Splashdown Remastered and Housecat

She was startled as the bag began to pop, her feline eyes widening and her round ears flattening against her head. McGregor pulled the bag from the microwave, tearing it open and pouring popcorn into a waiting bowl. She watched him curiously as he drizzled melted butter over it, steam rising from the snack as he carried it back over to the couch.

"Are we eating?"

"This is popcorn, you eat it while watching movies."

"Why?"

"You just do, ok? It's tradition, and we're doing human stuff."

He flopped down beside her, navigating the menus displayed on the monitor with the remote, and Zhari reached over with her clawed fingers to take a handful of the popcorn. He batted her hand away, wagging his finger at her.

"No eating until the movie starts," he chided. "I figured you'd like war movies, there are lots of classics here. Platoon, Black Hawk Down, Zulu, The Battle of Britain. That's a personal favorite of mine. Oh, The Tau Ceti Rebellion, that's good. Looks like they have Heroes of San Francisco too, that's about the American-Chinese war of twenty one forty six."

"I don't know what those are," she said, her attention more focused on the popcorn than the screen.

"Ok, well let's watch something historical. You'd probably like Zulu with Michael Caine, it's all long rifles and melee combat."

"Who is Michael Caine? A great Earth hero?"

"Yes," McGregor replied resolutely, "yes he is."

***

Zhari had not understood the purpose of 'movies'. It had seemed like a pointless distraction to her, a waste of time that would be better spent training at the rifle range, or lifting weights to maintain her muscle mass. She found herself transfixed however, licking the melted butter from her furry fingers with her rough tongue as she watched the story play out before her. The red men in the white helmets fought like Borealans, wielding long powder rifles with bayonets as they endured wave after wave of attacks from the darker skinned humans, who charged their fortifications with a reckless bravery that she couldn't help but admire.

She wasn't quite sure what they were fighting over, territory perhaps, but she found herself fascinated by what was happening on the screen. The humans had an old civilization, their technology and their society had changed so much. These red men had almost nothing in common with the UNN Marines that she served with in terms of technology and tactics, and yet they were distinctly human.

It made her culture feel a little inadequate in comparison. Her people weaved masterful tapestries that recorded the exploits of great heroes and the outcomes of historical battles, and they had an oral history that sometimes approximated the way that the actors on the screen talked. Stage plays, McGregor had called them when she had made the comparison. No humans would ever see them however, not unless they visited Borealis. Perhaps her people should create movies too, so that the humans might know of their own battles and heroes.

She grew restless after a while, the 'movie' was exciting, but her Alpha had bade her to sit quietly and so she did. Zhari might have been the only Borealan in the galaxy who had a human Alpha, at least one that had not been appointed to her by a superior.

Some of her kin found the way that the humans did things to be unusual, even nonsensical, but Zhari had never had much of a problem understanding the 'chain of command' as the humans referred to it. Back on the homeworld, and amongst the Borealans in a private capacity, the leader of a pack was decided through strength. Those who wished to lead would face off, fighting with tooth and claw until one of them gave in, and the winner was crowned Alpha. It remained that way until he was challenged by another who sought to claim the mantle from him.

In human society, the leader was decided through bureaucracy and meritocracy, those who were most accomplished and experienced rising to the top of the hierarchy. It was not too far removed from the Borealan way, but once one attained a rank, he could not be challenged and deposed. In a human squad, if you didn't like your leader or you thought that you could do the job better, it was tough shit.

Zhari obeyed, as did all of the Borealans who had graduated the integration program. It was the will of the Patriarch that they give the UNN their full cooperation, and so an order from a superior was treated as an order from the Patriarch himself, the Alpha of Alphas. In this sense it was possible to bypass the usual pack dynamic, and in doing so create a parallel social structure that made taking commands from someone so much smaller and weaker than themselves more tolerable.

As well as deciding who would lead the pack, Borealan dominance battles also had a reproductive purpose. The victor usually mated with the defeated party, rigorously and violently, passing on their dominant genes and improving the stock of the species as a whole. Confrontation, blood and pain, these were as aphrodisiacs to the feline aliens. There was nothing more frustrating than a sassy human, talking back and teasing, begging for a punishment that could never be administered due to their comparative frailty. Because of that, the tension and lust that preceded a fight never abated, the urge could never be satisfied.

While cuts and lacerations from the curved claws and sharp teeth that her people possessed were trivial injuries to a Borealan, and commonly healed overnight, it was more than enough to maim or even kill a human. Their hides were tantalizingly clear of scars and imperfections, like a canvass begging for the stroke of a painter's brush. Their tiny, weak bodies almost seemed designed to frustrate Borealans, and all of that was coupled with an attitude that was inherently aggravating.

They insulted as a friendly gesture, touched and grabbed without permission, being around them was both infuriating and arousing. Taking human lovers was becoming more and more common amongst the Borealans who were stationed on the Pinwheel, an easier solution than trying to suppress such powerful and overriding instincts on a daily basis.

Zhari's own instructor was one such case, someone who she had thought to be a deviant before succumbing to the same vices herself. Raz had planted a seed in her brain that had incubated, coming to a head during her time on EE-4 and resulting in McGregor's victory over her. Her loins still ached when she thought about that day. Half crazed with lust, she had tried to take the human, with the intention of teaching him his place and satisfying the urges that she could not yet admit to herself.

McGregor was not like any of the other humans that she had met, however. He was tenacious, willful, sly. He had pulled her from the crashed shuttle on EE-4, and the two had taken refuge from enemy search parties in a shallow cave. She had outranked him, she was larger and stronger than any human, and yet he would not submit to her. He had goaded her, antagonized her, refusing to obey her orders and eventually provoking a violent reaction.

In the end he had overcome her, exploiting her weaknesses to gain the upper hand. Despite her size and her strength, he had brought her to heel, a feat worthy of any male from the homeworld. It had been humiliating in a way, and yet oddly exciting. The taboo of being overcome by such a physically inferior specimen still filled her with a kind of guilty arousal.

He knew how to push her buttons. The little demons had agile fingers that were devoid of claws, and smooth tongues that seemed almost engineered to drive her kind crazy. He was chatty, sarcastic, he always had to have the last word. A 'wise-ass' as his friends and colleagues referred to him. It drove her to distraction, a constant background radiation of barely contained lust.

Even sitting beside him on the couch was an exercise in self-control and restraint. She wanted so badly to tear into him with her claws, but that would injure him. She had to fight the urge to challenge him, knowing that he would overcome her yet again. He seemed to know her own mind better than she did.

Zhari had no idea what he had in mind with this 'vacation', but she knew his character well enough to suspect that his motives were less than honorable.

CHAPTER 6: LESS THAN HONORABLE MOTIVES

"Bon appetit," McGregor declared, slamming a large pan down on the table. Zhari examined the contents, it looked like the carcass of a bird of some kind. The skin was golden brown, with white meat protruding here and there. It was resting in a bed of assorted vegetables, none of which she recognized.

"What is it?" She asked skeptically.

"Roast turkey, with a side of roast sweet potatoes and turnips. I figured a chicken wouldn't make much of a meal for you. Try the vegetables, they're cooked in the fat."

She reached out towards the turkey with her claws, intending to tear the pale meat from the bones, but McGregor tapped her hand with a serving spoon.

"Alpha goes first," he said with a grin. "And use your cutlery, eating with your hands is impolite in human society."

Coming between a Borealan and its next meal was dangerous indeed, but McGregor knew that she wouldn't hurt him. That confidence was part of what made him so irritating.

"I have claws, what do I need with these tiny knives?" Zhari complained, lifting her knife and fork in her oversized fingers. They were the size of scalpels to her. The apartment had not come with cutlery because Borealans didn't use it, and so McGregor had brought his own.

"Consider it a punishment for getting hair in the popcorn. Gonna have to get you a pair of latex gloves to use next time we eat some finger food."

He picked up a larger knife, and carved himself a slice of breast meat, Zhari's mouth watering as the crispy skin pulled away along with it. He selected a few choice pieces of sweet potato, then gestured for Zhari to proceed. The majority of the meal was intended for her, mostly because she ate about five times the quantity of food that a human did in one sitting. She fumbled with the knife and fork, baring her sharp teeth as she became frustrated with the fiddly implements. Eventually McGregor relented, letting her use her claws, and she tore into the succulent meat. She pulled away strips, savoring the golden skin of the creature, and dipping the pale flesh into the grease and oil that had pooled in the bottom of the metal pan.

It wasn't half bad, all it needed was a touch of fish oil and it might have passed for an Elysian dish. The vegetables weren't bad either. Her people didn't care much for sweet things, their taste buds were more sensitive to salty and savory flavors. But she liked their texture and they had been roasted in the bird's juices, picking up some of its aroma.

"So, how did you like the movie we watched?" McGregor asked over a mouthful of turkey.

"Good," she replied, nodding as she chewed. "Will we watch more later?"

"If you want to, yeah. There are enough movies to last us years, never mind the week of shore leave that we have. Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for the last thousand generations of humans, our history has been pretty tumultuous."

"But you work together now?" Zhari asked, spearing a piece of turkey meat on one of her black claws and placing it on her tongue. "The red men and the black men fought in the movie, but I see them working together on the station."

"Red men? Oh, you mean the English soldiers and the Zulus? Yes, they're on good terms now, though neither empire still exists."

"Who defeated them?"

"Well, the British Empire defeated the Zulus, and then a world war ended the British Empire. Turns out trying to maintain a planet spanning empire is really difficult and expensive."

"But what happened to make all of the Earth territories come together?"

McGregor seemed pleased by her questions, this must have been what he had wanted, to get her interested in human history and culture.

"How many Borealans are there on Borealis?" He asked, and Zhari took a moment to think about the question.

"Maybe a few hundred million."

"At the end of Earth's twenty second century, there were twenty billion humans living on the planet. It couldn't support them, there wasn't enough living space, the resources were stretched thin. To compound those problems, environmental changes were displacing populations, forcing disparate groups together who had nothing in common and who were competing for the same limited resources and land. Entire societies and ecosystems collapsed, what land remained was ravaged by wars and famines. More than two thirds of the human population died off."

He started on another piece of turkey, washing it down with a cup of red liquid before continuing.

"Some people call it the third world war, but it really wasn't organized enough to be considered one war, it was more like a hundred smaller conflicts that all added up. It took a century before technological and social progress got started again, and all of the remaining world powers had one goal in mind. Get the hell off Earth, because one planet can't support the entire human species, and nobody wanted the same thing to happen again in another hundred years."

Twenty billion? Zhari couldn't even conceive of a number that high. Even the streets of the Elysian capital could feel overcrowded and claustrophobic at times, and she doubted that more than a few million people lived there.

"And so a period of time began called the great expansion. Everyone went skyward, searching for habitable planets and colonizing every rock that they could get their hands on. With access to new resources came wealth and prosperity. War and conflict practically ended, because why fight someone over land when there was infinite land to be had? If a group of people had incompatible political or religious ideas, then they could simply leave and found their own civilization where they could live as they saw fit. That was about when the United Nations Navy came into being, intended to be a peace keeping force made up of soldiers and vessels from all of the different countries and colonies. They would act as police, maintaining order in interstellar space. For a long time we were doing pretty well, with only a few disputes and conflicts between colonies. The Jovian moons seceding from the PRC was probably the biggest upset."

"And then they joined the Coalition?" Zhari volunteered.

"Hang on, I'm getting to that. So humanity was spreading all over the known galaxy, and so far we hadn't encountered any other sentient species. For all we knew, we were alone in the universe. That was when we came across the Betelgeusians. A colony ship arrived in the Betelgeuse star system to find that the planet it had intended to populate was already occupied. They tried to make peaceful contact, but the Bugs destroyed them. Forty thousand people were killed, all for no apparent reason. We realized then that just like living space on Earth, the galaxy was finite, and that there were other species out there who were competing for the same habitable planets. For the first time ever, humanity had an external enemy, an alien threat that everyone could rally against. It's strange to say, but we've never been more united as a species. We still have our disputes and internal problems of course, but away from the front, things are pretty peaceful."

They chatted a little more about human history as they ate, Zhari taking special interest in the 'Medieval' period, when the humans had fought using tactics and technology that were remarkably similar to that of Elysia. She had often criticized humans for their penchant to fight from orbit and at extreme range, leveraging their advanced technology to avoid dirtier and more dangerous combat. It had always seemed cowardly to her, lacking in honor.

Now she realized that for much of their history they had fought as Borealans did. There had been bayonet charges and massed battles with humans wielding bladed weapons, it was all so exciting. That was what she would ask to see next, the 'knights', as McGregor had called them. Ancient human warriors bound by a code of honor to serve their rulers, it was almost identical to the way that her own people lived.

Before long she had demolished what remained of the turkey, eating everything but the bones, and licking the grease from the pan with her textured tongue. McGregor seemed pleased that she had enjoyed the meal.

He stood, collecting the plates and cutlery from the table and placing them beside a sink that was embedded in one of the wood counter tops.

"I cooked, so you can wash up," he announced. Zhari rose from her seat obediently, striding over to the counter and turning on the faucet. She ran her hand under the water, waiting for it to warm, and then reached for the dish soap.

"Stop," McGregor ordered, and she found herself standing still. Damn it, the more he acted the part of an Alpha, the more she found herself responding to him. He was learning to take advantage of her instincts. Not obeying one's Alpha would be seen as a challenge, which would result in a punitive clawing in most cases. While McGregor had no claws to speak of, and was not capable of physically overpowering her, she still had that same gut reaction that had been instilled in her over the years.

"Something is missing," he mused, and Zhari could hear him pacing behind her. "Oh, I know what it is."

She turned her head to watch as he retrieved the mystery box that he had placed on the counter before dinner, tearing open the cardboard packaging. She craned her neck, curious as to what might be inside, but McGregor snapped his fingers at her and pointed at the sink.

"You are forbidden from looking inside this box, understand?"

"Y-Yes," she replied, turning away. Damn, he really was playing the role of Alpha, had he been doing research or something? She wouldn't put it past the sneaky shuttle pilot. Her round ears swiveled like furry radar dishes to listen, both for more commands, and in an attempt to figure out what was in the box. She heard him break open the cardboard, then fumble with what sounded like a plastic wrapper of some kind.

"Ok, turn around."

She turned to face him, and saw the human standing before her with a pile of black and white fabric in his arms. He thrust it into her hands, and she examined it more closely. Was it clothing?

"What is it?" Zhari asked, sifting through the pile of thin material. There hardly seemed to be enough of it to constitute an outfit.

"A traditional human uniform, I want you to wear it during our stay here."

"A uniform? But it's just...strips of fabric. There isn't enough here to cover me."

"Oh, that isn't the point," he replied with a wide grin.

"Why do you want me to wear this?" Zhari asked, confused.

"Because it pleases me. You want to please your Alpha, don't you?"

She had no doubt at this point that he must have been poring over information about her species and their social system in preparation for this week, he had planned it all in advance.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Go change."

She bowed her head, and made her way towards the bedroom.

***

Zhari emerged from behind the sliding door, her cheeks flushed red as she stood before McGregor in her new getup. It was another hit to his bank account that had been difficult to justify, but looking at her wearing the specially made clothes, he knew that it had been worth every credit.

The eight foot tall alien was clad in a revealing maid outfit, little more than a brassiere and a short skirt made to resemble the traditional garment, her body language betraying her self-consciousness. Borealans did not generally dress pretty, they either wore uniforms or armor, and McGregor was unsure what the fashions were like back on the homeworld. Gender roles on Borealis were less distinct than they were in human society, and they were a little less sexually dimorphic than humans, with the females able to match the males in size and strength. For those reasons he doubted that they were accustomed to such sexualized clothing, he couldn't picture a Borealan wearing a bikini or a ball gown.