by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
The cocky white cat pattered and quipped with the fuzzy spider-like alien for a while, posturing and positioning himself as a connoisseur who should be introduced to whatever finer things were usually kept tucked away for only the most discerning customers. Eventually, the cat ended up ordering fairly standard drink bulbs for all four of his group, but Ensign Mike and Lys both found the banter that led up to it to be fairly entertaining. Vossie’s displeased demeanor remained unchanged. The rabbit was not impressed.
The drink bulbs contained a bright, thick turquoise fluid with a vaguely basil, mint, lemony flavor. Ensign Melbourne’s pink nose wrinkled and his whiskers bristled every time he took a sip. The cat clearly didn’t like the drink, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from enjoying its novelty.
Lys said the drink reminded her of something she used to drink back when she and Korvax had lived on the Wayfarer, before the Wanderlust had picked the two of them up. The caterpillar reclined in the hammock looking supremely relaxed and happy… but also, to Mike’s slit eyes, disturbingly like an insect caught in a spider’s web, waiting to be eaten. Whereas, the white cat and grumpy rabbit just looked entirely out of place.
Mike liked the drink well enough, but the toadstool couldn’t help being distracted by Vossie’s continued displeasure. Even though the rabbit seemed to enjoy the blue fluid, he was clearly preoccupied by something going on around them.
Ensign Mike narrowed their slit eyes, staring around the unorthodox bar, trying to figure out what had such a grasp on the rabbit’s attention. And then they realized: some of the reptiles were wearing some sort of technological implant on their brows, much like the ones Morphicans wore. Much like the one Vossie used to wear… the one that was buried deep inside Mike, inextricably intertwined with their mycelial body now.
And without having to think about it at all, Mike knew exactly what Vossie was thinking — the rabbit was trying to figure out if these electronic devices had more than a superficial similarity to the neural implant he wouldn’t be able to replace until they got back home to the Milky Way. He was trying to figure out if he could jerry-rig a replacement.
“It’s not a good idea,” Mike said mushily, quietly, without offering any context.
Ensign Melbourne skewed an ear, and Lys stared blankly with her eyespots at Mike for a moment, but then the cat and caterpillar returned to the conversation they’d been having with the spider bartender. Vossie, however, glanced briefly at Mike and then looked away, as if he wished the toadstool couldn’t see him at all.
But Mike could see him.
Mike could see right through him.
And Vossie must’ve felt the continued pressure of Mike’s row of eye slits staring at him, because the rabbit muttered, “We could run tests on it, make alterations. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t work. Big surprise. Then I’m right back where I started.”
“That is not the worst case scenario,” Mike intoned drily, like a cold breeze whistling through an autumn forest.
“I’m not playing worst case scenario with you,” Vossie answered, echoing something that Mike had whispered straight into the young rabbit’s brain many times during his childhood. Back then, Vossie had been plagued by a strong anxiety that caused him to catastrophize every possible situation, imagining more and more unlikely disasters that could happen to him. Mike had soothed that anxiety out of him with whispered words and chemicals released straight into his brain — or, anyway, Vossie’s neural implant had done that. But Mike carried those memories.
Apparently, the soothing chemicals had really mattered more than the soothing words, because Mike could still offer the words… but Vossie was stuck taking pawfuls of antidepressants and mood stabilizers now to mimic the chemical effects, and pills swallowed twice a day just couldn’t be fine-tuned the same way that Mike had been able to do while hooked right into the rabbit’s brain.
Mike could understand why Vossie was still desperate to replace his implant. But his implant had been made especially for him, tailored to his brain by Morphican doctors who were experts on their own species’ physical anatomy. Any so-called replacement that Vossie found on this side of the universe simply wouldn’t be comparable. Not at all.
And yet the rabbit sprang out of the hammock they’d all been lounging in together, sailing in the direction of the closest reptile fitted with a technological gizmo on its brow.
Ensign Mike sighed deeply with the gills that rimmed the underside of their toadstool cap head, alternated with their eye slits. Then Mike jumped out of the hammock themself in pursuit of the wayward rabbit. Intrigued by the sudden turmoil, Ensign Melbourne turned an eye to watch the proceedings.
By the time Mike caught up with Vossie, the rabbit had introduced himself to the reptile and already struck up a surprisingly pleasant conversation about its implant — what the device did, how it worked, and how an individual might come by one of their own. To Vossie’s frustration, the answer to that last part seemed to be: he couldn’t. Such devices were designed specifically for the individuals who used them, under some sort of archaic, bureaucratic system similar to having a doctor’s prescription.
Vossie was out of luck. Or so it seemed until Ensign Melbourne floated up beside him and meowed softly, “I’ve actually wrangled our little group an invite to an exclusive, underground gambling den. If I’m not mistaken, I bet we could win one of those devices in the games.”
“Games we’ve never played before,” Vossie countered, “that are most likely illegal.”
The white cat shrugged. “Illegality can be a fine and blurry line, and haven’t you ever heard of beginner’s luck?”
“Yes,” the rabbit said coldly. “It’s a myth.”
“It’s also fun,” Melbourne meowed firmly. “Now, I’m gonna go play some games one way or the other. If you want to tag along and see if we can win one of those thingamajigs for you, you’re welcome to join. Otherwise, see ya on the flip side.”
Vossie frowned. The rabbit was clearly thinking that it was his duty as a superior officer and individual with more sense than the addle-brained feline ensign to put a stop to these plans. Or at the very least make sure Lys didn’t get mixed up in the cat’s foolish antics.
Ensign Mike was sure that Vossie would do the right thing. And so the toadstool was absolutely flabbergasted — all possible coherent words knocked right out of their red-and-white spotted toadstool head — when Vossie said, “Alright, we might as well check these games out. If nothing else, it’ll be useful cultural enrichment. We know very little about the society in this sector of the Tetra Galaxy and recreational pastimes can teach you a lot about a people.”
“That’s the spirit!” Ensign Melbourne meowed cheerfully. Then placing a paw on a nearby beam, the white cat whirled around, kicked off and sailed back toward the arachnid bartender. He’d already regained his feline grace and was now soaring about like a dancer. His white fur added to the effect of his gracefulness, conjuring images of swans or ballerinas.
Vossie wobbled his way across the space, bouncing from one beam to the next rope to another beam and so on, much less gracefully. Still, it got the job done, and the extra length in the rabbit’s feet did seem to give him some advantage when it came to reaching out and making contact with the various guide ropes and rails.
Now that everyone had their bearings, Lys seemed to be at the biggest disadvantage, because her arms were all so short and stubby, barely more than pudgy hands sticking out of the sides of her worm-like body. The caterpillar noticed Ensign Mike watching her with concern and laughed sweetly. “Yeah, I’m not really built for this… yet.” Her wriggling mouthparts twisted into her version of a smile. “But someday, I’m going to have beautiful wings, and then none of you could keep up with me — even you with that clever beard of yours.”
Ensign Mike felt the underside of their toadstool cap head blush along the gills, causing them to wonder if their own autonomic blushing response was actually a deeply held affectation designed to make them seem more mammalian. Even if it was, Mike didn’t seem to be able to suppress it. “Thank you,” they muttered mushily. “I figured I should use whatever appendages I could… even if most of the time, I try to hide that my beard is actually prehensile.”
“Why?” Lys asked thoughtfully.
“I don’t want to remind everyone of how different I am.”
“But we’re all so different from each other,” Lys replied simply.
Ensign Mike didn’t have time to process the caterpillar’s perspective right now and what it meant about the different ways they saw themselves. The four members of the Wanderlust crew had converged at the back of the bar where the arachnid bartender was tidying up the rows of drink bulbs stuck against a wall that seemed to be covered in some sort of sucker disks to hold them in place.
“My friends are in, and we’re ready,” Ensign Melbourne meowed to the spider. “Where do we go?”
The bartender pointed with one of its eight limbs toward a salamander-like being at the outer edges of the bar and said in its quietly screechy voice, “Shlu-shu can take you. Say Attratoc sent you.” The spider never stopped working while talking to them. Having eight limbs looked really convenient.
“Thanks!” Melbourne meowed before turning tail and sailing back toward the indicated amphibian.
Continue on to Chapter 5…