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RP: ISC Phoenix [R&R] Like Humans Do

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Luca

The Ultimate Badass
🎖️ Game Master
Dishes in the sink
The tv's in repair
Don't look at the floor
Don't go up the stairs


I'm achin'
I'm shakin'
I'm breakin'

Like humans do
Like Humans Do - David Byrne

>ON!

Crimson Kestrel, Captain's Room
Parked down in Sargasso during a period of rest and relaxation while he was awaiting further orders from DATASS and writing that engagement report, Luca was keeping himself busy with balancing some of the Phoenix's books on the face side of things. John handled all the important numbers that mattered to the Phoenix internally, but Luca was busy handling fan mail, government correspondence, sometimes notes to old friends and family to see how they were doing. It was time consuming, but had to be done, and Luca quietly relished these moments.

An email with a Lorath extension and header had come through. He'd seen many before, but this one had what could be translated into ".gov" on the end, meaning that it was from a government institution... then the ".royal" after it.

'de'ala_uxez.adalheidis@tur'listia.gov.royal.'

Luca tapped his finger against his desk, tilted his head and sucked on his teeth, wondering quietly if it was a prank played on him by Echelon. When he clicked on the message and saw some of it come up in preview, he figured it wasn't. What did the Lorath Royalty want to do with Luca?
Hello, LuLu~!

Hope you're doing well. I've been awful bored recently and wondered if you might pop down and come for a visit? Bring a case of something that could strip paint off a hoplite and that smile of yours. Oh and and preferrably the biggest gun you can carry: I hear its Ok'rara season!

Protection will not be nessesary of any sort.

Be sure to arrive on Prime on the 19th of April, Yamataian standard calender.

Love and kisses,

~ De'ala-Uxez Adalheidis Tur'listia
An invitation for tomorrow? Luca wondered as he pointed the mouse over the Reply button, but instead flipped over to the minimise key and bought up a search engine, typing in 'de'ala-uxes adal' and letting autocomplete get the rest.
Code:
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia lorath
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia high queen
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia scandal
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia rehab
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia party invites
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia capacity (volume)
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia record holder
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia incident
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia sextape
de'ala-uxez adalheidis tur'listia loves it up the butt
"Huh." Luca said as he clicked through some of the entries and tilted his head, deciding to leave it there once things got lewd and he couldn't verify the veracity of what he was reading any more.

He grabbed some of his morning tea and took a gulp to drink in what he'd read and got back to replying, maximising the email window pane again and hitting reply.
Hi De'ala,
I'm uh, flattered by your invitation.
He checked his schedule. He had nothing scheduled that day and made sure to keep it that way.
Lucky for you, I've got nothing planned on the 19th. If something comes up, I'll stay in touch. There's a lot that can happen to me between now and then.

I'll be sure to bring something that'll knock socks off of Yamataians, and bring the biggest gun I can - might even bring the one I built myself.

Cheers,
LUCA, Ultimate Badass

PS. Holy crap the goddamn Lorath High Queen's contacting me?!
PPS. What's an Ok'rara?
Not more than a few minutes later as he was sifting through fan mail and charming fan art of varying degrees of quality...

It was incredibly informal.
Try to imagine a wilderbeast and a small office-block had a child.

That's an Ok'rara.
Luca whistled. That was quick. He started typing a reply back.
Should I bring RX-33?
I do like the way you think.

As much as you can carry.

Do you have any fast personal transport?
Of course. I'll be sure to bring whatever I can. I've got plenty of room to pack.


A while later...
One shipping container, with his preferred armaments, space for a personal, portable workshop in case anything broke; his motorcycle, ammunition for all of his weapons, and at least two hundred pounds of high explosive, and a hundred pounds of food and water. Plus, Echelon had the containers plated with something that defeated radar scanning - so he could take it all anywhere he wanted.

He hopped into the old Jilanth T2 and took off one evening from the Sargasso spaceport under the cover of dark and with all of his plans arranged and everyone taken care of and accounted for.

He didn't have an ETA back, but he'd keep in touch.

Yasuyuki Okamura (Space Dandy) - Viva Namida

It'd been a long, long time since Luca had travelled alone, ever since he reunited with his old team. He did a dogleg out of Nepleslian space, through Gartagen space, and then turning to Lorath space. Along the way, he stopped occasionally for some travel food, to sign the occasional autograph, and rest somewhere other than a chair.

Once he approached the Lorath galactic border... things just went swimmingly. No scans, no impediment, just let right through without another word. Was this thanks for his part in saving people on Drift so many years ago? Or maybe it was something else he'd done. He didn't know what got the Lorath Matriarch with a capital M to pay attention to them. Suspicion had crossed his thoughts once or twice in transit.


Lor, Wilderness Hangar, Morning
He was receiving vectors to land somewhere in a dusty, windswept plain, much like the savannahs of Delsauria that Melissa waxed lyrical about so much when she went big game hunting herself. He was surprised to see a spaceport out in the middle of nowhere - it looked prefabricated. Luca made his approach calmly and landed in a designated hangar.

He breathed in, counted to four and breathed out as he powered the shuttle down, and walked past all of his wares inside of the shuttle's back cabin to reach the back, grabbing the Battery Railgun and a pair of triangular pointed sunglasses as he went and mounting the Motorcycle. The airlock's back hatches were flipping down as he was revving the Motorcycle up.

Lovely thing he was straddling - big enough to compete with a car on the highway, painted in equal amounts of black, orange and white with the number 72 on both sides. It still took petroleum in an age of antimatter and aether, giving the engines an unmistakable roar of the old world, a dinosaur's. Once the ramp of his shuttle was down, he rolled down gently into the courtyard.

Before him stood a tall pale figure grinning ear to ear between two smaller figures in black. While some elements of her attire were decorum -- a tiara that sat beneath the hairline over her forehead, long earrings that dangled in chains and a particular colour-scheme: That of white and brilliant amber, too dark to be gold, like galvanized iron.

This person with ease swung something behind their shoulder -- a rifle which she held like it were a pistol, approaching the shuttle before its engines had even spooled down and it was then that Luca realized the enormity of this woman: Seven, maybe eight feet -- seeming closer than she really was with her strange build.

"Oh Lulu~" she called out: Snappy but affectionate and dripping with mischief behind a voice that normally wore a dress of peaches, cream and red-tape.

Luca lowered his sunglasses, his eyes looking at the middle of her body first - which was his eye level, and looking up before seeing her face. He always knew the Lorath women were big, but this lady, she was enormous. A primal signal, perhaps one from a response a long time ago that people lied to themselves that they'd overcome was firing off - Luca had adopted it as his warning signal.

At the same time though, there was something pleasant about the woman as he rolled closer, then came to a stop before her, the front wheel of his motorcycle not far from her feet. Kickstand down, he dismounted and looked up at her. She was able to see his piece strapped to his back from where she was standing - a weapon built from scrap that fired batteries at people. She'd seen it some of the 'anonymous' videos of Luca in action taken by bystanders.

He took a step back when he realised that he was eye level with her belly, and tried looking up at her face again. "De'ala...?" he asked, belly feeling a little light as the signals in the back of his head were being suppressed, all the while he was so flattered she'd called him 'LuLu' - only Zeta and Aerin called him LuLu.

"That's De'ala-Uxez Adalheidis Tur'listia to you" she grinned ear to ear, trying not to laugh. She couldn't hold it in. "Lulu, You came!" She pushed a set of aviators further up her nose -- mirrored shades glistening in the burning light: arms outstretched as she stepped forward to embrace him. Her arms were... Powerful: Like pythons, wrapping about him like he were a child, as her back arched lifting him clean off his feat with a terrifying ease: swaying from side to side like a child with a doll before letting gravity bring him back down, leaving his chin in her chest.

"Did you bring everything?"

The man found himself looking at her long neck as his chin rested against her breasts, taking inventory of what happened, and surprised by her strength. He looked up at her again, peering up her neck and just nodding at her, then trying to motion, with his head, towards the Shuttle he'd came in.

"See for yourself," he said, normally stern voice a little shaken by how suddenly she'd swept him up, but regaining composure quietly. He let his feet dangle off of the ground before finding his feet again.

De'ala could see a hundred tightly packed bricks of RX-33 in his shuttle, making a two hundred pound cube of high explosive. A handful of detonators rested on top, and each brick came with a fuse, ready to stab into it to activate it. To one side, she could see a workshop, and a huge rack of guns and ammunition.

And a few large bottles of cleaning alcohol which could be used for cleaning his tools - or drunk in a hurry as was the secondary intended use on Nepleslian ships. A lot of Nepleslian mixology relied on a bit of cleaning alcohol to give it more kick. Whether it was degreasing engines, cleaning weapons, disinfecting wounds or killing brain cells, this stuff had it all.

"Lorath weapons are so clinical... I love the smell of cordite" she sighed, like a mother remembering some flame from her school days.

Luca tried to look at the rifle that she had on her back. "What's that you've got there?" He was aware of her amazing strength, and amazing ... tracts of land which he was briefly allowed to tread. It was only sending more uncanny signals off in his mind as dust swirled through the courtyard. "Where's your bike?" He wondered if there'd even be a bike big enough for her wouldn't could be classified as aerospace craft.

He scanned the courtyard for any signs of other personnel following the Queen. With someone this politically sensitive (or insensitive, given how much scandal went off her back like water) was standing by, he figured there'd be some sort of retinue following her.

"You're alone out here." He quickly concluded before looking back at her, this time scanning her from the feet upwards. He was starting to resemble pieces of a resemblance falling into place like the mysteries that came tumbling out of a certain Sourcian on his crew - the only starting point being a crappy handbook tossed together by Aiesu. His only question was who the imitator was.

Isn't this woman like, biologically two years old or something? he pondered, based on some of the research he did earlier shortly after he got De'ala's email. Maybe she's Yamataian two years old ... and seven centuries too or something.

She grinned. It was familiar for reasons Luca couldn't make sense of -- a faint rolling of shoulders: A hum above and a sharp metallic ping as something came free of a wire: A heavy metallic object parachuting down. As if rehearsed, she walked beneath it, risking life and limb and out through the other side of its shadow: the box neatly meeting the ground barely a meter behind her and the parachute self-igniting, seemingly evaporating into embers and dust. The front began to open behind her, eyes never leaving him: Behind, a single oversized airbike with what resembled a side-car built where the front wheel would be if it had any.

"Not really. With the LSDF, you're never really alone."

And then he recognised it. Rebeka wore the same smile. Knowing her appearance was based on a person alive hundreds if not thousands of years ago during the peak of their reign - a painting Aiesu had shown him worth more than his ship and crew kept under lock and key. He could imagine Rebeka practising the expression in a mirror. But this person, in a strange way it came naturally. His eyes widened at her for a brief moment. He was standing in front of history.

History it would seem, didn't repeat. But it did rhyme.

Her shoulder soon swept his vision, as she turned about a faint upward cant of her head as she made her way into the cargo container turned garage: Equipment along the walls in racks and even what resembled a refrigerator on the far wall which with plodding steps she made a bee-line for: Reaching inside and withdrawing a can of something cold and very Nepleslian. Fingernails beneath the rim. Psst. And then bottoms up. She made short work of a full sized half litre can before scrunching it in the same hand like a styrofoam cup and sighing. And then a belch. Deep and hearty.

"Want to go at it first or do you want to get to the point?"

Was this person really a queen?

Luca's eyebrow raised at the distinctly Nepleslian behaviour, but perhaps some facets of the Nepleslian psyche reverberated with this Lorath. Kinda like how Nepleslians imitated Yamataians, Yamataians imitated Nepleslians, and Lorath impersonated Nepleslians. It was a strange cycle of cultural admiration for perhaps misplaced reasons, but this Queen seemed to have it down pat.

"Yeah chuck me a tinnie," he held up his arm with the Grapple Stunner attached to it.

She was cast again in the light of the refrigerator. The sound of tape. And then the can came flying.

"Catch."

As it sailed through the air, Luca's arm seemed to be pointing at where it was going to be at its apex, and he cricked his knuckles singlehandedly. The piton of the Grapple Stunner fired out and grabbed the half litre can, then zipped back to the palm of his hand. He thumbed the ring pull open and started downing the beer. He stopped three quarters of the way through and asked: "So, what's the point to get to? We're hunting for an ... an ..." He tried to remember the word, snapping his fingers and producing a spark with each. "Ou'li? Ourex? Octopus? Ocky Strap?"

"You'll see" she chuckled.

He looked at his beer and noticed something taped to it that he didn't feel immediately while the can was in his gloved Grapple Stunner hand. He pulled the items off of the can and let them fold open one by one like a wallet. Condoms, three of them.

He looked between the large sized condoms, the large stash of beer, the large amount of explosives he'd bought along behind him and then back into her face.

"Are you trying to seduce me?" Luca asked in Lorath, his country Yamataian accent starting to peer through.

She tipped her head back, that same grin clear as crystal as she watched him beneath the flattened whites of her hair: the red paint around her white eyelashes over her eyelids and cheekbones making Luca think more of war-paint.

"You think I need to?"

"Well then," he mumbled as he found himself temporarily mesmerised by her looks. He'd only had a handful of moments in life when he was on the back foot when it came to the language of love. "Probably not. So," He sat down and clapped his hand against his knee. "What do we doing first?"

He'd mumbled that last syllable and only realised a moment later. Real smooth, Luca. He thought.

"Smooth? Maybe." her grin widened, revealing teeth now. Eyes narrowing some. "Maybe."

Psionic to boot? De'ala could hear the sound of the can being crushed in Luca's other hand, squishing the one of the condoms together. "You can read my thoughts, you're Nepleslian as fuck, you're The Queen, you wanna fuck and you're very good at it; and you wanna hunt."

He clicked his tongue and shrugged. He seemed okay with this arrangement of things. He'd dealt with weirder women, and he was able to please them too. His grip on the can eased and he finished the rest with one gulp, perhaps mulling it over after a hearty belch, not as strong as De'ala's but considerable for a Nepleslian-minded Minkan.

"How about afterwards? They say the best aphrodisiac on Nepleslia is the sound of gunfire."

"Alright then~." Luca nodded at her, now content and ready to mentally handle who he was dealing with. "Let's go." He stood up and grapplegunned some RX-33 into hand.

-


De'ala's Retreat, Lounge Room, Noon
The sound of a burning fire

It was a good haul. Luca couldn't get his hair to stand back down after firing the Battery Railgun so many times - he was practically ionised. The smell of detonated RX-33 followed him too. So was the fresh feeling of a strong drink, cold in hand and trickling down his throat.

"Haaanh~" she followed behind, dripping in sweat. She looked worse for wear but couldn't stop grinning: Arms stretched, fingers intertwined delightfully as she settled herself onto the couch next to him: gargantuan arm settling behind his neck, dangling down his shoulder as with a single hand she hooked the ringpull and opened another can. She was happy to take it slowly this time before holding the cold metal against her forehead.

"I've never seen someone plant plastic explosives on a moving target. Especially not one they were being chased by. How did you make it stick?"

Luca looked up at her and shuffled in his seat, snuggling closer to her. "Simple, a bit of double sided tape, and you aim for the furry parts." He nodded. Though, De'ala would've noticed that his motorcycle seemed to be capable of driving itself. "Failing that, you get close and slip it under one of its scale plates."

And he figured that out as he went - De'ala saw him take some nasty tumbles and she could feel the bones being broken from afar, but he always got back onto his bike.

She made a point of squeezing his bicep, shifting his shoulder some: feeling how it didn't *quite* fit into the socket, given the roll he'd taken. He gasped when she put the squeeze on him.

"How are you still going?" she said, eyes mouthing I'm not swooning or admiring you, I just want an answer. -- very to the point, the same way Luca thought another man might.

When the pain subsided, he looked up at her and seemed to be incredulous for a moment. He always had this question asked of him by so many people. The news reporters, his marketing team, his would-be assassins, his crew...

His daughter.

He'd given all of them different answers, but it all boiled down to one simple phrase: "Because I want it more."

De'ala stared. Eyes unblinking, focused, locked on his. In this moment, it was one predatory animal eyeing down another over a grassy field -- each staring the other down. The silence was uneasy, seemingly endless before her more human-like manners returned as she took another drink.

"It suits you."

The intensity of the moment passed soon for Luca too and he chuckled, stifled by the broken rib that was mending itself as they spoke. He put a cocktail that was composed of a bit of industrial cleaning fluid to his lips and gulped it down. "Where'd you learn to mix?" he asked. "That was delicious."

"Fiftieth century Orlana. Just beneath the equator" she smiled, rolling her thumb over her knuckles. "The sea-food was to die for. Literally, the people thought."

But the Lorath calender was on its seventy second century. "Wait, fiftieth century? How old are you? I think it's seventy second century right now, so you're a..." He couldn't say MILF, DILF or GILF, there was some time travel involved, surely. "T-TILF?"

"Well, my second birthday was about eight weeks ago" she chuckled. While she'd mixed him a drink, the silver flask still sat out, she continued to cradle her can, content with beer: arm arched: eyeing the label before settling her gaze on him.

Luca seemed to be looking around the little retreat which he was whisked away to after the hunt had concluded and some medical attention was given to him. Rich, deep polished woods were dominating the floor while plush, thick crimson rugs were accenting and complimenting the floor. Black leather couches and recliners, some of them outside on the patio staring into the night sky while a roaring fire with a mantelpiece carved out of a single block of alabaster carried trinkets and diadems drew everything together.

"Well, Happy belated Birthday then. Get up to anything interesting?" Luca looked over from the couch at the minifridge built into the coffee table. "I heard you had a big party and a lot of people were invited."

"They weren't meant to be there but I don't like the idea of doing things officially. The after-party is what's worth talking about: Anything before that was just PR."

"That's the one I was referring to. Like, I know the feeling of being dragged through official crap, mostly book signings and convention appearances." Though, he was impartial to the hospital visits for sick kids since he was giving genuine hope to those in need. "What went down?" He quickened his voice with a grin, intent to hear the details from the horse's mouth.

She tightened her arm about him: hand on his shoulder as she drew his face up against her chest -- without letting go of her can, languidly undoing just a couple of buttons on her shirt. Ample, it rose with her breath, sinking as her breath washed through his hair: those fingers squeezing as she drew him against the pale warmth.

"What's say we find out?"

He found himself up to his ears in marshmallow. He could feel her chest rising and falling with the breath and her heartbeat to his right. Tonight was going to be an interesting "Mmmhmmph." He nodded as he poured the remainder of his drink into her cleavage and finished it off. She was clean as a whistle, and the drink may have even tasted a little better with her sweat mixed into it.

He then dove forward into her to see if he'd be able to knock her forward, making a playful 'rargh!' and mimicking an Ey'tis' chittering by going 'shish-shish-shish!'.

A quiet banter rang in her throat as a chuckle: fingertips running through Luca's hair like a favored dog -- still that smile, that one smile that she never seemed to take off. Of course, Luca had to look over the moons in his way: glistening with beads of sweat and a few of curiously strong compound -- the duqs particularly already tickling through his senses and the alcohol playing catchup. She held that gaze, again that silence -- an uncanny almost unvalley moment between the two like a wild animal before she felt her shoulders huff with another chuckle.

"I've heard things, but I haven't had the chance to ask you yet: What sorts of things put smiles on a Luca's face?"

Luca seemed to have a smile on his face already as he settled in and slowly begun to realise that in just about every dimension, this woman was so much taller and wider than him, taller in fact than any other Lorath woman with some meat on the bone he'd cuddled. "Oh, you know, a bit of rough and tumble~" he smiled. Though, De'ala could feel small shoots of pain through him, but he just seemed to be able to suppress it and let his system get on with fixing itself. "I've been tied up a few times, sometimes I asked for it," he tittered.

A bout of giggles overcame him. He liked those situations because there was always this danger that the bad guy would actually get around to just shooting him! They never did and realising this put him into hysterics. Perhaps the duq trickling through De'ala was giving him a good nudge too.

"And I've always fallen in love with a woman that can kick my ass."

Perhaps the one string of truth through all of his lovers. Zeta was a ferocious sparring partner with an incredibly strong right hook, Aerin had all the bleeding edge tools, toys, and cash for anything, and Naoko only had to be herself to make him hurt and all it took was one rope.

"You're saying you'd like me to hurt you?" her voice came: words painfully slow and deliberate as she stared down her nose at him with a chuckle in her throat. Again, that alien otherness. What was she thinking?

"Like I said, I'm down for a little rough and tumble," he replied back with a grin, wiggling his butt over her and trying to move her, but ultimately making her extremities jiggle instead and leaving the Queen unmoved. She could sense he was being playful without being facetious.

His incredible tolerances to pain could also be felt, as his ribs still ached, but he was keeping a completely straight face. Did he even feel it any more? He was trying to do his best to get closer to her face, traversing those moons so his toes rested against her thighs and he was finally face to face with her, hands to either side of her long neck.

"Maybe you'd rather hunt something a little closer to home," she said, placing her hands over his, letting him feel the uncanny un-nepleslian warmth of a Lorath body as she smiled some.

Perhaps she was right. For the past couple of years, since he'd put the Phoenix Team back together, he had been systematically denying himself too much pleasure and distanced himself from relationships with his crew - and relationships altogether save for his daughter. She sensed a lingering fear beneath his weary eyes that it'd make him go soft again and lead to something like Delsauria.

He seemed despondent for a moment with the Queen's statement then sighed gently, breath cool in comparison to her's. "Perhaps you're right."

She reached over, taking her rifle, eyeing it for a moment -- pondering what must be going through Luca's mind. She furrowed her brow, feeling him and feeling not his urges but instead his needs and the kind of person he'd probably need, shifting through his memories like playing-cards.

"If you're still up for it, we'll hunt for food instead of sport. Are you any good on a barbecue?"

Luca nodded at her. "Plenty. I'm pretty good at steaks, sometimes I cook barbecue for my crew on birthdays. Just wait for my ribs to get back together. Shouldn't take long." He knew how long it took for him to put himself back together. He'd be ready because he wanted it - well, she wanted it.

-


Lorath Wilderness, A Camp, Afternoon
Mercenary Kings - Hunting Theme

The sky was scorched oranges and violet reds, screaming colours into darkness that tickled off on one side of the horizon. She sat atop a log, knees way up watching as embers tickled throughout he twilight: Out on a big metal slab table brought in on the bike, an assortment of things Luca didn't recognise and an assortment of preparations De'ala herself didn't. She took a pull from her can, eyeing him by the grill, the night beginning to chill some.

The first thing resembled a giant spider with a hard outer shell the size of a human torso, two bodies with legs joined with an abdomen in the middle resembling lobster in its dark blue color.

The next, some massive lizard with dark maroon scales, a white underbelly, swept back horns and golden eyes laid on its back.

They were all skinned by now, the work done together with a pair of kukuri-like knives, unwanted insides in a bucket, guts and skins aside: the air smelling thickly of spices.

The third was something alltogether different: Resembling a small cow or deer: a thing which roared with thick teeth that De'ala had put down as it grew too interested in the scent of their cooking. Since, nothing had come close, so she had it on the table skinned and ready to do with as Luca saw fit.

To one side was a large box, resembling a tackle-box, layered with little packets of spices, eggs, roe, vegetables and next to it tall flasks of meat juices and other strangeness. She'd let him prepare the spider first, explaining it was basically glorified lobster.

"Never cooked anything like a lobster before, eaten them a few times though - they're kinda tricky to eat..." he commented as he reached into his boot and pulled out a diamond combat knife, one of the ones they used to issue to soldiers back in the Yamataian Star Army in YE28. It'd seen a lot of utility rather than actual combat action.

"I'm no butcher, but I'll try and get some good cuts out of this if I can, and cook the rest in its shell..." He got to work at cutting the tail from the rest of the body, the knife gliding through the spot between the abdomen and thorax, then inspecting the shell, then trying to remove some of the organs that existed in that spot, including the digestive tract. "This is a big ass spider. I would hate to be afraid of spiders..."

"They don't bite: they eat a big fruit that to you would be like a cross between a coconut and a gourd called a V'taloup. They have big claws by using their front-legs together to drop them from the trees and thick armour. They bite, but it isn't painful."

"I know Allison's afraid of spiders, but not afraid of this weird... thing that starts with a V." Luca mentioned offhandedly, loosened by drink as he was making sure there were more individual bits he could roast all at once, separating the legs, the thorax, abdomen, head, and splaying them open so he could remove the guts and start spicing it all up.

"Houu... Is that a stuffing? I don't recognise those ingredients. They're Nepleslian, right?" she said, feeling her eyes well up at something. "the air is stinging my eyes when you cut that."

"Kinda, yeah. I'm making this up as I go along. Hope you like bread crumbs, onions and berries." He said as he finished chopping up a pair of onions. Along their trip, De'ala noticed him picking local berries, and confirming if they were safe eats in addition to integrating Nepleslian fare into the stuffing. "Could throw the roe in there too but that might be a bit overpowering."

"Do it~" she grinned ear to ear, eyes sparkling. "We can scoop it out later then serve it separately. Like, adding to the meat as we go as a condiment or something" she tilted her head, watching curiously.

"Spider caviar, then... hum." He mumbled as he scooped and squeezed it out of the spider, though she could see him hesitating a little, either being careful or just trying to find his way around this beastie as he placed the orange spheres in a bowl. "I don't think we have a cracker big enough to take scoops out of this..."

The spider was stuffed, and it was time to put it to roast. From what De'ala told him, the exoskeletal shell was a very good insulator for heat since the creatures were cold blooded, and they were traditionally cooked in their shells. He decided not to debate her word and followed the cooking instructions, placing it on the barbecue plate and putting the hood down over it so it could steam itself too.

And he burnt his finger. Ouch! He jumped at least three feet into the air and was sucking on his finger for a bit, equally embarrassed and hurt.

"Huh? Oh... Steady. We cook everything about fifty degrees hotter than you do"

De'ala was collecting cutlets from the larger animal: Laying them out on a steel tray and tenderizing them with a shunted hammer with a piece of cellophane over the top: flattening them out. Soon, she was shredding the meat into strips, then grinding it.

Before long, she was rolling strange spherical shapes of meat and vegetables in her hands, making a heap. Meatballs.

"Ooh, just like mum used to make," Luca commented. De'ala had seen a memory where his mother was making meatballs for spaghetti sauce, but using ground beef in a family kitchen rather than ground big ass spider out in the Lorath wilderness.

Luca then looked at the Knife De'ala had been using and remarked. "There's someone on my crew who uses ones of these." He examined the top-heavy blade. He knew that once you swung it, you had to follow through and you could easily lop someone's arm off with it. "Maybe you've seen them in my thoughts."

He still mentally referred to Rebeka as a 'them' occasionally despite the Sourcian's feminine figure, because Aiesu, in her notes, wasn't sure if Rebeka even had a gender, or if she was just a singleton. The word 'pudding' tended to crop up a bit, but to Luca, pudding was something you put in your mouth.

He didn't want to put any part of Rebeka in his mouth.

"Pudding..." she chuckled, rolling her shoulders as she kept working, dicing the bone now into thin discs. "She's a strange one. I've only read preliminaries but... She's a good sample of a potentially larger threat" she said, now taking a bowl and putting the bone slices along with what appeared to be some sort of liquid, stirring it. They soon became floppy and she began adding other things.

Luca had to admit, she was quite threatening. "Well, if you're already sweeping through my memories you're probably looking at the time she kicked my ass in a sparring session because I bruised Seiren's arm." He cricked his neck as he recalled the memory for her. The speed, violence, brutality, the sound of Seiren pleading for her to stop making it all go still.

He then leaned in and looked at what De'ala was cooking while the spider was cooking in its own chitin and starting to smell quite nice - an aroma of spice and crunchiness underscored by the whistling of steam escaping its shell in small places. "What's that you're making?" He asked as she watched her work the bones.

"Marrow-cakes" she said, stirring the mixture which had now almost become sloppy, buttery -- the discs resembling slices of boiled eggs now as she stirred vigorously.

"You're actually really frightened of her, aren't you?"

Luca pursed his lips, clicked his tongue and looked up at De'ala. An uneasiness was creeping up his spine when he remembered seeing Rebeka 'in action' when he pulled the brakes out and let her go wild. There were no survivors. "I've only worked out that she hates unshielded, 'dirty' electronics," he said, pointing to the Grapple Stunner.

He then cleared some phlegm in his throat with a snort and swallowed it down. "I'd rather not dwell on her out here though. This is supposed to be a holiday, isn't it?"

He looked over to the roasting spider, then flipped it over with a large spatula and long tongs. That side was done.

"You're pretty handy around a grill" she nodded, peeling off the thin clear rubber gloves she'd used to mix the marrow, leaving it to set, tossing them off to one side in the bush. Luca would hear foot-steps, then feel warmth against his back, a voice above.

"Let's have a look..." she began, carefully examining the grill's contents, flipping things over since she couldn't see the underneaths...

"Lorath meats tend to cook very quickly on open coals, but the middle takes a while... The trick is a low heat, indirect... Though this thing, here, you should aim for crunchy on the outside, then the shell goes all flexible. You scoop up sauces with it or you use butter."

"Yeah, it's how you get a good roast made too. I sear the outside on a hot plate, then oven it so it has a crunchy out, and a juicy middle."

"Why aren't you a chef?"

"I think Ella Harriet can have her restaurant, I just like cooking for my crew and friends." He scooped up some of the juices that'd escaped from the spider and figured he could make a gravy out of it, looking for a pan and some gravy powder. "Now... I wonder how this thickens?" He asked out loud, thinking on his feet as he heated the juices and started dropping increasingly smaller amounts of gravy powder in to get the right consistency. Not broth, not sludge.

De'ala tightened her arms about Luca, letting them drape over his neck: slowly closing on him like a mouse trap with a chuckle in her throat above.

"Didn't you just hire a chef?"

"Oh, Red? Yeah. Well, I don't always have the time to cook. Got bills to pay, PR to do, guns to rebuild, lives to save." He looked up at her with a sly grin as her arms cloaked over him, "government correspondence to answer..."

"Hou~? If you need to be in more than one place at one time, there are ways around that sort of thing these days" she'd chuckle. "Thinking on it, you don't trust the consortium either, do you?"

"The little one creeps me out, and I've never liked the idea of having clones, not one bit." He feared misrepresentation, just as one enterprising dickhead had tried to pin a terrorist attack on his likeliness - and it wasn't even a good likeliness either.

"Besides, scarcity adds value. If I can be everywhere at once, I become less valuable, don't I?" Luca noted as he watched the gravy thicken into a nice texture, stirring some up at the end of his spoon, and then giving it a sip for taste. He smacked his lips and looked down at his pan of gravy. "This tastes way different to beef..."

He couldn't quite put his finger on the flavour because he did not eat lorath spiders which ate large coconut like things. It tasted like lorath spiders which ate large coconut like things. It definitely didn't taste like chicken. He took a big drink of beer to wash the taste down. "How's the marrow cakes coming along?"

"Ah, come look" she said. They were laid out across a large thick leathery leaf which she was now gently looping over -- and then again with another, using twine sourced from bark to wrap the closure shut. "No foil, but it'll do" she mused, approaching the fire, holding it atop a pair of sticks and slowly setting it down indirectly, off the coals.

"It'll need to be covered up for about forty give minutes or so, but we're good."

"Cool, sounds like dessert then," Luca replied back as he observed that the spider gravy was coming along beautifully. He took a spoonful of it and lifted it over to De'ala's lips to see what she thought.

She bent down, hand upon the makeshift table as she set her lips to the very tip: silently taking a quiet taste, emptying the spoon. Her gaze explored some invisible room in her mind, as if reading text and recalling experiences. "Salt. Longer on the heat. No more than ten minutes."

"Gotcha," Luca replied as he grabbed a pinch of salt and drizzled it into the gravy with his fingers, crushing it into dust and stirring it in. "So how's life being the Queen, anyway?" He asked, wondering if his life was similar: Hectic and unrelenting at the best of times.

"Its good" she said, taking time with her words. "Not quite what I expected and yet completely what I expected. Apparently whatever I'm made to be, I'm very good at it."

"That's what my mum always told me," Luca nodded back after some consideration on times gone. He then looked up from the kitchenette and looked around the Wilderness and let go of a long sigh. The afternoon was beginning to segue into twilit evening. "She wasn't wrong."

"That you're good at what you do?"

"Maybe too good." He said as he peered through the steam of the gravy and into the sky through the trees, gently turning orange and casting long shadows beaten back by Luca and De'ala's cooking fire. "It nearly killed me once."

He still had regrets on Delsauria, buried under the desert somewhere.

"Well, dying's something I'm very familiar with." she smiled, pausing for the first time in a while to sit over a chopped log half as thick as Luca was tall.

"Would you like to talk about it?"

Luca set an egg timer for the gravy and the spider - which were both nearly done, then turned around and found a good log to plant himself on, sitting next to De'ala like a child sitting next to a teacher in the class of life. "I guess it couldn't hurt. How is the other side?"

"Ever dream too long?" she said, reaching aside for one of the thick leathery leaves she'd used. Carefully with a knife, she began making subtle cuts.
"I don't mean when you stay in bed for too long, but when you actually dream for too long."

It'd been a while, but he nodded at her. Some days prior to the Phoenix coming back together, there were days where he stayed in bed not to recover physically but to put his mental faculties back together, and nightmares danced through his mind, unable to wake up.

"You know when..." she paused, licking her lip. She kept going with the knife. "When you wake up and the first thing you try to do is to cling to everything you dreamt of?" Luca nodded back immediately. Vita said that she was able to write hers down as soon as she woke up, but Luca never got the hang of it - fragments only returning to him throughout the day and not making a coherent whole.

"In that moment, you're booting up. You're remembering where you are, who you are, what you're doing and what you're worried about. And at the same time, you're losing the dream. Your head only has enough room for so much, right? Imagine you're waking up and the thing filling you, you can't read, only write. And gradually what remains of you just goes. That's death. But death is just a transitional process. Pretty morbid topic by your standards, isn't it?"

"And then some, yeah," Luca nodded. Sometimes the 'morning boot up process' also precluded him to put his morning tea in the fridge by mistake. "Though, funny how they never programmed the ability to remember dreams into Yamataians. Thought they'd have that figured out by now."

"On that note, something's been bugging me since I swapped from my dying Yamataian body to a Minkan."

"Oh?"

A question most Yamataians avoided.

"Yamataians don't have an afterlife. I was Nepleslian originally, then Yamataian, now Minkan." To the Yamataians, there was no 'soul' aside from a large series of ones and zeroes. "I've been wondering whether I am Luca Pavone, or a program on hardware who thinks its Luca Pavone."

"Well, if you want answers to that, you first need to know what Luca Pavone is..." she said, pulling at his cheek the same way a mother might a child "And what Luca Pavone means," she smiled now, warm. "In the end, what's the difference between neurons or code?"

He didn't know what it meant himself, but so many people gave him a definition with some common factors in each interpretation.

She saw his lack of knowing and stepped in, eyes so soft.

"Its a soul, isn't it? That's what you wanted to say." she shifted her hands now, Luca's chin over her index finger, thumb over his lower lip as she stared into his eyes, gauging him in a way only a Lorath could. "You felt silly though, didn't you?"

"...kinda yeah," Luca nodded without moving his head, letting his head bobble in front of De'ala's gaze. The egg timer went off and he looked up, ears and eyes visibly paying attention to the sound, then interpreting why it went off, "Oh, I'll get that. We'll talk more over dinner, okay?"

He was looking for the plates and cutlery first before he had any intention of pulling the roast crab-spider apart.

Her hands settled in her lap, knowing he'd escaped. Intimidated? Either way, she let Luca have his autonomy, to move about her. Her own head lifted slowly to gauge the sky. Stars now, hung in the barely blues, arcing through the azure burn sizzling on the horizon. She lost herself in that moment before tipping her head and watching Luca. "If its off the coals, it'll be fine. I'll have whatever you're having."

He seemed to be keeping his head above water as he got some plates and cutlery from a box, then grabbed a cleaver and started taking the spider-crab apart on a large chopping block, prying the chitinous plates open and discarding them into a pile, then scooping the steamed cutlets of meat onto plates, then slathering it with gravy as he added the other vegetables and bits. Both plates had quite a sizeable portion on them, and the cutlery was included.

"You like working with your hands, don't you?" she said, attention returning to the endless acres above.

"I'm ambidextrous," he proclaimed as he sauntered over, balancing the two plates in his hands and arms, grasping the cutlery firmly and passing De'ala's portion to her.

"You look good in the kitchen" she said, carefully taking her plate, reaching her fork and then carefully shifting along the log to make room for Luca. He sat down next to her. It took him a moment to realize but his seat was warm, where she'd been before. And she'd given that to him? Some Lorath custom maybe. Strange. Next, Luca put his plate in his lap, and took a moment to admire his creation in the light of the campfire.

A smile crept across his face that the Queen could have heard from where she was sitting. He bent down, groped about the log and hoisted a bottle of something strong and a pair of cups up. "Drink?"

"Please" she nodded some. Her attention never really left the sky though. Something was on her mind.

He put his cup down by his side, popped the cap of the bottle off with his thumb, poured her a glass, and waited until the maroon liquid was flat, reflecting the evening sky. He looked up with her as he passed the cup to her, but ended up bumping the cup into her bosom as he was looking upwards. "Pretty evening," he cooed. "What're you looking at?"

"Nepleslia" she said, taking a sip from the cup.

"Which one?" He said, pointing aimlessly into the sky.

"New Kohana... Rok'veru... Kennwes... Delsauria... Nepleslia... See how they make a loop, with five points? Depending on where you are, the constellations are totally different. We call it the morning-band or the wedding-band, because its the only constellation still visible in winter-mornings."

Luca remembered that he had something to eat in his lap, and took a forkful of flavoursome meat before looking back up, "Wedding band? Huh, the only weddings that go on in Nepleslia are shotgun weddings," he snickered.

She gave a subtle roll of her shoulder, not quite a shrug. And then another drink.

"The dot in the middle of the ring. That's Yamatai. Xyainbor, Tatiana, Yamatai, Anisa and Ohara make a sort of line, like a lance or pole-arm, passing through the band. We always thought it looked like a spoon." Still she let her food sit, before realizing its presence -- a Nepleslian fork (something she'd have to get used to) and knife slipping through the cuts of meat. She wasn't sure what to make of the gravy, never using quite so much herself given its strength but she enjoyed her first mouthful.
"Ironic, don't you think?"

"Oh yes." He grabbed his own cup and poured himself a drink, then noffed down on some more of the spider-crab.

"After charting the stars, we learned to make something of a game of working to what constellations people would see from other places."

"Sounds like something you'd share over the web, make a community out of."

"We did, after we had first contact. You said you wanted to talk theology?"

I did? Luca asked himself, leaving De'ala in silence.

"Code and neurons" she said, taking another bite, particularly fond of the spider-crab.

"Ah, right right." Luca nodded along.

"So you think..." she said, swallowing her lot and pointing with her spoon. "They have souls... But those over there, don't. So they have an afterlife, but the others haven't?"

Luca looked into his food, unsure of where she was pointing. "What, the spider?"

"No, no..." she said. This time she was pointing to the sky, making a point with the constellations. "Here... And here. Those two. The haves and have-nots in your book, I believe?"

He looked up from his plate and into the stars. "Hm? Yamatai and Nepleslia." He reflected on what measure of have and have-not there was, since Nepleslia had some good haves, like freedom to succeed and fail. Yamatai had the have of eternal life.

"Well, you said Yamatai has no afterlife. Because you don't think code has a soul."

"Aside from looking back on ancestors. Chiharu's still popular, but I think it's just Nekovalkyrja building a shrine to themselves at the end of the day."

"So you don't consider them people?"

"The first time I was in contact with them, they nearly killed me, hijacked the ship I was working for, lead us into a cross-galaxy chase for the ship, let us get captured by the SMX." All of the YSS Goban. "No, I don't."

There was an exception.

"Well, that all sounds like something people would do" De'ala smiled now, cheeks rosy. She'd already refilled her glass four times now and was refilling it for the fifth time before deciding to hand Luca the glass and to keep the bottle for herself, taking a deep long pull from it.
"You don't get to decide who is and who isn't people because you like them and dislike them, you know?"

Luca seemed to be quiet as he peeled his eyes away from the sky and into his food again. She was right, but did Luca want to admit that the things he fought tooth and nail against again and again had people's motivations? After the holes in his back? After the family dispute? Delsauria?

What did those people want which Luca stopped? "Hn." He seemed uncomfortable with the idea of knowing just how much he'd stopped over his career. Though, breaking up the human trafficking and NMX rings, he could live with happily, so there was that.

"Think of it this way." she said, bouncing her fork within her fingers before taking another mouthful. She took her time chewing and enjoyed herself, then had another long pull from the bottle. Taking her time. "What imbues personhood?"

"Doing shit." Luca said. He thought he phrased it wrong, took a drink and repeated himself. "Doing things."

"They do things. They were made to do things. They get things done. Try. Again."

Take two from Luca. "Why they do those things, and who will remember them for it."

"Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Would you do things if nobody remembered them?" De'ala said, smiling warmly.
It was almost fox-like, the way her eyes were closed.

"I... probably wouldn't, no. People remember what you do to them, and for them."

Memories came to mind of serving Vita breakfast in bed.

"Well, people most certainly remember what they do. If you didn't, you wouldn't be talking about them. You might not agree with their actions, but that doesn't make them people any less, does it?"

"No." He replied, nodding.

"Strike two. What other reasons do you have?"

She was getting into the heart of him and peeling the layers away. He could feel it, and she could see him starting to flounder. He had one reason thought of, but maybe it would've been the wrong reason. 'I want it more' in retrospect sounded ... corny, like something out of kid's shows.

What reason did he have? Friends? Family? Money? Fame?

"You do its because its easier than not doing it, don't you?" she said, eyeing him in a very peculiar way. "Because its convenient."

"Most people would say that what I'm doing wouldn't be convenient for them if they did it themselves. What sets them apart from me? Why does what I do happen so naturally for me?"

"Nothing does, @Luca," De'ala stated flatly. "Nothing sets you apart. You feel. You hurt. You need. You think. You remember. You dream. Both of you. And you, just there. You of all people should see its very dangerous to say someone doesn't. To say they're not people. It gives you carte blanche to do as you please with no repercussions on your mind, because you convince yourself that you never hurt a person. So you didn't do anything wrong."

Luca's fingers opened. One, for himself. Two, for those who wronged him so long ago, but he couldn't uncurl his third finger. Who was the third one? He looked around himself, feeling overwhelmed.

"Like you're being watched?" she said rather calmly, her voice cool and knowing.

"Not just by the critters or the LSDF, or SAINT, the IPG or DATASS," Luca stammered.

A sound turned in her throat. Not quite laughter, but it was there, mulled like slow caramel paint, twisting and turning to form colour in her voice. Warm colours.

"That's fine. You're always being watched. You should know this."

He always felt something over his shoulder that he could never place. "I wonder if its hungry." He wondered out loud, perhaps a little inebriated from the drinks.

"Well, he likes the countryside. There's a reason we're out here. He needed to be here. Its good for him. And its good for you."

"Who's 'he'?" He said, looking up at De'ala, now straddling the line between confusion.

"You are" she said, her smile widening, bunching up her cheeks sweetly now, eyes so warm.

"You're referring to me with the royal We?" Luca misunderstood, still getting nowhere, and letting some of his food go cold.

"Well, the body is the throne of the soul, isn't it? Doesn't that make you royalty, just for being here with us?"

Luca's head begun to tilt. Something was ticking in him. "I suppose so, doesn't it," He looked back up at the sky. "Is 'he' up there somewhere too?"

He didn't know if any of what he was saying was right or wrong now.

"Up is such a funny way of looking at it. We both evolved with our feet and our heads. For the longest time, the sky represented where we couldn't go. Its not that he's up there somewhere or down some place so much as he's somewhere neither of us can be. What do you think a soul is, Luca? On your terms?"

"It's the wind in my sails. I don't see it, I can't hold it in my hand," He grasped his right hand shut around his fork. "But I can feel it, and it's definitely moving me somewhere."

"Its like personhood, isn't it? You can't see, touch, smell, taste or hear it. But its there."

"Yeah."

"In that sense, it isn't a thing. Its a quality. Anything can have soul. Its those things I told you about. And it doesn't come from the self, but it is bestowed by others. Loneliness is painful: When we're alone, we're not embued with anything. Not love, not respect, not power, not fear, not personhood, not a soul, not truth, nothing. We merely are and as ourselves we cannot see the truth for our own eyes."

He nodded solemnly, grabbing his cup and taking a sip.

"They scare you because the gaps between them are smaller than they are between you and other people. That they can be so alike. You have trouble telling where people are and the communication is. Like taking a crowd and smearing them together. You can either see the grain of salt, or you can see the pile as a complete object. When the definitions become mixed, it becomes tricky: If you think that you can't see persons, you believe there can't be people."

Sensing quiet, she began to tuck into her food. What had been dark dirty charcoal smear backwashed cyan sky was now ebbing black. The pinpricks stood strong, brighter than before. She ate in the darkness, glancing aside only to see the lip of the sun on the horizon and a tickle of brazen flavours gradient screech and rolling form in the sky. In this moment, she was glad to have her meal and to be where she was, giving Luca the time he needed.

He took all the time he needed.

>OFF!

Luca came back three days later, significantly mellowed out, with a smile on his face that couldn't be wiped away, and smelling like the heart of a forest, the blood of beasts and the distinct smell of gunpowder. It was almost like he'd been on a camping trip into Mother Nature herself. His face sported a layer of stubble that hadn't met a razor in days. Luca looked rugged and a bit hurt, but ultimately, a good experience for him on the whole as his smile beamed.

Further inspection of his returning wares showed a handful of pieces of Lorath artwork as a parting gift, and his entire supply of cleaning alcohol and RX-33 he'd bought along were gone. His supply of ammo that he bought with him was looking pretty thin too, but he was able to buy more from Karl. As Luca was skipping towards his room to get a grip on things, he was spinning a large earring around one of his fingers.
 
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