Taera sighed dramatically, a hand fluttering to her chest as if I’d wounded her deeply. I didn’t understand the performance, but then, I was beginning to think her entire existence was a performance for an audience of one: herself. We were standing near the cargo bay airlocks, watching six different drone loaders move supplies into the Crow’s hungry holds. The ship was preparing to sail, and the air hummed with purpose and the ozone tang of active machinery.
The loading crew was a diverse lot. A dwarf with a braided beard thick enough to shield him from small-arms fire, hefting crates with a grunt that spoke of tectonic patience. An older goblin—Braxis, I presumed—who moved with a lazy economy that belied the sharp intelligence in his eyes as he directed the drones. A beautiful green-skinned girl who seemed to be the nexus of the operation. A purple-haired woman whose aesthetic was so aggressively… anime… that she looked like she’d stopped traffic on her way to the spaceport. A lithe elf who handled delicate-looking instruments with preternatural grace. And a baseline bald human who looked like he could bench-press a shuttlecraft and was using the rolling muscles in his chest to intimidate the heavier crates into moving themselves.
“Sometimes I despair of humanity. We have lost so much,” Taera said, her voice dripping with a wistfulness that I was 90% certain was affectation. The same percentage of what she did and said could have that label applied. She was… endlessly dramatic. I’d have appreciated the theater of it more if I weren’t acutely aware that she could just as dramatically cut my throat if she thought it would serve her goals.
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I looked at her curiously. “If you are flirting with me, I don’t get it. My romantic repertoire is a bit rusty, limited mostly to ‘try not to scare them off with the chronic pain and the impending soul-death’.”
She chuckled, a sound like wind chimes made of glass shards. “Oh, it’s just since the Diaspora. We have lost everything. Our language, our culture, our little idiosyncrasies… it was all washed away in the tidal wave of practicality when we discovered the System...”
She launched into a lament about lost languages and homogenized culture, a lecture that was both fascinating and utterly infuriating given my circumstances. She finished her tirade on the poetry of profanity and the origin of the word 'scrot' with a predator’s smile.
“Your perceptivity is annoyingly sporadic. You were very close to the right interpretation, and yet you fail to grasp its significance. I understand your noble, paladin-y intention not to bond her, but for the love of all that is holy, David, use your scrotting aura.”
The command was so unexpected I complied without thinking. I wasn’t used to extending my aura in a non-combat situation; it was like unsheathing a sword in a nursery. It was a tool for domination, for sensing corruption, for battle. But I let it wash out, a silver-and-black wave of divine intent and necrotic decay.
