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See, here's the thing- as far as Shephard is concerned it's still early spring and he's on board the Borealis along with Maripyaipok, Jan ten Boom, and several other people who all had different reasons for wanting to accompany the teleporting boat to Brazil. He's got absolutely no reason to suspect anything about the-

"Mother pus bucket!"

-calendar on the Milliways side being set to Cubefall. Oh well.

At least he got some decently interesting choices this year. GERTY isn't really his style, but it's still kind of interesting; he might be scared of flying but it's probably different if you're actually built to do it; the wearable NBC response robot has its own kind of appeal; and-

Huh. Well, why not:

"This ain't as bad as that thing with the hooves'n mandibles, that's for damn sure."

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"Naw, I don't speak it, not the whole language," says Shephard. "Just the bad parts- Aufreisserin Der alte Aufreisser hat sie rumgekriegt! Er hat es ihr besorgt."

This is probably not going to improve the impression he is giving at all.

Well, it does and it doesn't.

On one hand, Autor blushes like a pink peony opening up to the summer sun.

On the other, he cracks up.

"That's terrible," he says, wheezing and using the table for support. "And your accent's not half-bad, either. You remind me of Karkat."

He tilts his head. "How many languages can you swear in?"

Shephard has to stop and think about that. For quite a while.

"English. Spanish- South American, not Spain Spanish, I don't know nobody from Spain," he says. "German. Dutch. Quebecois. Russian- I got a feller from Chelyabinsk to teach me mat, that counts double on account of how much reaction it gits. Arabic, ain't got more'n two-three words of that. Indonesian, same deal. Brazilian Portuguese. Sateré-Mawé... 'course I'm learnin' to speak that proper, that'n Spanish. I like to be able t'give folks a little bit of their homeland no matter where they're comin' from."

The boy grins at him. "A little bit of their homeland, huh?" he says, wrinkling his nose. "I suppose some people love that kind of nostalgia."

Including him. Surprisingly.

"Swearing's a portable souvenir, at least, if specialized," he says, and orders some tea. "I assume you started gathering the bulk of it due to your tours for the Marines?"

"Naw, I started way the fuck before I joined the service," Shephard says. "Momma gave up on washin' out my mouth with soap'n made me work with her on the beehives instead, she heard me talkin' like that. Must've been when I was, I dunno, seven."

He thinks for a minute, then turns to the bar.

"You got any grubloaf? I got no fuckin' clue what that shit tastes like but I reckon I oughta give it a try long as I got these horns."

The kid smiles and shakes his head at the description of Shephard's mother. "Beehives?"

But his curiosity is completely derailed by the temporary troll's order. "Oooh," Autor says. "I bet your taste buds are completely different. Trolls tend to eat scorpion innards. I wonder if you'd be able to withstand poisons?"

He wonders, in the back of his brain, if Shephard has an empathy bladder now.

"Yep. Kept 'em for the honey, trucked 'em out to farmers a season at a time for the cash."

As the steaming dish shows up, Shephard considers this. "Could be," he says. "Might try that out later, see if it works. You know the trolls much? Sounds like you been hangin' around Karkat a fair little bit at least."

"Er, yes," The kid says, and briefly looks to his shoes. "A little bit. He's hilariously profane--like you, but different. I haven't seen him in a while, though."

And Nepeta keeps track of my love life, such as it is?

"I assume you know them as well, then?" he says, examining Shephard's horns. "And why choose troll out of your Cubefall options?"

Autor would absolutely pick that if he didn't already have plans. Maybe next year.

"Yep," says Shephard. "Friends of mine. Been a big help to me'n mine back home, too, most of 'em, anyways."

Terezi's never been to his world or done much of anything there, but she's still a friend of his, at least insofar as a crazy blind synaesthetic troll who licked him at their first meeting and talks like a rabid lawyer can be said to be a friend. Which... is actually pretty far, considering.

"I ain't all that interested in robots, and flyin' ain't my thing now that I ain't got to do it for a living. Reckoned I'd see what troll was like," he says with a shrug. "Been weirder, once or twice. This ain't so bad."

The kid nods thoughtfully. Of the two trolls he's met, he has the impression that once they've given you their loyalty, they're loyal until death. Or, post-death. Again.

Or something.

"Your anatomy has changed, obviously," Autor says. "Interesting. So, you fly for a living? Are you a pilot, then, or is there some other technology you work with?"

He doesn't know when Shephard is from, come to think of it.

"Ain't flyin' for a livin' any more," Shephard corrects. "Used to be we were damn fuckin' short on pilots, 'n yours truly was just dumb enough'n lucky enough to survive his first flight or two in a helicopter. Got stuck flyin' the shitfuckin' murderbirds right up 'til I lost my hand. We got other pilots now."

He seems to think this makes sense.

Autor's gaze flickers to Shephard's right hand, and then away again. Explains the glove.

"Who were you fighting at the time, if anyone?" he asks, trying not to grin at the way Shephard slings obscenities around.

"Combine," says Shephard. "Alien maggot things that showed up 'bout sixteen years back'n fuckin' conquered the goddamn planet. Assbaskets were tryin' to work Earth's atmosphere into somethin' they could breathe, on account of their dimension ain't nothin' like ours chemically, 'n we were blowin' the goddamn shit out of their last big processing facility. Yours truly was flyin' air support, only I got shot down'n pinned in the fuckin' pokkelijder ass balls wreck. Medic had to take my arm to git me out alive."

Edited 2013-06-05 20:58 (UTC)

Strangely enough, hanging out with Karkat does in fact make Shephard easier to understand.

Still, the flexibility of curse words as verbs and nouns and adjectives never ceases to amaze. "I assume you're not fighting them anymore? What do you do now as a Marine? Rebuild?"

"Ain't no Combine left to fight," Shephard says, and for a moment there's a vicious sort of satisfaction beyond the common run in his voice. "We broke their backs on Earth, 'n then we went to their dimension, 'n one of our scientists shredded the whole. goddamn. place. out of existence. They ain't comin' back. Me, I got a country and a Corps to rebuild. Ain't too many other folks qualified to pull it off."

"How did you do that?" the kid asks. He doesn't blame Shephard for destroying the Combine completely--in fact, he's fairly impressed--but he does wonder what the people of Earth could have learned from them. What they did learn from them.

Survival takes precedence, however.

"Whoooooole lotta violence," says Shephard with a crooked grin made no better by the trollish gray of his current complexion. "Couldn't explain the physics of what Dr. Freeman did to the Overworld if you paid me, tell you the truth."

Actually, Autor would be surprised to see any other sort of grin with those fangs and black lips. Well, not Nepeta so much. But still.

And the kid has seen Dr. Freeman's name come up on the bulletin board a couple of times, and if he stops to think about it, he'd recognize Alyx and the twins, too.

"Still," Autor says, "that's impressive. How horribly did they destroy your Earth?"

"Far as we know there ain't more'n a couple million humans left alive anywheres," says Shephard, "not to mention the environment's shot to shit. Used to be there were a good six'n a half billion humans out there, so I figure we're lookin' at whatever the fuck the next rung up from plain ol' ordinary genocide is, seein' how most of those don't knock the population down by three fuckin' orders of magnitude."

Normally, cutting off that many zeroes on the end of a number would require, like... the Toba catastrophe.

"You know anything at all 'bout the trolls'n their situation?"

Autor whistles, loud and low. He's not very good at it, but this deserves an attempt. "I could see you bouncing back from those numbers, given a thousand years or so? Maybe, but if the environment has been poisoned..." He tilts his head. "Has there been any progress made to reverse or contain the atmospheric damage?

"And yes, I know about the trolls," Autor says, furrowing his brow. "First there was a civilization, then there were twelve, now there are fewer than that."

So much happens, all the time.

Shephard nods. "I'm askin'," he says, "because during the whole fuckin' time the Combine ruled Earth, there wasn't a single goddamn human child born. The fuckin' maggots put up an energy field that fucked up pregnancies before they got past the first week. We ain't been knocked down near as far as the trolls when it comes to numbers, but we got sixteen years of no fucking children to make up for."

Not to mention no fucking fucking, but he's not about to explain that effect of the Suppression Field to some random German kid.

Autor blinks at him, which is about the same as having his jaw drop. "None? None at all? Well, that... certainly puts a damper on things," he says, and immediately regrets the technically-correct phrasing. "I assume that's been shut down?"

"Not a goddamn one," says Shephard. "We got all kinds of work to do. And yeah. It has."

The direct pressure seems to have worked. Shephard starts carefully picking the napkin away from where it's tacked to his hand. As far as he's concerned he didn't cut nearly deep enough nor hard enough to necessitate any more wound care beyond washing it out and letting it dry again. It's a slash, it'll heal.

Autor shakes his head. "But you can't--" he starts, and then shuts the hell up. Shephard is well aware of what his world can and cannot do, and just like his attitude towards the cut on his hand, any fussing is useless.

"Good luck," the boy says, without ceremony. "I hope you all manage to have children soon."

One corner of Shephard's mouth makes its way upward. "Just so's you know, kid," he says without taking his eyes off the bit of napkin he's working free, "I ain't exactly what you'd call the best man in the world to say 'you can't' anything to. Might be we really are that fucked. I dunno. Ask the eggheads, they'll give you a better picture'n anything I could come up with. Me? I'm the jarhead skin-banger hillbilly kid from the ass end of nowhere. Reckon folks'd generally agree I'm too goddamn stupid to know when I'm up against something too big for me."