Boots 3 (ver 5) (Patreon)

I'm not 100% sure where this is headed, but I've nailed down both Ykahi and Boots's personalities. Both are likeable and like each other, but not so much that they wouldn't screw each other over.

Boots 1 (ver 5)
Boots 2 (ver 5)

EDIT: Boots and Ykahi hadn't been friends long enough before he pisses her off, so I've edited in some fun stuff from an earlier version. Second half of this scene has changed, and I'll post the inserted one tomorrow.

———

Ykahi had flattened her ears against her head, trying to muffle some of the noise, but one wide cone perked slightly to catch what Korosovak was shouting into his strand. Technically, the red krakun with the yellow horns was her owner, but Ykahi thought of him as her roommate.

“His floor is my ceiling,” he shouted, “trust me, I can hear him dancing up there.”

Three of the four apartments—1C, 2A, and 2C—calling the super back-to-back? Impressive! A feat unprecedented in Ykahi’s memory, at least. Each of the other tenants was so atypical, so non-confrontational, she found it absolutely amazing that they’d even go so far as to ask Korosovak to tell the bright blue krakun to keep it down.

Obviously, none of them would ever take it upon themselves to knock on the rich krakun’s door!

Ykahi shrugged. Must be the late hour, she decided. Krakun get testy when denied their sleep.

“Yes, yes, I will. I’ll go tell him to keep it down, now,” said her roommate before hanging up. From the comfort of his couch, Korosovak scowled, his head rebounding slightly from each boom as Bota’s dancing boots thundered on the ceiling.

When he finally started to rise, Ykahi asked, “You’re really going to tell him to turn it down?” He looked over toward her. “It’s not your job, is it?”

He groaned. “No, it’s not my job, but someone’s gotta do it, and I guess that someone is me.”

Korosovak frowned even harder. He grabbed the armrests and began to hoist himself upright just as the little ringel offered, “I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘I’ll do it.’” She stood from the countertop and tucked the strand she’d been reading from back in her belt.

Her roommate’s eyes went wide. “Really?”

She rolled her eyes. Korosovak was just as non-confrontational as the other four. “Yeah, I don’t mind. Botabriask is a softie. He’ll do whatever I ask.”

The red krakun opened his mouth to voice an opinion, but the skeletal ringel didn’t wait around for him to find the words. She scampered to a rough hole in the drywall, through tunnels inside the wall that led up and up before she finally popped out into the bright blue krakun’s living room.

Bota’s dancing was a sight to behold. He swigged from a beer bottle while smashing his golden boots down against the floor more or less in time to the music.

Ykahi had no idea if he was doing it well, but from her low angle, the effect was positively terrifying.

The yellow geroo she’d seen earlier—male and perhaps twice as tall as Ykahi—emerged from his shoebox. He hesitated, then finally raised his voice. “Sir?” he shouted. When he managed to catch his owner’s attention, he added, “Sir? Our cubs are trying to sleep. Would you mind turning down the—”

Without hesitation, Boots hurled the mostly empty bottle into the corner. Ykahi gasped, but the missile sailed just over the alien’s head to explode against the wall behind him. “Get back in your box!” bellowed the krakun, his jaws opening wide enough to swallow a geroo in one gulp.

Soaked in beer foam and sparkling with a few shards of broken glass, the geroo didn’t hesitate. He turned back and dove into the crude hole in the side of his home.

Botabriask just laughed. “Have fun cleaning that up in the morning,” he burped before noticing the skeletal ringel at the other end of the room.

Ykahi froze, feeling tiny and vulnerable, but as she usually did, she covered her discomfort with bravado, bending over with forced laughter and slapping her knee as if Boot’s reaction had been the funniest thing she’d ever seen.

“I thought you’d be back!” said the bright blue krakun over the pounding music.

Grinning wide, the little ringel played into the part. “What?” she shouted, holding a paw up to her ear.

Botabriask turned the music down a few notches and repeated himself, but she kept up the act, shouting, “What?” each time until he’d reduced the stereo to a level that his neighbors could surely live with.

“Of course, I’m back!” said Ykahi as she strolled across the living room. Bota returned to the table to grab another beer, and the ringel scampered up a long ladder that ran along one of the table’s legs. “I had to find out how things went at The Silver Coin.”

Bota grabbed one of the discarded bottlecaps and tipped a splash of beer into it, filling it to overflowing. To the ringel, the cap was huge, too heavy to lift now that he’d filled it with a dozen liters of liquid.

“Oh, thanks,” she said without great enthusiasm. She liked beer well enough, but it wasn’t her preferred beverage.

The krakun raised a single talon. “Ah, ah!” he said, then pointed out the label on his bottle. “This is Thirty Pieces Lager. You can’t buy this at stores. It’s an in-house beer that you can only get at The Silver Coin.”

Ykahi gasped and clapped her paws together in excitement. She still hadn’t left the apartment building, but the bright blue krakun had brought her something special, something she could never have tried otherwise! Her heart felt close to bursting, and she drank so enthusiastically that she nearly dunked her head into the frosty brew.

“Hrm,” she mused out loud as she wiped her soaking-wet muzzle. “It’s different! I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.”

“Different good? Different bad?”

“Anything different is good!” laughed the ringel. “So, I guess there was dancing at The Silver Coin?”

“Oh yeah!” he replied with a grin. “I stayed for maybe an hour after I finished eating.”

“Yeah?” asked Ykahi. “Dance with anyone pretty?”

Boots shook his head. “Nah. It was all old timers—dusty old retirees passing their last few centuries.”

“Bummer,” she said with a frown. “I guess you didn’t get to dance.”

“Actually, I did,” laughed Boots. “It was weird but still pretty fun, y’know? They showed me all these wacky dances that were popular thousands of years before I even hatched. I can’t see becoming a regular there, but I still had fun.”

He ripped open a bag of Tasty Frooties and dumped some in a bowl. Ykahi didn’t hesitate. She climbed over the bowl’s edge, then disappeared beneath the colorful snacks.

With a look bordering between amusement and disgust, Bota watched the bowl, the contents shifting about here and there before the ringel finally surfaced. She draped her arms over the bowl’s edge, like a swimmer catching her breath between laps. “You’re so lucky,” she sighed. “You get to go out and have so much fun.”

He shrugged. “Actually, you’re the one who doesn’t know how good you’ve got it, Ykahi. I also have to go out and work while you hang around the building and ask tenants about bakeries and book stores.”

“But I could work!” she whined, straightening up. “Why? What’s your job?”

Botabriask’s face lifted into an easy smile. He lowered his snout closer to the fuzzy creature. “I work in advertising.”

“Easy!” she laughed. She snapped her fingers, her ears lifting into a grin. Then, they slowly drooped once more. “What’s advertising?”

He rested his cheek on a palm, explaining, “Advertising is convincing people to buy something they don’t want to buy.”

Ykahi rolled her eyes. “That’s so simple! If I were a krakun, I’d be great at advertising.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked. Then, licking his lips, he suggested, “Suppose your client was the Silver Coin. How would you convince people to go eat there?”

“I’d threaten to break their knees if they didn’t go,” the ringel said with a nod. The tiny creature picked up a Tasty Frooty and took a bite out of it. Then, speaking with her muzzle full, she said, “Nobody wants their knees broken. They’d go for sure.”

Bota laughed and pounded the table with a fist, making the snacks jump and dance all around her. “You can’t do that!”

Her ears fell and she tossed the half-eaten snack to the side, so it disappeared in with all the others. “Why not?”

“It’s…” he started to say, but the words ran out. Eventually, he turned away. “Well, it’s against the rules, okay?”

“That’s dumb,” Ykahi grunted. She turned about and crossed her arms, leaning back against the side of the bowl. Ever so slowly, she sank among the snacks. “They give you a super-easy job and then make up rules why you can’t do it.”

Boot’s steel grey eyes disappeared into crescents as he laughed silently to himself. “Yeah, that’s the way it works, I guess.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FSfpVwLEMC3BqR6TzOmrlT_OeL_ihH9rDrM8X0tyaC8/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?