Family Matters Page 2

  At first, money was to be made in mining the stars, converting all that raw mineral into something useful for the denizens down on the planets below. Then, people with no intention of mining flocked towards the stars chasing adventure. Smart businesses realized that idiots with more gold than neurons would pay thrice what it was worth to travel the stars in luxury, followed by the middle class who wanted the particle board facade of upper class luxury. A line of hotels, the outside done entirely in gold, orbited around the most expensive moons in the galaxy. Gyms with the first controllable artificial gravity kept the elite in whatever shape they preferred, and even orbiting farms allowed life long spacers to get back to their roots without having to take a shuttle back to the surface.

  But one constant was shared across all classes be they wearing solid gold jumpsuits or polishing them -- the need for clean clothes and the want of soaking in a tub. For the rich there's the complimentary pass to the spa where marble cherubs spew scented bubble bath over their patent leather hides. For the middle class, family bath houses sprung up so the little ones could play in the ball pit while Mom and Dad soaked away their worries in a tub fitted to their exact size to save on water.

  And for those who couldn't scrape enough coins to travel back down to a planet even if they wanted to, there was the Wash 'n' Scrub.

  Variel ran the pumice stone under her toes, digging out the vestiges of mud. Her soggy hair dribbled down her back as hungry vacuums below sucked at the liquid pouring off. It was less a tub than a bucket one could dip a sponge into and get a good going over. Not relaxing, but the water awakened her skin far better than the shower sanitizers ever did. Even in her old days she'd scrape up some time on leave to find a planetside tub and clean off the soldier grime.

  Her fellow bather, an older siren, twisted her fingers around her hair and wrung, the teal strands like a water snake struggling beneath her pruned fingers. You were charged for every molecule of excess water you walked out with, but Variel'd rather cough up the extra coin than shove her head into the jet engine repurposed into a hair dryer. The siren appeared to feel the same as she let her glistening green hair slip back across the sea foam shoulders. Her voice lock hissed, indicating it was filtering her words into something that wouldn't intoxicate the listener. "I despise those water vacuums," she said, her sagging face lifting as she half smiled.

  Variel returned it herself, nodding in agreement as she picked up her towel. In her old days she'd have scurried under it, or even paid the extra to rent a robe. The difference a half dozen extra scars and years could make. Tossing the scrap of fabric across her shoulder she strode out of the tiny room, her raw feet prickling at the grate. One of the owners grinned at her from outside the room, her fingers poised over the cash register.

  Wash 'n' Scrubs were operated all across the galaxy, from above a volcanic dwarf colony to a troll server farm, yet every single owner was the exact same. Regardless of species she would have a raisin countenance with a smile never reaching past the nose. Her voice would grate across every nerve as she surveyed her domain of floating water suppliers with the vigor of an Emperor over his vassals. This Empress smiled the painted smile at Variel and eyed up the woman's still soaking hair.

  "That'll be another three cats in hats pictures, please," she said.

  "Three?" Variel tried to bargain.

  "Three."

  Variel resigned herself to her fate and flicked on her PALM, grateful she kept her hair short. The cashier scanned Variel's embedded identity chip and passed the wet woman a paid pin. "Have a nice day."

  The captain nodded vaguely, pushing the stick pin into her towel so she wouldn't be arrested as a chemical smuggler. Not that she was going to be leaving anytime soon.

  As her unshod feet cut deeper into the grates, she questioned the decision to toss her shoes into the laundry pile, even if they were encased in enough mud to excite future archeologists. The hallways leading from the Scrub side of the station to the Wash were as well buffed as a shark's mouth. Now to find the rest of my little ones, Variel thought as she pushed open the sealed doors of the laundromat.

  Her ship came equipped with the latest in cloth sanitizing and stain removal technology from a century ago. Not that things had improved much since ruffs were in style. It did a jolly great job breaking up stains and eradicating growing bacteria and odors. It simply failed to soften clothes. When you could no longer fold your shirts to put them away, it was time to stop by the laundromat.

  A cacophony of machines beating to their own drum thudded across her weary brain as she entered the room. The machines were lined up like a maze, allowing someone to enter into the labyrinth to claim their final prize only after they passed each test. The first was an ogre set up beside the automated drop off point. He didn't seem in any particular hurry, his thin eyes surveying the loads every person dumped into the bin for the machine to sort. She could tell by the way he inched away whenever someone got too close he didn't work there.

  Variel stopped in her walk as the ogre's eyes landed upon her. His snack stick paused mid-bite while he looked over the still healing sword scars across her midsection. Slowly, deliberately he shifted the purple eyes up to her head. Her scowling face was marred by the deep scar of an orc wound from a war fresh enough no one talked about it. The ogre chewed on its thick lips, and -- despite the human being a few feet shorter and only in her underwear -- it stepped back, allowing her entrance. One did not mess with someone who not only fought both orc and knight, but lived to drip all over it.

  A pair of gnomes scampered past her calves, a massive tool chest carted between them. Their fur was soaked through, revealing how minuscule of bodies they really owned. An unrecoverable line must be leaking somewhere for how quickly the two flew past, even dropping down onto all fours to push the box past. Variel turned another two corners before she heard a familiar din above the sounds of the laundromat.

  "I challenge him to a duel!" Orn's voice could drown out a Dragon's fire.

  She came upon the odd sight of most of her crew camped out at one of the few tables in the refreshment lounge of the laundromat. Orn, in the rattiest pair of shorts that could still cover what iota of shame he had, tipped back in a boosted chair. He had a pencil in one hand and a sucker in the other. Occasionally, he mixed them up and tried to lick the eraser.

  "You can't do that," Ferra responded curtly. Her elven nose was buried behind a thick piece of cardboard fraying at the ends.

  Her husband laughed in between spurts of spitting out eraser, "Why not?"

  "Because this is an office. You solve your problems diplomatically."

  "I can diplomatically staple his head to his shoulder!" Orn tipped back in his raised seat, threatening to topple over.

  Ferra sighed and rolled her immense eyes skyward asking for strength or perhaps a stapler of her own. When people hear engineer on a spaceship they tend to imagine someone with a proud paunch, thick beard sprouting across the neck, and the ability to list all the elements of the universe alphabetically for fun. Ferra was none of these things, but if you had to choose which to run into at the end of a dark alley you should always pick the neck beard.

  She breathed heavily, shifting in her laced medical corset as the final vestiges of her cracked ribs knitted together. You should have seen the other guy. "Orn, so help me, if you turn this into another hour of you pretending you don't know how to play, I will..."

  "Perhaps try rolling your dice to decide for you," Monde suggested, cutting off his patient lest she pop another stitch.

  Orn dropped the pencil he'd mostly been waving around. The ancient tool entertained him and he wouldn't put it down even after Ferra explained it was nothing more than a relic tumbling about in her old box. "Fine, I'll toss these around then," he rumbled his hand about before blowing upon it and chucking the thirty sided dice across the table.

  Ferra counted up the pips, it was all elven to the dwarf and orc sharing the game, and read down her list. A twisted grin took over her f
ace as she sat back. In a "the following announcements" voice, she informed her husband, "You were caught looking at porn on your boss' computer, you have been fired."

  "WHAT?!"

  "Please collect your things and exit the building."

  "I appeal! I demand HR do something! You can't do this to me, I got you the Aloidalg account!" Orn flailed his arms about as if he were really being fired.

  "There is no appealing, it is a crit. Bye, bye," Ferra waved her fingers to shoo her husband on before turning to the orc, the only one of their party dressed in actual clothes. Monde tipped his head at the exasperated dwarf, but rolled his own dice.

  "Congratulations, Mr. Johnson. You have unlocked a new networking buddy," Ferra read, ignoring Orn's exasperated waves.

  The dwarf kicked his foot into the table, rattling the pewter statues of a pair of elves in business suits and sending the troll boss skittering under a book. Plummeting from his chair, he stomped off, running stomach first into his captain.

  "Can you believe that?"

  "I know, considering the shit you look up on my portals I should have thrown you out an airlock years ago," Variel chided.

  "Ha ha," Orn muttered as he glanced back once more at his wife, his better half, playing all chummy with the orc after kicking him out. "A level 15 middle management hedge witch runner and this is what I get? Not even a severance package?" A final huff snorted out of his nose to end the anger at the situation. Orneriness replaced rage and he turned to his captain, the one paying all those bills, and he grinned. "Cap, is it smart for you to be walking about like that?"

  Variel folded her arms, suspecting she knew where this was going. "Get it out of your system."

  "Just with all these chemicals and machinery around and you in nothing but those small clothes, people are liable to willfully blind themselves."

  "You're one to talk. Is that little griffins on your shorts? Your shorts so ragged the hems were last seen during the dwarf's fifth stone age."

  Orn feigned shock at her daring to glance in his nearly nude direction, then burst into giggles. The sucker reappeared in his mouth and he swished it around in contemplation, "All right, it's a draw."

  "I'm so relieved," sarcasm poured off her mouth into the vast water caverns below.

  A flurry of white skirts turning around the corner broke off the captain and pilot's goodnatured feud as a pair of elves moved from the actual tub "you can sit down and everything" section of the station to join the refreshment table.

  "All we need is the genie and we could have a crew party," Orn muttered.

  Brena smiled strangely at the image of her landlord and their navigator both nearly naked and leaning against one of the few automated food machines. Despite all of their clothes rolling around in the wash, she still had a floor length skirt and long sleeved white tunic covering her dark body. Only her hands and the occasional flash of black feet poked out from the angelic, pristine outfit.

  Her brother kept his eyes upon the ground as he greeted them, "Hello Variel...and Orn. This Wash 'n' Scrub is nicer than the last we visited."

  "Oh?" Orn theatrically turned his head about in a semi-circle, "Is it the retina searing fluorescent lighting or how the grating doesn't fully pierce your flesh with a waffle pattern?"

  Taliesin held out his hand, a small rectangle clutched inside, "Complimentary soaps."

  "You got soap? Free soap?! No fair! I had to scrub my ass with some old baking soda left in the back of the cupboards!"

  The elven siblings blinked slowly, each trying their best to not imagine that scenario. Variel; however, choked on both a laugh and a sob trying to simultaneously escape.

  "If you will pardon me," Brena pointed to a table tucked in the back of the room as she removed a small pad of actual paper from her laundry day dress's front pocket, "I was hoping to utilize this time productively." Without waiting for anyone to feel upset at being declared counterproductive, she turned towards the table, her now purple hair already curled and coifed.

  Taliesin half shrugged his shoulder and trailed behind his sister. As she took a seat at the wobbly chair, he leaned against the grimy wall. Brena rocked back and forth to her own internal beat while scratching -- a quill of all things -- across her paper book.

  Orn shook his head at the image, "There's something not right about those two."

  "Uh-huh," Variel answered noncommittally. He said that every time Brena deigned the dwarf with more than "pass the salt."

  "They're so quiet. Except when she's doing all that singing, then it's yap yap yap."

  "So they're quiet, except they're not," Variel enjoyed leading the dwarf into the grave he dug himself.

  "Don't go twisting my words at me. You know what I mean. Our assassin's as quiet as the grave, and the bard can't stop blathering about her stories."

  "Imagine that." Variel wished she'd been smart enough to bring a book. She'd cleared most of her PALM's storage a few days ago in anticipation of an update.

  "And that skin of theirs."

  "Oh for all the gods' sake, how can you possibly find fault in their skin?"

  "It's swirly, like someone dumped black oil into oatmeal and stirred. Then topped it off with orange powder," Orn waved vaguely at the elves doing their damnedest to pretend they couldn't hear the dwarf a few feet away. "Skin should be proper, only one color. Maybe two if you got some really good tattoos."

  Variel massaged her head, she had a constant headache at the back of her skull and its name was Orn. He hated to admit he disliked Taliesin because the elf could kill him with his pinkie finger, and he hated Brena because of his wife. Cats in a sack tossed into a river got on better than the two elves born with the wrong set of ears.

  "I wonder..." Orn's voice switched from ranting xenophobe to greasy used shuttle salesman. "How far down do you think that orange goes?"

  "Orn..."

  "To the neck?"

  "Orn."

  "Down to the navel? Do dulcen elves even have navels?"

  "For shit's sake, stop," Variel moaned.

  "Or all the way to the..."

  "If you don't stop that right now I will knock your head in and drag your nearly naked ass to the ship. I don't care if they call the corps."

  He weighed the seriousness of her words and found them lacking her full spirit. When she screamed "Orn, I'm going to kill you," he kept pushing. When she got to "Orn, I am unlocking the safety harness on your suit," he tended to stop.

  "Come on," he wheedled, "you're not the least bit curious?" An eyebrow waggle would have happened if she'd been looking down at the dwarf instead of still trying to find a forgotten game on her PALM. "To add a dulcen to your list?"

  "Fine," Variel dropped her hand and glared upon the boil at her feet, "If it'll shut you up and end this conversation, I'll say that the orange goes to the stomach. Happy? A pointless bit of trivia you can never test yourself."

  Orn looked to his right and wickedness that unfortunate people confused for charm claimed him. "Wanna bet? Serious bet, you say they have orange stomachs, I say they don't. Loser owes the winner five jelly farmers."

  Variel wanted to ask him how he even thought he'd get away with determining this bet, but the challenge might keep him busy the entire day and out of her still damp hair. She nodded slowly as Orn inched off towards a sink. The pilot filled a paper cup with the equivalent of a two course meal.

  Walking slowly towards the elven siblings, he held the cup in front, his eyes always upon the vibrating surface. Variel broke from her hand and the world slowed down as the twisted dwarf's plan lanced across her brain. "Not Brena" she stage whispered, trying to not draw attention while getting the dwarf to look at her.

  Orn was foolhardy but he wasn't stupid. The dwarf stood next to the leaning assassin, his voice dropping low as he whispered something. When Taliesin leaned down to hear it, the cup of water exploded. Expensive water drenched across the white undershirt of the assassin, exposing for the world his very not-orange stomach.

&nb
sp; The pilot feigned excuses, trying to mimic mopping up his mistake, but he still had time to turn back to Variel and mime "pay up." Taliesin batted away the dwarf's hands twice, trying to salvage what shreds of dignity the assassin had. Finally, accepting defeat, he removed the shirt.

  Orn's jaw dropped. In all his twisted plans to embarrass the dulcen pair, he never imagined that beneath that assassin's clothing might lurk an assassin's physique, toned, lithe, and all the better for crawling through unreachable places. Variel didn't look up at the now half naked elf. His uncomfortableness was palpable, but Orn couldn't stop staring even as Taliesin turned on the dwarf, his yellow eyes blazing first with embarrassment then anger.

  A few other heads followed the commotion as well, and found the now topless elf intriguing. One other elf, her skin the color of rose quartz, stumbled into a chair as she tried to cross the room. Orn curled his hands up, trying to cover his spare supply of flesh that a moment earlier didn't bother him in the least.

  "I should add this into the drying cycle," Taliesin said loudly, his voice quivering for a moment. The assassin wasn't used to eyes landing upon him, it usually meant he'd failed. His sister nodded, her own hand still batting away the water droplets on the table, trying to salvage her work.

  Without waiting for her to rise, or offer to join him, Taliesin vanished back into the folds of the machines, hoping to find one he could hide behind until everyone in the laundromat forgot his embarrassment or died. Orn walked back to Variel, a shame hanging across his head that would be forgotten as soon as it began.

  "You lost almost an hours worth of pay to earn five measly candies? Was it worth it?"

  The dwarf dropped his hands from his heaving chest that resembled a bosom when he hadn't stopped by the gym in awhile and sighed. "Yes," that mischievous grin returned, "Yes, I believe it was."

  A half hearted voice, audible only to those species who lacked external ears scratched across the intercom followed by a few beeps in case any cyborgs needed to launder their organic side, then an intelligible command for the rest. Variel's small pin flashed red; her clothes were finished. She picked the vibrating thing off her towel and shot a warning glance at Orn before vanishing deeper out of the labyrinth to her freedom.