incline would be my signal to call it a day.
Raiska doesn't even slow down though. He moves as if gravity weren’t suddenly working much harder against him, as if his muscles weren’t doing way more work on every single movement.
The aliens who were loud and talkative moments before have all gone utterly silent. They watch in awe as Raiska clears the last few hurdles, and then he touches the ceiling.
I expect him to hold on a while longer, and then maybe climb down. I don’t know why exactly I expect him to climb down, considering that no one other than me is afraid of falling. He’s clearly not, as he simply lets go of the cliff and plummets.
I close my eyes.
I don’t open them until I hear Raiska speaking. From the ground.
I look back up and see him almost on top of me. He wraps his arms around me and presses me tight against his body. I hug him back.
“You did it, Raiska. You made the leap thingy, and you…”
Did he actually break the record?
I look up at the silver-skinned alien, and from his smile and all the holograms being flicked at him, I realize that Raiska not only broke it, but he broke it by at least two seconds.
“You broke the record,” I say smiling up at him.
“What is a record?”
Everyone looks up at him.
One of the aliens who lost the bet stares at Raiska incredulously. “You didn’t even know there was a record, and you broke it? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“You climbed this mountain—one of the hardest mountains there is—faster than any humanoid in the galaxy, man!”
“I was this fast?” Raiska asks.
His cluelessness makes the silver-skinned alien laugh hard, and it pisses off the ones who lost the bet even more. They aren’t really mad at Raiska though, just at themselves for underestimating him.
“I mean,” I say, “not to diminish your accomplishment, but this is just one gym, right? Like, maybe the top climbers in the galaxy just never have come to this gym?”
A purple female alien shakes her head. “This wall has been replicated atom-by-atom thousands of times. The record is galaxy-wide. Your mate is a natural born climber. If he put his mind to it, he’d completely upset the entire sport.”
“I thought it was a hobby?” Raiska asks. “It’s a sport? Do I need to keep searching for a hobby then?”
I squeeze his hand. “A sport can be a hobby. There’s overlap.”
“Did this guy just get unthawed from cryosleep or something?”
“He had a sheltered upbringing,” I say, smiling.
It’s relatively odd to be more knowledgeable about basic things like this on an alien planet than my alien boyfriend, but Raiska’s unfortunate childhood and life up until now means that he knows a lot less and has less experience than me in certain areas. This helps me feel less like just a “little human” that is reliant on him for everything. It makes me feel like I’m not only forcing him to protect me while offering nothing back to him.
Raiska is soon surrounded by the other climbers, and he seems to have a lot of fun talking to them and explaining different strategies he used while climbing the murder mountain.
Even though he seems to be enjoying himself with them, he’s holding me tight against his body, and he keeps looking at me more and more.
Abruptly he cuts them off. “I will be back. I will break my own record next time. Thank you for sharing your sport-hobby hybrid with me.”
We leave the gym, and it’s already late afternoon. We stop at a place that has some incredibly creative food. It’s all synthesized, of course, but I quite honestly can’t tell the difference. Kula’s food tastes incredible...but so does this. Maybe I’ll have to eat a lot more on Lakria to really start being able to taste the difference from hand-cooked food, but I’m perfectly happy to eat fruits that are synthesized to be perfectly ripe, or meat that is marbled with just the right amount of fat and didn’t need an animal to die to enjoy it.
Raiska eats a lot. He didn’t seem especially tired from climbing, but it must have used up a good amount of energy.
I may not have climbed much, but I am a lot weaker than him, and I worked up quite an appetite too. We eat very well, and once our food is done, we stay and get some drinks.
I’m drinking this pale blue thing from a glass shaped like a