Memory transcription subject: Alvi
Date [standardized human time]: Sept 16th, 2136. Start of 5th Claw.
My tongue was all but burning from stingfruit juice, but I bit into my last piece nonetheless, savoring the spitefully sweet tang that flooded my mouth. I reached for my glass of chilled juicefruit and shivered as its icy chill trickled down my throat, my eyes bolting around the room, overwhelming me with all of his color, history, and family, before snapping to Valek as he said something. I didn’t quite get it, but his ears were down and his tail thrashed behind him as he strode back to the table.
Why can’t I hear him?
Why does it matter?
His voice danced in my ears, whistling fast and sharp, pulling fresh memories of giggling and playing pups from the fountain. I felt that energy, that joy, like dawn’s light across my wool as I imagined a younger me running around this den, giddy and manic with a droid part in her paws. My breath was cold on my tongue in the wake of the juicefruit, and I waved my ears forward and back to soothe their burning heat. “Sh-She’s just getting a book, it’ll be fine!”
It was nice when she sang last resting.
She sounded so… nice. So warm.
As warm as the blankets she wrapped you in.
He mumbled something. Something I understood but didn’t hear. I took another drink of my juice, whining slightly when I found its bottom, before it was gently retrieved by Valek passing by. “Oh, yes please; juicefruit juice if there’s any left! Your Mom leaves the den so warm, I think I’ll sleep out in Maeve’s room, this paw.”
Why are my ears hot? And my eyes?
You’re just tired. Maybe Valek…
His voice was musical, high then low with a question that I just… couldn’t quite… “Well I’m boiling, so maybe we just missed the fire.”
My body itched with energy. I could feel my legs clench and relax of their own accord, curling my toes and twitching my tail as my focus scattered to the winds. “I-I mean… Yeah, I guess it would still be weird to them. Stars, I know I was the one to suggest giving it a paw or two but I don’t-”
I’m not tired, I can barely sit still! Everything is so much! Why is my heart so loud?!
Valek reached over my shoulder, placing my glass of greeol juice on the table, and I was drowning in his weight behind me. My ears snapped back to find his jaw just above my crown and getting closer. My skin felt like it was suffocating under his breath, and my ears burned like fire. My eyes swung behind me and his silhouette seemed to fill my sight; I could feel his pads sink into my wool as my shoulders bucked against him. His breath was hot on my neck, his claws pricked my skin. I felt him against me, a heavy hot weight my hips tried to press into and my tail pulled desperately against. My heart hammered in my chest and my eyes went wide as I realized what was happening.
That feels amazing…
Valek. Wait. Don’t. Please. Wait.
Please. Right there.
This isn’t right. I don’t like this.
He was so close now, drinking me in, pulling and pressing…
And stopped.
Please, Valek. Please.
Tighter. Closer. Lower.
His grip lessened. He stepped back.
No! Come back! Don’t stop!
“A… Alvi… Uh…”
Don’t go!
I leaned against the table gasping for air, pulling my tail away from his thigh to my front, all but sitting on it as I fitfully worried the tuft. Valek’s ears swung around the room and his tail hung low around his legs, twitching and shaking, just as confused as I was. He shook his head quickly and slapped his paws against his snout, then pressed his palms hard into his temples. “Augh, my brahking head… H-How long… Mmph… How long has it been since your last cycle?”
---
Memory transcription subject: Maeve
Date [standardized human time]: Sept 16th, 2136. Start of 5th Claw.
Did I spill some at home, and it came with my stuff? No… Even if that were true, maple doesn't linger for over a week. Maybe I'm just imagining it? It has been… damn I haven't had a proper breakfast for at least a few months now… do I even know what maple smells like anymore??
The mystery of my bed’n’breakfast held the biting cold at bay while I made way back to the burrow, holding tight onto my book of mythologies so it wouldn't be ‘claimed by the sluagh’. It took no small effort to pull the door against the wind, so I planted my foot against the doorframe and pushed off.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I made it into the warm safety of the den and shook the cold from my bones. “Ok! To say that humans have a lot of folktales would be underselling it by several orders of magnitude, but this’s got enough that you should get-…”
I looked up to see Valek completely under the kitchen faucet going full blast, drenching his head and ears in rushing water, and Alvi at the table staring at a glass of what looked like pink lemonade.
“... What… Did I miss…?”
Alvi kept staring at the lemonade like she owed it money, but Valek turned off the faucet and spoke through the water that continued filtering through his wool, “Alvi’s on her cycle. Probably has been for a paw or two. We… I… Almost made a mistake.”
“Oh?”
I looked at the two again, their heavy shoulders, their fallen ears… And their messed wool.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I’m gonna wake up Mom and Dad, see if Uncle Maasi can take Dad and I for a few paws.”
“What? Why?”
Valek combed his hands through his wool, coaxing out most of the water to splash into the sink, before reaching for a kitchen towel, “Well Dad and I can’t stay, and I will not ask Alvi to leave. Maasi used to take Me ‘n Elsi when we were pups, when Mom was on hers; we’ll be fine as long as I keep the two of ‘em off’a that Truth Seekers speh.”
“But… why do you have to leave at all? You have an apartment on the farm now.”
Alvi’s everything perked up as she met my eye, and Valek froze mid-drying, “...Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Well, in fairness, neither of you are thinking with your head at the moment.” I answered through a giggle that quickly grew to a snorting chortle, “Not the right ‘head’ anyway!”
“Maeve!” Alvi squeaked, which only made me laugh harder.
“What?! The folk’s’re asleep, it’s fine. Sound like a plan, Valek?”
He finished drying his crown and mane as his tail curled in thought, “I mean, that helps me n’ Dad, but I’m not going to ask Mom to walk through galetime to help.”
“‘Course not, I’d be staying with her so I’ll make the runs; I won’t leave our girl hanging.”
It was a delight to make Alvi glow a steadily brighter shade of tangerine through her tight-knit, fuzzy black-and-grey wool, but I kept my focus on Valek, “Thankfully I’m not built like a cottonball so the wind is just an annoyance. Think you can make a care package I can take with me?”
Valek’s tail bobbed a thankful >Yes<, “Alvi, you’re welcome to take what you need from the kitchen for now, Mom and I’ll get you something once they wake up; should be ready before next claw. You sure about this, Maeve?”
“I am, if Alvi is. What’d’you think, cutie?”
She continued to twist and worry the tuft of her tail, even as it flicked anxiously in her paws. “I-I don’t want to go away-”
“Uh-uh. Don’t you dare.” I spoke with a finality I hoped would get through to her, “You’re not going anywhere; you’re stuck with us, and that’s final! I’ll be right there with you through this, you won’t be alone. Call it a ‘girl’s weekend’; we can braid our hair and talk about boys!”
Alvi blushed so hard I’d clock her about ninety-eight percent done with her transformation into a dark chocolate orange. Valek brayed like an ass as he started up the stairs before calling back to me, “I need to take a bath before I start presenting, you two have fun out there!”
I brought my focus back to Alvi once I heard the landing door close, giving her a few seconds of silence before approaching, speaking quietly, “How’re you feeling, Stormcloud?”
She whined before answering, “Awful! I’m hot. It feels like my wool is on fire. Everything… itches! My ears are already numb from doing this speh!” She barked as her ears continued to flap forward and back, “My… My brain feels like a sieve that is somehow also screaming, and… And I’m just so scared! It’s never been this bad before, a-and I’m not due for paws! What’s wrong with me?!”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Nothing is wrong with you, sweetie, you’ll get through this.” I reached out to try to comfort her, but she winced when I touched her ear so I pulled back; the sound of thundering water from above gave us the chance of a distraction. “Looks like Valek thinks a bath is the way to go; I have a shower in the apartment, how about we start there?” Alvi's tail and ears gave a weak affirmative, and she started to slide off the chair to stand; she was unsteady on her feet, reminding me of when I was once dizzy from a fever.
I was the first outside, keeping my body between the door and jam to make space for Alvi to pass, before spinning aside and letting it slam closed. Alvi was holding onto what she could of the rough wood paneling beside the door before I stepped to her side, pulling one paw to hold onto the seam of my pajamas. We struggled through the pounding wind, step by step, and I started to believe the kids’ stories were a little less fiction than I first thought.
It was fully dark here between the two porch lights, and I still had a good six or eight meters before getting to the doorstep, when a massive gust almost blew me over. I heard a scream at my side and looked down to see nothing there. Panic filled me immediately and I started frantically searching downwind, but Alvi’s dark coat made her impossible to see, and my bright orange bob billowing in my face was doing no favors.
“ALVI!!” I screamed through the wind, straining my ears to hear through the howling night. I heard her scream again, further but not far! I crawled in what I hoped was her direction, following her screams as best I could. I felt warmth and wool on my fingertips, and immediately scrambled to cover her with my body.
Supporting myself with one hand, I used my other to pull hers from the dirt to wrap around my neck, yelling for her to hold on. Now able to focus only on my own balance, I speared us into the wind and powered through to the porchlight and our salvation.
We made it to the door; now we just had to open the damned thing. I lowered a very uncertain Alvi to the ground, stabbing my favored leg and side into the wind for her to hold onto while I put my other knee into the door jamb and pulled with everything I could muster; Alvi almost falling inside and myself right after with the door slamming shut behind us.
“FUCK!!” I yelled at no one as I tried to catch my breath, “Fucking… FUCK. I thought you guys were joking?!”
Alvi gasped alongside me before she shrugged in the Venlil way, her tail giving a small jump before falling still again, “This is the furthest outside of the Green I’ve ever been! I had heard stories, but scorching sun, I didn’t know it got this bad!”
“Fuck.” I stood tall, leaning back to eke out the strain our trek had gifted me and detangle the fiery nest that was now my head. “Well, I guess the plan was to hole up anyway, so whatever. Not looking forward to doing that thrice a day though; I’ll ask Valek to pack ‘em big, make it one run a day.”
Alvi had barely moved from where she entered, standing there knock-kneed and shivering with squinted eyes, tail curled tight around her as she pulled and kneaded the wool of her chest and hips, “Aw, sweetie… C’mon, let’s get you in the shower.” I laid my hand on her upper back and she both flinched and leaned into it with a quivering whine, before I gently eased her forward to the back corner of the apartment.
Her wool was smooth, almost slick. No, definitely slick. When she left my side for the bathroom, I could still feel an almost greasy residue between my fingers. On reflex - a very regrettable reflex - I brought my hand to my face to smell, and immediately needed to stifle a cough from the overwhelmingly earthy, cloying sweetness of a maple processing plant on fire.
Good lord, that’s intense. Thank god for sense blindness, or this weekend would be hell.
I wiped the offending hand on my pajama bottoms and started pacing as Alvi ran the shower, trying to figure how I would tackle these next few days. I was no stranger to helping a girl-friend through her PMS, but was this at all similar? I racked my brain trying to remember what Valek had told me about their cycle so long ago, but I was coming up blank; I was… a little distracted at the time [NSFW]. All I could remember was that they somehow managed to function as a society despite half their population needing to be horny for a week every few months; though I guess humans are actually horny all the time, as a species, so maybe that was calling the kettle black.
Don’t get distracted, come back. Maybe… Alvi did mention she was hot… which, I mean, yeah, but… cold. Cold! That’s why Valek was waterboarding himself!
I looked around the room with new purpose, trying to find anything that I could use to help cool her down, before landing on my minifridge.
I can’t just stuff her in there, even if she’d fit, but… Oh! Shit! Where did I put that…
I dove into my under-bed storage, digging through clothes to find… AHA! My silica bead heating pad! Cackling and immensely proud of myself for the arduous task of finding something I already knew the location of, I quickly ran the two steps to my cooler and tossed it in among the clementines, seedless grapes, chocolate, and bottles of non-dairy creamer that came with our last UN shipment.
Having fallen firmly into ‘helper mode’ I frantically flew around the tiny apartment, tidying clutter, setting up a cozy area, making sure her chew-plate was handy, whatever I could think of to help. The apartment, however, was barely twenty square-meters so this did not occupy me for nearly as much time as I hoped.
Food. Food is good. Chocolate! Everyone loves chocolate!
I turned on my electric kettle and started making mugs of hot cocoa for Alvi and I; non-dairy, of course. The UN was very insistent and very thorough in making sure nothing I requested had any animal products of any kind, which certainly made my tea less exciting, but thankfully synthetic creamer was a well established wonder of modern science.
I had just finished mixing our drinks when I heard the water turn off…
“Uhh… Maeve…?! How do you dry out?” Alvi pined through the door.
Shit! Right! They use a drying room!
“That… is a very good question! Let me get you some towels.” I answered as I scrambled through the linens, laughing at my own forgetfulness as I passed a handful through the mostly closed door, “Feeling a little better sweetie?”
“Much!” She replied back through the door with a sigh, “I can actually think now. Are you sure you want me to stay out here? I appreciate it, I-I do! Really! But it can get pretty miserable, and it’s ok if you-”
“Leave you to be miserable alone?” I interrupted, not letting her continue to talk down about herself, “Nuh-uh. Not happening. You’re right that I might not know what I’ve signed up for, but I’m still signing! I’m not going anywhere.”
“... Th… Thank you.” She replied in a tiny voice.
“So! Normally I watch bad rom-coms when I’m on my ‘lady’s days’, but I don’t know what’s on Venlil tv. Wanna watch some more Thorns?”
Alvi stepped out of the bathroom still slightly damp; much more steady, though still nervous. “Uh, sure. Yeah. W-What do you mean ‘lady’s days’? Do humans have this too?”
She found a seat in the cozy nest I made on the couch while I set my pad into the pad-mount and brought it to the coffee table just in front of her, and answered while I got everything booted up, “Kind of! Valek and I talked a little about the Venlil cycle while we were on the station, but what is it like for you?”
“Darkness, I don’t even know anymore. Normally I’m once every third harvest, but I’m a full 9-paws early; at least!”
“Well, I’m glad it had the grace to wait until we were back from Dawn Creek. Can’t imagine you having to deal with this in a hotel room.”
Alvi groaned with aggravation, “Ugh, that would have been bad! I’m hot all the time; eventually everything aches because my legs… stars, this is so embarrassing.”
“You’re fine, we don’t have to talk about it if you’re uncomfortable. It is interesting that so much of your experience is around ovulating; nearly all human women can’t even tell when we’re ovulating, and have to see a doctor to find out.”
I picked out Thorn’s familiar spiral-patterned matriarch among the pad-mount’s personal-sized screen’s title cards before stepping back to the counter to retrieve our hot cocoas. Alvi had sunk into the cushy cushions after having found sufficient distraction with her metal knot puzzle, “You’re so lucky, going through a cycle is humiliating at best; I wouldn't wish this on anyone.”
“Oh, it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows, I can promise you that. Your problems are around ovulation, ours are around menstruation.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“So the egg does its thing and moves to the uterus on its own -” I answered, sitting beside her and letting her lean against my side. Her eyes were on the puzzle while her near ear was focused on me, “- whether or not the mother is triggered by anything, like pheromones. But fertilization still requires… ‘help’, so what happens to the egg when it doesn't get fertilized?”
She shrugged her tail, “Well the right answer is ‘get reabsorbed by the body’, but it sounds like you do it differently.”
"Very different. We are one of only a few species on our planet who, instead of reabsorbing the egg… Shed the uterine lining, the egg along with it, and start from scratch.”
The tinking suddenly stopped. Venlil seem to lack a lot of facial muscles, emoting mostly with large body movements. But for a brief moment, I was convinced Alvi had eyebrows, and they had collapsed in on themselves in an ugly soup of disgust, incredulity, and empathized pain, before almost crying, “Wouldn’t that hurt?!”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“How… How do you deal with it?”
“With help from a patient and loving partner,” I answer, laying my hand on her shoulder to emphasize my point, “And! A whole lot of chocolate.”
I leaned forward to the coffee table and retrieved our mugs, myself holding the too-hot porcelain by the handle while Alvi held it in her paws without issue. “I can say with no small amount of confidence, and just a smidge of pride, that this will probably be the most amazing contribution Humanity will make to the galaxy.”
“What is it?”
“Chocolate is… well to answer you directly I’ll be technical. It is an emulsion of a fermented then roasted fatty bean, normally cooled to make a solid shape. The fats melt at around our body temperature, so they make a very smooth texture when we eat them. Since the fats melt in high temps, it also works great as a warm drink, which is what you have; hot cocoa!”
She stared at the steaming mug, her body playing out her confusion and hinting anxiety, “Maeve, I… Thank you, but I can’t drink this.”
“It’s fine! This is dark chocolate, totally vegan; I wouldn’t give you-”
“No, Maeve, it’s… I just cooled down in the shower.”
My brain short circuited as it connected the two too-obvious dots, only allowing a simple, “... Right. Oh! That reminds me!” I launched myself from the couch and jogged around the table, before halting mid-step to turn around and grab mine and Alvi’s mugs, taking them with me to the icebox and putting them inside as I withdrew the now-cold silica cooling pad. Her ears were high and head cocked in confusion, so I clarified, “Normally we treat our period pains with hot-pads, but they can be cooled just as well!”
I handed Alvi the pad as I sat beside her on the couch, reaching over the side for a light blanket. She held it against her neck first, whining with a long breath, before placing it long-ways between her thighs with a relieved sigh.
“Ah. Dealing with that kind of heat, then?” I asked, inviting her to sit closer, wrapping my arm around her when she snuggled up tight against my side.
“Yeah,” she said with an amused whistle as she resumed tinking away at her blacksmith puzzle. “Not many other kinds of heat in it.”
I smiled as I held out the remote and pressed play. “Well let’s hope some overdramatic Gojid will at least distract you.”