Primary memory transcription subject: Zeleveya of Tarn, the venlil Zelzfruit.

Date [standardized human time]: July 14, 2136

Location: Venlil Prime capitol city, chemical research lab

Shock quickly became action however, as Jalnak immediately rose to his feet, whirling around and bringing his tranquilizer pistol up to be in line with Zeleveya’s chest. There was a moment of silence, as the former security officer was taken aback by Jalnak’s reaction, his hand slowly beginning to slacken as recognition flickered in his eyes. Before the pistol could fully leave the window of her body, Zeleveya decided to take a quick point and gently pushed it off to the side with an outstretched paw. “Could you maybe not greet me with a gun to the face⸮󠀡” she said, her tone deadpan.

Jalnak blinked in surprise, before he quickly holstered his weapon with a growled out “Zeleveya of Tarn, what are you doing here?”

For a moment, Zeleveya felt a soaring sensation of a true victory against the Exterminator in their verbal sparring matches, but very quickly the venlil felt the rage return as her view splintered to focus on the different elements of the situation that were present. Jalnak, a hand still lingering near his weapon with a look of confusion in the cast of his ears; the other Exterminator, frozen halfway up from his seat with his body tensed in shock; Kalne, trembling like a leaf in a stiff breeze as her focus was consumed by the final element of the situation: the Hive soldier’s severed hand-like claw, displayed proudly, *blatantly* on the desk in a large specimen container. At the mere sight of the horrid thing, Zeleveya felt her gaze shift, darkness creeping into the corners of her eyes as she instinctively stepped in front of Kalne to block her view of the carapace-sheathed reminder of past days.

The step forward took her closer to Jalnak, and as the male venlil hesitated her rage only intensified.

“Oh, Kalne and I are on a date,” Zeleveya said snippily, as she began to gradually advance towards Jalnak, scathing words flowing from her lips all the while. “I would think that you’d have been informed, or were you too busy breaking legal codes to take a look at your communicator?” By the end of the question, the slightly shorter venlil had begun to push the center of her head against Jalnak’s, both of her eyes staring forward to take a hold of his baleful glare. “Well?” she asked.

“I’m not breaking the law with this,” Jalnak ground out as he yielded before Zeleveya, allowing the smaller Venlil to push him all the way up against the edge of the table. “I’m trying to do my job.”

“oh yeah.𝄽” Zeleveya’s somewhat quizzical words came out punctuated by a derisive snort. “Tell that to your reaction. And even if it was legal the very least you could have done was put that- that thing away before Kalne could see it-” Zeleveya leaned slightly to the side and jabbed a hand backward towards where Kalne stood still, trying to shake away the shock that had taken hold of her, as she raised her voice into a vengeful shout “just LOOK AT HER!”

Jalnak flinched at the shout, an action echoed by the other Exterminator, whose fright then only intensified as Zeleveya’s left eye focused on him.

“You,” Zeleveya spat, her words harsh and her tone allowing for no rejections of what she had to say, “Take that piece of filth and get it out of our sight!”

“I–” the Exterminator began to speak, somehow having the gall to hesitate at such a moment, and Zeleveya quickly grabbed Jalnak’s ignored, useless datapad and chucked it at the venlil’s head. The venlil threw himself down onto the table immediately, allowing the pad to fly over his head and bounce off the far wall of the office, and Zeleveya began to step forward threateningly.

“Your hands are practically sitting on the wretched puddle of speh,” Zeleveya growled. “Pick. It. Up; and get it the hell out of here.”

His ears frantically twitching in acknowledgement, the Exterminator grabbed the specimen storage container and fled towards the cold storage room. With the primary source of tension now absent, Zeleveya untensed her shoulders and quickly scurried over to Kalne, their tails intertwining as the striped venlil burrowed into Zeleveya’s scruff. As she quietly made reassuring gestures towards Kalne, Zeleveya allowed her gaze to focus back on Jalnak. He hadn’t moved from the spot where Zeleveya had bulled him back into the best, absently gazing at where his compatriot had run.

“Explain yourself,” Zeleveya hissed as she rubbed a hand along Kalne’s back.

“Fine,” Jalnak grumbled. “But did you have to throw my tablet at Relwan?”

“It’s mil-spec,” Zeleveya snapped, “it’ll be fine. You, however, might not be if you don’t start answering questions right this instant. What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

“I was trying to develop a tranquilizer that would function against Hive physiology,” Jalnak admitted. “Ergo, not illegal. We had to put down one coup and that soldier was of average disposition for how its people work.”

“you were still designing a weapon to use against members of the Herd,” Zeleveya said, her tone laden with accusation. “If you don’t start making sense right this instant, I’ll take Kalne straight to Regional supervision and get you thrown out for predator inclinations. The three Tenants certainly know that we certainly have enough from Rejio’s testimonies before he passed.”

Instantly, Jalnak’s hand was wrapped around his tranquilizer pistol, ready to pull it free from its holster. “Don’t you dare use Rejio’s death as a simple… tool for manipulation!”

“Then just make some sense of this!” Zeleveya’s voice had become filled with equal parts pleading and fury as she stared steadily at Jalnak. “Just tell us why you are doing this, why you’d break the rules in such a manner to a frankly inconsequential end. What drove you to this path‽”

Jalnak instantly seemed to deflate, his anger cooling to something that merely simmered just enough for the turbulence to be visible, rather than a boiling surface spitting scalding droplets at anything that came close. “You want to know the reason I’m doing this,” Jalnak asked. “Fine. It’s because of you. You and Kalne who got to live, and Rejio who did not. Larek of pod CR-13, a medic without even basic combat training who was the first one to move, and the first to die. Paln, also under Kalne’s command, and someone who shared my worldview; a worldview which might very well have been the direct cause of his death! Ralze the Zurulian, prestige Exterminator of unit EVS-08, who had to watch her lover get decapitated before she too met the same fate; her armaments useless against her foe. THAT is why I am here, fudging the numbers and slaving away beside Relwan to ensure that nobody else dies!”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Jalnak stopped, his chest heaving as he glared at Zeleveya. “I lost my brother,” he whispered. “I lost my mom, I lost two fathers, one of whom only two paws ago. This is my oath, why I carry neither flamer flares nor firespitter in my duties. Nobody dies, not on my watch.”

Zeleveya blinked in surprise at the newest part of Jalnak’s identity that had been uncovered. “Rejio,” she breathed hesitantly, “he was…”

Jalnak nodded somberly. “Yeah, he adopted me. And now he’s dead. All to save your life.”

Zeleveya briefly glanced down to see that Kalne had been listening intently to the entire conversation, before she looked away from them both. At its core, the events of that fateful Claw had been because of her. *She couldn’t be here.*

She had to–

> ⁂[ERR]

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> ⁂ [-CAU: Memory Int. Fragmentation-]

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> ⁂ [-command line ntg sup file: prep-]

“bring it back out,” a seemingly-distant voice said in a tremulous tone.

> ⁂ [ERR: initial error was unexpectedly resolved]

>

> ⁂ [-logging incident . . . resuming transcription playback]

Zeleveya looked down at Kalne in shock as the striped venlil rose to her feet and stared directly at Jalnak.

““What?!”” Both Jalnak and Zeleveya had the exact same response. a simple, incredulous question, voiced at a complete lack of understanding.

Kalne briefly glanced at Zeleveya, then moved over to pound on the door that led to the cold storage room. “Hey Relaw or whatever your name was,” she said loudly, “the situation’s resolved, and I know that you’re listening. Get back in here and bring that piece of contraband biomatter with you!”

After a moment of silence, a sullen voice rang out from the other side of the door. “Not until you take away that she-devil’s ammunition,” the Exterminator – Zeleveya remembered Jalnak calling him Relwan – said. “I don’t want to catch a data pad to the face if I accidentally piss her off.”

Kalne didn’t even hesitate, grabbing jalnak’s Tablet from where it sat on the floor before reaching out for Zeleveya to hand hers over. “Hand it over Zelz,” Kalne said cheerfully as she beckoned with her fingers. “We’re supposed to be productive, yes?”

Zeleveya just rolled her eyes and passed her tablet to Kalne. “For the record, mine would break if I threw it,” she said snarkily. “And besides, Jalnak doesn’t use his anyway, so it made the perfect projectile.”

“I resent that remark,” Jalnak retorted, easily falling into a familiar dynamic as the trio tried to rapidly shift the conversation away from its earlier topic.

It felt… forced to Zeleveya, and she expected from Jalnak’s stilted movements that he felt the same way. But at the very least, she was feeling a lot more stable, and ready to face the subject of Jalnak’s work.

Then the door opened, and Zeleveya flinched at the sight of the Hive soldier’s talon that sat within the purple gel of the specimen container. Nevermind, she thought to herself, still not ready.

“Hey,” Kalne said softly as her tail twined around Zeleveya’s, “we’re going to be fine. I mean, I can still distinctly remember that thing wrapped around my throat and I’m still here, right⸮”

Zeleveya nodded shakily. “Speaking of, how is it that you are still here? You were quivering like a frightened sunspot barely a few moments ago.”

Kalne shrugged. “It’s ’cause I’m in control of the situation now!” the striped Exterminator said brightly. “I wasn’t before, so I was scared. This time, I’m choosing to put myself in this situation.”

“Well, I for one am quite glad that you are now comfortable with this,” Relwan said as he interjected into their exchange, having set the … talon back onto the desk. “We were only able to arrange fifteen Claws of isolation before the janitorial staff remove any samples for cataloging or destruction, and this thing would definitely fall into the latter pile. Most stuff does, gene samples for studying, vitamin extraction; if you don’t manage to accomplish it all with extreme expedience, then it gets purged.”

That was interesting, and it certainly would take Zeleveya’s mind off of the talon. “Really?”

Relwan nodded enthusiastically. “Oh most certainly,” he said. “It’s budget constraints, really, I mean, poor Nikonus gets the vast majority of his Gojid genome work put to the flames every five paws, he’s been here for years trying to treat a lethal allergy to some contaminants that he’s really cagey about, and how much progress has he made? Zilch!”

Zeleveya came to the conclusion that she liked Relwan. If anything, he was a good source of gossip… potentially even gossip about Jalnak. “Well Relwan,” Zeleveya said with a somewhat official past to her ears, “I think that we could get along quite well. I’m sorry that my general reaction to the circumstances put about by Jalnak tainted our meeting. And speaking of Jalnak, how did you meet him?”

“We studied together,” Relwan said cheerfully. “Marvelous work ethic, he became a frontline Exterminator, I headed towards Assessing and research of neurochemistry with relation to Predator Disease. It’s probably one of the singularly most complicated chemical fields that isn’t part of literal rocket science!”

That last fact didn’t come as much of a surprise to Zeleveya, considering that the whole thing was a farce. The first revelation though… that was interesting. “You studied with Jalnak,” Zeleveya remarked flatly. “You, studied with him,” –she briefly flicked her tail in Jalnak’s direction, the tranquilizer-obsessed Exterminator bent over one of the microscopes– “and graduated with your sanity intact? Impressive.”

“I resent that,” Jalnak yelled across the office, but Zeleveya ignored him.

Relwan shook his head in amusement. “You are an enigma Zeleveya of Tarn,”Relwan said, a layer of bafflement entering his tone. “You do not mesh normally with the Herd, maintain aggressive relations with part of it, and yet somehow those parts do not ostracize you and others cannot help but like you. It is… a rather intriguing combination of personality traits that must allow for this to be possible.”

“yup, that’s my little Zelzfruit’s charm,” Kalne said as she pressed against Zeleveya’s side. “and speaking of…” her voice dropped for a moment, almost becoming a pitch-perfect mirror of Rejio’s crisp baritone. “She’s taken.”

Relwan waved his hands frantically in an appeasing gesture as Zeleveya couldn’t help but look at Kalne with a somehow even greater level of appreciation. “I know full well that that is true,” Relwan said, his tone probably meant to be reassuring but tinted by fear of the threatening edge that had taken over Kalne’s voice. “Zeleveya did very much mention that she was here on a date with you. Probably skipping out on a normal shift, but I won’t ask.”

And with that, Relwan began to rapidly usher the pair out of the small office room, general instructions spilling from his mouth as he did so. “You two lovebirds have fun, the facility is yours to explore and the floor map’s back in the foyer, there’s tables on the roof platform, and the break room has plenty of snacks. And please, don’t interrupt our work again.”