"No no no, [i]this[/i] is my favorite part."

Popcorn was a very human thing. In all of Zik's approximately four seconds of extranet searching, he had not come up with another species that had an appropriate parallel of popped grains consumed traditionally while watching a film. It was cheap, an efficient delivery system for any of a dozen spices, and even moderately tasty--especially when stale, he found, which gave it's normal crunch a bit of spongy texture. Human and salarian teeth were relatively similar, so it seemed likely that the sensation was as pleasurable for them as it was for him.

Even if the little fucking husk stuck between his teeth was figuratively killing him.

On the surprisingly large screen ahead of him, a pair of humans were copulating. They had been for 10 minutes and 41...2...3 seconds now, mammals inserting organs and swapping fluids in a disgustingly fascinating little ritual. The fact that it had been filmed in the apartment he was currently sitting made it even more entertaining, the cross between the illicit conduct and the sheer mundanity of it almost laughable. Placed on the facet of the light above the bed was a small and nearly undetectable camera, and if the view wasn't quite as humorous as it might have been given a better directing budget it did its job. The little couple on the screen pulled away from each other for a moment, tanned skin mixing with spacer-white, as one of the little figures offered a tinny admission.

"...those cargo doors, baby, you've got incoming!"

Zik couldn't help but [i]snerk[/i]--another human term he found both amusing and accurate, a precise combination of a smirk and a snort. Who [i]said[/i] things like that? His finger flicked to a small button on his omnitool and the film jumped back a second, the man on the screen repeating the statement again...and again...and again...

"Who [i]says[/i] things like that?" He asked the same man, who was now sitting next to him on the couch holding the popcorn in his lap. [i]Holding[/i] might have been a pretty generous word, though, considering his hands were taped together behind his back. It was a good thing the bowl was stainless steel--having seen the places he'd put the naked organ beneath it, it would have been extremely unhygienic to use anything even remotely viable for bacterial life.

He responded the same way he had to pretty much all of Zik's jokes, comments, thoughts, and professional annotations--a furious wriggle of his head and some desperate plea muffled into yet another 'mmph' by the adhesive on his mouth.

"Not saying my species would have done any better." The frog-man admitted, reaching over and taking another handful of popcorn with his three fingers. Worse than five for containing the independent little snacklets--a spoon would be more efficient. "Salarian pornography--already a joke. Doesn't exist. 'Hey mama, plop me some roundies.'" Another snerk. "Not appealing."

Stephen Vellon was not having a good night. It had been going well enough until he reached his apartment, at which point it all went [i]tits up[/i] (hurr hurr--Zik had already used that one to death) at the sensation of a stunner going off in his left armpit. His next sensation was the vinyl weave of his awful couch under his bare ass, followed swiftly by both the intense body-ache of post-electrocution human muscle cramping and the confinement of tape at his wrists, ankles, knees, elbows, and lips. The psychotic salarian grinning at him--oh wait, that was just the tattoo on his face, [i]no, God, it was both[/i]--and the hitherto unknown home video of last week's little romp with that tramp a few doors down just made things worse.

"This is the part where I let you talk." Zik was saying as he watched the screen contemplatively, stroking his chin while crunching on his latest handful of popcorn. He was currently hoping to get the hull stuck between L12 and L13 out by consuming more of the stuff; that a four year old could have told him it was a fool's gambit escaped him. "And the first thing you say is 'please, let me go!'. And I say 'No'. And you say 'please, I'll give you anything, if it's about the money--' and I say 'You couldn't pay me enough'. Or 'Fuck your money'. Or 'No', again. I haven't really worked that one out yet. Anyway, then you say 'Please, I have a family', and that's when I laugh. They're the ones that paid for this!" And he did laugh--come on, it was at least a [i]little[/i] funny!

Apparently not to Stephen, whose eyes went from wide and terrified to wide and horrified.

"Mockler's Syndrome. Sexually transmitted infection, mutation of common vorcha bacteria when introduced to human vessel. Asymptomatic in human males, extremely unpleasant for human females. Symptoms include painful inflammation of uterus and ovaries. Treatable, but unpleasant. Your wife was the first diagnosed case on Brighton 5, which meant infidelity."

He paused for a moment to let the cheesy, stupid, awful one-liner repeat itself again in the silence. Stephen closed his eyes.

"Wife wanted to know what was going on, hired someone to track you. Someone contacted me. Daughter saw the video he made and threw in extra if you didn't come back and I had...more than the usual amount of intoxicant purchases recently." He looked to the man with a grimace, almost sheepish. "Sorry. Bad month."

The man whimpered slightly.

Zik had to admit, he was losing interest fast. This wasn't exactly some mastermind he was dealing with here, no Moriarty to his Holmes. This was a sleazy mercenary who pretended to his family that he wasn't off taking grunt work and fucking prostitutes. It might as well have been a transaction, something fast-forwarded past. Even his efforts to entertain himself were seeming increasingly juvenile, desperate attempts to eke even [i]some[/i] satisfaction out of--

The Sur'Krasher's hit single [i]Reap, Sow, Reap[/i] emanated from his omnitool, stopping him in the middle of his thought process. Raising a finger to his very confused captive--[i]hang on, hang on, gimme a second[/i]--he flicked a small button on his omnitool and opened up the communications link.

"Trish Rayana. Long time. Something up?"

Pop. In a single smooth motion he drew-aimed-fired the Scorpion pistol fixed at the holster on his thigh. It seemed a natural movement for him, a reflex--he didn't even have to look. The shock hit Stephen before the pain of the bullet, his eyes going glassy and shoulders slumping for a moment. The sound of Trish's questioning reply was tinny through the speaker in his ear.

"No no, it's fine."

A little timer began to tick in the back of his head, a subroutine long ago memorized---[i]three...two...one...[/i]

The high explosive charge in the bullet primed. This second [b]pop[/b] was much louder. Zik reached up and wiped a gobbet of what used to be intestine from the bridge of his nose.

"I can talk."