Zufa

After she took a shower herself, she cooked me supper, and it was pretty much like I expected. Gray hairy crab legs, some leftover meatloaf, and something like caviar. Since I couldn't care less about being poisoned or drugged at this point, I ate everything on my plate.
She called that gray stuff "Zufa" and it was halfway decent. It wasn't what I expected, but it was all right. The closest thing I could compare it to is pork mixed with candy and thousand island salad dressing. That's not accurate, but it's kind of what it was like. The caviar tasted, well, like caviar, with sort of a cheese flavor. I only ate the stuff because I was hungry.
While I ate, she told me stuff about the job. She said we're required to wear uniforms on the station, and that the station is fairly large and you could actually see outside. She said we were in a shuttle and that's why it had no windows. She said the station is powered by solar energy and gravitational power generated by Jupiter and that the break rooms get all the channels because we're up in space where the satellites are.
She also told me about some new policies, like how there aren't any breaks, only a fifteen minute lunch and that the caller needs to scan their identification into the computer before I can assist them with their locked spaceship.
The break thing caught me off guard. I asked her what happened if I had to go to the bathroom, being there's no "health breaks" or breaks period, and she just said "I'd learn more about that when I got onboard". Whatever. I figured I didn't have a choice, but I could probably find some wiggle room somewhere.
We got done eating and I went back to watching HBO on the hologram. Since we weren't talking, she made bad attempts at conversation. She asked me what I thought about my coworkers at BBL. I gave her a guarded response, so she asked me if I had any prejudices against race.
I said I was okay with black people, and as a Christian I have to love people of all races, but certain customers get on my phone and give the whole African American race a bad name.
She tells me that her people are discriminated against by the color of their fur. That made me laugh, but she was serious. She said it was difficult for the green people to get work. Okay. Sure. That's great. I'm wearing your clothes and a bikini because you made me throw out all my stuff and ruined my food and I'm supposed to feel sorry for you.
She asked me if I liked her fur color and I said it was okay.

Clothes

I went to the entrance, looking for the compartment I stowed my luggage in. She wasn't happy about that since I was trailing that slime everywhere, and kept telling me so, but I didn't care. In fact, I was pleased to finally get even.
My gloating turned out to be short lived. When I opened the compartment, I found my suitcase was missing.
I asked her where it was and she said "in a field behind NCO."
I said, "Isn't that where we are?" and asked her to open the hatch.
But she said we were in space and if I opened the hatch an alarm would sound and I'd be sucked out into the vacuum.
I said likely story, but then she asked me how it was that I floated if we were on the ground.
She said she'd show me the view outside once I was cleaned up, but I didn't want to hear it.
I tried to open the hatch anyway, so she typed something on a panel that kept it from opening.
I told her to take me back to earth so I could get my suitcase, but she said we were on a schedule and were actually near Mars right now. Then she told me I shouldn't have put my bag in there.
I tried to hit her, but she saw me trying to run at her and swam out of the way, so I ended up drifting across the room.
I spent several minutes trying to hit her. It was difficult due to the weightless environment, but I managed to catch her off guard and hit her in the stomach. I then yelled for her to get my suitcase.
At long last, she finally told me she could, but with one stipulation. If we went back to get it, she'd take me off the project and I'd be stuck with BBL and Target, and only if I'm lucky. She said my other option would be to say I was sorry and wash up and she'd "pretend like this didn't happen."
Like I said before this trip, I have nowhere else to go. I said fine, I'd shower. But I didn't say sorry, I just asked her if she had towels.
She said she had something better, and some nice outfits I could wear. I said I'd rather keep the ones I had on, but she said they at least needed to be washed and that she didn't want me stinking up the place more than I already had.
I told her that would be pretty good revenge, but I had to admit the smell was more than I could tolerate. I didn't say that last part.
I gave up and asked her to show me the clothes.
So we go into her bedroom and she takes out a box from the storage compartment. She took some items out and showed me, but everything looked gay. Bright colors, silky, stretchy fabrics, midriff shirts, feminine looking leather apparel, girly t-shirts, bikinis, dresses. No jeans whatsoever.
I asked her if she had any menswear and she said this was men's wear. I clarified and said straight men's wear. She said that straight Abreya males wore that stuff. I said I wasn't one, which got a laugh (I guess I walked into that one). Ignoring it, I asked her if she had the stuff that regular men wore on earth, like jeans and boxers and t-shirts and such. She said no.
I contemplated my options. I could wear this gay stuff from the box, or I could raid her closet and try to find something more suitable. I knew she had some dress slacks and turtlenecks. It might be a feminine fit, but so was all this other stuff.
So I asked her if I could use her work clothes.
She said she wasn't sure, and that I might get them smelly. I told her I wasn't wearing the clothes from that box and started poking around the walls, trying to find where her closet was. She finally got annoyed and opened another compartment, showing me the contents of a box of clothes. Real pants!
I tried to grab a pair of slacks, but she said I'd get it dirty, so I just pointed to them and a turtleneck and said I'd wear those.
She said okay and led me into what can only be described as a bathroom. It didn't have any of the fixtures I recognized, so I asked her how to use everything. Unsurprisingly, she asked me to disrobe. I said I didn't need her to bathe me, I just needed to know how it worked.
She showed me how to use the bulb things to make it spray soap and foam, and how to vacuum it out of the chamber. There was an oxygen mask there and she said I'd need it when all the air got sucked out. I said okay and she showed me a "drier", and how to use that instead of a towel. And then she told me to go on and shower and she'd put the clothing in a compartment by the door. Not trusting her, I said I'd wait for her to physically put them there.
I waited and she indeed put the clothes in the compartment. I checked and made sure they were the slacks and the turtleneck I asked for.
I asked her how to shut the door and she showed me. Of course, she wouldn't leave the room until I said something. But she did, and I took my shower.
It was kind of weird. The soap came out of the sprayer, and another had the water, and I had to use the mask to keep from drowning. She must have hard water, because that sprayer hurt.
I got out and tried the drier. It felt like I was in a giant sized version of one of those Dymo driers they have in movie theater restrooms. I got dry in seconds and then I went to the cubbyhole where she put the clothes.
She must have pulled a switch while I couldn't hear anything under the sprayers. Instead of the slacks and shirt, I found this drapey red shrug sweater, some green layered thing that looked like a miniskirt, and a silver bikini bottom thing.
I checked the other compartments, hoping that the clothes I wanted were in another location, but I could only find a bunch of equipment, lots of bottles with labels I couldn't read, and some horse grooming supplies.
I wasn't happy, but I was tired of fighting. Figuring I'd be in a better position to negotiate when I'm clothed rather than naked, I put on the bikini, skirt and sweater and I went out.
She looked at me and laughed and said I looked cute. I told her it wasn't funny, demanding I get the clothing I asked for.
She gave me a response that almost sounded like a script you'd use on an irate customer, understanding statements and all that jazz. It sounded fake.
I told her we're in zero gravity and a skirt just floats around me instead of concealing anything, and I still had no intention of sleeping with her.
She sighed and said she'd get me the clothes I wanted.
This time I got the turtleneck and the slacks I asked for. Once she brought them to me, I changed right in front of her, since I was already past my embarrassment threshold.

Slime

She was trying to convince me that my food was flushed away into her septic tank somewhere, but I wasn't convinced. I decided I needed more information. I was looking at a dark tunnel and didn't even see my food. Furthermore, I couldn't care less if I died. I acquired a gradual desire to end my existence when I became unemployed for an extended period a couple years ago. I was unemployed for months. I laid in my bed, apathetic to life, to the point where I decided that the things I was afraid of, like dark closets and basements and darkened attics full of creepy paintings were no longer something I should fear, that I'd rather get mauled to death by a ghost or a demon or a burglar than have to face another day of joblessness.
And this is what went through my mind when I decided to climb through the hole and take a look around. I should be employed at Hallmark doing art, and I'm working at a damn call center. So what if this situation is a little unusual. I still think life sucks, so I went down in the hole.
She didn't close it up when I went in, but she did something to make the fungus on the walls glow.
The tunnel was really cramped. Only about four feet tall, I think, and I'm about six feet tall.
I didn't see it from the hole, but there was also a foot thick layer of clear slime running along the bottom. The moment I entered the compartment, I sunk into it, my clothes soaked through to my skin.
I couldn't breathe without having my ribs and arms pressing against the walls, but I didn't want to breathe too deep anyway. The smell was literally undescribable. It wasn't like any scent or odor I knew from anywhere, so I had no grounds for comparison. It wasn't like a shit smell or like dog poop or a skunk or cow poop. I don't know what it smelled like, but it made me queasy. I pushed myself ahead, looking around for my food.
What I saw ahead of me was a chamber, about three feet in height, with an oozing "pad" of something fleshy covering the floor. The "pad" was pitted all over with these cup-like holes. I looked in one and came close to throwing up.
The cups contained these little worm creatures, about the size of pipe cleaners, with little mouths on one end and sightless flatworm eyes. They squirmed in and out of these holes, and it was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life.
I screamed and backed up to the hole. I was okay with dying. I wasn't okay with being infected with tapeworms or having those things crawling around in my bodily orfices.
She sticks her head through the hole and said they're harmless. I said right, like tapeworms or fecal bacteria or salmonella. I told her black widow spiders might be great in a petting zoo, but I wouldn't go there, and I wanted out. I saw my food nowhere in there anyway.
I tried to push myself out, but it was difficult to do in a frictionless confined space like that. Fortunately, she pulled me back out, and I was floating in her hallway, dripping and smelly.
Of course she told me I had to take a shower, and I reluctantly agreed. So then I went back to get my suitcase.
Problem.

Such a waste

Back to my story about what happened that Saturday a week and a half ago.
We're on the sofa, watching the "cable" thing, and she asks me what I want for lunch.
"Actually," I told her. "I brought something. How do I get my stuff out of that compartment?"
And then she giggles and says I'd have to go into the crawl space behind her bedroom and fish it out of the septic system.
Obviously, I wasn't happy. I cussed her out and told her that food costs money and there's poor people living in third world nations who would have killed to have that food. Her response was I was welcome to fish it out of her sewer and that she couldn't stomach the smell of earth food.
I told her that not everything can withstand ammonia and excrement. I said I put bread and spaghetti in there and it's not like a tin can where you can just wipe it off and not have it stink. I cussed some more and when she said it wasn't Christian I threatened to beat her up since the bible didn't say anything about it being a sin to physically assault a space alien.
When I began to think more clearly I told her that if she were a Christian she'd at least care a little something for the poor and wouldn't go about wasting food. She responds to that by saying I'm the one that put it there. At that point I screamed at her about how I wouldn't have if she had told me what I was doing instead of lying and playing like it was a storage compartment. Then I demanded to know where the crawl space was.
She led me back through the hallway, to the room with the bed that looked like a jellyfish, and into a narrow corridor off to one side of the room. I guess she could tell I was angry because she didn't try anything, she just pulled a panel off the wall and opened a fleshy partition, gesturing to it.
I looked in. What I saw was a narrow passage with slick slimy walls of that fleshy stuff. About three feet below the hole I could see a flat area leading into a dark tunnel.
I stared into there for more than a couple minutes, trying to figure out what to do. I'm claustrophobic, it didn't look too big, and the air didn't seem too fresh. In fact, there was a smell coming out of there that made my stomach ill. I looked at Sigma and she gave me this expression like it wasn't worth it.
Neither option looked that good. I could either dive down into the hole, get all smelly, and possibly get sealed up inside there forever, or I could give up and let her serve me hairy bug legs with eyes on them, being that I got a new "liver" or something now. Option A would be disgusting, possibly fatal. Option B meant playing straight into her hands, letting her taking advantage of me, and losing money.
More about this in the next post.

Back to the grind

I'm back to doing Target/BBL for awhile. I thought it would be refreshing to do halfway normal work for a change, but today sucked.
Halfway through the first hour of my shift, the computer system fails and I get this lady that asks me to guarantee it won't be too late to change her order if she calls back. I tell her I can't make that promise so she demands I call her back when the system is down, not the other way around. I told her I would. I took the verification information, but she put down the wrong name so I still had to call her.
It turns out to be a waste of my time. I was able to add the items she wanted and cancel the original shipment, but she wanted to combine coupons and use a coupon she didn't have, so that sucked. Also, the manager (Joe) handed me this pile of papers and a cheap "photo album", and one of the papers gave all these retarded reasons for an automatic fail on a call. It's as if to say they can fire me for any reason they feel like.
Once the phones came back on line, I really got in deep shit. This black lady that does the call monitors pulled me aside and said to go into meeting. I had to sit there at her desk, in Arthea's chair, while she did who knows what, and then she led me out of the BBL area. I go into this office and meet this other strange lady and they tell me the meeting is about an e-mail.
What happened was I had this lady on the phone the week before I left and she was pissed about losing a $20 Fashion Club reward without having it expired or applied to anything. I really thought a mistake was made, as the reward exists, but there's no documentation to support it being expired. It was still within the date, and nothing was recorded. So, unknowingly, I sent a message directly to the women's clothing company, and I guess I didn't put information in it, so they sent me a screenshot showing the unrelated $10 she just received recently. I sent an e-mail back saying, "That's obvious. What about the $20 reward that was expired without being used on any purchase?"
Only now am I catching heat for it.
Anyways, they browbeat the hell out of me, and I could sense I was about to lose my job. It's likely my new position would go with it. I said I was sorry, and lied and said the e-mail wasn't intended to insult.
Lessons I learned:
1. Never e-mail the client about anything. Send it all through the team lead.
2. Never side with the customer. Especially about $20. That f***ing bitch isn't going to get anything. Maybe there is a benefit to sending form letters.
I felt bad about making a false promise to the customer, and felt guilt about neglecting my duty to assist her with something I assumed she deserved, so I forwarded a request to have her reward reactivated to the team lead, Scott, who is a dead ringer for that stupid lawyer guy from the movie Idiocracy.
Scott didn't understand the problem, either. He told me about the wrong reward, the $20 that was used on a purchase, instead of the one that wasn't used on anything, and had no documentation of a purchase. I give up.
The lady was a whining, greedy, stuck-up bitch and probably had used it on something and it just wasn't documented. I don't care anymore. Nobody understands me. Let her call back about it. She'll be someone else's problem now.
Honestly, if Scott was looking at the right part of the account, he could be right. I'm just assuming he looked at the wrong reward. Either way, she's SOL.

Back on Terra Firma

It went on longer than a week.
I just got back today. I've got more to tell than I've got time with all my work and stuff going on, and I want to do some normal stuff like drawing and listening to .mp3's and playing video games for once. I might not do many posts about work for awhile, either. Life is crazy, and I can't easily pack everything into one day's posting.
On Saturday, I packed a week's worth of clothing, as well as my whole BSA camping kit because I didn't know what the hell I was getting into. The lock blade knife seemed like a good idea for self defense. I also brought towels. My experience at the Conifur convention told me to not trust people to provide anything.
In fact, I mentally debated the food issue. I assumed she had something, as she'd given me meatloaf and enchiladas before, but I worried if she'd slip me a mickey and I'd end up naked in a tank of slime again. On the other hand, I realized I'd be spending a week with her, possibly alone, and she'd just as easily slip something into my food supplies, inject me with something, or douse a rag with chloroform and knock me out with that. Still not sure, and wondering if she'd run out, I packed some food from the kitchen cabinets, and grabbed some other things from the store, enough for a week or more, and then I went to the ship.
Before I left, I told my parents I was going on a week long business trip and they were impressed. If they knew the truth, they probably wouldn't be as much. I told them I was going somewhere in Kansas, but wasn't sure where. Close enough. I may have been in a tank full of slime, and it may have left me smelling like...whatever for the rest of the day, and all that other stuff, but I still couldn't accept the idea that the sea cucumber thing could actually go into space.
So anyways, I brought my suitcase and grocery bags to the usual place.
Sigma showed up at the entrance of the "ship" dressed in a short green kimono top and black leather pants with her tail curling out from the back.
When she saw what I brought, she laughed at me.
I asked her where to put my groceries and she showed me a chute-like drawer on the wall. It seemed like as good a place as any so I slid a grocery bag down there. It didn't make a noise, so I figured it was cushioned for things like bread and eggs. When I asked if more would fit in there, she made this little grunting sound like a ferret and told me it would. Her odd grin should have told me something, but I'm not that good at reading people...or whatever she is.
So, figuring it to be like the baggage chute at an airport, I put the rest of my groceries in there. I asked her if there were a way to get them out again and she grunted and said yes, so I didn't think too much of it.
Then she took my suitcase. I followed her into another room to see where she'd put it and it was a good thing I did. Instead of tucking it away somewhere, she laid it on this thing that looked like a mammoth jellyfish and rooted through everything. She threw my clothing all over the floor and the jellyfish, then proceeded to poke around in my camping supplies.
I yelled at her and told her to quit, but she didn't. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was searching for contraband. I told her she was violating my privacy but she told me she was entitled to search my property for drugs due to the fact I signed an agreement to allow such searches when I first applied at NCO. I told her I remembered no such thing and she chided me for not reading it.
Then she found my lock blade knife. She said weapons weren't allowed onboard the Getohako, so I explained how useful it was for other things like cutting rope or cooking. She only responded by saying I didn't need it.
She set it aside and then told me I didn't need my matches or Swiss army knife, either. I tried to explain how they were harmless, but she didn't care. She took my bug repellant, and some other stuff, but I had given up arguing with her. It was pointless.
She took my stuff and put it in a locker somewhere. Then I had to pick up all my clothes. The jellyfish thing was kind of a bed, it seemed. It was spongy and flat and you could sit on it, even though it was sticky, you could see through it, and there were wiggling things on the bottom.
As I was putting the last of my clothes back in the suitcase, I saw her thumbing through my bible with a bemused expression on her face. I decided to let it be because she could use some of the lessons in there.
She asked me if aliens needed Jesus.
I said I didn't know, that they might have their own messiah and there's nothing in the bible that says anything about extraterrestrials unless you're being really creative.
So then she tells me to go into the other room to train. I took my suitcase with me, and I looked around for a place to store it. I poked around and ended up finding a pretty large cabinet thing, so I put the suitcase there. I heard a soft click and a muffled thud, but I figured it was just my suitcase falling over in the compartment.
Sigma grinned at me and pointed to the computer with the gravel keyboard. I asked her if she wanted me to work and she said no, I needed to get better at the language module.
As I studied, I felt everything shake. I asked her what happened and she said we were taking off. I asked her who was piloting and she said it's automatic and we were just going up to the station anyway. I rolled my eyes and said okay. The room had no windows, so I had no clue what was going on outside. Thinking it to be an elaborate joke, I just ignored the externals and focused on the training program.
When I had completed yet another language module, she said I could take a break, and she digs a board game out of a cabinet.
It's Solar Quest. Never thought I'd see that game again. The game she had wasn't even updated to reflect Pluto's demotion, but I didn't care. It was something to do while we waited for...whatever.
After a couple turns, she points out a spot near Jupiter and says that's where we're going. At first that confused me because I was thinking in terms of the game, but I realized she was talking about the "station" where I was supposedly going to work. I kind of laughed and said okay and kept playing.
As we were playing, she told me all this stuff, like how that thing she put in me was like a liver and I could now eat alien food without it poisoning me, and that she is different from other Abreyas because she was born with bumps on her ears and body and that it's some kind of medical condition like warts. She asked me if it bothered me. I said not really since they're not all over like that one lady at Sprint.
I guess I could have done better to make her back off I'd said it's disgusting, but I value my job, and well...there are other reasons.
I was in the lead, with the greatest amount of space property on the board, when all of a sudden the pieces started floating into the air. She laughed at my puzzled reaction and put the pieces up before they could make a mess.
That was my first clue that the thing had actually gone somewhere without a truck.
She put the game away, then she took out these things that looked like scoops, and a cluster of ring shaped hoops. We were floating at this point, so she climbed across the room by means of handlebars and crescent shaped depressions in the floor, to the "door" at the end. Her tail is very versatile. She carried a pair of nets with it, and was able to have a hand free to climb. I, on the other hand, had trouble with carrying the rest of the equipment and had to juggle.
I followed her into the hall in the room beyond, and she set up the hoops, sticking them into specially designed sockets marked with symbols. She then went into another room to change. When she came back out, she was dressed in a one piece black-yellow bikini thing, and carried a bizarre looking puck thing that was covered in feelers.
She told me the rules and we played this weird game. Apparently the goal was to throw the puck through hoops, but the hoop had to correspond to the color the puck was glowing in or it didn't count. It was really challenging, especially since she was using an extra scoop with her tail, and her feet had thumbs on them.
We played this game for a good twenty minutes or so, and it got easier when she decided to give herself a handicap by not using her tail.
When we were done, we were all sweaty and she asked me if I wanted to take a shower. I said no thanks. I really didn't think it would be a good idea to get naked there, but I figured I'd have to shower eventually.
We put the stuff up and she said I should train some more. We'd been conversing in her language frequently during the game, but I guess I wasn't fluent enough so I went through another language course, and a program that told me how to use some other computer system.
While I was doing this, she told me more weird stuff about herself. She said that all "Abreyas" had tongues like hers, that they naturally split into four parts and that their dentistry, and kissing, is more interesting because of that. When she started describing other "interesting things" their tongues could do, it quickly got too graphic and I told her I'd heard enough. She didn't quite get it so I told her I didn't want to hear about the things she did in the bedroom, and asked her to stop. She finally did, despite how she protested that it doesn't necessarily happen in the bedroom.
One of the coffee table things (they weren't really like any tables I've seen before) in the room had a hologram thing built into it, so she switched it on and I could see it playing the Discovery Channel. She offered me a sofa and showed me how to change the channel with a track ball thing attached to the arm. The menu wasn't arranged like the ones I was used to seeing, and some were in that script I saw on the training software, but most were English.
She seemed to have all the channels...on earth. Well, maybe not the local ones, but a ridiculous amount, nonetheless. I watched MTV Japan, and as I'm watching, she sits down next to me, close enough for me to feel the texture of her bikini on my arm, and she asked me what I wanted for lunch.
That's when the trouble started. More about this in the next post.

Gardenia Furry comics [Part 78]

In the waiting room...
http://www.furnation.com/akktri/Gardenia383.html
http://www.furnation.com/akktri/Gardenia384.html

Archive:
http://www.furnation.com/akktri/Archive.html

Updates on the status of the comic:
http://www.furnation.com/akktri/inprogress.html