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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Lanzen_Jars on 2024-10-01 22:06:24+00:00.

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Chapter 187 – Bet it all on red

Six feline ears all twitched as they turned quiet for a moment, listening to the ongoing argument happening just outside their door that had progressively crescendoed into straight up yelling over the last few minutes.

“You aren’t going to prevent us from protecting ourselves!” the barking chatter of a party they had so far only heard and not seen rang out. Tiasonko, by the sound of them. The voice of the lumbering primates with four awkward arms were quite distinctive, even among the many species of the galaxy. “We know that the favorite meal of those felines is primate meat. And since there are no defenseless beasts for them to gut alive on this station, we are not going to wait until they finally drop their masks and try to get their fix some other way. The primates of this station will-!”

“Sir, we humans are primates as well,” a far calmer yet still firm voice interrupted the rant abruptly as one of the soldiers guarding the door rained on his parade. “I assure you none of us have any worry about the myiat taking a bite out of us.”

“Primates? Hardly!” the ranting voice almost immediately piped back up again. “You’re a hairless bunch of flesh-eating freaks! You look a lot more like those monsters to me than you resemble any of us!”

“There is no reason to get insulting, Sir,” the voice of the human soldier replied again, still as professional as it was stern.

“Or what?!” the tiasonko challenged. “Will you shut me up? Put me in my place? What are you going to do, predator? Looking for a fitting excuse to butcher me?”

Inside of the room, one of the felines scoffed.

“They always make it sound like they would enjoy that somehow,” Zishedii commented in Cyamoit. His comment gained some exhausted twitches of lip-corners that never quite morphed into full on smiles from his company.

“No, but I will call the local authorities on you if you don’t curb your aggression,” the human replied unflinching as a rock.

“Call the guards on me because I am telling the truth!?” the yelling person called out in an almost smug and victorious voice, earning him loud chatters from the unseen comrades presumably backing him up. It seemed like he really thought he had some sort of high-ground there.

“Call the guards on you because you are openly threatening violence against an Acting-Councilman,” the human replied dryly.

“Tssss…a Councilman. Sure,” the boisterous primate responded with clear sarcasm and disdain. “I don’t accept that bloodthirsty creature as one of our leaders. It doesn’t have the same-”

“Have fun explaining that to law-enforcement,” the human interrupted yet again. “I’m sure they would love to hear why you think that you only have to follow the rules that you ‘accept’.”

The smug chatter suddenly died down a bit. If Shida had to guess, she figured the human had actually pulled out his phone to make the call now.

“I-” the tiasonko tried to speak up again. His voice carried far less of the earlier smugness now, even if he still tried to keep that fire burning.

“I will be sending them pictures of you as well as detailed recordings of everything you said,” the human cut him off immediately. “Hope the clicks are worth the criminal record, jackass.”

Judging by that last comment, there were probably more cameras than just the soldiers’ body-cams involved.

There was more chattering now, though this time it was entirely in the tiasonko’s own language that no one in the vicinity understood apart from the primates themselves. It sounded stressed though.

Then, a moment later, the voices quickly began to become more quiet as the sound of awkward running filled the air, which the felines’ fine hearing perfectly picked up on despite it being muffled by the door.

“Oh, now that it’s too late, they run,” Commander Jireynora commented with an annoyed roll of her eyes. She let out a deep mixture between a sigh and a hiss as her shoulders sank slightly and her ears lay flat down onto her head. “Honestly, I am starting to wonder if I should hate evolution for making our main prey primates. I mean, of all the things it could have been…”

“Don’t let them get to you,” Zishedii replied in a firm voice almost instantly. “If you say things like that, you make it seem like we actually did something wrong. Our ancestors were animals, hunting other animals. It happens on every planet there is. It is part of nature and it has been around almost since nature began. Don’t just let them build this narrative that it is somehow something new and scary.”

Jireynora nodded hesitantly. However, Shida crossed her arms and released an annoyed growl.

“Well, we can’t pretend like we haven’t been allowing that for quite a while,” she said under her breath. The comment sounded generally annoyed at the world, however in reality it was largely directed at herself.

Once upon a time, she had been quite guilty of very much feeding into the stereotype, after all.

“Hmm…” Jireynora huffed and briefly rubbed her hands over her ears in order to calm herself a bit. Once her ears had perked back up, she let out another sigh. “Well, at least they left before the Ambassador came.”

Zishedii released an amused snicker at that.

“I’m sure he would have torn them a new one,” he commented before running a hand along the long part of his hair. “They sure are getting loud, though…”

“Spurred on by an old idiot who should have gone to jail ages ago,” Shida growled again, her crossed arms tightening around her body a bit more. “Maybe we’re lucky and he’ll give himself an aneurysm before the election goes through.”

Zishedii and Jireynora both gave a single, only slightly restrained laugh.

“You should be careful with saying things like that too loudly,” Zishedii advised, but Shida quickly shook her head.

“They can have me on record saying that,” she proclaimed confidently. “I don’t think violence should be involved, but we would all be better off if he worked himself up enough to just keel over.”

Zishedii shifted his lips slightly, his tail giving a gentle sway.

“I’m going to have to ask you to not talk about one of my colleagues like that,” he then stated in a firm voice, though the way he put emphasis on ‘have’ indicated that it was very much something he felt compelled to do instead of something he did out of conviction.

“Hopefully he won’t be one of your colleagues for long anymore,” Shida gave back to that, her own tail also swaying, but far more agitated than that of the Acting-Councilman. So much so, in fact, that the Commander tilted her head slightly.

“Are you alright, Shida?” Jireynora asked, her voice pivoting gently into hesitant worry.

Shida released a sharp breath through her teeth and un-knotted her arms, running her hands up to glide her fingers through her rebellious mane of hair; then tangling them slightly in a mild grip.

“I’m just getting myself worked up now,” she admitted after a moment of introspection. “Guess I should be careful to not give myself that aneurysm I wish upon others.”

Jireynora smiled at the humorous deescalation, though a bit of that earlier worry remained on her face.

“Should we change the topic until James arrives?” she proposed.

However, Shida let go of her hair and waved the idea off.

“I think I need to get my head clear,” she established. “My therapist said I should be using my energy productively whenever it starts building up. I think I’m going to grab some of the boys and meet James halfway.”

Jireynora and Zishedii exchanged a brief glance with each other that ultimately ended with Zishedii giving a mild shrug.

“Alright. Just be careful and make sure to take the escort with you,” Zishedii reminded firmly, as if that wasn’t exactly what Shida had just said she was going to do.

Shida gave a hint of an eyeroll but then saluted the Acting-Councilman and Commander before heading out the door.

A group of soldiers to accompany her was quickly gathered, and so it didn’t take long before she was heading in the vague direction that she knew James and the others would be coming from. Of course she shot him a quick message informing him of her new plan, but there wasn’t much of a reaction apart from an ‘alright, be safe’. Then again, what else was he going to say?

Shida quickly had to admit to herself that she probably wouldn’t have been happy with any reasonable answer and that she was simply still looking for something to be upset over. At least in regards of recognizing her own behaviors, the therapy had been a great help so far.

When it came to actually doing something about them once she recognized them, well…

She started to breathe more deeply, going through a few breath exercises in hopes to simmer down her growing agitation a bit. It was annoying to have to go through because just the day before, she had been almost perfectly fine for once. Even news that were far worse than a bunch of dipshits coming and yelling obscenities while threatening violence they had no chance of going through with hadn’t been able to get a rise out of her then.

But now just thinking about a senile old asshole was enough to get her blood…

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