Serix threw Cassie a quizzical look when she handed him a bent strip of metal with a puffy white thing speared on the end. He continued to watch her while she proceeded to stick her own metal strip into the bonfire until the ‘marshmallow’ began to change colors. Then, she withdrew the strip and held out the brownish thing to him after letting it cool for a moment. He looked at it curiously. It was edible? He had never seen a food like that before. He wondered if it was part of some exotic plant on Earth.

His eyes widened when he took a bite of the marshmallow. He hadn’t been expecting the bland-looking thing to taste so sweet, but it was even more sugary than the Earth fruits he had tried. In fact, it was almost on the border of [i]too[/i] sweet for his pallet. Humans had an incredible tolerance for sugar if they ate many foods like this. Still, it wasn’t bad, so he nodded at Cassie who was awaiting his reaction, “It’s… different from anything I’ve ever eaten before. We never had anything nearly this sweet back on my people’s ship. Plants on Earth must produce much more sugar than the ones we saved from Lunair to produce a taste like this.” He stuck his own metal strip into the fire to cook the marshmallow, but he overestimated the amount of time it would take for the food to turn brown. When he moved to pull it out of the flames, some of the fire continued to glow around the now-black marshmallow. He quickly blew it out and looked over the charred thing curiously. Well, no point in wasting food. He shrugged and ate the whole thing in one bite, and then turned to Cassie with a grin, “You know, I actually like it better this way.”

“Hey, the alien likes junk food, too,” Sarah laughed, walking up to them with Jerry and Quincy. She glanced at Cassie and beamed, speaking to her in an odd accent, “Oh, honey, you look [i]darling[/i].” She laughed and switched back to her normal voice. “Makeup suits you. You should wear it more often.”

“She’s [i]trying[/i] to say you look pretty,” Jerry snorted and rolled his eyes. “She’s just not very good at it.”

“Oh, shut up,” Sarah replied with an equally sarcastic roll of her eyes. She sat down next to Cassie and dug through a bag of marshmallows to stick on her metal strip. She and Jerry continued to bicker good-humoredly and Quincy crossed over to kneel by Serix. The male leaned in close to his face, staring at him with an unreadable expression. Serix shifted his weight, uncertain about what the human was trying to do. While his people didn’t have as much of a need for “personal space,” the humans always seemed to avoid getting too close to each other. This was the first time one of them had gotten this close to him—apart from Cassie, of course, but even she had been uncomfortable with his space-less behavior when they first met.

“Do you have an off-switch?” Quincy said suddenly.

“A what?” Serix frowned in confusion.

The human tapped the spot between his eyes, “For the glowing thing you always do when it gets dark. I’ve always wondered about that. Is it automatic or something? Or do you manually turn it on and off?”

“Well, technically my eyes always glow,” Serix answered with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. “You just can’t see it when it’s bright out. But no, I can’t ‘turn it off,’ as you say. Back on my home planet, we didn’t have anything like your Sun. We had three moons, which reflected the distant stars, but everything was much darker than it is on Earth. So, to compensate for the lack of light, my people used natural luminescence. Many other life forms did, too.” He sighed thoughtfully. “From what I’ve heard, Lunair was a beautiful place because the forest floors were lit up with thousands of different-colored bioluminescent plants and animals. I wish I could have seen it for myself.”

“So, you’ve never actually been to the place where your people are from?”

“No, the migration happened long before I was born. There are only a few elders who still remember their days on Lunair. The planet is probably lifeless by now.”

“Then from now on, I want you to think of this place as your home planet,” Quincy announced, slapping him on the shoulder. “Earth may not be as snazzy as that glowing world of yours, but there’re still plenty of cool things here. Hell, you’ve even got yourself a girl! I’d say our planet’s scored more points than Lunair ever will. True?”

“True,” Serix couldn’t help but grin at the human’s optimistic attitude. If only the others were more like him, living with them would be so much more enjoyable. He spent a few more minutes conversing with Quincy and then turned to Cassie once they were done. “It’s getting pretty late. Do you think we should head back?”