a reason to complain. It’s obvious he didn’t know I literally have one arm, which means I must have been doing as good as everyone else.
That’s all I want. I just want to be seen as a person, judged on the merits of my works, not defined by the number of limbs I do or don’t have.
I clear my throat to gain the attention of the invisible-pitchfork-wielding crowd and turn my palm up in a whaddya gonna do gesture. I appreciate that they’re all coming to my defense, but it’s cool. He didn’t know. “What do you call a Jedi with one arm?”
In the stillness, I sense everyone’s disbelief. But a couple of girls must’ve heard this one. They swivel around to me, looking like startled owls.
I smile. “Hand Solo!”
At first, nobody makes a sound.
Understandably, the aliens mostly look confused. Except for Beth’s alien. Beth has five mates, and they love movies. I’ve heard we have them to thank for film entertainment being available in the great black: they visited Earth and downloaded like all the movies. And it’s Beth’s craziest mate with her today, the fun-loving one that seems to drive everyone nuts. Ekan is his name. But I like him fine, and I like him even more when he peels Beth’s hand off of his mouth and shouts, “Star Wars!”
Beth’s biting her lips, her eyes on me, but she’s nodding to show she agrees with him. In a Captain America voice-impression, she says, “I understood that reference.”
I try another one. “Where does a one-armed girl shop for clothes?” When nobody pipes up, I clap my leg. “A secondhand store.”
“Hahaa…” someone chuckles weakly. Karen, I think is her name, and she still looks like a startled owl. They all do, but they’ve stopped death-glaring at Bubashuu. Everyone’s looking at me now.
“It’s okay to laugh,” I encourage. “I was born like this, I didn’t have to use one to pay for college or anything.”
Ripples of something on the route to laughter lap against the tension. I take a breath for another joke.
“Enough.”
All eyes swing to the head of our group, to Bubashuu himself, whose eyes are fixed square on me. He’s got a deep furrow between his scaly brows.
For those of you who haven’t seen a Rakhii yet, let me fill you in on what they look like. Bash is much like most of them—except he’s got even more muscles. But let’s start with the horns. Rakhii have two of them, big wavy-sweepy things that look like they could knock you out and stab out your eyes if you’re standing too close and they swing them too fast. Crowding around the bases of their horns where humans have hair, Rakhii have what they call ‘quills,’ but they’re more leathery-spikes than pokey-spears. They lift up and down with their moods and reactions—same for the long things trailing down their backs which actually are pokey-spears. These they call dorsal spines. Get a Rakhii angry enough and I’ve been warned that the spines will drip some kind of don’t-touch-it stuff. On their heads, they’ve got long expressive ears that taper at the tips. They mostly carry them so that they rest all folded against their heads and necks. Most of the time you never know they’re there. And Rakhii bodies are covered with rough-textured dragon-like scales. Face, hands—even down to their tails. Their tails are long and whip-like towards the end, where they’ve got a fanned set of blades that they can snap closed or open, or operate independently. And finally, like a dragon, a Rakhii can breathe fire.
Oh, and they have magic spit that can heal injuries.
Nifty creatures. Intriguing for sure.
Their styles of dress are just as interesting as their skin-deep appearance. I’ve seen gladiator skirts and metal plating on some of them, and plain pants and shirts on others. (With slits in the back for their dorsal spines and tails, of course.)
All the quarry workers seem to pretty much go shirtless. I bet Bash in particular makes it a real good look, but sadly, he’s in full workday-dress. His shirt is alien-chambray and his pants are a sturdy cargo-carpenter type deal, like all the males here. They might have started out life as a light shade of fabric like white or khaki but it doesn’t matter what they used to be, because everything that steps into the quarry quickly turns pink-purplish-red.
Everything here is eggplant to blood red because the stones are a gradient comprised of those colors and everything, everything here