“Drink your nutritious poison and while we pick rocks, you can talk my ears numb.”
I grin up at him. “Well, when you ask me so nicely...”
~*~
I talk Bash’s ears numb. But hey, he told me I could. And he never tells me to stop. He’s even interested to hear about the mini-set I’m building (thanks to him bringing me the alien-balsa wood), which brings us to the topic of the real-life sets I’ve worked on, and all the fun that those endeavors wrought. “My mentor won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Lighting Design, but when the awards banquet was being held, he was in the middle of designing a set for the Vienna State Opera. I’d just finished up a production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so I was basically in the right place at the right time to help him out. I got to accept his award for him and give his speech. It was awesome—and I mean that in the full breathtaking-but-daunting definition.” I stop to let a cart roll past me, and one of the Narwari pulling it eyes me, licking its fangs hungrily. I blink after it until Bash nudges me with his tail.
“Move, human,” he orders, lugging an Egyptian pyramid-sized stone on his shoulder beside me.
Hefting my boulder, I do as the boss urged and keep pace with him to the stationary cart we’re working to fill. “As cool as it was to accept his award—and it was cool—I’d have loved to have been with my mentor instead,” I say wistfully.
Bash deposits his giant rock with even less care than usual. He doesn’t plonk it down. He hurls it. The wood-slat cart doesn’t just creak; the boards in the middle of the cart where the stone hits actually splinter and the rock lodges itself in with an impressive crack!
“Why would you have loved to be with him?” Bash bites out between his sparkling white fangs.
I bump my rock onto the back of the wagon, and it rolls in the now messed-up cart and knocks against Bash’s lodged stone. “Because he was building sets in Germany. Germany puts on like five times the amount of productions that the States do. And everything is so beautiful there. Maybe it’s just a case of the grass is always greener on the other side, you know?”
Bash doesn’t know; he gives me a look like I’m incomprehensible.
“Though I do love working in playhouses just a little more than ballet theatres. Have I told you about the sets for The Audience, where the—”
“Where the actress left her work site to bellow at a group of musicians who were rudely interrupting her place of current employment,” Bash confirms. He crosses back to where we’re rock harvesting and starts beating on the crater wall to bring down more stones. He takes a moment though to perform an almost admiring tip of his horns. “I approved mightily of her,” he announces.
“Helen Mirren, and you would, you really would.” I stand back from the spray of rock chunks showering down as Bash’s hits connect with the stone wall. “She’s serious about work. But she had every right to go after that group, and it was really funny. So I guess I told you that one. How about Frankenstein?” Bash’s tail sweeps a smattering of scattered rocks in my general direction, moving them out of the danger range so that I can start gathering without getting beaned in the head by the pickaxe raining shards down. “I helped design the set and got to do some wiring for the massive filament light bulb installation. Oh, and you’d probably like the story itself. The monster is deadly, but he’s really just misunderstood.” And mistreated when all he wanted was acceptance and love. I sigh. “It’s very you.”
“You’re insulting me again, aren’t you.”
“Teasing! And only a little. Not insulting…”
The day goes on like this, with the highlight being when Bash calls for break time and sits with me to eat his lunch. He even offers part of it to me, but when I see that whatever he’s eating is dripping an unpalatable olive-green foam, I decline. I spend too long staring at his food; it looks like someone took Ramen noodles, formed them into a semi-circular patty of wriggling ribbon-worms, and baked them. Then they folded it over, stuffed alien food in the pocket, and turned it into a pita of terror. Bash notices me watching, his eyes flash with humor, and he bites into his hair-raising