#ndtech2024

Tech adjusted his goggles.

“I take special care in learning about the creatures in the galaxy. I find them fascinating.”

“So is the venomous twirfang aggressive?” Omega asked. “I mean, it must be since it has so many teeth, but does it only attack if provoked, or does it hunt?”

Tech smiled, a wonderful thrill filling his chest. “Oh, it hunts all right. Though, I will say I don’t quite understand why it has venom. The venom is only on the teeth, which by that point, you’re dead anyway. Perhaps to incapacitate its prey to make an easy meal for it—I know some snakes do something similar, or even constrict their prey to keep it still while they eat it whole. But I digress. The venomous twirfang could have possibly just had a useless trait from evolution. After all, most lifeforms have something like that.”

Omega was rifling through the tools, like she needed something to do with her excitement.

He handed her back the spanner, and asked for the solder.

She gave it to him, and he was soon fixing some faulty wiring that had been giving them trouble with life support.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Have you ever wondered why humans have an appendix?”

Omega put her elbows on the crate, her chin cupped in her hands, a thoughtful expression on her face that Tech was happy to see.

“Oh. Huh.”

“So, as I was saying, there are useless traits, which the venom might be one. Perhaps it helped at one point—hmm, maybe the teeth were smaller, or there were less of them. The mouth could have been smaller too.”

He straightened as an image of what the creature might have looked like thousands of years ago entered his mind. He pictured something smaller, slimier, maybe even without its four eyes.

Tech had the urge to find a data retrieval center so he could dig into this.

“Oh, perhaps there weren’t muscles under the gums!” he added.

“Do you have a holo of it?” Omega asked. “It sounds weird.”

He gave her a grin, and got back to the soldering work. “The word I would prefer to use is fascinating. And yes, I can show you after dinner”

“Sweet. So what else does it look like?”

“Well, picture a fish, but it has legs. Six of them.”

“Six?!”

“Yes. The large amount of legs is necessary to move its considerable, round mass across swampy land. The feet have thick webbing between the toes to help it not get stuck in the swamp.”

“What does it get out of living in a swamp?”

Tech couldn’t stop thinking, couldn’t stop smiling. Someone hadn’t asked him this many questions about his special interest in quite some time. To be fair, they were busy running from the Empire, but his mind was busy with this; always busy with something.

“It feasts on smaller predators, and some large prey. It blends in well with the landscape because of its green skin. I do believe it fits in the class of amphibian, actually. So it has slick, slimy skin.”

Out of the corner of his eye Tech saw Omega scrunch up her face in disgust, and he almost laughed.

“It tends to sit halfway in the water, halfway on land, waiting for its prey to approach unknowingly. When it moves towards prey it can move fast thanks to its six legs. They are deceptively long, letting it make leaps one wouldn’t expect.”

Omega fiddled with the welding torch, and— Oh no, Hunter would not like that.

He promptly took it from her, and put it on a crate on his other side. She gave him a disappointed look, but with a raise of his eyebrow she ended up letting out a huff, letting it go. He almost expected an eye roll, having seen similar expressions on lifeforms countless times through his recordings. The slight pinch to her eyes showed that she was just a hair from doing so, that she was resisting.

“The venomous twirfang mates by—” He glanced at Omega, a twelve-year old. Sure, she probably knew a bit about her own reproductive system at this point with puberty, but…

“Never mind,” he said, blushing slightly. Right, not everyone wanted to hear how creatures mated.

But it was so interesting! The venomous twirfang was able to change its sex to suit the needs of a potential partner. There was even documentation of males carrying the eggs. And there was at least one more documented sex, and a hypothesized fourth one, though those studies hadn’t been well corroborated seeing as, well… the top researcher had died getting too close during the mating (which was often violent).

He did his best to search through the catalogue that was his mind for something else to talk about regarding the venomous twirfang.

Ah!

“They have gills on their stomachs that let them breathe underwater during the long hours waiting for their prey.”

Omega started patting her own stomach, and he couldn’t help but find it highly adorable.

“Gills on the stomach,” she repeated, words punctuated with emphasis as she thought it over.

“Yes.”

“I wonder where humans would have gills if we needed them.”

“You’re not going to like that answer,” Tech immediately responded.

Omega leaned in again, so much so the crate tipped, and he held out a hand to steady her. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh?”

“Well, if we look at how gills work and how they need access to the lungs, and based on human metabolism, they’d be on the chest.”

Omega’s eyes widened and she looked at Tech’s chest, then her own, horrified.

“All over the chest, in fact. We would not have any free space. They’d be large for our blood supply.”

I wonder where the breast tissue and mammary glands would go then. Hmm… Perhaps the stomach in this case.

Omega shuddered, perhaps imagining what he was, and how gills looked when they were at work, the way they moved.

“Oh gosh, okay.”

“Would you prefer if I tell you how many lungs the venomous twirfang has?”

She nodded.

“Four. Usually it only has two lungs at work, but the other two act as reserve lungs for situations that require more oxygen in the blood, such as the rare times they chase after their prey, or are attacking something because of a perceived threat to their habitat. And mating,” he added. “It also helps with injuries. It has been documented that the venomous twirfang has been able to survive while missing two of its lungs, or with injury to two. If one of their lungs is infected with something or is decaying due to prolonged illness they can actually rework it through their body into their stomachs where they can purge it through the mouth.”

Omega’s eyes were wide. He hoped with wonder, because that was certainly what he was feeling.

“Wow,” she breathed. “That is the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.”

He paused in his work, gesturing at his chest. “Worse than the human gill thing?”

“Way worse.”

“Oh, um…”

“Cool.”

Tech inwardly breathed a sigh of relief.

It went on like that, Omega asking questions, Tech answering them, and they finished the repairs in a little under an hour.

She was helping him carry the crates of tools back into the ship, the sun setting, and Tech couldn’t help but feel not just a sense of accomplishment about a job well done, but something deeper, something special.

He was content. Actually, he was more than content.

During dinner at Cid’s place, everyone sitting around a table, and enjoying surprisingly lovely fried food that perhaps did not meet military nutritional standards, Hunter nudged Tech.

“You’re in a good mood.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Only you could be in a good mood from repairs,” Wrecker said.

Tech nodded because it certainly was true. He loved doing work like that, loved using his mind in a way that felt like he was delving deeper or stretching it, coming to new conclusions, new solutions, new thoughts, new ideas. It was invigorating, it was fun. But today it was more than that. He felt light, giddy, like he had released something and it was met with wonder.

“You get in a good mood from building explosives,” Echo pointed out.

“Yeah, of course I do,” Wrecker said. “Duh.”

“Well, it was more than the repairs,” Tech began.

Omega immediately put her food down, slammed both hands on the table (subsequently rattling their cups and plates), and stood, leaning towards all of them.