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“Perhaps he is strange for an Atisari,” she sang. “Though that is something for the two of you to talk about.”
“We certainly have a lot to talk about,” I murmured.
That small glow of excitement grew. I was learning things about these different species that I’d never heard before. No one on Earth knew about this stuff; it was just me.
I didn’t have to worry about no one wanting to hire me when I had this kind of opportunity. My life didn’t have to be one of going from audition to audition hoping that someone saw what was special in me and chose me for their project.
I could make my own project.
The streaming services would absolutely eat this stuff up.
All I needed was a crew.
[ 13 ]
AESON
“How high do you think you could leap?” asked the guard standing closer to my upper body. I turned my head to look over at him. He clamped an arm guard onto his forearm as he looked up at me. “Or do you have no spring at all? Just looking at you it seems you have a lot of reach if you extend upwards with lift off of the ground.”
“You will find out as soon as my mate arrives,” I replied, studying the armor.
The group who had agreed to spar with me was a full squadron that had been training in the gym when I arrived. The gym itself was different from what was available on my planet. It had ropes and surfaces that were designed to help the Norratar train with the use of their claws, both for climbing and slashing. They had punching bags, balance poles, and a variety of weights in the corner. Most of the gym was set up as a huge obstacle course for leaping about, but there was a large padded section in the middle for sparring. There was a human woman climbing up and down on one of the vertical poles.
I focused my attention back on the group of Norratar soldiers gearing up to fight me.
It was a risk sparring with a group of the Norratar, as they wouldn’t have the same rules of engagement. To try to mitigate the issue and make sure that I was going to give my mate the showing she deserved, we’d spent some time discussing the rules. The Norratar were all putting on armor that would protect them against a certain amount of compression, and some of them were going to be armed with electrical batons.
This had to be a real fight to assuage my culture’s requirements, but I couldn’t risk killing any of the Norratar soldiers without causing a serious incident, so I would have to hold back.
That should be obvious to any of my species who would watch the later recording.
But the other downside was the Norratar didn’t want to risk killing me either.
Both of our cultures had ceremonial fights that could end in death, but there hadn’t been any fights of that nature between any of the members of our two species, so this would be the first. The Norratar were not fighting me for a spot as one of my mate’s males, and they had no dispute with me, so this fight didn’t fit into the legal requirements for a brutal fight on either side.
We both had to be cautious with each other.
Yet I still needed to give a good showing or my people wouldn’t not respect my mate.
Norratar claws couldn’t penetrate the majority of my body, but they were donning gloves with color excretors in the tips, so if they managed to get to one of my vulnerable points, they could mark it with an ‘injury’ and win the battle that way.
I couldn’t lose.
“Wow, this room is HUGE!” my mate’s voice called out from the door. “How do they even get a room this big on a spaceship? Don’t they need the space for something more important, like an engine or something?”
“There is nothing more important than taking care of your body.” The pole exercising woman dropped down and walked towards my mate, a huge smile on her face, her arms held out. She had blond hair with black streaks in it.
“Lorelei!” my mate called out, her face breaking out into a smile that was like the sun rising on the cold mist of the dawn.
I stilled, stunned by her.
I hadn’t realized until that moment that almost all of her smiles before had been fake. The only real smile she had given me was the tentative one right before she told me she was going to marry me. Now that I had seen the real thing in its full glory, basking in the warmth that wasn’t directed at me, did I realize that all this time she had been performing.
She hadn’t shown me who she really was.
I watched her wrap her arms around the other woman as the two of them made high pitched squealing sounds and began tilting back and forth rapidly as they clutched at each other.
I wanted that.
