The Tapyri wrinkled his nose, halfway between indignated and disgusted: "Then they say my diopters are getting worse - are you sure you can see well enough?"

"My eyesight is great, thank you-"

"Then how come you clearly haven't gotten a good look at those brutes? They have teeth as tall as my head is wide!" he insisted while squinting his bright olive eye. "And that's not even mentioning that gross, gummy skin of theirs hanging from them like dried out sludge - or their terrible personality! We had to chase away that gaggle of them just two weeks ago before they demolished half the town by trying to bite the spines off each other!"

"And the females are even bigger and angrier," the Glatorian grinned back far too excitedly.

"That's not a point in their favor!"

"See, that's what I mean! You're weak!"

"I'm sensible!"

"Weak!!"

"Oh, don't you listen to that crazy trout of a woman," Scodonius shouted at them from where he was failing to fix the Kaxium's sidecar engine after his latest crash in the arena. "When it comes to partners she wouldn't know good taste if it hit her in the back of the head with an overripe Thornax."

That got him a wrench launched against his vehicle, which landed squarely onto a tire hard enough to dislodge it from the rest of the sidecar and send it bouncing across the arena.

While the other Gaquri ran after it singing curses under his breath, Kirbraz crawled out from under his (much larger) half of the racing chariot: "He's right and you know that, Kiina," he spat - not so much because he disliked her, but because a pipe had burst and covered his face in oil, and he wasn't particularly keen on letting the massive splash that had gotten in his mouth make a home in it.

"Gelu's right there, you know," she reminded him.

"Don't drag me into this," said Glatorian immediately excluded himself from the discussion again, blocking a lukewarm swing from Berix and nudging him to fix his footing as they sparred.

The pilot huffed wetly as he started to wipe the oil off himself: "Who cares about that walking blanket! I'm talking about Ferfax!"

Kiina lifted her head skyward and groaned.

"Ferfax? You mean elder Ferfax?" Crotesius piped up.

"Who else?"

"And what's with her?"

"That amateur mechanic you've got there never fancied her!"

The Tapyri's mismatched eyes bulged out of their sockets. He turned to the already sour woman at his side with a flabbergasted glare: "You are absolutely insane!" he shouted. "More than all that space talk and drooling after Skakdi already implied!"

"Oh sweet River Eyes," she bemoaned, annoyed beyond belief, but couldn't get the full sentence out.

"And then she comes here telling us we're idiots for not thinking a Bruiser would be good bed company!" Scodonius joined in as he rolled the tire back into his sidecar. "The gall of her, I tell you..."

"Wouldn't have complained about a shortage of lays if she just got over herself and asked Ferfax," Kirbraz nodded.

Kiina threw a spare pipe at him with the intention of either caving his skull in or push a hole clean through his head. Unfortunately, seeing as she hadn't used enough force, the blunt tool just smacked the older man hard enough to launch him backwards, ramming his nape against his chariot and tearing the world's most anguished swear to date out of his mouth.

"SORRY, you spineless five-times winners of the Most Boring Taste In Sexual Partners Award-" she began at a tone of voice that was way too loud.

"Shut up!" Gresh (understandably) yelled back at her.

She ignored him entirely in the white hot glow of her rage: "-You may be such great fans of colonoscopies that you can't go a day without one, but I think I'm allowed to not be interested in playing doctor with her after she's spent an ungodly enough amount of hours wrist-deep in my mangled uterus pulling my SPLINTERED HIPBONE out of it with TWEEZERS!"

An unpleasant, shuddering silence crossed the arena very quickly, which the Glatorian of Water greatly appreciated as she focused back on the Cendox, yanking the faulty radiator out with her bare hands.

Crotesius said absolutely nothing, scared enough by that.

Scodonius, however, still insisted with a mumble after a few seconds: "She's not a boring choice for a partner..."

He flinched when Kiina threw her hands in the air: "OH, of COURSE," she hollered mockingly, "An OLDER WOMAN who knows how to BONE, how REVOLUTIONARY!" then she leaned forward, fires of Plude burning in her crescent pupils: "You would start shaking and barfing your soul out if a Matoran propositioned to you!"

The Gaquri sputtered, gasped, babbled, mouthed vacuously in search of a response that wouldn't confirm her statement; when he failed, he fell back on a simple: "They wouldn't do that anyways!"

"You don't know that!" she yelled back: "They're still figuring this out! One day they might!"

Her younger brother almost blushed at the idea.

"And you would say yes?" Kirbraz asked.

"Of course I would!! They're small and charming and full of rotating bits under their armor!"

"Where do you see the charm in those?!"

She vaulted over the overturned chariot, rushed up to him, slammed him into the ground, pointed a finger shaking with pure wrath at his eye hard enough to poke it out and growled between gritted teeth: "They've got more charm than you do, you rotten week-old bottom feeding runt of a carp, so jot that down--"

"She would bed a Vortixx if she could find one," Gelu intervened despite his earlier assertion of wanting nothing to do with this discussion, earning himself a shudder from Berix together with a betrayed glare and an attempted surprise attack from Gresh (both of which were parried easily much to the Lebori's chagrin).

"I would!" Kiina confirmed without a hint of shame.

Several of the people around her met her statement with wordless yet very obnoxious threats of puking.

She rose to her full height and pointed at each of them: "Weak, weak, weak, and weak," she declared with utter contempt. "None of you will survive the winter."

"They're snake-faced!" Scodonius objected.

"Don't insult snakes like that," Gresh hissed back at him, feathers audibly bristling under his helmet.

"And besides, they - er..." Crotesius coughed, awkwardly raising his hands and gesturing vaguely at the area under his neck. "They're... They've got... I mean, they look like-"

"Breasts!" Kiina cut him off, exasperated: "It's breasts! It's just breasts! Just puffed out a bit like when someone's had a kid recently! Is that what bothers you? Is that the thing that's too weird for you? Are you trying to tell me you've never seen breasts? Breasts?! The one thing everybody has?!?"

"Not on the chest!" the poor Tapyri argued in a strangled voice.

"Yeah, that's unnatural!" Kirbraz agreed: "Nobody needs those so high up - or out at all hours, too, they've got no decency!"

"They wear armor over them, asshole!"

Gelu stretched and lean on his shield: "It is pretty weird," he threw in his two cents. "They're still built, not born. It's not like they have a reason to have them."

"Maybe, if you get me a date with one of them, I can ask what their purpose is!"

"I'm not doing that."

"Then die ignorant and alone."

"None of you are normal," Gresh decreeted with disgust.

Kiina sputtered something that came dangerously close to an extremely cruel laugh.

The younger Glatorian stomped his foot hard at her provocation, a gust of wind escaping from the shield he pointed towards her and almost knocking her down: "What are you laughing at! You're the least normal of all of them by a mile and a half!"

"Says you, master of extinction," she mocked him right back: "If everybody followed your example the Agori species would've ended before the Great Beings even had the time to arrive!"

His feathers poofed from the seams of his armor and shook angrily.

"She's not that wrong," Gelu unhelpfully butted in.

"I don't care what the rest of you do, I just want you to stop being gross and loud about it!" Gresh yelled. "And quit being weird about the others, too! How come Berix and I are the only ones who are normal about them?"

He looked to his peer for confirmation.

What he saw was the young Gaquri paling into the world's most transparent shade of azure faster than lightning, with eyes blown wide and a guilty air about him that would've made one think he was off get convicted.

His wheezed nonsensical babblings - an anxious attempt at explaining himself, at apologizing - worsened his friend's face.

"Don't desert me," Gresh begged.

The sound of his voice violently undid the knot in the Berix's throat, who hurriedly bellowed: "I'M NOT WEIRD LIKE HER!!" while frantically pointing at his adoptive sister (who hissed a "hey!" that could have easily shut up someone less used to her growls). "And I'm not, I don't - it's not like those three either, I'm not thinking of, of sleeping with - it's just, he's, I-I... I just like mechanisms!"

Gelu tilted his head: "You what?"

"I like engines a-and machines and, and gears and pistons and all- not, not like that-" he hastily assured with a gesture that was meant to indicate what Crotesius, Scodonius and Kirbraz felt for the leader of the Water Tribe "-But like, like, uh, like... Like... Like watching?"

He bit his tongue immediately as he realized that wasn't a normal wa to explain himself, either.

"Because you're a mechanic?"

Thank the worms Gresh got the gist of it: "Yes! Yes, it's - I, I know how machines work and it's, it looks nice! I like t-to see them function! And, uh, and when we're working on something, Nuparu and I, when he moves maybe I, uh, uhm," and his voice started getting softer as embarrassment mounted over him, "W-well, sometimes, uh, I just - it's not weird! It's not! B-but maybe I- 'cos, 'cos you can, sort of see how the whole - the bits move under, under the armor, and it's, it looks... It's just... Nice... To, to look... At..."

Kiina pointed at him - not angry at all, on the contrary, looking elated: "Exactly!" she exclaimed: "That's it, that's the whole point! The eroticism of the machine!"

"The what?" the three pilots choked, suddenly feeling very weird about having let her near the chariots.

She responded with a silent, large, furious gesture calling out their cowardice for not even having developed some degree of at least spouse-like attachment to their vehicles after all the time they'd spent repairing and racing with them, with the added infuriating implication that the apathetic no-fun shell of a person that was Perditus was a better pilot than the rest of them specifically because he clearly had something going on with the Thornatus.

(Perditus did not, in fact, feel unusually towards his chariot; he had something much more sinister going on. Kiina didn't know that, so she ascribed to him the milder form of madness of being a somewhat jealous husband to his car.)

"Don't call it that," the Lebori groaned.

"W- how else am I supposed to call it?!" she rebuked: "The sexyness of metal?"

"Just don't say anything!"

"Then how am I supposed to convey how bad I want to ram a robot?!"

"Shut up!!"

Berix hurriedly reassured his peer, mostly on account of him looking seconds away from keeling over and having an embolism: "I didn't mean it like that-"

"But you get it," his sister insisted, "And that's what counts."

"Truly outstanding how barefaced your are about your lunacy," Gelu commented halfway between mocking and genuine.

"As opposed to you who try to keep it down, you mean?"

Now all heads turned to the Koniri, whose ears would have shot backwards in a threatened display if he hadn't been wearing his helmet, and instead produced only a muffled thud as they ran directly into its confines.

He narrowed his eyes at her and chewed on his lower lip thoughtfully, carefully, pondering how to get out of this unpleasant spot she'd shoved him into.

His first strategy was to feign ignorance: "I don't know what you're talking about."

"The swamp Toa," Kiina explained with a sharp smile.

Drats.

"That being...?" he tried again, still working on that denial.

"The green guy who Lewa left in the jungle to do whatever it is he's doing now," she specified, still grinning from ear to ear, knowing: "Who shows up like a ghost if you go too far in his territory and whacks you with his stick until you leave. The one who had algae coming out of his muscles and seams."

"Ah," the other Glatorian hissed between his teeth, which were grit so tightly that it almost sounded like 'fuck'. "Him."

"Yes. Him."

"What about him?"

"Don't you have something to share regarding him?"

He was done for.

There was no tiptoeing around it, considering everybody had clearly gotten the gist of what she was implying and the silence now marked the wait for him to either admit that he'd found said wetly miserable being attractive (confirming their assumptions) or state that he didn't (still confirming their assumptions).

He was stuck in a trap. It was like preventing the raid on Vulcanus all over again, being given an out but knowing he wouldn't have really been able to take it. Somehow these situations hounded him.

But he had a bit of freedom, still. He could sort of... Soften the whole deal. After all, they just had assumptions.

They didn't know anything for certain.

So he shrugged, averting his gaze and clearing his throat, and with the most casual voice he could squeeze out of his himself he admitted: "He had... Beautiful red eyes."

"And you shoved your tongue into his toothless metal mouth far enough to lick the inside of his neck," the Gaquri added in tone.

Shit.

Gelu squeezed his eyes shut as if to avoid a blow directly to the face, but it was too late.

Gresh had already started pretending to wretch, vomit, puke, throw up and give physical examples of various other synonymical verbs as loud as he could to swiftly and effectively convey his disappointment in him as he kneeled on all fours on the ground like a horrendously sick cat.

Kirbraz hadn't quite gotten to that point, but he was very close to actually ejecting his stomach out of his mouth, which was kind of worse; Scodonius was looking at him like he'd grown four pairs of arms, jaw threatening to fall off his skull due to how wide it hung open, and Crotesius had put his head in his hand just enough so that his green eye could still be visible, blown wide in flabbergasted disbelief. The sheer power of their more than altered emotional states combined would have been enough to get the Great Spirit Robot up and running again even with that giant hole in its cranium if they hadn't already dismantled a fair good chunk of it.

A whole life spent being considered in their eyes as a respectable warrior - completely annihilated.

In less than thirty seconds, too.

Fucking Quartz Peaks.

A timid hand reached his forearm, trembling hard enough to rattle his armor and him within it.

He looked down: Berix shook harder.

Dejected, Gelu gestured at him with his chin to ask away.

"H-how, uh - how'd it t-taste like?"

A few feet away, the Lebori sobbed another wretch.

The Koniri twisted his mouth as he thought back to that moment.

"Kind of like licking your own blood," he settled on replying.

"NICE," Kiina exclaimed with too much enthusiasm.

Gresh rushed at her and almost actually puked on her foot; when she shouted at him in disgust that he was an idiot and tried to kick him in the mouth he blocked the leg in his grip, turned, and launched her into the dirt - where he almost immediately joined her as she managed to smack him in the back of his knees.

Vastus watched their brawl break out from the seats where he, Ackar and Tarix had been silently spectating the entire discussion, the Agori closer to the two wrestlers sagely deciding not to intervene.

"Do you think there was something about Bara Magna that made the kids like that?" he wondered aloud.

Her friend and husband pondered over it for a while.

At last Tarix pulled the pipe out of his mouth and decreeted solemnly: "Too dry climate."

"Yeah, that oughta done it," Ackar agreed.

"You and your sand boytoy don't get to judge the youngins on this."

"I am going to actually kill you one day," the Tapyri replied exhaustedly as he turned to him.

Vastus flicked a finger at his arm: "Get in line, cougar."

"If you keep doing this I'm going to kill you, too, you know that?"

"So long as I get dibs on my husband that's fine."