Shopping Trip 1 (Patreon)

A strange discussion about Rick's characters spawned an idea where Gert, Inzari, and Styx go on a shopping trip together. I felt inspired, so here's what I've got:

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Gert fidgeted while the ringel captain sifted through the pieces of the broken weapon. Unable to take the suspense any longer, the big geroo blurted, “Can you fix it?”

“Most of it, sure,” Sinon said in ringel. He pulled a piece of shielding out from between two pieces of plastic, “But the blast shielding has been punctured. Charging the weapon with damaged shielding is liable to make it explode. Very unsafe.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Gert with a nod. “There’s tons of metal foil in manufacturing. I’ll go grab you some.”

Inzari, standing on the table beside him, rolled her eyes. “Jeez Gert. This isn’t just any foil.”

“It isn’t?”

Styx looked up from the shattered components. Insisting on speaking geroo even though he knew Gert could understand ringel, he said, “Bi-metallic foil is this—zinc and gallium.”

Gert shrugged. “We can probably find both—”

Inzari hit his forehead with the heel of her paw—not hard, but hard enough to get his attention. “Bi-metallic,” she repeated.

With much more patience, Styx pressed his palms flat together. “Alloy it isn’t. Zinc on one side, gallium on the other. Bonded chemically.”

“Oh!” said Gert, drawing the sound way out. “Yeah, there wouldn’t be any of that in manufacturing.”

“Of course not. This is for blast shielding, Gert,” grunted Inzari, “not wrapping up a sandwich.”

“Well, not in manufacturing, I said.” Gert smiled. “But the gatesider market sells it by the sheet.”

Inzari frowned. She snagged a fragment of the torn foil and held it only centimeters from Gert’s nose. “This stuff?”

“Yeah, that stuff!” Gert said. “The docksiders like to line their hammocks with it. You see, zinc/gallium has this photo-phobic property—”

Inzari was already pulling on the camouflage unit that had been cooling on the table’s edge. “Nobody wants to hear how they wipe their tailholes with it Dr. Science. I’ll go grab us a couple sheets of it, and I’ll be right back.”

Gert’s meaty fist grabbed the handle at the top of the camouflage generator, stopping her mid-step. Inzari nearly slipped completely out of the backpack. Lips raised in a snarl, she rested one paw on her blaster, but she didn’t pull it from its holster.

“You can’t just take it,” said Gert.

“Oh, no?”

“No,” Gert replied as if she’d asked an innocent question rather than sneered it with a “Just watch me!” sort of tone. “First off, we don’t steal from geroo. Second of all, this stuff is really delicate. You try and grab a sheet while no one’s looking, and you’ll just tear it.”

Inzari scowled.

“And seriously, this stuff’s cheap. There’s no reason not to pay for it,” Gert sighed, trying to appeal to pragmatic nature.

The ringel pulled her backpack back on and with the tap of a button, transformed into an attractive female geroo. “Fine, but you’re coming with then,” she said as she hopped off the table. Reaching over, her holographic fingers touched the holographic strand on her shoulder. “This thing’s just for show. There ain’t any credits in it.”

Styx dove for his generator in the corner. “I come too!” he nearly shouted.

Along the way, Styx walked beside Gert. “Docksider lineage traces back to coastal villages that surrounded Moon Lake, back on Gerootec. This lake was huge, practically an inland sea. Anyhow, these fishing villages must have been very close socially. After four hundred years, all other cultural divisions have melded together aboard the White Flower II, but the gatesiders have remained—”

Inzari, walking behind them, rolled her eyes. “No one cares, Gert,” she huffed.

Styx, in his geroo disguise, straightened his back, taking a moment to glare at the quartermaster. “I care,” he insisted.

Gert’s eyes darted between the two for a moment, but he continued to walk down the empty corridor without slowing. At last, he turned back to the sailmaster. “Yes, well, so much as we can tell, the docksiders have kept their culture largely intact…”

Inzari held up her paws as if they were two puppets having a conversation. With her ears low in irritation, she silently mouthed “I care.”

Gert turned back to look at his girlfriend, but Inzari quickly dropped her paws to her sides. “What?” she asked. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

At the market, Inzari crushed her ears down with her paws. “Docksider music takes a bit of getting used to!” shouted Gert over it, but Styx was already bouncing along, his quickened pace synchronizing to the recorded music’s driving beat.

While Inzari skulked around the market’s edges, Styx dashed here and there, yelling excitedly for his friend, “Gert! Look at this! Have you seen these?”

Gert yarped, his ears raised in earnest joy as he watched Styx take it all in. He reminded him of an excited cub, where everything he spotted was new and interesting.

Suddenly, Styx gasped loud and fell to his knees in front of a glass display case. He pressed his nose to the glass and stared with wide eyes.

“Found something you like?” asked Gert. He didn’t sit on the deck, but he bent far over to the side to see what the disguised ringel had fixated on.

“These! These! These!” Styx said, frantically tapping the glass with all ten of his fingertips. “These! Must I have these!”

Behind the counter, an older geroo stuck her finger in a cup of beads. “Dis?” she asked. Then she moved on to another and another. “Dis? Dis?”

“No, no! The red ones!” said Styx.

When at last the dealer touched the beads Styx was staring at, her ears lowered in disgust. “Dis? Nah, dis na be da right bead of you. Clash it. A yellow or a white ya go.”

Styx looked up to Gert’s eyes. His comprehension of geroo had improved greatly since coming aboard, but the gatesider’s accent was very thick. Even Gert was having some difficulty understanding her fully.

“She says that this shade of red wouldn’t go well with your pelt, that you should probably consider a white or yellow instead,” Gert explained. Then, with a paw cupping his best guess of where the ringel’s ear might be, he whispered, “Besides, I don’t think we can even reprogram your disguise to use these. We’d have to reimage the whole hologram from scratch.”

Back behind the glass, the vendor was pulling out tray after tray—different sizes of white and yellow beads for Styx to consider, but the disguised ringel wouldn’t take his eyes from the red beads. Suddenly, he grabbed Gert’s arm and pulled his ear close to the ringel’s lips. “Not for disguise geroo!” he hissed. “With blue fur it match so nice!”

“Oh!” said Gert quietly, finally understanding. Sure, the red beads would clash with the red fur on his geroo disguise—not that they’d even be visible in the hologram if he was wearing physical beads—but the red beads would go well with his actual fur, his blue ringel fur. Gert closed his eyes and envisioned the pale blue around Styx’s neck. Then he tried to imagine the sparkly red overlaid on top. Doing this without actually being able to see the colors made it no small challenge, but eventually Gert nodded. “Yes, I see what you’re saying. That might work nicely.”

Ah, ringel and their love of jewelry! thought Gert. His ears grinned. Generally, ringel favored jewelry that implied wealth—gold, platinum, jewels, anything flashy, colorful, and expensive. But there was something refreshing about his friend’s fascination with these common beads, him “going native” after only a few weeks on board. “You know these are glass, right?” Gert asked. “Generally speaking, there’s no precious stones on a gate ship.”

“Yes, glass!” said Styx, nodding excitedly.

Gert nodded too. “Excuse me, ma’am?” he said. “Let’s have a look at those red beads.”

The vendor’s frown deepened, but she pulled out the bowl of red beads and set them on the counter. Styx snatched one in an instant and held it to the light, breathing in an excited breath at the way the glass sparkled.

Gert moved his nose a little closer. He had to hand it to the ringel, these were exceptionally nice beads. Not just any geroo could wear beads this bright. They would look out of place on anyone who didn’t have a particularly outgoing personality.

Of course, by ringel aesthetics, the color was downright drab.

“Yes, yes, many!” said Styx, sticking his fingers in the bowl.

Gert touched his paw to get his attention. He shook his head. These beads were slightly larger than average and no ringel had a thick neck. If Styx was really serious about adopting some geroo fashion, he’d need to tone it back a bit. Geroo tradition was for females to wear more beads than males, but the aesthetic was much more about the necklace’s total width than it was the actual number of beads. With beads this large and a neck that narrow, anything more than a few would look more feminine rather than masculine.

“Three,” said Gert.

“No, eight!” said Styx. He had already pulled eight from the bowl and lined them up across the glass.

Gert shook his head again as he took in the sight. Eight was ridiculous. Even for a female who was obsessed with raising cubs, such a long string of beads might seem excessive, almost desperate. For a guy, it would be comical. He grabbed three beads off the end of the line and pulled them aside. That would be a nice length. Short for a thick geroo neck, certainly, but they’d look very handsome on Styx.

The ringel growled in the back of his throat and glared at the three for a long while. Eventually, he slid a fourth over to sit with the lonely three. “Four.”

Gert bit his lip in thought. Four might be a bit much if he were a ringel and trying to wear such a necklace, but Styx was a very different person than Gert—very different from any geroo he had known. Perhaps four would go well for such an interesting guy.

“Yeah, okay, I could see four.”

Without prompting, the vendor threaded a length of cord through the four and held them up at neck height. “Tun’ about,” she said, her ears still low in disgust at the color combination.

“No, no, no,” Gert gasped, hurriedly putting his paw between the two. He couldn’t let her touch him, or she’d realize that the geroo she thought she was seeing was merely a hologram. “Just … uh … just the four, some cord, and a Z-clasp to hold them. He obviously doesn’t need to try them on.”

The vendor shrugged and grabbed a small bag, but Styx touched the holographic strand on his shoulder. “Uh…” he whispered.

Gert put his arm around Styx’s shoulders and pulled his own strand from its holster. “Lemme get those for you, buddy. Very least I can do,” he assured him.

Truthfully, it was a little strange for one guy to buy another guy’s beads, but with the number of times the two had been intimate over the last few weeks, it didn’t feel any stranger than offering to buy him lunch.

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xl9IF-tE7j42ROXgYzeitNl_eKXwKhrQnpWoFKAKaRc/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?