Selling

After the reclamation of Coruscant, many Yuuzhan Vong were roaming the subterranean levels long after the initial population departed for Zonama Sekot. Among them, the majority were members of the oppressed underclass. The survivors were brought to the attention of the Galactic Alliance, but the stragglers have been left alone. Recently, there have been attempts to discreetly integrate the refugees into the growing reconstruction effort, but little information is provided of their whereabouts to protect the identities of the workers. It is not known whether these endeavors have been successful, as the species as a whole is well known to be opposed to the use of mechanical devices crucial to repairing Coruscanti structures.

"I've been doing it for the past fifteen years."

"Wow."

The two in question were sitting at opposite ends of a slab of stone, or coral, or duracrete,
in the off center of a dim apartment living room. The shutters were pulled down, as they had been
in the many months after its primary resident moved in. A dusty smell pervaded the crust encrusted walls.

"Iwon'tlivethatlong." her guest concluded very quickly. He didn't have time to spare. The funny looking human female nodded, but her green plumed guest was already asking another question.

It is also notable that among the postwar population of Coruscant, a sizable number of Devlikks have taken residence among the settlements still under construction. The Galactic Alliance's reconstruction efforts have offered incentives for sentient beings to move to the dilapidated capital. Devlikks are known for their willingness to participate in activities that often lead in death, as the average Devlikk's lifespan is ten standard years. It is due to this that many have been hired into the underbelly of the planetwide city where unsafe conditions are often observed. However, a sizeable chunk of the Devlikk population is attracted to Coruscant by its Darth Coral culture, which they believe is contributed greatly to by prominent Yuuzhan Vong fetishionists.

"Wowdidyoustealthosepaintingstoo?" he motioned towards the tapcaf brown wall to the right filled with artwork framed in aesthetically pleasing asymmetrical wooden frames.
"No, they're from my devo--I mean Yun-Yamm..."
"OootellmeabouthimI'veheardallsortsofcolorfullanguage," he interrupted urgently, with a wide beaked mouth flapping in tune with a yellow chest that was puffing at a highly mechanical rate which Grizhabel'd was glad was, fortunately, completely natural.
"He grants blessings to those who show bravery," the human female stated proudly, sounding less human by the half seconds he was diligently counting.
"I'manamateurstuntmandoesthatcount?" he squawked with excitement with his two front limbs placed together.
"..those who embrace death willingly are blessed by his tentacle clad touch," she smiled benevolently.
"OoohwheredoIjoin?"
"We can start the ceremony right now, Yun-Yammka appreciates intense devotion!" she said as she placed a hand to her nose and led the Devlikk to another room. Her hand felt stiff and clammy, causing his feathers to perk up as if Yun-Yammka's holy feelers had touched him after emerging from a cold shower.
The walls started to take on a brighter shade of purple as the strange human removed her face.
It peeled off in the middle like a pasty white mushroom burger as the walls caved in an abstract application of violet makeup that might have been a fungal induced hallucination. Underneath was a shade of pale much pastier than the skin that had peeled off. The Devlikk was ecstatic to see she was wearing a significant amount of blue eye shadow.

"Wowyou'retherealthingIcan'twaittogetallmyfriendsintothis." he pointed at the sarcastic phrase tattooed on her right arm.

The walls had settled on a form of architecture not unfamiliar to poseur Sith lords and fandom acclaimed science fiction artists. The Devlikk could agree with the dramatic lighting cast by the lichens plastered around a small curtain. A quick tug of a string

 

I like how the character of Horace seems really jittery but curious, you portrayed that quite well, I take it it is a species trait? Or is it character specific?
It's nice to get those paragraphs of insight into your YV characters mind from time to time, really shapes the story. Nice addition

 

Ah, I don't know about species trait. It might be that some of them do things really fast because their lifespans are condensed, but others are happy to live short lifespans in the pace of a human...or a Kaleesh...or a Yuuzhan Vong for that matter.

 

I need to update this more often. I don't know how to build suspense.

Sold!
Horace was hoisted by a pulley elevator to the household of his relatives, tapping his right foot for the waste of precious minutes of his fleeting life. He saw the yearling cousins looking down at him, grunting through their upturned beaks from using theirs for a similarly unintelligible purpose.

From the fourteenth floor of a rusty apartment building the Blumly family perched, their home open to the constant breeze. They must of thought it very brave and death defying, as it was highly
uncomfortable up there. Despite the romantic exaltation of sticking appendages into high,
windy places by many a Holodrama, the reality was quite contradictory to this. The four Devlikks huddled around the burnt remains of a spiced hawk-bat; they must have thought it very trendy, as it was becoming increasingly distasteful to eat them. Local liberal Vongforming enthusiasts would look down on him.

However, like illegally downloading Agamarian sparkle-bop, any discrepancy in the hawk-bat population was generally shrugged off as socially acceptable by most normal Coruscanti that had relocated to the planet due its vast array of profitable tourist attractions and the vast array of financial incentives to breed and repopulate.
Most accredited missing hawk-bats to the feeding of contraceptive pills to control the booming population.

Horace sat down, wondering how the members of his family who were still alive managed to
snag the creature. He also wondered why they had not been evicted yet. He owed it to a gigantic intuition field that surrounded the neighborhood, cast by a hairless aquatic mantis eater
two stories down to the east. His life was short enough: he believed most anything he found
casting an aura of non-violence and self-discovery.

His most recent devotion was to Yun-Yammka, the newly adopted God of angry holologgers and black-clad operatic metal singers. With a feat of neuron hopping much faster than an Ortolan could behold, Horace conjured the images of the past hour. They were hazy, as memories usually were, but he shared them enthusiastically with the three other Devlikks.

It might of appeared mind boggling to the viewer, but he expressed himself in such fluid and fleeting vocabulation; it superficially sounded like he only warbled a nonsensical tune five times faster than a sentence of Basic, but Horace's siblings knew better. It was a complex paragraph expressing the phenotype and fashion taste of his religious leader, Grizhabel'd, and the modern definition of Yammkature.

They joined him in warbling, and offered him a leg of hawk-bat. Tearing off his portion, Horace savored the flavor, as he did with all food. Despite his briefness of communication, he loved to eat slowly. It was all relative; he devoured much faster than a Sarlacc, but much slower than flesh eating bacteria found in remote parts of Ithor.

Horace Blumly watched the scene outside, witnessing the many-rayed sun drag itself a bit quicker than he usually deigned to notice. The sky was blue-a shade that would signal artistic incompetence on its own, but the clouds were orange, like a fleshy fruit. He pretended the hawk-bat tasted like the sweet, saccharine-coated pills suspiciously linked to Qelah Kwaad. It had been earlier in the week that had dragged by like a month that he had found spiritual guidance in the confectionary bar. He stringed out another message to his relations, this time asking to set aside time to buy new clothes.

Orid Blumly, an inch taller and a feather ribbon extra of Horace, was the first to respond. She got up from her moss-encrusted seat around the fire circle, and as if by telepathy, the room was brought in array. The Blumly family stood and strapped on their traveling bags.

Through the windy opening of their dubiously acquired home, they leapt fourteen stories with their parachutes trailing behind. Air friction and experience propelled them into a gentle descent, landing them with a faint plop against the closest sembla

 

Arg, I need to update this. I found out I was nominated for the "Most Underrated" section of the 2007 fanfiction awards. Need to provide material.....

 

I finally typed it up, the chapter DX
There's going to be more an Grizhabel'd, but I'm leaving for Seattle today and won't come back until the 1st.


...With A Mandatory Paintjob
They never came home to Circling Overhead Lots, but opted to sleep inside the shopping mall's bedding section, where hopefully they would not be evicted. They flicked the window blinds inside their heads closed.

Horace adjusted the color of the sky until he was satisfied with the saturation level. It was always an inky, star sprinkled black on this side, and he wondered if the monitor on the inside of his skull was broken, as it always showed a paler, washed out landscape when he dreamt. He saw it soon enough, having plucked a single layer out of the folded sheets of color.

Devlikks dreamt in layers, never sparing any space in their unconscious thoughts for emptiness, except for the tiny atom-breadths between strips of neural film. There was little lifespan to waste, and the footage of one dream fitted snugly into a flat film, rolled around its fellows in a way reminiscent of fitting smaller and smaller handwriting on a dwindling blank space on now obsolete print paper. An imaginary machine was doing the equivalent of transcribing it into electronic text. He couldn't tell whether it was a machine or not, or whether it was typing. Yun-Yammka would not approve of typewriters, not even imaginary ones. Horace wasn't thinking this, of course. He was thoroughly unconscious.

The astral projector fired off into the black of his electric patterns. On this particular incense-laden night Horace recalled a particular memory on the banks of the Kunbal Jungle*, on the crust of planet Kalee. He didn't ever recall being there, or leaving out incense to burn near his borrowed non-flammable bedding.

[*which had the properties of a rolling body of water, hence the reference to a riverine body part.]

He watched without thinking, and saw the visage of the late warlord Lyrid-el G'norf Gessel, his towering legs dwarfed by the canopy. He was standing in a steamy sun shower, contemplating the trophy locks of a wild, wild Karabbac woman as his ancestors did long ago*.

For generations, the glimmering of Jungle sundew off the lovely flame-red hair of a woolly Karabbac slain by reinforced blades haunted the lurid sleepy stirrings of warlords in the pre-morning light. A century's worth, longer.

In the ones to come, a certain troubled Kaleesh youth would stumble upon a particularly sumptuous example of flaming ruby mane, but the scene returned to Lyrid-el in that split-second Horace focused his attention to the bony umber face staring into the distance.

[*as expected of the savage warrior alien genre, most of these ancestors were male, except for Lyrid-du G'norf Tassel, infamous for her shampoo adverts. Lyrid-du herself was completely bald around the skulltop region, and in fact was advocating the care and feeding of wigs worn by the likes of said Karabbac-masked women, which she had been one of once. This resulted in a wide number of mishaps, perpetuated, as stated by the new Escrow Order, by Yun-Yammka, God of Lawyers. However, most of the accusations flung her way involved her trophy status; as like most sentient species, the Kaleesh were more interested in disputes of symbolic nature than mutilation of physical plumage from misuse of wig shampoo.]

He followed his wandering love to the foaming, raging river Ramernel in abundant laughter, standing on the now tangible banks. Only, he found laughter for more lyrical and far more deliciously moist in sound, like a wet sneeze, a smack of flukes against white water.
It was also bald laughter, for in the murky water, clambered upon an eroded rock, was an obscenely beautiful sight. She had no hair, or leather body armor, but was socially acceptable.
Lyrid-el's heart fluttered at the sight of the cetacean.

It was true; she lacked back legs, or sunbeam auburn hair, or clothing for that matter, but compensated tenfold for her aerodynamic shape, a body that ended in two p

 

Eerk, this needs an update. Here I am with the disjointed plotlines. It will all connect...eventually.

Infidel Incantry (part one)

Limni pushed the massage chair through the rotting ground cover of the Zonama rainforest. Godsend the ground was not actually dead, but was making fizzy noises as she stepped on it.
She had found it; the massage chair, not the ground; in a trash heap next to her family?s minshal. Taking sympathy, the shaper trainee had shoved it into the space in the back made by the recent deaths of all the resident yanskacs in the dinner tank.

She begged her almost-father to keep it.

Naturally, he said no and she was further pelted with rocks for associating with such an abomination and thrown out of the village. Despite angry lynch mob gathered around her entrance-valve, Limni insisted on keeping the chair, further horrifying her already traumatized family. She was unmoved, emotionally, at least.

With a huff, she remembered pushing it across the sea of angry Yuuzhan Vong peasantry as the perimeter of the minshal was taped for purification.
Dung maggots! She scarcely felt the sharp points tear the skin of her back. Limni walked on?
As she predicted, the pelting stopped after she had suffered the length of a modern Star Destroyer in projectiles. Her pain tolerance was impeccable.

Never mind them! Limni was lugging it to a more accepting society in the northern hemisphere, and Sekot would help her! Such a benevolent planet that would rent itself predominantly to generic blue-skinned humanoids would not allow her to be devoured by predators. Besides, how likely was it she would die in the backwoods if the planet provided a complimentary scarf to each of its sentient inhabitants? Limni was determined to find the tree they grew on. In truth, she almost expected one to grow as soon as the thought formed, to support her change in lifestyle.

No divine intervention came to fortify her resolve; instead of a soft, fluffy, fur scarf, Limni was pelted by a rain of discard fruit rinds from the canopy above. If the planet was benevolent, Limni thought, the peelings would be trained to avoid hitting me.

Halting momentarily, she promptly yanked the orange gunk out of her ratty juvenile hair. On her elongated forehead the humidity had formed salty droplets that furthered the rank smell. Limni wiped it with her hand and trudged on. Zonama Sekot?s current orbit promised balmy midday temperatures, a feat that needed no regulation from cranky, coffin-dodging old shapers who were now freed from their primary occupation to invent massage chairs of their own. They should, Limni further thought.

She remembered why she had left the shaper?s damutek the night she met her mechanical companion. Such archaic rules! This and that whatnot about the horrors of free love, sucking up to lewd warmasters, the whole five kilometers! Not that she expected to stay in Gortree and exercise her freedom to choose a sentient spaceship as her man-of-honor at her escalation. No, she would continue to lug the massage chair through the peatish ground even if she was allowed to snuggle with a sea slug.
She hoped Sekot wouldn?t pull off a lesson of morality and send her back to the master shaper who smelled of stuffed voxyn and boiled space cabbage. She hoped the chair wasn?t detectable in the Force and was yet another ingenious tracking device. As if the planet?s green coloration picked up frequencies like an intergalactic prodding organ tickled by her every movement in the undergrowth, Limni began to feel the first pangs of suspicion. Lifting a spiked boot, she suspected she had just stepped on a hidden recording beetle.

Hopefully, the planet wouldn?t rain more fruit peels on her already soiled headdress for this act of disrespect towards Yun-Yuuzhan?s creatures. Her boots continued to stomp stomp in the mud. The massage chair was miraculously waterproof. Cautious crèche caretakers had warned her that waterproof furniture was detrimental to the planet?s delicate ecosystem. Did chewing mites die as they nibbled

 

She strapped on flame-retardant seat belt. - Are you sure that's a massage chair?

The massage chair, already awakened from its slumber, whirred to life at that moment. Limni shrieked as it lurched violently downhill, taking the highly tattooed adolescent with it. - That's no massage chair!

I like this, it's a little odd and quirky in places but I think that works in this latest update's favour, i'm curious to see where this is going

 

Oi! You commented (ahaha, you seem to be the only reviewer these days because I update once every two months). My Yuuzhan Vong all seem to be escapist types who manage to run away from home without being used as target practice by crusty militia(wo)men. Limni is vong!Bjork but there's also an actual warrior with the name XP

I have the part I didn't type up half-written. I need to make it a bit more historically relevant (update me on the 40 ABY time period! Jacen Solo is doing something irrelevant!)

 

Nice update -- I'm starting to see a pattern among all these characters.

And it's interesting how something as mundane as a massage chair can be the instigator of so much angst.

 

Really? A pattern? My characters are usually a)female, b)representative of Asperger's syndrome symptoms, and c)improbable animals XD

 

It helps to post in smaller segments *short attention span*. I'm aiming to make these bits able to stand alone.

Work Day
Grizhabel?d slipped wearily off the fiber-filled mattress. On the soles of her calloused gray feet, the floor felt cold, like the poorly-heated residence vessel she had once lived. Her dreams had been occupied with visions of far-off worlds alien to her memory, and mountains and mountains of dead bodies. Nothing unusual---dead animals came and went from the stuffed cooling unit of her collective unconscious. She rose to straighten her back, aching from the husky mattress.

For the first half of her life, Grizhabel?d awoke to the sound of other funeral workers. Before the waking hours of the worldship they rose, pulling on stale-smelling aprons to begin their life?s work. In the dark was silhouetted a cold room filled with bodies.
The stench of reclamation had not yet set upon the cold storage chambers she walked. Steam rose from the orifices of the still-living as they plodded, zombielike, hunching their backs to open the freshly-made deathbeds of the select few of the higher castes notable enough to require their own compartments, away from the contamination of dreck such as her self. Grizhabel?d boggled at the contradiction, peering inside the tunnel.

Their bodies would be pawed at by funeral shift kanabar no matter who they were, stripped of the ornate coverings they donned while still breathing. Grizhabel?d walked on, away from their compartmentalized rooms.

She turned over the body of a warrior in the unorganized heap too mutilated to tell if it had been male or female. A pair of gloved hands trembled over the ice-coated chest. The little grey Yuuzhan Vong would have to be careful in greeting the mourners coming to claim the body. She had once addressed the remains of a commander a rank too low while her fellow workers were occupied elsewhere, heaping the responsibility of greeting to her alone. She had been severely kicked by the grieving parties after she had switched the names of two vacuum-damaged corpses.

They had been two rival domains. She thought about the rivalry between the tephlophene players in the funeral shift. Of course! There was none, not including the mid-morning scramble to grab the one with the cleanest belly. A tephlophene smelt dreadful to anyone unfortunate enough to be to write funeral dirges on one. She hadn?t told this to her human companions at the Museum of Improbable Organisms when the opening for a horn player had opened.

Her bandmates had found the matter highly romantic and insisted she write a song about it. Metal doors swung open within seconds of pressing the down button. She stepped inside. Grizhabel?d shook the flaking skin from her braided black hair inside the elevator lift. She swore the smell of preserving fluid was still lodged inside the keratin. The two ocarina-headed sentients in business suits shuffled aside, worrying in formats unbeknownst to her.

The elevator doors opened to a poster of Jacen Solo. Grizhabel?d, lost in memory, snapped out of the coroner?s office, where she was polishing her tephlophene with gusto.
What was he up to now? Something irrelevant, she thought. Grizhabel?d deleted all the news casts that came through the slot in her pigeonhole.

What? There were more today? Sometimes she would forget to check the mail. No matter, her contact informed her of a new public appearance several days in advance. She would do it later. She would have to visit the Museum of Improbable Organisms anyway?

She stepped out into the street, beyond the automatic doors with a thoroughly killed brown sack slung over her shoulder. Grizhabel?d?s right eye twitched at the poor taste in architecture as she glanced back. Perhaps it was the light that made her grey irises convulse; tt was a sunny purple day, and the shuttle to the entertainment district was already waiting as she blinked the rainbows from her photoreception.

Meanwhile, Jacen Solo was interrogating the former tuba player of the Voidgazers in sterilized room

 

Open House
A piece of her face fell off.
It was only natural---old Yuuzhan Vongi like her were constantly losing bits and pieces. It was probably genetic.
In her twilight days, Master Shaper Dal was a rusted relic, resigned to sitting idly in her dim room as light shone from the oblong portal leading outside, casting a static brightness upon the great fleshy shawl draped over her gnarled tree trunk of a body.
It was hard to tell if she felt anything at all about her missing body parts, for the Yuuzhan Vong seemed to relish their imminent mortality.
She was always having the bits and pieces that fell away being stolen by her prim and proper neighbors, to be sold at craft fairs to tourists that looked like dandy bedfellows. These days, the Almighty Tentacled gods had little market for body parts, and whatever happened to detach itself from its host was off the planet within the week.
If she could wiggle her ever so pointy ears, she would. Unfortunately, they were very stiff with the essence of creation, and would have fallen off anyway. More revenue for her neighbors, perhaps.
The scene outside was veiled in stony white dawnlight, but Myrnum Dal could see up ahead a most colorful video store clerk. Even from afar, the master shaper knew this visitor bought and sold highly unnatural recordings for a living. Why else would color be bleeding from it in such sloshing sound waves?
(The common onlooker wouldn't notice the void anyway, for Yuuzhan Vongi are gifted with the ability to hear color, while most other species only heard blue. The video clerk was leaking every hue except blue, although many of the rolling crests of auditory information came marginally close, as Yuuzhan Vongi are otherwise blind to blue sound waves.)

Myrnum Dal could see now the mop of peculiar brown hair, the uncommonly pale, bespeckled skin, the checkered rags it wore. She wondered if it was just another hip adolescent fresh from the creche attuned to decorating their speech with words like peace and misogyny, who wore infidel fashions constantly to be more socially acceptable.
(it is notable that while these teenagers were more socially acceptable on a galactic scale, their elders were thoroughly disturbed)

This seemed more unlikely the closer the video clerk approached, and Myrnum Dal watched as it slunk, shadow-like, into the room. It looked very unnatural, as video clerks ought to be. Infidel was a more appropriate term, but Mrs. Dal found it to be dirty language.
The visitor searched its robes for something, but at that unfortunate moment Mrs. Dal's ears fell off.
"Oh poot, I was going to invite you to a movie screening..."
Mrs. Dal, eager to correct the abnormally white video clerk, croaked
"I can still hear you."
"Oh poot, I keep forgetting how hearing works. Here, I got news to pass. Ask for Oranda!"
The strange visitor handed Mrs. Dal a plastic case, which would normally be very upsetting to old shaper ladies. Instead, she took the package without detaching her hands.
With that, Oranda disappeared in a poof of logic as an abstract sound pattern of pastel colors.
Mrs. Dal got out of her chair to walk to the nearest tattoo parlor to apply for a new pair of ears. She had been meaning to for a long time, but now artistic self-modification was out of style and frowned upon in most parts of the galaxy. Freak accidents were becoming increasingly welcome.
She was relieved to find that the wiggling neural interface model was fortunately in fashion.

 

"This is a scene from Apocalypto, you're gonna be sacrificed and we're going to chop off your head!"
Says my savage beast of a sister.

An update! I only write a lot when I'm in the mood (by writing a sentence XP). Typing is such a chore...
This is my reply to Bee Movie, because I think Seinfeld should of been a male florist and Barry be a girl (which is a fact for honeybees. The workers are all female)

Yeng'k Hul (The Beekeeper)
In the arid foothills of Bolgur, east of the great city of Shar Haan, there lived a menagerie shaper who collected the viscous, golden honey for all future parties. He went about his hobby long into his prime years, secluding himself from the ritual and pomp of the providence lord?s city. There was a reason.

On this morning, two-fold the time before the worldships with their myriad colors sailed for faraway shores, he walked the grassland orchard in the predawn. The smell of settled mist hung in the low-hanging trees, and the sparkbees in their nests were not yet awake. As if the Overlord of his very own worldship, he weaved in and out among them with an empty container and a bellow of sleeping gas. It was time for them to pay their dues.
At one hive he stopped down with his collection pitcher. With his thorny right hand he pulled open the tiny wooden door (for it was in that age they occasionally used a piece of dead-wood). Curled up in the wax matting lay a tiny worker sparkbee, glistening green and skyblue in the drowsy twilight.

?Hello my little servant,? said the shaper in his most courtly voice, wedging a finger under the miniscule animal, sweeping her legs up. Taken by surprise, she twitched all four appendages against his pinch as she was lifted out of the nest and into the almost drinkable morning air. Feeling rather like she was glued to a gnat-trap, she looked up inquisitively at the giant with a pair of ruby-red compound eyes.

?Brrr, brrrr, brrru? she said, but they were not words the shaper could understand, only the sound of a fresh dinner.

Still speechless, the sparkbee watched as the old man inserted the thin beak of a bloated sack into the body of the nest. A plume of thick white vapor spewed out of the entrance like a swimming sea jelly and left the inhabitants dazed, as if they could drink themselves into a stupor on their own honey.
She clung tighter to the beekeeper?s hand as he opened the chamber of the nest to scrape leftover fluids off. Chunks of waxy residue fell into his bucket and he shook the container strapped to his shoulder.

Only beginning to awaken, the colony had drifted back into their nightly hibernation. Little clumps of flesh with legs and chitin twitched occasionally. They did not notice the shaper taking his share of their work. His captive began to regain her courage.

?Why are you doing this?? asked the sparkbee, clicking her mandibles like a wood saw.
The shaper, delighted that his full-time hobby finally yielded somebody to talk with after so long (for it was not uncommon for sparkbees to speak with their masters then) replied:

?Because the Yuuzhan Vong have been given dominion over Yun-Yuuzhan?s creatures. We take what we need, and you will adapt.?
He cupped the little thing to his face, pinching her sides to avoid a pair of venomous stingers, expecting her to object in her typical, high-pitched voice.

?Why is it so?? replied the sparkbee, helpless to stop him from moving on to the next nest and pilfering more of their hard-earned treasure. It felt wrong, and this old man was proud he had squeezed out a response!
?As you will see, it is a matter of size, strength, and brain power. A Vua?sa possesses a greater mind than that of a tiny sandbiter. The Yuuzhan Vong outdo them both, but sparkbees are an inquisitive race. Yes. We?ve organized ourselves into a rigid hierarchy like you, and yet we?ve the comforts of having others build our cities. And I could crush you between the tips of my fingers if you decide not to comply now you?ve learned my secrets.?

 

Oh joy! An update. God I hate Windows Vista's filtering system.

In the Woodworks

Sed Nierp was experiencing technical difficulties. It was those damnable walls again. In his dugout several stories above sea level (for all buildings in this particular sector were very much above sea level), there was a patch of white behind a painting of a nerf in his kitchen.

At first it had been a small patch of caf-cream discolouration, but as the weeks passed it grew in size and Sed was losing patience with the universe for bringing this upon him for buying real wood paneling. The stain was an eyesore. It had to go.

What was it that the creator expected of this deceased tree? Was it one of those odd species with only one gender per tree? Was this one a female tree who spoke for reproductive liberty? Was the Force punishing her for not producing more of her species, like a good tree should of, being its misogynistic self? Was it immoral to buy wood made of trees he pretended were sentient?

Sed Nierp did not care. It was his kitchen, and the universe had no right to give it a post-mortem treatment of cancer! It had cost him a fair sum to install it in his Coruscant condominium, and much more to dodge the wrath of concerned in-laws worried the addition of anything once living to their living space would devalue it. They dreamt of a day where they could move out of county and into a pleasant country house.

How quaint, country living. There?s more farmland on this planet than when I last read Lukass Fiiksion books. Again, buying them worried his in-laws. Oh, for depreciation of property! How he loved overpriced paperbacks. How he loved undead trees mowed down in the name of civilization and Chiss storage systems. Word was that books were back in style?

Sed Nierp snapped back into reality.

He had recently bought a larger painting of a agricultural landscape to cover up the spot, and wasn?t intending on spending any more of his paycheck on the Udding-forsaken walls. The stain needed to go, but not necessarily away. He needed the money for other purposes. His blood was beginning to strain his arteries, for boiling was only the right of underwater crustaceans.

He felt like a crustacean deprived of its ability to spawn, strapped to the sweaty torso of a cubicle worker turned commando. He hated cubicle workers.

ARRRG! Udding-be-damned those cubicle workers were the cause of all his suffering. Just this morning he was blocked from searching for ?removing wood stains? by a faulty filter. It had read it was making the Holonet family-friendly. By which species? standards?

ARRRRRGH! How he despised his cubicle-working in-laws.
With as much fury as he could muster, he slashed deep into the laminated paneling with his dinner fork. It felt good to desecrate the object of his unhappiness. He was not a Jeedai, for crying out loud!

He would certainly share this with Grizhabel?d. She was surely as displeased with her living space as he! And when she damaged her workspace, it actually squealed in pain. And she had no in-laws.

Sed Nierp wanted nothing more than to move in with the Yuuzhan Vong worker. She certainly didn?t work in a cubicle, and had family values that did not include searching for innuendo in every search query he could think of! But what would his aunt say? What would his girlfriend say?

We?re genetically incompatible, he would reply. Besides, Grizhabel?d was most definitely very well-preserved, and most likely very aged from living in the?
Why was he thinking this way? He?d get strangled for associating with her in the first place if he ever revealed what she really did for a living before they met?.

It was a publicity stunt. That was why he hid his stash of dark clothing in his room, where his in-laws would not see them.

Sed Nierp?s musical career had gone flaccid by the time he had met the odd gremlin in the back alleys. His band was one tubaphonist short after Murdock Grunner was apprehended on suspicions of being a Corellian spy.

 

Heh, I've really been enjoying this. You have a wonderful sense of irony and dark humor. I love the adolescent pathos you've imbued into the post-war GFFA. Let me know when you update again!

 

Teenagers scare the poodoo out of me, they can care less as long as...

Yep. I finally get a new reader XD

Eh, I do like writing about Grizha's old occupation. Blame the book Stiff by Mary Roach.

 

lol... painfully clever as always. The pain stemming from the fact that I'm often driven to the brinks of insanity trying to follow this stream-of-conscious-esque style. But the Yuuzhan Vong would be pleased.

 

It's working, it's working!

I ought to write an accidental parasite-baby fairytale with the Yuuzhan Vong, then. Those are especially tormenting for women like the tree who got chopped down :B

 

I say I say, a rude interruption is about to occur! Oh, there's Mandolorians in this chapter. And Jaina Solo.


[hr]


Meanwhile?

On the mossy lawn Vua Senneq opened the jaws of the folding chair. A fickle creature, it resisted her prying fingers before submitting and spreading in its full glory. It had no jaw muscles to speak of, sans atrophied strings of tissue too weak to sink its teeth into an unwitting bottom. Vua Senneq wiped sweat from her dreadlocked hair and straightened her studded faux-crab skirt.

Two pale blue hands waved and beckoned the white-garbed menagerie groomer to sit down. Master Handler Dal was so pleased with the courteousness of her host her new ear implants curled up like a fern frond.

?Hello, Madame Dal!? waved two boys in similar dress to their friend in video-taping. This was a holofilm screening, she knew, and by these children. She snapped out of her initial enchantment over the quaintness of the place.

The juvenile warriors (or were they delinquents?) from the school adjacent Mrs. Dal?s house called it an amphitheatre. She was expecting the chair to bite her unshielded bottom, in due manner of amphistaves. Silly children were always finding new ways to conceal weapons in pieces of furniture, now that Sekot declared world peeze and the banning of juvenile projectiles.

She was supposed to know all their methods, but she supposed the parts of her brain involved with advanced shaping had fallen out with her original earlobes (she was wiggling her newly acquired curly-haired miraque ears like some lost lovechild of domain Val experiencing the joy of mating season for the first time with her prehensile tongue and half-a-dozen others). Simply stated, she had no idea about folding chairs and their use by horny commanders to snare potential love interests. Not that anyone would be interested in an old prune like her; anyways, Mrs. Dal had decided long ago that she was asexual, when her pinkie toes had exploded in the hot tub. Forbidden romance? A female of her age was simply too old to be involved in a steamy affair with a local military precipitate!

They all wore such dreadful clothing. Black all day! And those imported tube-worm socks were too much. Mrs. Dal shook her head and sent pieces of ash-grey tentacles into the seats around her.

An omnipotent ?erggshk!? through the nostrils followed, interrupting the silence of the forest. Mrs. Dal flushed blue with embarrassment and wiped the residue with the fleshy umbrella she clutched in her arthritic hands. Drat Elan for making umbrellas so popular! Fifteen years or more dead and that annoying dirge the Eel Company pilots loved so much still stuck! She had met morgue workers cutting up bodies for the Maw Luur and smelling of dead fish who were prettier than that no good priss. Mrs. Dal gritted her prosthetic teeth and indented the green carpet with the vertex of the umbrella, using all the force her elbows could sustain. Gods knew how her arms didn?t fall off.

When she turned her murky grey eyes back to the stage, Mrs. Dal discovered Vua Senneq was gone, and some other hip young fashionista was in her place. Another flurry of decayed flesh was flung from the Master Shaper?s headdress and the audience groaned. Like Tsavong Lah and one lucky villip mistress, Vua Senneq and who knew what were using the backstage dressing room for unholy purposes. Mrs. Dal?s ribs itched at the thought. It was about time to apply lotion to them, she thought.

The amphitheater reeked of planet Sekot?s benevolence as she waited for the lights to go out. Mrs. Dal could almost see the trees smile as they closed in tighter, darkening the outdoor space. Suddenly, she did not feel so out of place in a crowed made of adolescents she would normally be suspected of participating in unsavory activities with if seen together by her fellow shapers.

Silence inside the hollowed-out space lingered until Vua Senneq appeared, minutes later, on the speaker?s platform. Vua Senneq, wearing a headset with a built-in radio antennae. The style was

 

Touche, Kecen! I do believe you've hit the head on the nail with this one, as the Vong would say.

 

Hehe, was it the Mandos, or Jaina?

 

An update? Really?
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

[hr]
Evicted

Rain poured in litre buckets in the analog of springtime. Coruscant was abloom with airborne allergens and yellow flowers on the muddy cobblestones of this particular business quarter. Hawkbats and flitterflies dashed through stone arches and the occasional umrach assaulted the unsuspecting mugger with its fluorescent tentacles. A steady drip-drip could be heard on every metal surface; Coruscant was a planet of rust and decay at this time of showers. The machines hummed, sang in the rain like happy avian immigrants of dubious legality.

In actuality, the rainwater that brought so much merriment was being funneled through a sprinkler system consisting of plaeklite tubes with holes punched in them, because this was a cheap community with cheap values. Coruscant was short of natural precipitation due to a variety of factors that cannot be described without a thorough rational scientific explanation. What can be said, a low-altitude sprinkler is one of the cheapest replacements for rain. We return to our story.

At this time of year, the rainmen (and women) held a banquet in celebration of a job well done; semi-annual maintenance on this particular rain machine had been completed and there would be liquid respite for all in the vicinity (except for neighborhoods where the inhabitants were species incompatible with the occasional drenching, who opted out of paying the rain bill in favour of installing waterproof shielding). In a planet still recovering from collateral damage, this was a minor miracle (although the sophisticated Yuuzhan Vong cloud-seeding method was far more efficient, it was not popular with politicians and unappealing to the working sentient). They decided to commemorate the occasion by sending torrential showers down on the Museum & Theatre of Improbable Animals and its competition, in praise of capitalism and the Galactic Credit. Down below, the pollutant-laden earth rejoiced at this gift of life. After all, the citizens of Coruscant were paying for this vital service to their lawns, and they might as well enjoy it like it was first-class service.

However, Grizhabel?d, the janitor of said alleyway attraction, was not so glad. Standing gaunt and grey on the mossy rooftop of the museum-theatre, she battled the miasmic sting of precipitation, perched upon a tarnished metal ladder and wearing a bright yellow raincoat with dirt stains on it.

It just so happened that a family of Devlikks had illegally settled in a hollow where the roof had caved in and been patched up five years ago. Sed Nierp, the landlord, conscious of how this would degrade the value of the property, sent his faithful Yuuzhan Vong tubaphone player into the fray to deal with them. No sooner then she taken the ladder from the broom closet did the rainmen (and women) turn on the water supply.

Her ratty black hair, plaited in dreadlocks, was now drenched. Grizhabel?d was furious that a machine had dared to make her cold and miserable, especially one that could easily be replaced. She was even more annoyed that this was the family of the same Devlikk who had so willingly joined her cult of the newly-christened Yun-Yammka, God of Lawyers.

?Come out, you can?t do this without paying!?

?Yadidn?tpayferyourrenteither.? The elder Orid Blumly shot back. She ruffled her feathers and proceeded to study her high-intensity training manual. Having a lifetime of at most ten years, she had little time to waste. What was the odd creature doing in a human skin? Wasn?t she really the tubaphone vocalist from the Voidgazers?

?Orid!? shouted Horace, disturbed at his sister?s sudden hostility towards his idol.

?That?s different! The building was rundown when I got there and I am a functional member of society now. Now get out, vermin, or I will file a lawsuit through the Slayer?s metaphysical hotline!?

?Speciest. You only persecutin? us because we look like birdies.? chanted the youngest featherball, slower and

 

that's hilarious a Yuuzhie tryinig to evict someone from Coruscant

 

Nah, just a small museum. Wait until Mann Hill's collection agent arrives on the scene...