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Ullane Wistim || Last Night || Rickshaw TT-R
She circles high above on the winds blustering over the ocean and this floating, artificial island she calls hive. You’d call it a trash heap, but you’re not sure yet if she minds or not.
She doesn’t seem to mind too many things, yet.
Her wings, solar-powered lightweight metal and plastic creations attached to a harness, sharp and curved like those of a gull, flash in the light of the moons, and you cup a hand over your eyes. Most trolls would want a mothlike model, or a butterfly, a dragonfly even.
Mesawa wanted to mimic a bird. Are all trolls with them so obsessed? You should ask her, ask her about her own lusus, about the gulls and the other birds you’ve seen stealing fish off the docks and market from hawkers who don’t protect their stalls well enough with screens or lusii.
“Going to keep doing silly tricks?” You shout.
She dives low enough to have the wind of her passing stream through your hair, chilling your scalp as you toss up a coin for her to catch.
It bounces off her wing - she twists, and flips over to catch it on her body before grabbing it and flipping back over before her momentum fails her.
“Buy us some drinks!” You call, and with a woosh, she lands in front of you, breathing heavily but grinning.
You help her out of her harness, not that she needs your assistance. It’s something you appreciate about her.
Her wide eyes look up at you from their cradles of odd red markings - though those are seen as a sign of proper regional heritage, you’ve begun to learn - and she leans into as she also wriggles out the last straps, and one smacks you in the foot as it slides to the compressed plastic surface.
Mesawa’s as warm as any rust, heavier than some, which is expected for a girl from a sea city. You don’t put your arms around her, instead turning so she’s leaning into your shoulder instead of your chest.
“I guess this is how you want me.” She murmurs. “Still tense, and now uncomfortable. You’re a classy woman.”
You rub a knuckle against her right horn, and finally turn to kiss her on the forehead, strands of windswept hair drifting over her shoulder as you do.
“Is that how I get one forehead kiss? Are we bartering, Wistim?”
“Not this time.” You reply, and press your lips to hers.
Ullane Wistim || One Perigee Prior || Eastern Isles Outpost
The QPIN toughs who’d been there before said that an outpost was just a wreck waiting to happen. A shoddy, leaking construction built by half-rate carpenter droids on an empress-forsaken rock too far to get help from shore quickly, and far too close to Rickshaws for comfort.
You can’t really disagree with that. At least not yet.
Glitch looks as bored as a seadweller at a maroon village gathering, and you can’t blame her. At least she can look at her phone; the chances of the pair of you getting attacked are very low. Most trolls here look like they lost a fight with a cholerbear, and she looks like she could skewer one while buffing her nails.
She follows you to the counter, where you flash your company pin and the troll turns an interesting shade of teal before hurrying you two to the back.
“Look.” He says, wringing his hands, maybe 8 sweeps old. He’s sweaty, and if his hair was any longer than a fuzz of stubble, it’d probably be a mess. “I really don’t want to get involved with this. The only, and I mean only, reason I called you folks in was because I don’t want anybody thinking we were skipping on purpose.”
Glitch smiles, and he turns paler. No markings; he’s not Rickshaw, and from his voice, you doubt he’s from the Isles either. Maybe an unlucky transfer.
“We know you’re not to blame.” You say, if not kindly, then at least neutrally.
“Great. Great.” He fiddles with his shirt cuffs, his clothes nice enough that you suspect he must have a higher blooded quadrant, probably a moirail. Perhaps that’s how he’s still alive.
“So you’ll take care of the raiders? I mean, they’re Rickshaw, and I’d bet my evening coffee they’re not even one of the bigger ones, the kind that’ve lasted for a hundred cycles. Nobody’s going to miss a few more - “ He grimaces, and says a word in what you think is Seacant, what many of the Rickshaws speak. “ - well, scavengers is the nice way to say it, but hey! I don’t think they deserve me being nice.”
Glitch stares him down cooly, and you sigh. The thieves may not even know they’re stealing Queenpin goods and payments.
And maybe you’ll wake up as an indigo tomorrow night.
Ullane Wistim || Three Weeks Prior || Open Eastern Sea
The raiders’ ship was probably quite seaworthy before it got bombarded by QPIN laser cannons.
Now it’s less a ship and more a slowly sinking pile of rubbish as you look down on it through the ship’s screens, glowing with their live feed. It must have a helm in its hold trying to keep it up as long as it’s managed since the attack; you’re not one to cry tears over every troll in a column, waste of energy, but a twinge of sympathy makes your ears flick for what must be terrible conditions even by helm standards.
You wonder how Glitch feels. You doubt Hap Ret cares all that much; he may be maroon enough, but he’s not psiionic, and helming will never be a worry for him.
You wonder what the hell that was that just landed on the ship in a flash of light glinting off metal.
Shouts and scrambles back to the weapons control panel commence, but you call for them to stop. You don’t know for sure this is a threat.
Amidst grumbling, you take a scouter pod down to get a closer look, stungun and laser pistol on your hips.
There’s a flash of light that blinds you for a few seconds, and when you recover you see a troll shooting upwards with metal wings spread wide, defying gravity and the sea serpent that took a snap at her.
You grit your teeth, and then use the pod’s aiming system to land a few rounds of bullets into its eyes and throat. It screeches fit to crack the heavens and falls back beneath the waves with an almighty splash, abandoning its attempt to search the ship for prey, and you follow the flier.
They duck and weave in crazy patterns, as if trying to lose you, or just showing off. The pod’s radio crackles and Hap Ret rambles about could he know what the hell is going on, please, or is she too busy chasing actual fucking Icarus to give a status report?
You shout back your coordinates and heading, and then the flier comes to a halt so abruptly you’re meters from crashing into her when you brake.
Because it is a her, you can see now - a maroon girl with a harness that her wings are attached to, and she hovers in the air like a hummingbird.
You can’t quite tell through the pod’s feed, but you think she’s grinning at you.
She shouts something in a strange language - Seacant, you think - and more fliers swoop up, these ones with their troll-style wings sensibly on their backs instead of arms, holding what look like very large and possibly illegal guns for anyone under violet to own.
You curse rapidly in Spanish and Standard while taking the pod into a deep dive (the fliers follow) as Hap Ret yells further, and you yell back that you could use some backup right -
- now, as you hear the deep thrust and rumble of the ship’s engines, and -
- the fliers swoop right back up, and make two of the hand gestures all trolls know: the request for a truce, and then for parley.
Ullane Wistim || Two Weeks Prior || Ricksaw TT-R
It turned out that Mesawa - the maroon girl - and her allies were from a rival Rickshaw to the one that had been raiding the outpost’s shipments. They were more than happy to get their work done for them and converge on the wreck to pick off anything that remained.
Seeing the mark of QPIN on the ship’s hull had stopped them from trying to kill Ullane, as they were wise enough to realize it would end for them much as it had ended for the trolls of BB-H.
A new business arrangement had been worked out. In exchange for keeping BB-H from sticking their snouts where they didn’t belong, TT-R’s flier squad (you refuse to call them a flock, as they claim they’ve titled themselves) will get a percentage of profit and aid in any further retribution if they need it, in exchange for a share of the spoils.
Mesawa was the only maroon among them, you muse, looking over at her laughing and eating with her squad at a table on the other side of the outside restaurant, which is really just a glorified fried fish stand with tables, the vendor’s millipede-axolotl lusus sniffing underfoot around for scraps and keeping the gullmites at bay.
Glitch and Hap Ret have been gone for a while - it’s hardly any of your business where - so you slide over and sit at one next to the group, listening to their chatter even if you can’t understand most of it.
A muscular cerulean peers over at you curiously, says something to Mesawa (she rolls her eyes) and then says in oddly flat Standard:
“Hey. Come over. Here. We want to talk. To you. Yellow girl.”
You stretch, crack your neck, and then get up and blithely stroll over. Just because you’re hemoloyal doesn’t mean you have to jump every time someone blue snaps their fingers.
“Sorry for Kyuung; he bought the cheapest translator worm he could.” Mesawa says, in a vaguely apologetic tone, even though a smile twitches at the edges of her lips. The other trolls - a lanky teal, a thickset cobalt, and another cerulean (wiry and short, unlike the towering wall of muscle) titter in agreement.
You look at her and then the cobalt, who seems happier yawning and lighting a cigarette instead of trying to defend his fellow blueblood, or take the attention away from a maroon.
Interesting.
“Don’t eye Chi-Hwa; he’s taken in three quadrants.”
“Two.” grunts the cobalt, taking out his cigarette for that one word before popping it back in.
You snort. As if you’re going to flirt with someone over teal, regardless of what squares they have taken.
“What you want to talk about?”
This makes the others grin and nudge each other again.
“What do you have taken?” pipes the teal. “Because I gotta say, if you’re eyeing Susu - ”
Mesawa flushes slightly, even if she rolls her eyes again and crosses her arms. Why? It’s just as ridiculous as the thought of you eyeing Chi-Hwa.
She might be appealing - unlike Cerbet, she’s soft in more places than just her hips - and she can clearly take care of herself, but you hardly know her.
You know she likes soaring through the air making narrow escapes and parading around as if she thinks she’s actually a bird, some immortal phoenix who unlike Icarus, will never get struck down, never falter.
Other than that, she might as well be a complete stranger.
Odd, your face feels warm. It must be the humidity.
“No, of course not.” You say, thinking of how she hung in the air with that grin, facing down your pod point-blank, despite having just seen you put bullets into a sea serpent.
Ridiculous.
Ullane Wistim || One Week Prior || Rickshaw TT-R
You yawn and turn over under the blankets, figuring you should get up and shower, but not really wanting to.
It’s warm here, and you’re not due back on Nott for another six hours. Mesawa’s already cooking, even though you told her she didn’t have to. She gave you a look and said it was time you had proper Rickshaw cooking, not just vendor stall trash.
You don’t know if this will wind up serious. You don’t know if you want it to, if the pair of you can even make this work longer than a few weeks, a few perigees. Right now it doesn’t bother you very much; the most important thing is making sure nobody finds out.
Mesawa wasn’t thrilled when you first insisted you needed to keep this a secret - were you ashamed of her, ashamed of a Rickshaw troll? - and you’d explained that it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the gossip vultures that populated QPIN and the chat you frequent.
That calmed her down a bit. She still eyed you, but she said she understood about secrets, and cheered up considerably when you said she was free to tell anyone in her life.
You push yourself up to sit, and the blanket falls off your bare, flat chest. You pull it back up as she walks into the room, hoping she didn’t see. It’s silly - she knows, of course, and she doesn’t mind - but she gives you her “don’t be stupid” look, except there’s something softer about it.
Soft like her lips as she leans in to kiss you, and you cup her head in your palms.
In this moment, your desire is more bare and true than anything else about you.
For once, you don’t think you mind.