Chapter Text
Chapter Five
A long while earlier… multiple days before that fateful date…
Alex’s parents had a particular kind of ‘origin story’, as terminally online individuals such as him and his circle of friends as well as acquaintances and quasi-friends put things, which immediately struck almost everybody that he talked to. For him, though, it often boiled down to simple images as well as equally simple pieces of disconnected texts. He didn’t mind talking about all that, per se, in the sense that it was tedious or even slightly irritating. He simply didn’t enjoy doing so either.
He pictured a doomed space station in his mind’s eye. ‘Living is more than survival. It means thriving. No matter the cost.’ He flashed over to a bucolic set of fields covered in plants gently pushed around by the simple winds. ‘Survival wasn't just improbable— it was grotesquely miraculous. It insulted your ability to do math, in a good way.’ He then pondered a wide expanse filled with jagged edges of former civilization such as shattered glass upon torn patches of concrete. ‘Eight bloody years. Or nine. Or ten. Depending on what event you pick as the beginning. Not that any of them were any less terrible.’
The most difficult moment was made up of, in contrast, inky blackness matched with the acrid odors of burning trees alongside the desperate noises of artillery shells. ‘Partisans. That one word says it all. Not heroes. Not heroines. Partisans.’
Alex’s own ‘origin story’, as he constantly reflected upon, represented a move from teenage type angst to twenty-something type angst as he built an online presence beyond being just another random goofball, looking to become more than another mere consumer who laughs at silly cartoons and cries at melodramatic memes about robots in love. He’d accomplished a lot, academically, yet it all felt fairly hollow for reasons that he found difficult to really get into. It hit him especially hard when he visited a university hall named after ‘Belt War heroines’, as the large placards stated, and suffered wave after wave of disorientation as his fellow students laughed in there, listened to music in there, picked their noses in there, and otherwise appeared bored stiff.
That happened literally during his first week. ‘Of all the rotten luck… damn it.’ He’d needed support. He’d needed understanding. He’d needed basic caring. The ‘Monument of the Vanished Battalion’, in which Alex’s parents’ unit was memorialized, truly had become too much to deal with. He’d gotten some cookies. And then he’d basically let social media eat his whole body in mind to feel better again.
It was silly to the point of actually seeming somewhat horrifying to think of being in ‘the Chat’ and ‘the Club’ involving a metaphorical baptism. Yet Alex’s very first post to the very first long-running series of chats on a certain imageboard became a quasi-meme more or less immediately. He thought back to it more times than he’d ever admit, even if pressured in private messages.
Somewhere, in a hundred cold rooms lit by laptop screens and dim lamp pools, the river of ‘the Chat’ flowed— affirming, anxious, celebratory, chaotic, mocking, worrying, and venerating all at once, somehow. The platform known simply as ‘Status’ had developed a sort of intellectual clearinghouse specifically labeled ‘s/OneTicket’. That all got started several months before Alex’s fateful date with Bryan. The ‘One Ticket Only’ meme itself simmered for well over a year before breaking out as a popular ‘vibe’, as everybody around Alex put things, but after watching it for the first time he experienced an emotional-ish right hook to the face.
Jumping into ‘the Chat’ and quasi-accepting his role in ‘the Club’ was the emotional-ish left hook. He would never be the same again. It was always moving. Even when nobody was really paying that much attention, it built up more and more. Memes full of typos, sessions of literal dreams being described in poetic language, and ironic drawings of goofy fantasies existed side-by-side before his eyes— endless little sparks fizzled into the void yet somehow flowed back out over time.
“Yes, I’m a fully licensed logistics assistant who can navigate orbital freight lanes. And this silly job is paying my way through college. Yet I also accidentally squeaked when my human supervisor brushed my shoulder yesterday. Loudly. Not a ‘I drank my coffee too fast’ squeak. A ‘I just won a free year’s rent squeak’ squeak. Let me laugh, okay?"
That was Alex’s first post as he joined ‘the Club’. He used the DataScope corporate logo in its most grandiose depiction to illustrate the text. And he’d shared all that without a second thought.
It wasn’t loud. It didn’t spike the server loads. There was no visible crash of symbols taking place, with nothing stirring any of the algorithms.
He hadn’t even worked for DataScope that long, having moved to being a standard student assistant for his college in a matter of mere weeks. He phrased things that way because s/OneTicket cherished honesty. And vulnerability. He needed to get back on his bearings after the college’s administration hit him with wartime related anxiety via its exhibits, on top of his already tough struggles, and he had wanted to make a ripple. ‘Just a ripple. I swear.’
In a biochemical processing station hovering around a tiny moon, a small technician— the pale-furred, square-jawed, and exhausted furfolk having hundreds upon hundreds of posts to his name— had paused mid-scroll. His thumb hovering over his tablet’s screen, his heart had jolted. Painfully.
Mikey, as Alex later learned, had then whispered aloud into the humming air something that wasn’t really an actual sentence. And, without thinking, he tapped out a reply: “Gods. Same. Solidarity, brother.”
Alex received private messages from Mikey weeks later. He got similar comments from a set of twins working in a hydroponics maintenance tunnel under New Carthage City. A huge variety of furfolk all throughout the star system followed in not too long. Somebody higher up in the DataScope corporate hierarchy even chimed in. Alex, naturally, felt stunned.
And in Alex's own tiny apartment, the screen's blue-white light carving shallow valleys into his tired face due to his device’s wild settings, he saw the first public reply flicker in. And then another followed. And about ten more popped up.
Nothing explosive at first. No shouts. No riots.
He pondered the nature of all those small voices reaching out like vines under frozen soil. It brought to mind all of his experiences as a young child given his parent’s home resting nicely alongside so much greenery. He knew ‘the Club’ featured so many individuals metaphorically curling around each other, with them all feeling like tentative, shivering efforts at being alive.
Alex always knew that his longings didn’t actually make him alone. He’d rarely felt like that, though. When his post became a real quasi-meme, being a part of the cemented history of s/OneTicket while spreading out to s/CollegeFurfolk and s/UniThoughts, he sure finally felt like that. Over ten thousand individuals had taken in his confession for what it had been worth. The emotions that he’d long wrestled with thus had found a name. The spiritual water thus had found a shore.
He so, so badly wanted to be offline friends with his peers and not just online associates with them. They almost seemed like anime characters to him given their exaggerated, strident differences.
SallyMouse always sounded so bubbly, curious, happy, and even flirty at times without engaging much at all with darker things, hypersexual things, trolling things, obnoxious things, and the like. Going beyond her hyper-romantic focus and love for fantasy details, somebody’s half-serious and half-silly post that she was “the template with which the humans gender-swapped things in order to create Alex” or something like that lived rent-free in both furfolk’s minds. They’d confessed in private messages to each other that they literally dropped their cellphones from their paws in laughter.
Offline, she seemed “doomed”, in her own words, to remain shyly single in an anxiously depressed way forever if not for years and years. Alex would never admit it, but her private message about how “being this asexual surely doesn’t help” also lived in his mind rent-free. Kiff apparently had almost the same problems. Some obnoxious, pseudo-intellectual type who’d gotten banned all over s/OneTicket and elsewhere, to Alex’s serious relief, had snarked that Kiff came across as “a psychologically ‘flattened’ Alex and SallyMouse, like the cheaper black-and-white drawing based on color photographs”. Alex had wanted to just reach out and hug the other mousy student over and over again the past many months. They both felt hyper-romantic time and time again, especially when surrounded by particularly cute human men and human women, but that cautious, rules-oriented kind of personality grated Alex more than he liked to admit.
Melo joked once and a while that ‘the Chat’ wound up being for most something like “a drug addiction covered by free college internet, like the cheapest lines of cocaine ever only in cyberspace”. He needed “hit after hit”. He felt “withdrawal”. He worried about “not even having the energy to brush my teeth” after “chasing another high”. It was only slightly funny to Alex at first. Looking back later on, he wondered a lot if any of that talk had ever been humorous at all, either intentionally so or unintentionally so, especially after knowing Melo a lot better as well as himself a lot better.
Alex needed a far better social life. All of the other furfolk did. Badly.
“Hey! You! The student assistant!”
The sudden remark caused Alex’s head to lift up from his daydream. He glanced all around. The study hall appeared almost entirely deserted. He shifted about in his comfortable chair, having been apparently too luxurious if he literally felt like sleeping snug as an infant in it, before spinning over to the side and leaning an arm against the table. His backpack, oddly assembled in a way that made it nearly as soft as a pillow, rested right beside him alongside a pair of large sweet tea bottles.
“Yeah! That’s me! Alex!” He gazed up at the extremely tall human woman standing before him. She appeared as if he could give Bryan a run for his money in an arm wrestling contest. Her proud wearing of the college’s bright colors, showing off official ‘school spirit’, warmed Alex’s heart in a way that he knew was as pathetic as it was meaningful. “Nice to see you!”
“I’ve got a package of magazines for you. All academic. And scientific. All glossy.” She smiled as she held up her purse against her chest. “And all a part of next week’s work.”
“My aunt once told me, ‘If you do what you love and get paid for it, then is it even work?’... and I wonder about that sometimes,” Alex idly remarked as he got handed a large envelope from the lady’s purse.
“Is it preventing you from sleeping properly?” she asked, putting on a snarky expression as her head tilted to the side.
“Yeah.”
“Then, my little Awoonian, it’s work,” she remarked.
Alex shrugged in mock offense. He shut his eyes for a bit and placed the package onto the table behind him. He then sighed a little.
The contents included two papers of typed messages, stapled together, alongside three highly glossy magazines covering a variety of scientific topics. He scanned across the stylized representations of space-time bending at the force of exotic cosmic events, including possible spots with miniature, almost-invisible black holes, and then held the first message up right in front of his face. One of his supervisors, a pleasant human woman who’d spent over a decade at the college, asked formally as a professor for him to draft the formal response to an administrative statement about local chess.
Alex’s interests mostly lie in the scientific journal evaluating a set of Prothean ruins that had involved minimum exploration until quite recently. As a student of chemical engineering, he found the idea of using the elements of the standard Periodic Table in exotic ways to provide agricultural enhancements for barren moons incredibly exciting, even if several of his mousey friends got bored almost to tears when he brought it up. Even the subject of him possibly venturing into Prothean buildings himself in the not-too-distant future didn’t stir that much interest, which Alex found simply bizarre. Celebrity gossip from cross-species colleges such as his own felt like guff, pretentious nonsense by comparison.
“Knock! Knock!” A familiar voice came out from the small door besides Alex’s usual spot in the study hall.
He jumped up and swung it up. Melo stood before him, wearing an oddly formal outfit that featured a black shirt with certain grey stripes clinging tightly to his fur. Alex smiled. Melo smiled back.
“I’m tempted to ask why you said ‘Knock! Knock!’ out loud instead of, you know, knocking,” Alex remarked, sitting back down on his spot. He spread all of the materials from his administrative package out carefully on the table in front of him.
“It’s a study hall. I didn’t want to be too loud, right?” Melo stepped over to a corner of the table.
“So… instead… you shouted those words. Shouted. Great plan.”
“It seemed like a decent idea at the time,” Alex murmured playfully, wiggling his tail against the table for several seconds. He then held up a canvas bag that he’d kept by his legs the whole time, which Alex hadn’t noticed until that very moment. “Like I said before, I qualified for that ‘two for the cost of one’ thing at O’Brian’s Diner. Got you their special with all of the refried beans.”
“Sure, thanks,” Alex said, his eyes returning to the two pages from professors who’d wanted to message him personally. He paused. “Don’t know why. I just love refried beans.”
“You should try fried beans at some point. Save some time.” Melo poised his body against the nearby chair.
Alex playfully mock-punched Melo. The other mousy student returned the favor by mock-swatting Alex’s ears. They both grinned.
“Some late-night reading material, eh?” Melo inquired, with him leaning over and brushing one his shoulders against one of Alex’s ears.
“Exactly. Although, to be precise, it’s more like ‘all day reading material’.” Alex tapped a paw upon the thickest magazine.
“Miniature black holes? I’ve heard of those, actually,” Melo went on, his tail swinging a little bit as he clearly had memories flash all over his face, “going to seminar type things over several months. Listening to guys going over these recent problems in mass relay maintenance. I think. Or maybe not. About half of what those consultants for these freighter crews said flew right over my head.”
“Ironically enough,” Alex remarked.
“Yeah, I know, but, well, I’ll get a decent job after I graduate no matter what,” Melo continued, “if I keep showing up everywhere anybody even thinks out loud about communication issues. Or anything else to do with long-distance talk going back-and-forth. Sheer annoyance through constant presence is underrated.”
“Speaking of which, hey, are you doing that voice chat later? Even though Kiff’s feeling pretty sick?” Alex reached down to grab a pen, looking to write on the printed out papers a little bit.
“He messaged me that he wanted us to go on without him. Figured as such.” Melo shrugged.
“Fair enough.” Alex took a deep breath. He slipped his chair closer to the table.
“Oh! That’s a letter about our chess team?” Melo suddenly asked, his eyes growing wide as dinner plates after scanning one of the typed messages.
“Yeah,” Alex replied, shifting the paper about until it sat in the exact middle of the table between the two students, “and I wouldn’t say that I’ve got ‘the passion’, not as much as you and Kiff as well as the other key players, but I’m still finding that I’m more and more interested every week. You were right. You just were.”
“Like I told you before, almost everybody who plays a few cities over is… like… just terrible. I know that it’s unprofessional as all hell to say that out loud. Yet it’s so true. I don’t care if I live there. I’d much rather be able to actually grow and think things through as a part of your team. This college’s team. A group of furfolk with… like… vision. It’s more than worth it,” Melo commented, with bright energy radiating off of his whole body.
“Take a look at the exact words of the letter, though.” Alex held up an arm and gave the papers to Melo.
“The administration congratulates the Chess Team— this year being composed of a majority furfolk roster with the valuable participation of two human exchange students— on advancing to the Kasparov Ring Semifinals," Melo began to read aloud.
“Majority furfolk. Supplemented by humans,” Alex muttered, with his tail drooping a little bit.
“It was clean. It was correct.” Melo stopped, understanding all too well the tingly sensations of uncomfortable coldness going across Alex’s fur. He felt exactly the same. “It was… yeah… reading this silently… I can almost feel icicles forming on my paws… I get it. Alex, I do.”
“I’m supposed to draft a thank-you letter back.” Alex took in another deep breath. “I know that I should say that… like… we ‘appreciate the support shown to competitors such as my fellow mousey students and I alongside other furfolk who traditionally haven’t had the opportunities to study chess in a university setting’… and that I’m ‘honored’... to… yeah…” He blinked rapidly and reached for one of his tea bottles. “Yeah.”
“I’ve got to say something, myself,” Melo began.
Alex looked upwards. He locked eyes with his friend. He titled his head to the side a bit.
“I still feel satisfied. Really. I do,” Melo declared.
Alex, still caught between the weight in his chest and his focus on Melo’s words, felt something unspool a little inside him. “Those wins, like, were still incredible.”
“And this is a tremendous change! An official congratulations? Without any demeaning terminology? And an active attempt to say that all of these mingling social events represent the future of the whole star system? Even if it’s all worded kind of badly, like, does it really matter?” Melo raised his voice even more.
“That’s true.” Alex thought some more, his paws migrating around the end of the table.
Melo grinned wider, with his tail flicking a happy little loop in the air behind him. Alex took in the pleasant scene. And the room felt lighter to the both of them— not being calmed down and not being fixed but seemingly having been aired out.
"You see?" Melo asked, tapping the papers with one paw before giving it back to Alex.
“Huh?”
"Finally. They can't pretend it didn't happen. The administration. It can’t pretend that we’re not the backbone of this college. And that we don't do impressive things." Melo sat down upon a chair besides Alex’s spot against the table, calm joy radiating off of the first student’s face.
“Yeah, ‘impressive things’,” Alex repeated. He had found himself combing through the very last of the magazines. He hadn’t liked the first article past the cover one bit. “Like this. I suppose.”
“What’s that?” Melo ambled about a bit, getting his face comically close to the glossy paper. His eyes grew wide as he read the title aloud. “So, ‘Evaluating Extreme Cold As Well As Extreme Heat Tolerances Among Smaller And Smaller Non-Human Sentients’ is what the coolest kids are talking about, these days. Alright.” He let out a little sigh. “Do you have to analyze that for your job?”
“Exactly,” Alex commented, with him sliding over to the next page. He let out a sigh just like his friend. “I swear that both of the furfolk interviewed after getting… well… experimented on… even with their consent… I mean… look, come on, don’t they look exactly like Kiff? Only getting splattered with more freckles than you can count?”
Melo’s eyes anxiously surveyed the illustrative photographs. The biggest one featured a mousey construction worker, wearing overalls with a long screwdriver clutched in his paws, sweating profusely as he twitched repeatedly on a tight black chair. Wire after wire stretched across his arms and legs before going under his shirt. His eyes had narrowed into little slits as his mouth had opened wide. A pair of human hands were visible in the scene, but the figure’s body had gotten mostly hidden.
“Yeah, I see it too,” Melo finally murmured. He rubbed his face with two paws. “Yeah. Just as tall. Same fur, really. And so on.”
“Looks like I’m expected to turn my heart off while reading and then reviewing this,” Alex went on, “as if it was a big lamp with a light-switch right on the nearby wall.”
“If it makes you feel any better, well, I’m sure that the salarians and turians would’ve done the same to any human guy that they’d managed to suddenly ‘volunteer’ for experimentation, just like this.”
“Given how much they complained last winter, I suppose most of Bryan’s family would be alright with boiling in a lab instead,” Alex interjected, with him grinning slightly even though he felt surprised at himself for doing so, “and I can’t deny that he’d maybe even join them.”
Melo pulled out a pair of containers from the canvas bag full of discounted meals. He then pulled the lid off of a particularly wide one containing brown rice piled atop a layer of refried beans. The soothing yet still spicy smell soaked the air all around his face, causing him to let out a gasp of total joy.
“If somebody’s going to boil us, then they’d better do it with jalapeno sauce, am I right?” Melo asked, making his trademark laugh.
End of Chapter Five