Octavia Girl

Chapter Four

Autocorrect Makes Fallcet Faucet (obviously because he’s a drip)

Jenna had a conference room made up in the Sand Palace. The place was not decorated like the Dahlia Palace, which was all white and vibrant magenta. The Sand Palace boasted glittering walls that were actually covered in sand. One brush of her hand against the wall of the conference room left Jenna a little speechless. They had wallpapered the rooms with sandpaper—pretty sandpaper—but sandpaper nonetheless. She was so grateful she had not been given the Sand Palace. She would have filed her nails on the walls like she was part cat.

Putting those thoughts aside, Jenna met Fallcet at the conference table with Crimp and Sardius on either side of him. The most delightful thing about the newly crowned diplomat was that he had Sardius’ handprint on his face in bright purple. Sardius' slap the previous day had been so hard and so intense that it left that kind of a mark? She felt a fresh flush of love for Sardius. He was too incredible.

“Jenna, was all this really necessary?” Fallcet asked darkly as he rattled his handcuffs. He was a mess. He needed to shave, shower, change his clothes, get some sleep, and maybe have something to eat.

“Have you had breakfast?” she asked from the head of the conference table. She was looking to solve only the most pressing of his problems.

He nodded.

“Then have a seat. Leave his handcuffs on. I don’t want any sudden movements in this meeting.”

Sardius and Crimp placed him a few seats down from Jenna. Close enough so she could see the expressions on his face, but far enough away that he couldn’t snatch at her if he wanted to.

She was about to start talking, about to begin the interview, about to start talking when she suddenly remembered that Sardius had told her that it was his policy to put bombs under chairs… under all the chairs when he set up for a meeting. This was the first time she’d had a formal meeting in a conference room since she became a diplomat.

Adjusting her earpiece, she wondered if there was an indirect way she could ask Ixy if there was a bomb under her chair. Unable to think of a way to ask that didn’t give it away, she turned back to Fallcet.

“I-is everything okay?” he asked, sputtering a little through his swollen lip.

“Yeah. Everything is great,” she took a heavy breath in, centered her thoughts, and started her questioning. “I guess the biggest question on my mind is why you wanted to be a diplomat without living on the floating palaces with the rest of us? Are your boys at the AAMC planning on bombing the planet, killing all of the rest of the diplomats, and leaving you as the only living survivor?”

“How crude,” Fallcet said drolly.

Jenna tapped her nails against the smooth tabletop. “You don’t think they’d bomb Octavia Prime? The method of murder is unimportant, but was that their plan? If you were away, you’d be spared whatever gruesome fate they had in store for the rest of us?”

Fallcet stuck his chin out and looked away like he was bored.

Jenna considered his stance. “You do realize I’m going to have to keep you close as a response to your taking a crown, especially because it was without my consent.”

“Does that mean I’ll be sleeping in your bed? I don’t know if there will be room for the three of us,” he said, giving Sardius a dirty look.

Jenna was completely unrattled by his insult. “No,” she said without skipping a beat. “It means that you are now under house arrest. You are not allowed to leave the floating palaces without the permission of every single diplomat. As for where you will sleep, you’ll sleep here, in the Sand Palace. I’ve arranged for the master suite to be given to you.”

“Pity,” he said sadly.

Jenna leaned back in her chair. “What’s your play here? I’ve already refused you romantically. What good is it going to do to sexually harass me now?”

“Nothing. It just drives you nuts because you clearly don’t have much romantic experience. I know you’re not shagging him,” he said, pointing a thumb at Sardius. “He’s just sleeping in your bed because you’re too scared to sleep alone.”

Jenna refused to let a look of annoyance cross her features. She didn’t know who she should be cursing from the orbital security team who allowed their system to be hacked and, thus, video footage of her everyday life to be leaked. He was trying to freak her out and it was working though she hadn’t yet let it show. She had to buckle down and kick him back.

“The algorithm matched us,” he continued confidently. “Having me around will be like torture for you. You said you didn’t want me before. Well, that was because of the mushroom I ate and the fact that you don’t want to listen to the AAMC. By extension, you don’t want to talk to me, but soon, you’ll be crying into your meal replacement shake. You’ll want me like I’m an itch under your skin that you can’t scratch. I’ll be here, but you won’t be able to have me.”

She groaned loudly. “You are so dumb!”

The sound caught him off-guard and he jumped a little in his seat.

“I am very romantically experienced,” Jenna continued. “That’s why I’m such an unpleasant person. It’s because I don’t fall for cheap lines or cheap men and you look super cheap to me. And you’re extra dumb because you’re trying to threaten the thing I hold dearest in the world. My duty.”

“Your duty? You weren’t even doing this job this time last year.”

Jenna smacked her lips with a condescending smile. Fallcet didn’t understand what her grandfather had been like and what his effect on Jenna had been. Her grandfather had been everything she loved. He had been gentle, intelligent, and the person she wished she could be like most. He had taught her about her grandmother and he held Jenna up in the air like she was the most important child in the universe. Because of the dark hooked crown on her head that she couldn’t take off, Jenna believed him completely.

She cleared her throat. “Fallcet, no matter what the matching algorithm said, I’m not attracted to you. I didn’t fill out my side of the test. Someone else filled it out for me on my behalf. It’s invalid. I’m not going to fall for you and the longer you keep spouting crap, the less we’ll get done. The only path forward that doesn’t involve me killing you is you allowing me to finish my work the way I began—my way. I’m still willing to crown at least one more AAMC guy, but I’m not willing to give them all the votes they want.”

“You have to,” he insisted. “If you don’t, they’ll kill all your diplomats to get the majority they need.”

“They wouldn’t dare kill Celestina,” Jenna shot back, thinking of the reporter’s famous and fabulously rich media mogul family.

“Fine. That’s true, but they’ll kill Excelyn or Philip. Like you said, it’s the only way to get the crowns off them. It doesn’t matter who you crown at this point, if they aren’t approved of by the AAMC, they’ll kill them.”

Jenna didn’t worry about how the AAMC would kill them. They had proven that since they were able to kidnap Jenna that there might not be any limits to what they could do, even on a planet like Octavia Prime. The Octavians just didn’t operate in the same world as the Adamis since one was a land creature and the other a sea creature.

She glanced at Sardius. He was pulling his thumb across his throat in a lazy kill motion. Crimp was sticking her index finger in her ear and making her hand look like a gun that was going to blow her own head off.

Jenna felt her heartbeat relax a little as she saw their attitudes. They weren’t scared. They knew talk was cheap.

“I’m not sure that will work, even if they kill me, Excelyn, and Phillip,” Jenna taunted. “I mean, someone managed to get rid of all the last round of diplomats, and look, the AAMC still isn’t getting what they want.”

Fallcet did not like being reminded of that fact.

Jenna cleared her throat. “I can’t rescind your appointment now, but you know what I can do?”

“What?”

“I can give you a chance,” she offered generously. She felt generous as she said the words. “I think that after you spend some time with us, working with us, your opinion of me, and what I’m doing will change for the better.”

He scoffed.

She ignored him and began by giving him some information that she hoped he would find valuable. “I have to tell you something because you don’t seem to know how crowning works. I imagine the program hasn’t been used to its full potential since my grandmother retired, but there are more than three more crowns left in my bag of tricks. There are not just eight to distribute. There are stacks of them. It’s only that we need eight diplomats to vote on what treaties to present to the Octavians. There could be twenty diplomats. I was crowned for years before I was brought to serve.”

“That’s part of the problem,” Fallcet rasped. “They needed you for years and you didn’t come. We haven’t had a full roster of diplomats in decades, and that is your fault.”

Jenn laughed again. “It’s impossible for you to make me feel bad about this. No one approached me and told me that they needed me on Octavia Prime. Everyone just half-assedly tried to abduct me with lame lines… and… shit,” she said slowly, putting the pieces together in a new way in her mind. “It wasn’t the Octavians who were trying to abduct me all those times. It was the Adamis. I didn’t evade 212 abduction attempts. Your guys weren’t trying to get me to come help. They were trying to leave me on Earth without bringing me to Octavia Prime and covering it with half-hearted attempts to get my attention. Armen was an Octavian idea, not an Adamis idea. You guys would have left me on Earth forever.”

“Why are you attributing those actions to me?” Fallcet responded angrily. “None of that was my idea. It was not my idea. I am an Adamis, but those actions were not my idea. The only thing that is my idea is this.” He waved his hand around. “This is the best thing I can do.”

“This?” Jenna repeated, looking for clarity.

“Yes. This,” Fallcet spat. “I am a diplomat and a very good one too. There are some very trigger-happy people in the AAMC and they want to go to war with the Octavians. By the end of next year, they’ll have twice as many ships as the Octavians and though they have historically been less than capable when it comes to space travel, all of that is going to change.”

“Why?”

“Because some cute Adamis scientist figured out how to make a liquid that humans can breathe. Humans were not built to suck a liquid into their lungs and push it out again whether it has oxygen they can absorb in it or not, but with a few slight body modifications, the liquid can escape their body through tubes set between their ribs. All a person has to do is train their body to only breathe in and it works. Then, they can move around with almost as much control as an octopus in water. Granted, we don’t have as many appendages to work controls on a spacecraft, but they’re training people to work in teams to have better cooperation. It’s looking bad for the Octavians because so many powerful Adamis are pissed at them for what they perceive as overcharging. We need to get the AAMC voice straight through to the Octavians. They don’t have to kill anyone if you’re willing to vote along with the AAMC people and we can’t fucking wait for you to casually crown three more people you deem worthy on TV. People in high places are getting impatient, and I wouldn’t like the Octavians to get attacked with no warning because diplomatic talks are on hiatus eternally.”

Jenna clicked her tongue and snapped her fingers. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Good. This is good.”

Fallcet’s face contorted. His exact thoughts were a mystery to Jenna, but he refocused himself and continued, “What I’m saying is that I am trying to reestablish a line of communication between the Adamis and the Octavians. What you said about the Adamis’ half-hearted attempts to get you off-world are probably a hundred percent true and they change my perception of you. If what you said about that is true, then I’m sorry for what I said. You weren’t trying to evade your responsibility.”

“No. I wasn’t. I think I can help you, but I do need a few things.”

“Tell me.” He looked quite desperate.

Jenna glanced over his head at Sardius and Crimp. The poison girl had crossed her arms and was looking at the back of Fallcet’s head like he had spilled the beans in a way she had never believed possible without a little well-planted toxicity.

The boneman looked grouchy. “We’re going to have to let his bruises heal before we put him on TV,” he said simply before he leaned forward and unbuckled Fallcet’s cuffs. “Either that or cake him in makeup.”