Chapter Twenty Seven

Signing Up To Be A Badass

The announcement that Jenna had crowned a new diplomat was very well received. She had a killer speech prepared where she explained to the Octavians and the Adamis that choosing Excelyn was the absolute best solution for desperate times. It struck a chord with everyone who wanted the two groups to resolve their differences and work together for a better future for everyone.

Once everything was done and everyone was gone, Jenna was finally alone. She had a shower to relax her nerves, but afterward, she still felt like crap. She hadn’t been able to throw up all the liplo fruit and she could still feel fragments of it rolling around in her belly and intestines.

“Are you okay?” Sardius asked her quietly as she towel-dried her hair.

“I’m pissed off, now that you mention it.”

“You hid it from the camera quite well. The footage was beautiful. No one saw the horrific shave job Excelyn did on herself, and yet you pushed all her pink hair forward so everyone knew who she was. The smile you had glued to your face was angelic. Everyone would have thought you were thoroughly pleased with the assignment.”

“I am, but I’m still pissed off,” Jenna said with a crack in her voice. “These things feel disgusting in my stomach, but who’s to blame? Her, for playing a terrible trick on me? Me, for not listening to you? You, for not insisting and screaming at me about the real consequences when I wouldn’t listen?”

“I wouldn’t blame myself,” he said, cocky and self-satisfied.

“Honestly, I would have slapped her and walked out except for two things. For one thing, she’d already started shaving her head. Where I come from, a woman does not abruptly start shaving her head without some real intention behind it. How could I refuse someone so hardcore? Secondly, Favel was going to be so ridiculously pleased. Besides, it sounds like there is no harm done, but I am starting to see what you mean about not eating. I’m going to give that a try.”

“You want to make Favel happy?” Sardius inquired, doubling back on their conversation. “Why?”

“You heard what we all agreed to during that meeting with the Octavian council. If I crown three diplomats, they’ll remove your recording device. Right now, I’m not sure what I would give to have a real conversation with you. Of course, I want to make him happy.”

“Huh…” Sardius said, not saying what he was thinking.

***

The next day, the candidates were in the Sand Palace speaking with Octavian delegates. Jenna sat in her room and looked over the results of the tests from the day before.

“The only one who is remotely decent is this one, Binarian Whistle. She didn’t act ridiculous with the food or drink. She hasn’t said anything stupid in our hearing and she answered the questions sensibly. Can you think of anything else, Sardius?”

“At the moment, she’s talking to an octopus named Gussy who doesn’t think she’s at all stupid.”

“I don’t even remember her from when we greeted the candidates. What does she look like?”

Sardius brought up a picture on Jenna’s screen. “You probably didn’t notice her because she’s a hundred and twenty centimeters tall.”

“If we take her, no one can accuse us of not being diverse,” Jenna commented wryly.

“Are you going to crown her?”

“No. I’m going to put her on a second-round list, meaning that I’ll invite her back after I’ve got a few more reasonable candidates. Though, I won’t have her back when we have the next batch since they’re all going to be soldiers from the AAMC. Who’s our contact for that?”

“Admiral Lou Denver.” Sardius brought up a picture of him.

Lou Denver’s face was shaved so closely, it was the first thing Jenna noticed about him. He must have shaved his face and head five minutes before having his picture taken. As it was, his military pose in the photograph showed no compromise. He was a military man through and through. He’d obviously been in the forces for years as he looked to be at least fifty years old.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Is he supposed to be pink?” Jenna asked.

“Yes. His race of Adamis is pink.”

“It looks really good with his navy uniform,” Jenna replied.

“Yeah… don’t tell him he’s pink. Those guys get really touchy about it. It isn’t just on Earth that pink has been feminized. Pink is a girl color throughout the whole universe.”

“What do they call themselves?” Jenna asked.

“Lekkea.”

“Do you think it caused him any grief being pink and an officer of the AAMC?” Jenna wondered.

“I don’t really know the complete dynamic. Lekkea make up the majority of the officers in the AAMC. Maybe it’s because they promote themselves when they can. Maybe it’s because they fight harder and work longer than the other officers because they have something to prove because they’re pink. I really don’t know. I fought hand-to-hand with one before and he wasn’t a push-over.”

Whenever Sardius gave a hint about himself, Jenna jumped on it. “You fight? What kind of fighting do you do?”

“All of the fighting. I’ve done all of it. That’s why I’m in jail with no hope of getting out.”

Jenna thought of how fit he must be if that much fighting hadn’t killed him. Then she thought of how unusual it was that a man like that had made himself her personal trainer. “Thanks for not making me do the training regime this morning. You know, when I wasn’t feeling well.”

He clucked his tongue against his front teeth. “Yeah, well, you would have had abdominal cramps if I had pushed you. You’re off the hook until you’ve finished expelling the liplo fruit.”

“Do you think I ate enough of it to turn my hair pink?”

“Yup. A single mouthful run through your digestive tract is enough to give you a stripe of pink.”

“Misha can probably get rid of it for me with a carefully chosen hair treatment.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Sardius advised. “You should show it like a badge of honor.”

Jenna scoffed. “What are you talking about? What honor? I ate something against your advice and puked a lot. What’s honorable about that?”

“It makes you look unpredictable, like your limits are in places other people can only dream about. It might make an assassin think twice before engaging you. It might make prospective diplomats willing to sign with you, even though there is a terrible risk tagged to the job. I’d leave it.”

Jenna touched the roots of her hair growing beside her black crown. “I suppose it will look okay for a while around the crown.”

Sardius suddenly chirped up. “Misha is outside the door. She wants to speak to you, but it’s marked on your information panel that you are literally in bed. Want to get out of bed and speak to her or do you want to allow your servants to talk to you when you’re in bed? Now is the time to set a precedent.”

Jenna got out of bed and pulled a filmy silk robe over her shoulders. “Let her in. It’s not like Misha hasn’t seen me in my undies already.”

“My lady diplomat,” she said, dropping her eyes and doing ten percent of a bow.

The first time Jenna met her, she thought she looked like a doll. Now she looked more like a little girl. Jenna instantly realized she looked more normal because she was not wearing the black contact lenses. Instead, she was wearing thick-rimmed glasses that showed violet eyes that looked more human than the jet black that covered too much of the whites of her eyes. Her hair was tied up in a messy bun and Jenna realized that Misha liked playing dress-up herself as much as she liked styling other people. How had she messed up at the morgue?

“I just received a purchase order from Sardius that he hopes will fix the problems with your footwear,” she declared.

“Busy little bee, aren’t you?” Jenna whispered huskily to her personal assistant.

Instead of answering, he threw the purchase order up on the screen along with pictures of the products he was proposing.

“These aren’t shoes,” Jenna noted.

“They are called barefoot sandals,” Misha explained. “They’re like sandals, in that they have all the beauty of straps without the bottoms. Obviously, if you wore nothing on your feet, you’d look like a country bumpkin, and considering the unusual shape of your feet, I don’t believe that sandals would provide you with the comfort Sardius is aiming for. These have the advantage of being very flashy and expensive as they are mostly constructed from valuable heavy metals and rare gemstones. They are also quiet because you would be walking on the pads of your feet. There wouldn’t be any thwapping of a sandal against your heel.”

Jenna looked at Misha curiously. “What do you think?”

“I think that as long as you are on Octavia Prime, meeting people here in the palace, they provide a very reasonable solution to the shoe problem. Otherwise, I’m going to need to have your shoes custom-made, which will not be a quick solution, but these don’t need to fit you any more than a necklace needs to fit you.”

“You’re satisfied?”

“Not entirely,” she said hesitantly. “The pieces Sardius wants to order for you would obliterate your style budget. If only you’d saved more shoes on your Pinterest boards. Then we would have been able to get the Octavians to pay for them instead of us.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to buy all of them,” Sardius cut in. “Only a few. I’m not the stylist.”

Jenna took hold of Misha’s shoulder and led her to a chair. “Sit down. We’ll get a few of them. Surely we can choose some that will go with more than one dress. Besides, I’m not a movie star. I can wear the same ones more than once.”

“Once you’ve worn an item three times in front of a camera, it will be auctioned off for charity.”

“Even shoes and jewelry?”

“Yes,” Misha confirmed. “You can keep special favorites, but you stand to do a lot of good by allowing the auctions. Your clothes will be worth a lot of money in the future.”

Suddenly Jenna understood why celebrities back on Earth sometimes made unusual style choices. They couldn’t keep their own clothes... and neither could she.

Jenna needed more money.

Putting that aside, she decided to deal with the barefoot sandals first.