Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 55551 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55551 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Dinosaur.
Scales run up his neck and around his chin. He has a horn of some kind rising from his skull too. Not quite like a unicorn, but not entirely unlike one, either. This guy looks like a bad-ass, bad-guy, lumberjack fucking dinosaur.
Before he can say or do anything, another creature puts its head out the window. This one has iridescent blue scales and a thick shock of similarly colored hair. He’s wearing a black leather jerkin and has bare arms, big, jacked, scaled arms. God. It’s kind of hot. All of this is kind of hot.
“Get outta here, you filthy animal!” The guy who is still indoors shouts that at the guy who just found himself outdoors.
That’s good news. They’re speaking a simple, common galactic tongue, one of the five or so I’m fluent in. That’s an excellent sign. Maybe the planet isn’t as primitive as it seems. It has to be connected to trade routes for them to be speaking a recent language. I’m starting to think there could be a pretty easy way off this planet as long as I can avoid whatever drama is unfolding in front of me.
“I’ll be waiting for you, Tor! You can hide inside your little bar now, but you’ll have to come out sometime.”
“Gar, if I have to send the boys out after you, you won’t be going back to your poor mate. You’ll be going into the ground.”
“I’m not afraid of you!” Gar is not having these threats. They seem to be pissing him off more than anything. Every time he opens his mouth, I see large, flat teeth. Craning my head around to look at the blue dude inside, I see much sharper teeth in his mouth. I’m watching prey defy a predator. I wonder if they’re the same species. I wonder how they came to be at all. They all look like the results of an alternate timeline where dinosaurs didn’t evolve before people, instead they evolved around the same time and fucked them.
This is far from the weirdest kind of alien I’ve ever seen. Life is weird. The universe is basically a random animal generator with only so many ideas to start with. I’ve seen sentient slugs with faces that look a lot like people faces too. They goo everywhere and have a horrid fear of salt. In comparison, the saurians seem pretty reasonably constructed.
“You should be. Go home.”
Gar huffs and puffs for a bit, but then seems to decide to take the other saurian’s advice and lumbers toward a bike. I watch him as he starts it. The technology doesn’t seem difficult to master. Just need to turn a key and wrench a grip on the handlebars, and the machine throbs to life with a roar that seems very disproportionately loud for its size. A cloud of gray-blue smoke chokes out of a pipe toward the end of the bike and after a bit of awkward wheeling around, keeping his tail carefully out of the way of the wheels by wrapping it around his waist, he is gone.
I watch him disappear in a cloud of rage. All I can think about is how much fun that looks. The last thing I had that went as fast as that on land was, well, I guess the shuttle. But it didn’t go that fast for that long, and it did end up much more compact in the impact. So.
It’s no doubt dangerous to go inside this place. It’s clearly occupied by very large saurian aliens, all of whom subscribe to an outlaw vibe. But I don’t really have much in the way of choice. I don’t see any other buildings around this area, and I need help. Or at least directions. Cowering in the bushes is only going to get me so far. It is definitely not going to get me off this planet.
Pushing the front door open takes all of my strength, but I manage to shove it around on its hinges enough to get inside. I step inside the bar, finding a haze of smoke floating about two feet above my head. For a moment, I go unnoticed, as all the patrons look at the place they’d expect someone’s face to be. It takes a minute for them to collectively direct their gazes downward and see me standing there.
“Is that a fucking human?”
“It’s a human. Not currently fucking, though,” another voice chimes in.
“We could change that,” someone in the back says, grossly making it less than three seconds until the first threat of violence. This is why I always ran an all-female crew. This bar stinks of male. If there’s a single female in here, I’d be shocked. It has that stench of unwashed pits, groins, and semen dried on unlaundered clothes that presents itself almost universally in places like this.