I stared. This was way too early in the day for me to go without coffee.

"Uh," I blinked, trying to find words. "You know. Men?"

It was actually very distressing to me when Scarlet merely stared at me and said, matter-of-fact: "I don't understand."

Oh, god, I was not ready to have this conversation.

I looked back out into the sea of faces to confirm what I had already been seeing for some time. It was a sea of women no matter how far I looked, in dresses and skirts and robes and all types of feminine fashion, but not a single hint of a man anywhere. I had not, in fact, seen a single dude ever since waking up on that arkology weeks ago.

"Uh," I tried again, certain that the universe was playing a cruel joke on me. "You know. Guys? Dudes?"

Scarlet continued to look at me with a confused stare.

I thought I was getting used to getting shot at faster than I was adjusting to this. Gingerly, I pointed in the vague direction of Scarlet's lower body area and mumbled a question that I honestly kind of hoped she didn't hear too clearly. "So...what's down here?"

"The vagina?"

Bizarrely, my first reaction - mentally, of course - was "oh, good, she's heard of those". "Right. So, uh. Are there people without vaginas?"

Scarlet looked at me as if I just suggested that people can exist without heads. "No...?" she allowed in her "I'm trying to be polite but I'm talking to an actual idiot" voice.

I felt like I owed the Congregation an apology. When we had been back on Athabasca, it had been easy to chalk up the gender disparity - by which I mean "I had not seen any dudes" - to the fact that I had not seen more than fifty people in a single room, and that I had been easy to justify the whole thing as "gay space mafia".

Never in a million years would I have guessed that this was gay space. Lesbian space. Whatever. Like the realization that I had, in fact, been teleported somewhere in outer space, this was one of those things that was easier to rationalize away if you didn't think too hard about it, if you didn't think about all the hints being thrown at you. But now that it was out in the open...

The point was, I was now in a corner of the universe where men didn't exist, apparently. I honestly did not know how to react to that. Which was rapidly turning into a regular occurrence, I realized.

Like, once I had accepted that I was in space, it wasn't...outrageous to accept spaceships and space stations and bullshit magic technologies and cute girls with fox ears. It wasn't that much of a leap. There was a logical progression in acceptances in the absurdities of the universe.This, though, felt like some immutable truth of the universe had been discarded.

I very fortunately did not ask how two girls would make out; I'd never met one myself, at least not that I knew of, but I knew that lesbians existed, of course. But more pertinently: "How do you even make babies?"

Once again, Scarlet stared at me for a quiet moment. Then, although her expression remained unmoved and her voice unchanged, I was almost completely certain that she was screwing with me when she started to answer, "Well, you see, when two girls love each other very much..."

I had never stopped an oncoming explanation so fast.

----------------------------------------

The breathtaking vistas of colors and lights and shapes eventually began to fade. The cascading mountains of temple-, castle-, townhouse-like buildings gave way to cliffs of a very different nature. The walls were no longer gracefully sculpted from and beautifully painted on imitation wood; they started showing signs of wear and tear, before eventually giving way to dull industrial colors with age-old stains on metals and other synthetic materials from a thousand cracks. The light-signs that I assumed were for business and advertisement no longer swirled with some kind of script of some kind of language that I didn't recognize, replaced instead by tackier designs and pictures with nothing resembling letters at all. Wide streets narrowed and narrowed until they became dark alleys and rusting walkways in between an urban sprawl that stretched into the skies - or whatever passed for the skies in this asteroid - impenetrable to the great streetlights above, lit instead only by dingy lamps and ambient glows from barred windows and cracked glass. Dust, litter, and undrained puddles gathered on the streets.

It wasn't all dankness and misery. Although the walls were industrial metal and aging concrete and rust and stains, the residents still did their best to drape tapestries and fly banners from windows and on wires running across the streets, although there were a few times where I belatedly realized that they were neither tapestries nor banners, but laundry being hung out to dry. The people here were dressed fancily in fabrics that were less rich compared to those I saw upon leaving the docks, but the residents still seemed like they were trying to live their lives. There was the unpleasant smell of sewage and garbage, but so too were my nostrils assailed by the scent of spices coming from roadside stalls serving food.

I'd been to Hong Kong - only once, my only trip abroad ever - but I'd never seen Kowloon Walled City. That was before my time. But I've seen the photographs before, and I couldn't help but make the comparison in my head as I walked these dark, dank, congested streets.

Still, I couldn't help but notice the presence of small groups - usually in three or four - of hooligan-like girls standing around on street corners, glaring, scowling, batons hanging from their belts. And I couldn't help but notice Scarlet - who had largely gone unarmed or concealed her weapons outside our time on the arkology - was now very openly slinging her submachine gun around her shoulder and carrying a handgun in her hip holster.

As we had left Dock 7, Scarlet had strapped a holster to my hip with a handgun in it. She knew I was a piss-poor shot - our time together on the arkology proved that - so I couldn't help but think that her going out of her way to make sure I was armed was more to ensure no one messed with me rather than out of any expectations that I could handle myself.

Weirdly enough, there was something strangely comfortable about this place. Like, I wasn't exactly being set at ease by the fact that this was very obviously the seedy underbelly of Anaffa, but there was this weird sense of familiarity and relief. I'd only ever grown up poor, and whenever I had been anywhere that was too upscale and too clean, I had always been on edge, like I was walking on eggshells. It wasn't just the feeling that I was dirtying something expensive, or I might break something I couldn't afford. Rather, it was a sense of self-consciousness: Of being so out-of-place that I can't help but attract attention, of doing something stupid because I didn't know the rules here, of both first- and secondhand embarrassment for both myself and whoever brought me here.

I wasn't familiar with this part of Anaffa, or even this part of outer space. I was sure that there was going to be a lot for me to learn, a lot of new norms and rules I had to follow, so on and so forth. But the similar economic conditions I was already used to felt like one less barrier to entry, and a significant one at that. I was used to trouble kind of being part of the ambient atmosphere. I was used to gangs with knives and guns hanging out on street corners. The circumstances were different, of course - I was in space - but more so than high-tech arkologies and lesbian mafias, this was...honestly kind of more of the same.

Still, the twists and turns around narrow staircases and alleys were dizzying, and I was almost certain that - if I was going to stay in Anaffa for no small amount of time - I would spend no small amount of time trying to learn the lay of the land. Eventually, however, Scarlet stopped in front of a fairly nondescript metallic door that I barely registered was situated in a high-rise not entirely unlike an old apartment complex. It didn't take a genius for me to figure out that this was probably Scarlet's place, then, when she swiped her bracelet over the handle of the door, which unlocked with a very audible click. She pushed open the door - metallic and heavy - and the lights flickered on, illuminating the darkness within.

"Come on in," Scarlet offered as she stepped through the door and took off her boots. I did the same.

I hadn't really gotten the impression that Scarlet was rich. If anything, I had always figured she was a blue-collar girl like me, except I worked with wrenches to fix stuff and she worked with guns to murder people. So it wasn't surprising that Scarlet's apartment was located in this rundown place, nor was it surprising that her apartment would be kind of small. Back home - back on Earth, that is - I had shared apartments and housing spaces with classmates I hadn't been close with, housing units that were maybe four, five hundred square feet in size. A bit cramped for two tenants, but our schedules had usually kept one person out of the place at any given time, so that was bearable.

The front door led into a square, windowless room that was no more than twelve feet on each side, admitting little more than a low table in the center. Instead of a chair, a cushion flanked one of its sides, indicating that you were probably meant to sit on the floor. I thought that this was maybe the living room, at least until Scarlet - kicking off her boots on the doormat, so I did the same - crossed the room and moved to one of the two other doors, a sliding door that revealed a small, half-filled closet where Scarlet deposited her pack of gear. As she did so, she pointed lazily in the direction of the second door and announced, "Go ahead and use the bathroom if you need it. I'll set out a cushion and a second bedroll for you."

I nodded and moved to the second door, dumping my own bag - full of my office clothes from humble little Earth - in a corner. I didn't actually need to use the bathroom right that moment, but I kind of wanted to take a glimpse in to understand what I needed to deal with through the duration of my stay here. I pushed open the hinged door and found myself looking directly into a small bathroom inside with a sink, a toilet, and a shower.

I froze for a moment, dumbstruck. When Scarlet had pointed me in the direction of the bathroom, I had expected...I didn't know. A small hallway behind the door that would lead to maybe a small kitchenette on one side, and a bedroom and a bathroom on the other. Or maybe a bedroom that would have another door that led to a bathroom. I did not expect...well, this. That this single apartment unit was literally a living room and a bathroom, all of which was maybe a bit more than two hundred square feet. There was no extra bedroom; this "living room" was it.

In hindsight, Scarlet's comment about how she'd set out a second bedroll for me made sense now. This room was where you ate and lived and slept.

The good news was that in spite of the rust and decay and general dilapidated vibe outside, the interior of Scarlet's apartment didn't look like the inside of a dumpster. The walls looked like concrete lazily masked by a thin layer of beige paint, and although they looked kind of cheap with pockmarked stucco and rough patches and faint blemishes, it looked reasonably clean. The flooring was made of some kind of woven material, possibly arranged over a concrete floor, a bit too rough in texture to be a proper carpet but also soft in form; a moment later, I couldn't help but notice a similarity to Japanese tatami. Although it looked kind of worn, the bathroom was clean enough. The air inside felt kind of stale, but it didn't smell unpleasant. The apartment had little in the way of furnishings, but it was cluttered with Scarlet's personal effects, a mish-mash of clothes, what looked like food packaging, bottles of unknown fluids, mechanical components that I couldn't identify, so on and so forth. It was a bit messy, but there was at least very little in the way of trash; Scarlet's apartment was mercifully not a pigsty.

Still, though, looking around, the thought of living in this tiny, windowless space alone felt kind of depressing. Strangely enough, I wasn't particularly bothered by having to share this tiny space with Scarlet until who-knew-when - my mother and I once rented a small room in someone else's basement back when I was a kid - insomuch as I felt kind of guilty that I was robbing precious space from her.

I couldn't help but wonder what kind of life Scarlet had lived up until now. Like, how she managed to cope living in this twelve-by-twelve room, leaving only for life necessities and whatever work put her on both ends of a gun.

Scarlet looked almost done like she was stowing everything away in her closet, and I was spending several minutes trying to make myself comfortable in this cramped room. Then there was a rapping sound, the sound of knuckles on metal. The unmistakable sign of someone knocking on the door.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Can you get the door for me?" Scarlet asked.

"Sure," I replied, getting up onto my feet and making my way to the front door. The inside of the door, thankfully, had a knob that was familiar to my humble Earth sensibilities; even in space, there was no beating the basics, I guess. But that wasn't really what I was thinking of as I pulled the door open to reveal whoever was on the other side.

The girl standing at the door was a bit younger than me, was a bit shorter than me, and wore a lot less clothing than I did. A tail protruded from and wagged from under a short, cheap-looking shoulderless shift dress, and aside from a collar around her neck, a pouch at her waist, and a pair of sandals on her feet, she wore nothing else that I could see. The ears from her head were a bit floppy; I figured they were dog ears, especially given her tail, which was fluffy but not quite bushy like Scarlet's more obviously fox-like characteristics.

Curiously, set to the side of the door was something that looked like a large utility basin made of a plastic-like material, alongside a few bottles full of different liquids.

"Oh, um," the girl blinked, clearly not expecting me at the door, and her tail actually froze in place for a moment as she stared. But she managed a bright-looking smile nonetheless - a little forced now, I was quite possibly an expert at that - and she politely curtsied, "Hello. Is Miss Scarlet in?"

The housing unit was not nearly large enough for its tenant to not hear the voice at the door. I was turning around and preparing to call out to Scarlet when the redhead poked her head out just enough to see who was at the door. "Carol," she greeted, wiping her hands with a towel before casually tossing it on the table and marching over. I retreated from the door to make space for her.

The girl - Carol - curtsied again, and her smile became noticeably less forced. I was maybe a little bit jealous. Not that I was looking to be a ladies' woman or anything, but Scarlet seemed to be pretty popular with people in a way that I was clearly not. Not really all that surprising, given our respective looks. "Welcome back, Miss Scarlet," Carol beamed. "Did you have a nice adventure?"

I wasn't actually sure how Scarlet was going to respond to that. I certainly would not have answered "yes"; I didn't like being shot at. To her credit, Scarlet actually seemed to think about this for a second before allowing, "In a manner of speaking." Then, a more blase observation: "You showed up quick."

"The other girls saw you come back," Carol giggled girlishly. Then, with an air of hopefulness: "I'm sure you have clothes that need washing?"

I recalled that prior to leaving Athabasca, the Congregation had, among other things, taken care of our laundry. Scarlet must've remembered the same, because she replied, "Not really, but..." She seemed to hesitate for a moment before turning back to look at me and asking, "You're alright with her washing your clothes, right? The ones you're wearing, I guess."

I wasn't sure the clothes on my back - poncho, tunic, tights - that I was gifted in Athabasca actually needed washing so soon, but Scarlet kind of gave me the feeling that she was maybe looking for an excuse to support a local family business or something? I didn't know. She didn't seem to disapprove, though, when I replied, "Um, yeah, sure."

It was perhaps due to the lack of space, but Scarlet simply grabbed a new set of clothes from her closet - a T-shirt-like tunic and a pair of short shorts - and moved off to a blind corner to change into them. It was a little awkward to watch, considering that Carol wasn't really that far away, standing outside the door, waiting patiently. Or maybe Scarlet was just being considerate to me, letting me change in the relative privacy of the bathroom. I kind of doubted it, though; while my new roommate didn't seem like the person who'd readily strip down in front of people, she also didn't seem like someone who was too bothered by the prospect.

I, on the other hand, picked up my sack of clothes and went swiftly to the bathroom to switch into my office clothes. Thankfully, the Congregation had washed it pretty nicely and cleanly, even if the whole thing still felt old and worn and matched only by the standards of a rummage sale. Still, it was weirdly comforting to switch back into clothes I was used to, I guess. Like putting on a familiar glove.

But I came out of the bathroom, passed my laundry to Scarlet - who had already finished changing and had her own clothes in her arm - did my best not to look too much at her nice legs under those short shorts or the sliver of her slender waist that peeked out under the hem of her tunic. The redhead, in turn, passed our clothes to Carol, who had been standing dutifully at our door all this time. She quickly went through our clothes to see what we had before telling Scarlet, "That'll be five crowns, if that's alright with you."

Scarlet reached into one of her pouches and produced a handful of what I assumed to be metallic coins of varying sizes, counting them before handing "five crowns" over to Carol. The back of my brain noted that they used actual coins: No paper bills, no digital currency. Just small discs of metal. I wondered what the conversion rates were between crowns and any currency I was actually familiar with.

Carol tucked the coins in her pocket and dumped our clothes in her utility basin on the floor, and I figured that she would run off somewhere, presumably to some laundromat she's based out of. Instead, I stared as she got down on her knees and began to pour and squeeze various liquids out of the bottles she brought with her. Water first, and then what seemed like detergent. Then she started scrubbing our clothes in the soap water by hand, occasionally beating them with some kind of plastic club.

It was mesmerizingly absurd to watch. It felt kind of like watching a historical reenactment video that a high school history teacher once shared in class. Except this wasn't a video, nor was this a reenactment: I was literally watching a washerwoman hand-wash our laundry.

Scarlet, on the other hand, very obviously felt nothing of it. She kept the door open, but she had returned to the living room and had sat down on her cushion by the table, lazily tinkering with two of her guns she had being carrying with her since the arkology. This was clearly normal for her, so it was unsurprisingly her that I quietly drifted beside and softly asked, "Um, Scarlet, can I ask a stupid question?"

"Go ahead," Scarlet replied with the impassive air of someone distracted by menial tasks and accustomed to stupid questions.

"Don't you have...laundry machines?"

Scarlet froze for a moment. Then a subtle, muted, complex expression crossed her face. It was really easy to miss, but she seemed almost...defensive as she looked at me neutrally and tonelessly said, "I'm not wealthy."

"Sorry," I muttered, simultaneously relieved that she even knew what a laundry machine was and also trying to swallow a comment about how strange this was. I was now in a civilization with spaceships and futuristic guns and space armor and drones and space stations...and yet people were hand-washing clothes in a bucket of water, and laundry machines are for the rich?

I again snuck an uncomfortable look out the door back at Carol, who continued to kneel on the dirty floor, diligently scrubbing and pounding away at our clothes. It seemed absurd, and not just in a sort of weird, "this is kind of silly to see" way.

I couldn't quite shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

----------------------------------------

The previous day ended pretty uneventfully. Not terribly long after Carol finished hand-washing our clothes and bade us farewell, Scarlet hung our laundry on a clothesline running across one side of the room to dry. Then she declared it was getting pretty late, flipped the table so it rested on its side and against a free section of one of the room's walls, and then pulled two bedrolls from the closet. They were pretty small and I barely managed to fit on one, but mine was surprisingly comfortable to sleep in, and in spite of the unfamiliar surroundings, in spite of the stale air, in spite of a distant machine-like rumbling that was still too loud to be inaudible, I managed to fall asleep pretty quickly.

Maybe it was just the stress.

The following morning, we headed out for breakfast. Scarlet had to help strap a handgun holster around my hip, shoved one of her handguns into it, then made sure I wore my still-damp poncho with the hood up. It was eminently clear at this point that my lack of ears attracted the wrong kind of attention, something that marked me as an "exile", something that I was going to have to actively keep in mind from now on.

The restaurant Scarlet ended up leading me to was little more than a stall tucked away beneath the struts of a larger building. Cheap, portable tables and chairs were arranged in front of it, making me think that the whole thing was a mobile operation, that the owner - a middle-aged woman with the ears and tail of a cat, as it turned out - basically had to bring all her stuff here every day to run her business. The place would not have passed a hygiene inspection; the tables and chairs were rough and scuffed, the stall looked like it may have survived a bombing from the Iraq War, and this was a section of the building complex that was dusty and rusty, marred by ancient stains of forgotten sewage.

Regardless, I had Scarlet place my order because I had no idea what any of the dishes described to me were. She paid for our food in coin, and a few minutes later, we were served bowls of reddish soup with ingredients that looked like smatterings of small vegetable leaves, a mess of grains and beans, and chunks from a crushed granola bar. No meat or eggs or dairy products, interestingly enough.

The surroundings were not good for my appetite, but the food actually smelled nice and tasted surprisingly good. Mostly salty, but with a hint of both sweetness and spiciness. It didn't disagree with my stomach either. Like, my digestive tract felt weird that this strange and alien food was passing through, but I wasn't immediately suffering from any stomachaches or a need to bolt for the nearest toilet.

The two of us were nearly done with our meals when Scarlet announced: "I need to go check in with Cerys to make sure everything is going smoothly. Do you want to come along?"

I wasn't in a big hurry to return to the Congregation, but stretching my legs didn't sound like such a bad idea, and the thought of being cooped up in that small, windowless room was kind of depressing to think about. "Yeah," I replied, quickly wolfing down the remaining contents of my bowl. Both of us were soon back on the road, and we again made sure to walk with our guns on display: Scarlet with her submachine gun slung around her shoulder, me pulling back my poncho just enough to show the handgun at my hip.

"If you get lost and need directions back," noted Scarlet quietly as we walked down the streets, putting enough distance between us and the nearest group of violent-looking girls glowering at us for her to feel comfortable enough to share this with me, "our address is Sector Three, Marsaili's Spiral, Block 17, Floor 23, Corin-98."

"...Okay," I answered after a moment, trying to commit all of that to memory, pretending that the string of unfamiliar words and random numbers had not just washed uselessly over me.

Tragically, my efforts at hiding my ineptitude did not go unnoticed as Scarlet looked at me over her shoulder and asked, "Did you write that down?" Then she seemed to realize a detail: "Oh, right, we'll need to get you an ostracon soon." "Ostracons" being the equivalent of smartphones or tablets here; Scarlet had seemed very surprised when she learned that I did not actually have one of those when she asked me about it back on Athabasca. "A good model from someone trustworthy. I know someone who might be able to help. If you really can't find your way back, ask for directions to Dock 7. Anyone can point you in that direction. Cerys knows who you are, and I can find you there if you're gone for too long."

That was a pretty decent solution until such a time that I could take down Scarlet's address. There was just one more obstacle in front of us, though. "Uh, Scarlet?" I prompted hesitantly.

"Yes?" Scarlet asked in the tone of someone being very polite about becoming accustomed to being asked really stupid questions.

"I don't know how to write in your language."

Scarlet actually stopped in her tracks as she turned around and looked at me, a deeply confused look crossing her face. "Pardon?"

I tried my best not to wince or look embarrassed. It was an impossible task; I only had more bad news to share. "Actually, I can't read in your language either," I admitted sheepishly. "Like, uh, all the signs we saw on the way in? I can't read them."

The fox-eared, fox-tailed girl looked at me with muted bewilderment. Like, she was schooling her expression well - as I had expected of her - but there was also still obvious disbelief in that inexpressive face. Although it was a version disbelief that was less "oh, my god, how dumb can you possibly be" and more "no, this is such a stupid lie, I can't believe you even tried". "You are unlearned in your letters," she said after a moment of silence. It sounded more like a flabbergast statement, but it was most certainly a question. For some reason, I got the sense that it wasn't illiteracy that surprised her, but the fact that I was claiming to be.

That admittedly made me feel a little defensive as I answered, "I can read and write in English. But, uh...you're not using English. Well, English writing. Letters. Thing." I had such eloquence in English. "I mean, I can obviously understand you."

Again, Scarlet was quiet as her brain was probably silently on overdrive, processing and trying to make sense of these facts. "So 'English' is your mother tongue?" she asked; the way "English" rolled off her tongue made it obvious she had never heard of it before.

"Yeah."

"But you speak perfect Esthelem."

I had no idea what "Esthelem" was, but I figured it was probably the language Scarlet somehow heard me speaking, just like I heard her speaking in English, at least to my teeny-tiny Earth brain. Was Esthelem literally just space English? Or was my brain totally scrambled by space bullshit? All I could manage was a shrug: "I guess."

Again, Scarlet mostly just stared at me with a look that fell short of accusing me of being an outright liar, but for whom the facts very clearly did not line up for whatever reason. To be fair, "literally a space alien that mostly looked like me" would not have been high on my list of baseless hypotheses either had I been in her shoes.

After a while, she just sort of quietly nodded. As if she didn't accept my answers, but that she accepted this was all she was going to get out of me. Maybe she even accepted my claims about being fluent in English but being illiterate in Esthelem at face value. She began walking again - presumably towards our destination - and I dutifully fell into step.

"Are you from Secella?" she finally tried after another moment passed.

"Never heard of it."

There was almost a hint of frustration on Scarlet's face at my latest answer. Still, she schooled her features well as she fell silent once more. Finally, she allowed, "I'm...sure there is a fenced Esthelem-learning application we can acquire when we get you an ostracon. You already speak it fluently, so it...shouldn't be too hard to learn to read and write."

Considering I was currently living off Scarlet's dime - and I still had no idea why she was being so helpful and generous, a fact that made me terribly grateful and insecure - it was all I could say to awkwardly mutter: "Thanks."

Scarlet did not immediately respond to this as she continued to guide me down the streets of Anaffa. Gradually, the streets became less seedy and dirty. We were slowly headed for the better parts of this firmament.

Then: "You are full of mysteries, Artemis."

I'm not trying to be, I wanted to say. It wouldn't be entirely truthful, though, and I was pretty sure Scarlet wasn't going to believe me anyways.