The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

Lily is getting settled into her temporary lodgings with the Ishizawas at Sacred Oaks. A unique challenge lies ahead of her, getting used to living in a nudist environment--as well as getting a glimpse of what else is different about her extended family's lifestyle.

Meanwhile, a long-awaited meeting is about to take place: Keiko is about to come face to face with "the other woman." What will happen when Keiko and Krista finally meet?...Probably not what you might expect.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/38

As Sharkira goes live on Scribble Hub, Princess of the Void continues.

“So if it’s not the Pankrillans, what’s everyone so tense and whispering about?”

“Uh…” Xamika waves an approaching Eqtoran keeper with a stricken expression away. “Where are you seeing that?”

Dylan casts a meaningful look across the bridge to four people in uniform—two Taiikari men and a pair of Eqtorans—gathered around a console. One of the Taiikari is gnawing his own tail with anxiety.

“Oh. That’s—” Xamika steps between Dylan and the whispering ensigns. Her boots have a metallic clunk to them on the polished floor. “That’s nothing, really. Nothing to concern yourself with.”

“Oookay,” Dylan says. “As long as we’re safe. Are we safe?”

“You are entirely safe. I swear. It’s just that they, uh—” Xamika glances at the knot of anxious observers and seems to come to a decision. “This is silly to admit, but there’s a game happening right now, and everyone’s rather invested.”

“A game? Like a football game?”

“It’s sort of the Taiikari version of football. It’s called—let’s see what the translator calls it, actually.” She digs into the sling bag across her chest and pulls out her translation panel. “Zuwai Nakmi.”

Staff Clash

Staff Clash, it supplies.

“Hmm.” Xamika tilts her head. “I guess so. It’s less a staff and more a sort of throwing stick that doesn’t have an English equivalent. Sort of a blunted, padded spear.”

“Xam,” calls a sky-colored man Dylan recognizes as another liaison. His next jumble of syllables is translated by the panel as They just penalty flashed Qark.

Xamika utters a barbed triplet of words that comes out as Nectar-addled whore of the abyss. Dylan laughs. Her face goes bright magenta as she snaps a trigger on the translator pane and blanks it out. “Please pardon my outburst, Dylan. I really—that was so unprofessional of me.”

“I’m a Lions fan, girl. Trust me, I get it.” He strains to make out the colorful shapes moving across the watchers’ console. “Or I’d like to, at least.”

“Qark Nuqzami is the star player on the Luavuquni Barracudas, and the Qena-Qel is about eighty percent Barracuda loyalists,” she says. “And he keeps eating penalties and we all think they’re quite unjust because this officiant is a, uh…”

“Hardass?”

“I’m just hearing that one for the first time, but it’s spiritually correct. Qark is the best shuttle in the league right now, without question, and he knows it. It’s the first decacycle that the Eqtoran players are really making an impact, and he’s essentially inventing the Paas metastrategy in realtime every game he plays. He’s just back from a suspension that made everyone just furious when it happened. Some controversial things said about the system commissioner’s relationship with the Imperial board. It’s all ridiculous, of course. Just Taiikari traditionalists upset that there are aliens getting their flippers on the Imperial game. Happens every time, and every time the real fans adapt and have a new variation of the game to enjoy.”

It's hard not to smile at how animated this little reserved military woman's getting. “You really like this game, huh?”

“I, well." Xamika seems to realize how much she's been talking. "It’s silly, it’s just a game, of course, but… The ship I’m on, we have a little intramural league for it. Just a couple of teams, really, but sometimes we play out. There’s actually a bit of contention right now as we decide how much of the Paas rulebook to adopt.”

He’s coaxing her out of her genteel diplomat mode, he can tell. “There’s multiple rulebooks, then?”

“It’s the first year of the Paas league. There’s always a push-pull between the way the game is traditionally played and the strategies each system’s teams eventually adopt as the host species leave their own stamps on the Clash. That’s what makes it such a fascinating game. Every time a new species finds its way into the Empire they make it their own. And Paas Clash is just fantastic.”

“What makes it so good?”

Xamika reanimates. “So there are these flex players on both sides’ center triads, they’re called shuttles traditionally because they train to carry one of the offensive compellers, but in Paas Clash they, um…” Her gesticulations halt and her hands return to parade rest. “This isn’t exactly what we’re here for.”

“You’re my liaison, right? You’re meant to do whatever I ask for.”

Color creeps up her cheeks. “Yes. That is… yes.”

“Well, what I’m asking for is I wanna get the Luavuquni Barracudas up on a bigass screen,” Dylan says. “And I want to watch the game with you so you can explain it to me.”

“I—” She sighs. “I think they’d like us to stay on-program.”

“Okay,” he says. “But what would you like?”

“Um,” she says.

---

“There’s Qark.” Xamika points past the legs she’s got propped up on the meeting room table to point him out. “You see? With the offensive compellers on his shoulders.”

On the screen they’ve projected across a marblesque blank wall, a burly Eqtoran man in a bright blue, beetle-like helmet—kind of a civilian version of the scary space marine guards—charges down a field criss-crossed by interlinking semicircles. Upon his back, affixed by their tails to handles built into his shoulderpads, crouch two Taiikari women.

“That’s a key difference right there.” Xamika taps her own shoulder. “The shuttles can carry two girls at once. Totally changes the pace of the offense. We’ve got stubby little legs, so shuttles are how we control the central compulsion zone.”

They’re seated together, in two spinny chairs, at one end of the long meeting table in this otherwise empty conference chamber. Dylan squints across the table’s span. “That’s the oval thing in the middle?”

“Very good. You step in there while your team’s got staff possession, or it’s out of play, you’re vulnerable.”

As she speaks, one of Qark’s compellers rockets from his shoulder, sailing through the air on a combination of his hurling arm and her catapulting tail. She whips around midair and whacks her tail into an Eqtoran in saffron. The anticomp visor on his helmet clacks open; he takes a knee. A glyphic countdown appears over his head.

“That’s their north flank carrier,” Xamika says. “So if Pokana can get in front of him—”

The blue-helmed Taiikari girl skids to the saffron Eqtoran. Her eyes flash and she barks out a quick command. He stands, turns, and jogs to the edge of the compulsion zone to screen one of his own teammates. A stripe of blue blazons itself across the top of his helmet, scrolling itself backward along it like a reversing progress bar.

Xamika whoops. “Player advantage. Now he’s—aww, konzaf’kai.”

The woman scurrying onto the field is in scarlet, not zebra stripes, but the protest from the crowd is universal. Dylan knows a ref when he sees one.

Qark halts in place and drops the staff he’s recovered. He raises his visor. There’s a look of simmering resentment on his face as the referee raises a flag-tipped spear that sends him stalking to the edge of the field.

“They need to fine this stupid shimhia referee,” Xamika says. “He wasn’t even over the zone line.”

“What’s shimhia?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“How about konzaf’kai?”

“That one means something like fires of the abyss,” she says. “Hold on to that one. You’ll use it constantly. Especially if you get into Zuwai, because these officials are such hardaxes.”

“Hardasses?”

“Yes.”

“I really think I might,” Dylan says. “I mean I’m totally lost, to be honest, but the airtime those girls get is crazy.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...taff-clash
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2440081/