig. Don’t be a fuckin moron.”

If one were only to observe his eyebrows, they might get the impression he’s a man entirely unhappy with the way the conversation’s come, but he can’t help but give a chuckle in Abissi’s direction. Abissi grins back at him, and in one movement rips the pine shell in his hands right in two, throws each half in a different direction, and elbows Barton in the side.

“Sounds to me, Bart, like you’re advocating for some sort of... dismantlin of organised theocracy, mate.”

“Bart,” he began after some minutes, finally figuring that it would just be far too difficult to drink his tea with such a grimace on his face.

“Yeah mate?”

His fellow subjugglator was sat in the old creaky rocking chair opposite him, busy slurping down his own tea. It didn’t really suit him, to be completely honest - not least of all because his mullet seemed agonisingly close to dipping itself in the scalding liquid at any given moment - but it kept him away from cigarettes, at least for the duration of the cup, and any time spent without a cloud of ash in hanging in the already-damp office air was a good time for Abissi.

“You reckon we can grow our own tea here?”

Bart stopped to think, and turned himself around at the waist to peer out the tetracontaoctagonal window behind him, as if he hadn’t seen the Gracilian rainforest a billion times before, and/or as if seeing it one more time would at all change the fact that he didn’t know half as much about actually growing plants as he knew about setting them alight in paper.

“Unno. Where’sit from, originally?”

Abissi rested his saucer gently on his lap, and scratched his hairy chin.

“I wanna say... one of the Old Frontier worlds.”

“A hot one?”

“Well ionno, do I! Or I’da said the planet!”

Barton huffed, and rolled his eyes, untwisting his gangly form so that he was facing back towards the center of the block.

“...you reckon the clickers drink tea?”

“What, the Gracilites?”

“Yeah, cunt. Maybe they know where we can grow the shit.”

Abissi started into a slow, thoughtful nod which quickly devolved into a confused shake of the head.

“What the fuck do ya think aliens know about tea, mate? It’s a bloody quest just to get the shit for ourselves.”

The bluer of the two shrugged, and finished his cup of tea with a swig that left dregs of leaf mush on one side of his upper lip.

“I dunno, man. Just think we should ask ‘em, if you really wanna try growin our own.”

Abissi’s nod returned, and he set his saucer and cup aside onto his desk. He could finish it later; it was about time he got up and went for a walk.

“Nah, yeah, I do, I do. I’ll ask em. I’ll ask, uhh...”

He grunted as his knees popped and he rose to his feet, clicking his fingers on both hands frantically in search of the name he was looking for.

“Kathlize?”

If he’d the energy, he might have tossed the note away in disgust at the utterly sound advice. But if he’d even that, the note would have stuck to his thumb and caused for an embarrassing moment of involuntary jazz-clawing anyway; so he counted his losses (that was 2) and wiped the little green paper onto the palm-wood surface to be with its brethren.

Kathlize was a good secretary - she was an alien, of course, but her Alternian was probably better than his own, and she made a damn fine cuppa! - and she had Abissi’s best interests in mind. But if a Subjugglator was going to try to fix his shiplagged sleep schedule in the most unhealthy way possible, not a life form in the galaxy was going to change his mind.

With a grunt, Abissi slapped his sweaty palms - yet another downside to Gracilia’s long, humid days - to the armrests of his rotatey clownthrone and heaved himself into a proper sitting position. God, he was so sticky- was that paper stuck to his hand?

It stops counting as shiplag when you’ve been on-world for over a sweep!

Damn it, Kathlize!

The intercom bug twitched with excitement as one purple-gray finger pushed down on its chitinous little head, and the owner of the finger leaned down to speak into its porous abdomen.

“Kathy?”

There was a moment’s silence, save for the ambient skree of crickets in the soil just outside the office walls. It was broken by the drawl of a similarly-groggy Barton Ngunal.

“She’s fuckin ‘sleep, dog.”

Abissi was incredulous! Asleep? At - he checked his slightly bioluminescent wristwatch - three in the afternoon? Utterly unbelievable! Justice never sleeps! The constant threat of uprising never sleeps!

He regained his composure just enough to lean in and slur a reply back into the intercom.

“....j’slike you should be, Bart.”

Another moment of radio silence, but with a pointed aura of confusion from the front desk end of the hive this time.

“...and fuck about you, Big Dig?”

If Bart had got him there, Abissi wasn’t about to let it show.

“Fuck’re you even doin at the front desk, Goony?”

Barton shrugged. Whether he was aware that he couldn’t transmit a shrug through the intercom or not, he apparently wasn’t about to let it stop him.

“Wan’ed a cuppa.”

Ungghhhhhhh. Uggggggggggh. Teeeeeeea.

“Chuck us one too, ay?”

Barton made a point of holding one digit firmly on the transmit button as he groaned in response.

“...Yeah, ‘ight mate. You at ya desk?”

“Haven’t moved.”

“In days.”

“It hasn’t been days.”

There was the sound of porcelain cluttering against chitin, Barton keeping one finger conveniently against the intercom trigger as he messed around to get to making another cup.

“...fuck’re all the cups at, cunt?”

Abissi groaned and looked around him, slowly left to right like a lawnring sprinkler on low energy.

Built neatly around his husktop like an anthill city was an uneven stack of teacup on teacup, all of them used, none of them cleaned. God, how long had he been at his desk?

“Mate, really.” Ugh! Barton again. As if it had been more than about ten seconds. “I can’t make you a cuppa fuckin anything unless you want to suck it right out the pot.”

“Right! Right, mate, I’m fuckin comin!”

Abissi swallowed and straightened back up in his seat, sucking back in whatever absolute terror had escaped his body. His face returned to the most neutral possible expression it could form.

“No I do not.”

“Mate, come on! What are you afraid of, the psychic police?”

Abissi grunted and reached for the radio in the front of the carriage, hiking up the volume of the Busta Mimes playing on frequency 98.9.

“I’m trying not to lose my job, Bart.”

“Dig, we are the psychic police, you fuckin moron. You remember the Kruelty Fried thing or not?”

The Dignoh let out a huff, then let his lips curl up just at the sides. Just a little.

“...yeah, I remember the Kruelty Fried thing.”

Bart let out a cackle that no doubt included a cough among the ranks of its sounds, and slapped Abissi on the back as roughly as he could muster in his lanky free arm.

“Good times, right mate? Fuck.”

He nodded, but his smile drooped some and he let his horns clack on the window at his side as he leaned over that way. Barton looked indignant, and moved his hand from the man’s back up his hair for a good ruffle-up.

“None of that, mate. That was meant to be a happy memory,” he added, grabbing Abissi by the horn once he was finished with his hair and yanking him back into a straight sit.

Abissi just sighed, again.

“I miss Alternia.”

If Barton had been quick at the art of bursting into spontaneous laughter at remembering an old joke, he was fast at taking his hand from his good mate’s horn and returning it to the reins of his lusus to steer their carriage to a park at the side of the track. When they had finally stopped, there were some minutes of silence before Barton let out a sigh of his own and leaned against Abissi’s side.

“I know, mate. I miss it too.”

“I miss Tinbur, and... and the sand. The red sand.”

“I know.”

Another moment of silence, followed by the knocking of horns as Abissi let his head rest against the other troll’s.

“This stupid yellow sand. It’s shit and I don’t like it.”