milliways_bar | (no subject)

One eye opens a slit. Then opens completely.

Nope! He's not gonna let curiosity suck him in. Nope. No way in hell. The eye slams shut.

And cracks open again. "Taking up macrame?"

"Working on the sensor sheaths for a full-face multicapability mask I'm building for a werewolf I know," Ray says. "He needs the mask to keep up with a friend of his when they go hunting. I don't suppose the word 'yautja' means anything to you?"

Ray's seen a lot of movies, but he wouldn't know the Predator movies if they bit him on the ass.

"A WHAT?!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the sound of one Fox freaking. "We've got a Predator in the house?!"

"Oh, is that what the human name for her race is? Spoon says she lets her call him Christine," Ray says absently. "He wanted me to work on a mask for him to make it easier for the two of 'em to go hunting together, ever since he killed that xenomorph with his teeth."

That skull, at least, he recognized.

"Unless we've got some bizzaro coincidence here, that's the movie name for them."

He jumps onto a a chair and slips into human form. "Gorblat's blue balls...well, as long as she doesn't try to take any of the patrons' heads for trophies, we're fine."

A chuckle. "Christine?! Great! Now I've got an image of one of those super-hunters doing Phantom of the Opera."

"I haven't spoken to her yet," Ray admits. "I imagine I'll probably get introduced soon enough, if only because Spoon- that's the werewolf- is probably going to show up with her in tow at some point. And around here you have to be careful about saying things like that. God help us all if this place gets another fit of the musical numbers."

A snicker.

"But that sounds like fun!" he protests. "Well, so you know you've got the right carbon-based lifeform when she does come around."

Foxtrot wraps himself in the illusion he gave Danny during the Foliage Census raid. "This is roughly what they look like."

After a couple of seconds, the hunt gear/armor is replaced with a tux, cape and white half-mask. "And this is what they look like on an Andrew Lloyd Webber kick."

Ray gives this some thought. "Okay," he says. "No offense, but anything that looked like the 'grr, argh' sort of hunter you just showed me would probably want me to point out 'what kind of use is half a mask?'. Although admittedly, I have no idea of their sense of aesthetics beyond 'xenomorph skulls make good trophies'."

He slips back to human form.

"Good point. But the image of one of them trying to pull off 'Music of the Night' is freaking hilarious!"

"Okay, I'll buy that," Ray says. "Not that I've met this one yet, so I wouldn't know if she had anything like the kind of pipes necessary to pull that off. I think there's some kind of a law in science fiction to the effect that every culture and every species has some variety of opera, and every single one considers everybody else's opera to sound completely awful."

"And if you don't even like your own species/culture's version?" he asks.

"That would probably be the point at which you start listening to rock and roll. Or possibly complaining that Bob Dylan sounded better in the original Klingon."

Foxtrot grins.

"Heh! Well, that's me to a T."

Sudden thought...then a dramatic facefault.

"Holy crap! Does that mean I'm normal?!"

What an utterly terrifying idea!

"Nobody normal in the history of the Universe has ever used the phrase 'in the original Klingon', Foxtrot," says Ray. "Except for normal Klingons."

Comic sigh of relief.

"Whew! Close one, there. Lead me not into normalicy, but deliver me from mundania."

Foxtrot leans back and props up his feet on the table. "Well, now that we've settled that little crisis, what have you been up to besides making Predator masks, Great Lord Ray?"

Ray makes a face. "Well, there was the incident with the Deep Ones, which I'm not sure if I told you about... I mentioned that, right? The jewelry showing up on Antiques Roadshow?"

"I think you did," he answers. "Deep Ones? Worshipers of You Know Who? What kind of incident are we talking about? You weren't fighting off something oily, tentacled and gargantuan without your faithful Poobah, were you?"

"Not unless you count the burrito I found in the Seven-Eleven where I met two of them," says Ray. "The words 'Dude was such a racist' came up multiple times in reference to Mr. Lovecraft. I still have to make an appointment to meet with their elders- the two I met were on the North Shore Community College swim team."

Blink-blink.

"Well, a tentacled burrito is pretty damn freaky, too," Foxtrot says. "Hey, sometimes it's damn good to find out that some writer was WAAAAAY off-base. They gonna sue his estate or something?"

"The general impression that I got was that they wanted to be left alone, since for the most part they had human relatives as well as Grandma P. down in the ocean," Ray says. "Although I think they're working on some kind of lobbying tactic for better enforcement of the Clean Water Act."

"I should think so!" he says. "There's a bunch of elven conclaves back who are trying to do the same thing about forests. Kinda hard to lobby and keep the non-human status of your clients hush-hush, though. Talk about round-about and sneaky. I hear that Fairhold's lobbyist was thrown out of law school because the professors were actually scared of him."

"Well, considering that some of these guys could pass for humans if you just assumed they were insanely ugly, I think they've got an advantage," Ray says. "These two were out in public, after all."

Foxtrot shakes his head.

"Ray, Ray, Ray...you gotta get a little more political savy with the stuff you've got going with your government and all. It ain't John Q. Public seeing through your cunning disguise that you have to worry about most of the time. It's the opposing lobbies and politicians looking for dirt to undermine you. Sit back and think a moment what would happen if some investigator working for the Oil Industry and their leaky tankers stumbled across the fact that the people standing in the way of getting safety regs relaxed were truly fish-people? And that's WITHOUT adding in Lovecraft's negative publicity blitz."

"Speaking of government," Ray says. "I, uh... kind of got some news I didn't really want."