Light stopped demolishing the poor cake for a moment to ponder Senjen’s statement. His mouthparts pursed mid-gulp, giving the QV a goofy, dumbfounded look in ensemble with his bulging eyes.

“I suppose It's been so long I’ve just…adapted. But yes, it has been hard to manage on FGC alms. Sorry Ruk.” Light shot a look at the Tekeri, who sat calmly and ramrod straight. She shrugged nonchalantly.

Light returned to his cake as Jess & Senjen sparred, smartly moving it out of the way of the Utaysi’s body as he slammed into the table. When he finally finished breaking apart the last layer and gobbling it down he met eyes with Ruknar again. She raised both ‘hand’ and contorted the three claws on each into a particular shape that Light recognised. 

She’d first made it almost two years ago. Light was not long out of emergency surgery to rebuild his broken body after a vicious gun battle and car chase had taken their toll. He’d spent four fraught days immersed in a specialised intensive care vat. The gel inside could work wonders over time, but his internal bleeding was so serious that he had to be be operated on immediately. A journeyman QV surgeon was tracked down and brought in to do the job, assisted by a synthetic intelligence.

When his life was no longer hanging in the balance and a long road of recovery wended ahead, Light was transferred to a specialist QV ward managed by the For Good Cause Foundation. They were a Tekeri non-profit medical aid and technology organisation that worked in some of the most impoverished and dangerous places in the galaxy. Apparently, Korit qualified as both of those things.

Ruknar was one of the junior doctors assigned to Light’s ward. On her first day there, she surveyed him in his vat from the corridor. He was struggling weakly against the robotic arms that were trying to feed him fronds of a sea kelp. It was a well-known delicacy for QV and had been widely cultivated. His skin shades were all over the place, flashing the colours of the very sick and confused.

“Stop! He wants crustaceans, not kelp. Get him some shellfish.”  Ruknar ordered.

“How can you tell?” The synth monitoring his room asked her.

“You see how the cilia structure on his anterior appendage doubles back on itself…in an ‘S’ shape? Thats how they hold shellfish to crack them against rocks. He can’t communicate normally, so he’s mimicking how he’d hold one. Like a child would.”

Rukner watched Light greedily eat the crustacean flesh gently scooped into his flaccid mouthparts, talons crossed in front of her. When Light was done, she noticed his head move and eyes strain to look at her. Ripples of calming blue crossed his scarred hide. The Tekeri held her hands up and recreated the S-grip as best she could, pressing it against the gel. Light did the same.

“It doesn’t cost much to enter, and there is a prize for the winner.” Ruknar paraphrased from the invitation.

“There is no chance. People win contests for a living on Korit.” Light huffed dismissively.

“Then we can watch them at work instead? Or…” Ruk was querying her AI assistant for other events in the area.

“There’s a solidarity benefit festival in Kwe-Lungo park to…protest the Vermilion Consortium’s depreciation of cross-species support within the Ecumene project.” She paraphrased, before looking seriously at people’s reactions. Light looked blankly back at her.