The unplanned consequences of FFM 2026 12: Back Away (and this one will also have consequences I didn’t plan for lol).
Steirdrar was not surprised to get a private message after lunchtime; Beyari’s rest period had ended by then, so she was likely awake.
He checked the message once his next break started. To his surprise, it was in Earth-Common rather than in Koltonese. Most likely written with speech-to-text, considering what the accommodations section of Beyari’s file said about textual communication.
/~/~DisasterHunter/~/~: Okay, so, I’m sorry about yesterday. That really shouldn’t have happened.
Steirdrar had time, so he wrote a response already. He figured it was for the best to default to Koltonese just in case.
Damp’n’FurryII: It’s all right, no harm done. How are you feeling? Hungover, I imagine?
The messaging system informed him that Beyari had turned a speech-to-text system on and was responding.
/~/~DisasterHunter/~/~: Ugh, yeah. I’ve had worse hangovers but it’s still awful. And it’s not all right. That should’ve never happened. I should’ve done better. I *know* better. It’s not the first time the Zomok crew has drunk me under the table and I should’ve said no when I knew I had hit my limit for alcohol. I know better than to let them talk me into drinking more than I can take. I know better than to give anyone the justification to call me an overdrinker. Ugh.
More text was coming.
/~/~DisasterHunter/~/~: And on top of that, I am *mortified* by my conduct in front of you. It’s one thing to make a drunken fool of myself with the fuuzzeea who talk me into that state in the first place or people whose opinions I don’t give a shit about, but in front of someone whose opinion I respect? Uurgh! That was *embarrassing*!
A pause before more text started coming again.
/~/~DisasterHunter/~/~: So, yeah, enough about that. You said the conversation with QWERTY went well yesterday?
Steirdrar checked the time. He still had a bit of his break left.
Damp’n’FurryII: Yes, it went well. Surprisingly well. I didn’t dare to expect QWERTY to just accept it just like that and then carry on with aers day. I’m not sure if ae has already told the others that I backed out. I came across Cou-2 when coming back from lunch and they winked at me when they passed by, so they was up to no good. What no good that is, I’m going to keep my plausible deniability about it, at least for now.
Damp’n’FurryII: I’ve got to go; my break is about to end. Talk to you more after my shift.
/~/~DisasterHunter/~/~: Talk to you more then.
~~~
Beyari was not surprised to have stumbled into a hell of her own making by deciding to drink “just one more since it’s not gonna hurt that much”, but it still sucked. Steirdrar may have shrugged her conduct off but she still cringed at how much she had struggled to speak intelligible Earth-Common and how Steirdrar had to come to her rescue when she got stuck at the very beginning of “full disclosure, I’m quite drunk”.
Absolutely awful.
That disclosure was completely unnecessary in the first place, considering how easy it was for anyone even without a decent sense of smell to tell that she was drunk. She made an absolute fool of herself with that for nothing.
Utterly undignified.
She would rather flop onto the table like some dead prey animal and let the hangover pass, but she still had plenty new bounty postings to look through. Ugh.
At least QWERTY was being merciful and did not say anything about her current state. Not that her brains had not already supplied multiple past “I told you sos” from aer to make up for it.
Terrible. Just terrible.
She was behind schedule when she was finally done — she was supposed to have done more before lunch — but at least she was done with the bounty postings. She contemplated swallowing a ration bar (almost) whole and sleeping through her lunch period.
It was probably for the best to chew at least a bit. She had no idea how sensitive her gag reflex was nowadays and she did not want to add almost choking on a piece of a ration bar on top of everything else today. At least the nap was actually a good idea.
~~~
Cou-2 would not have been able to contain their excitement if not for the espionage programming Steirdrar had installed for them and Cou-1 back in the IR. This C’zlu fellow was about to have a very, very bad day that even some of their victims in the IR would not envy if they knew.
This would teach them not to talk awful things about their buddy and their buddy’s friend for sure. And if not?
Well, Cou-2 had plenty people with different specialties on their side who would help with coming up with more methods.
The espionage programming kicked in and caught the giggle they wanted to make before it made it to their audio systems. They so could not wait to see what would happen.
Eskel-Zai vocabulary: Fuuzzee: Lit. “Shit-sheet” (vulgar) (slang). Used almost exclusively in plural, referring to a group of jerks. Earth-Common translations fairly often use words like “shithead” for this.
About the pseydonyms: Beyari’s is something cringy she picked when she was in her early twenties and in the beginning of her hunting career and she decided somewhere down the line that she was going to just own up to the cringy name choice despite the mockery she got from her peers. Steirdrar’s, on the other hand, is as outrageous and not like him as he was able to come up with on the spot after defecting so that that private-communication-only pseudonym is less likely to get connected to him at a glance.
WindySilver 