LARP Night on Union Station by E. M. Foner

Author:E. M. Foner [Foner, E. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-03T22:00:00+00:00

Twelve

“Come in, come in,” Dorothy greeted the Frunge attorney. “You’ve got great timing.”

“Flazint appears to be busy,” Tzachan mumbled, tightening his grip on an ancient valise that looked like it had been passed down from his ancestors. “I could come back in—”

“Nonsense,” the ambassador’s daughter interrupted, and grabbing his free arm, dragged the shy alien into the design room. A rarely used 3D modeling machine languished in the corner, and Flazint had a small metallurgical laboratory set up against one wall. “She’s just experimenting with coatings for silver thread to keep it shiny or something.”

“I wouldn’t want to interfere with—”

“Flazint!” Dorothy called loudly, and followed up by throwing a pincushion at the back of her fellow designer’s lab coat. “Company’s here.”

The Frunge girl carefully set down the beaker of bubbling liquid she had been about to pour and pulled off the head-and-shoulders shroud that she wore for protection while working with chemicals. Her hair vines were wrapped in a tight bun to reduce the chance of accidental damage, and her hands and arms were covered with heavy gauntlets.

“You have to stop throwing pincushions at me while I’m working,” she complained, while lowering a metal hood down over her experiment. “Just ping me.”

“Tzachan is here,” Dorothy repeated, maintaining a tight grip on the attorney’s wrist. “I’m going to go get the conference room ready and find Shaina and Brinda, so you show him what we do. Don’t forget to see me for a fitting before you go,” she instructed the alien, and then slipped past him into the reception area.

“I’m sorry for interrupting your work,” Tzachan apologized. He suddenly realized that his newly freed hand had nothing to do, and he vacillated between moving it behind his back and attempting to strike a casual pose like the models he had seen in corridor advertisements. After a moment’s hesitation, he tried to insert the hand into his suit jacket pocket, but it seemed to be sewed closed just below the flap. To the Frunge girl, it looked like he was scratching himself below the ribs.

“I wasn’t doing anything important,” she said, taking a small step in his direction and accidentally kicking the pincushion, which bounced off a stool and rolled to a stop between the attorney’s shoes. The hair vines of both of the Frunge turned dark green in embarrassment. Then Flazint’s eyes went wide with horror. “Dorothy closed the door on her way out?”

The attorney spun around and stared at the offending door. The ambassador’s daughter had waved it shut as she left, meaning that he was alone in an enclosed space with an unmarried woman who wasn’t a family member.

“I’m so sorry,” he apologized, frantically waving at the door, which didn’t respond since he was too far inside the room. “What’s wrong with the thing? Is it locked?”

“Even Dorothy wouldn’t do this intentionally,” Flazint said, unwilling to accept that her friend’s alien sense of humor might indeed stoop so low. “Try stepping closer. We keep the proximity fields tight so that the door doesn’t slide open every time somebody visits the business office.

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