I think this is the closest thing this site has to a DW-style 'personal journal' option right now, so... tah-dah.
Original Xeno-Courtship Thingamajig
This is another one written for /Write_now. It's a little short (and more than a little not-proofread, whoops), but I just really like the idea of a man sitting down to an awkward coffee date with a shy bird alien who's been leaving weird presents on his doorstep for weeks. Maybe I'll expand on it a bit and post it to AO3, who knows.
There was a rotting insect thrown haphazardly across Levin's doorstep.
The beast was easily the size of his forearm, glistening black and oozing some sort of vile green fluid. Strange compound eyes stared lifelessly towards the twin suns above, reflecting light in a pattern that might have been dazzling if not for its source.
Fucking Oldan wildlife, he thought with a shudder of disgust. Every bit of it was giant, murderous, or (most commonly) both. At this rate he was tempted just to never leave his house again--he could quit his cushy job, start up a little home business selling reinforced bug nets to fellow terrified expats, order all his groceries online. It would be a living.
Except... Levin shuddered. Except his home might not be all that safe, if these things kept showing up on his doorstep.
The first one he'd chalked up as an accident. It had been a bird no bigger than the size of his palm with a broken wing and a broken neck; he would have stepped on it on his way inside if a flash of bright red feathers under his boot hadn't caught his attention.
Birds hit things all the time: windows, doors, walls. He'd picked it up carefully (using gloves, of course; he'd learned the hard way that even the most innocent-seeming of animals on this planet tended to be poisonous) and laid it to rest in his side garden.
Elvin thought nothing more of it until the second one had shown up. Then the third, then the fourth... a menagerie of corpses had paraded themselves across his front step these past few weeks, fish and fowl and mammals alike. If he were a xenobiologist or a taxidermist, Levin might have been fascinated. As it was, he was mostly starting to feel very afraid.
Natural causes hadn't torn this bug to pieces and dumped it here. Somethng--or someone--was targeting him specifically.
Still. He had a professional image to maintain, a company to represent, and a guest to charm. He certainly wasn't about to embarrass the human race by breaking down into a trembling heap right in front of his alien coworker.
(Or not-alien, he supposed? It was easy to forget that he was the outsider on this planet.)
"Sorry about the mess," he said as smoothly as he could manage, stepping over the carcass to swipe his thumb across the front door's lock. It swung open with a click, and he gestured forward to urge his coworker past the dead thing and into his (tidy, impressive, not-carcass-filled) house. With any luck, she'd assume it was just a little mishap. Perhaps these sorts of bugs suicided on people's doorsteps all the time on Olda.
His coworker wasn't walking forward, though. She wasn't paying any attention at all to him: her entire focus was on the insect carcass laying at her feet. Her golden eyes were wide, wide open, and the feathers lying along her back ruffled in some sort of gesture he couldn't understand or decode.
"Leaf-Walking?" he asked.
Her gaze turned on him, then, intense and predatory as ever. He barely managed not to flinch.
"How long has this been here?" Leaf-Walking demanded.
"I, um." Shit. Shit shit shit. This really was something awful, then. He was being threatened, or cursed, or insulted, and he'd dragged her right into the middle of it. "Only since this morning, I promise. Someone left it here while I was away."
Leaf-Walking's thin, opaque eyelids wicked across her eyes in a strange, sudden gesture. The movement contrasted with the complete stillness of the rest of her body. "Is this the first?"
Part of him was tempting to lie, say yes, I swear never seen anything like it before, but he'd never been good at keeping his stories straight. Better to tell it all now and see if there was anything she could tell him in return.
"No. This is the seventh. There was a little red bird, and a toad-thing with six legs, and a snake with its belly slit open..."
"I can't believe it," Leaf-Walking breathed. "Levin, you have to tell me everything!"
"Wait, what?" He was no expert in her species' emotional cues, but even he could read the naked excitement in her voice. It was more emotion than he'd heard from her in all the weeks they'd worked together so far combined.
"Do you know who he is? Have you met properly? A lesser running toad, I can't believe it, I've never even heard of anyone around here who found one of them--"
"Wait," Levin interrupted. He barely understood half of what she was saying anymore, but there were a few key words he'd managed to grab onto. "You're saying you know why some madman's been leaving dead animals in front of my house all this time?"
"Madman? You don't..." Leaf-Walking pressed a clawed hand to her primary mouth. "No, of course you don't. I didn't even think about it. There's no reason at all that you'd know, is there?"
"Know what?"
"You're not being threatened," Leaf-Walking said. "You're being courted."



