“Yeah, it was a pretty good game,” Crick said with a grin, flipping the burgers over on the flattop while Cody, a few feet away on one of the long cutting boards, diced up tomatoes for their salad mixes. “I mean, I didn’t keep track of everything that was happening, but, ah, yeah, a good game.”
“I’m kind of surprised,” the younger hume replied, carefully guiding his chef’s knife in straight cuts. “Every other time I’ve asked, you say you don’t watch that much hockey. Kind of weird for someone from Minnesota, you know?”
“You forget, kid, I’m not from here; I’m from Brooklyn,” Crick answered. “And anyway, I probably wouldn’t have, but there’s this lady I’m seeing, and, well, she invited me over to watch the game with her and her sister and brother-in-law.” Crick used the corner of his spatula to scrape a little meat from the center of the patty, checking to see how far along the meat was. The ticket specifically asked for medium-rare, and he didn’t want to cook away too much pink and end up with a re-fire. Pleased with what he saw, he slapped a slice of cheddar and a slice of swiss on the patty, then dropped a small lid cover over it to let the cheeses melt.
“You’re seeing someone? How long’s that been going on,” Shawna asked as she dried her hands at the sink a few feet away, gloving up to come take over for Cody.
“A couple of weeks, not too-too involved just yet,” Crick said, feeling his grin expand a little, taking note of the slight bit of spring in his movements.
“Where’d you meet her?”
“My ‘Children of Outworlders’ group,” Crick replied without thinking. These were his coworkers, his peers, and though he would never go out of his way to say they were his ‘friends’, per se, he didn’t feel any overwhelming need to keep too many secrets from them. He noticed, however, that Shawna was giving him a curious look. “What’s up?”
“I’m sorry, Crick. I just always assumed you were from, you know, over there,” she said quietly.
“No, I’m from Brooklyn, New York,” the goblin replied evenly. “My folks got together shortly after arriving in this world. They got lucky, ending up in the city; there’s still a fairly sizable neighborhood of our people there to this day.”
“You ever miss it,” Cody asked, bringing out a Romaine heart to chop up for salad mix, casually working his knife. “Not because of the ethnic makeup, but I mean, it’s New York, man,” he said with a hint of excitement.
“You gotta remember, Cody, New York is not all it’s cracked up to be in movies and television shows,” Crick answered. “I’ll tell you what I definitely don’t miss; being cooped up in a fourth floor walk-up apartment that’s too small for comfort, and stinks constantly of sour milk.” He shook his head, thinking of his mother, still packed into one such place, her unit on the entry level, a prime location to get broken into and robbed. “Let’s just say I’m not eager to ever head back there.” Idle small talk continued for a little while, until chef Taylor came out of his office and approached Crick.
“Meeting tonight,” the elven chef asked. Crick nodded, and Taylor looked to his other line cooks. “You mind if I tag along? Shawna and Cody know how to close down back here.” The request took Crick aback a little, and he just shrugged after a few moments.
“Um, sure, I don’t see why not. But, weren’t you born over in Caldea,” the goblin cook asked quietly as the other two cooks shuffled away, sensing an awkward tension that, in truth, was not yet noticed by the goblin himself.
“Yeah, I was,” chef Taylor said, guiding Crick without direction slightly away, toward the office. Next to the office door hung everybody’s coats, and Taylor shrugged off his apron, as did Crick, before handing the smaller man his jacket. “But, um, you know Marcy, right? The human woman I’ve been seeing?”
“Yeah, she’s swung in here for a bite here and there. Why?” Taylor let out a little chuckle, smirking.
“Well, let’s just say that, um, she and I are going to be contributing to the potential membership to your little group,” the chef replied, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets. He gave Crick a steady look, the awkward grin lingering on his face. “I kind of want to get an idea of what sort of frame of mind our child might end up growing up with.”
**
Taylor hung back by the open double doors while Crick approached Eddie, Sam and Kimberly over by the folding tables, carrying his Crockpot carefully and setting it up, plugging it in before addressing them. “Hey there, fellahs.”
“I see you brought an unexpected guest tonight,” Kimberly observed, squinting toward chef Taylor. “But he is not one of us, Crick; he is a native Caldean.”
“You can tell?”
“Our people carry much in our eyes, our expressions,” she said cryptically, her own jawline tightening slightly. “He is not a Child of an Outworlder.”
“No, but he got his hume girlfriend from Earth here knocked up,” Crick replied quietly, not wanting to let his boss overhear their idle gossip. “And their kid will be one of our people, Kimmy. I thought I’d check you guys thought it was okay for him to join us; he even said himself before following me over here tonight that he’d understand if we wanted to tell him to beat feet.”
“The man has a legitimate enough reason to want to be here, I think,” Sam said, sipping his Caribou coffee from a paper cup. “Come to think of it, are any of our members here parents themselves? Are there grandkids yet for Caldeans?”
“Among the kobolds, maybe,” Eddie said with a nod. “Their shorter lifespan would almost make it a certainty, I’d think.”
“Kobolds don’t actually have any shorter a lifespan than my people,” Crick noted. “Three-hundred years on average, unless they get sick or injured. I forget, how long do the lizardfolk usually live, Sam?”
“We have about the same stretch as your average hume, actually,” Sam said, scratching his left cheek. “Eighty to a hundred years, give or take five or ten.”
“And we’re about two-hundred, on the average,” Eddie added. “As to your guest here, Crick, I don’t see any reason not to let him hang around in the back row, listen in on things. Kim, what do you think?” The three men turned to look at the elven woman, but she was not with them anymore, making her way tentatively across the room toward chef Taylor. Crick admired the quiet, graceful way she moved, but he sensed something was off about the manner in which she was approaching his boss. He set the serving spoon next to the Crockpot and jogged along after her, catching up just in time to hear her saying something in her people’s native tongue to Taylor.
“Voasa, t’in aclut tonan acha,” Taylor was replying, once more making Crick wish that among the languages he had studied over the years, that elven had been among them. He could speak perfectly good English, goblin, minotaur and hobgoblin, and a little lizard tongue, but he had never managed to get around to studying with any real determination the language of the fey folk. He didn’t understand the words chef Taylor had used, but he recognized the tone of them, and the kind of look that he was giving her; it hummed with a kind of quiet respect.
Kimberly said something else in elvish, something that sounded short and sharp, and Taylor immediately took a half-step back and lowered his head, looking down and away from her. Crick tapped Kim on the hip, and she snapped her head around to look down at him, a kind of icy dominance in her features that he had never seen before on her normally placid countenance. “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t think I like the tone of it,” he said quietly.
“I am merely pointing out to this koam that this meeting is for the offspring of those from Caldea, not for natives of that world,” she snapped. She turned and headed back toward Eddie and Sam, leaving Crick to meet chef Taylor’s eyes.
“What the fuck is going on here,” he asked bluntly. “What’s a ‘koam’?”
“In our language, it means something like ‘murderer’,” Taylor explained quietly. “We carry it in our eyes, an indelible mark, visible only among our own kind. It was a long time ago,” he said with a heavy sigh. “It was war. People don’t always understand. I don’t expect them to.” Crick nodded, opting not to do too much digging into the subject for the time being. Instead, he returned to his usual comrades, until the other members of the meeting filled in the rows, and Eddie headed up to the stage to get the meeting started proper. When Velis arrived with her sister and brother-in-law, instead of sitting with them, she came right up and claimed the seat right next to Crick, wrapping her arms around his and scooting as close to him as she could.
As the meet-ups went, this one flowed about as normal as it could, though when Crick got up for his share, there were several concerned expressions among the crowd as he told them all what had happened in his building since the previous meeting. “I don’t want to give in to paranoia, but I’m a goblin; that sort of thing tends to go hand-in-hand when everybody stands about a foot or two taller than you, and can easily kick you into the street,” he said to some few awkward chuckles. “What I mean to say, folks, is that we have to look out for one another, and keep a sharp eye and ear out around us. We’ve already seen rising crime of all sorts in the Twin Cities themselves over the last couple of years, and there’s plenty of folks who just don’t like us because, well, according to them, we don’t even belong in their world, sharing their resources. They bristle at the notion that there’s going to be increasingly more and more of us with each generation, becoming just another demographic to consider in all things. In a way, I can understand their frustration,” he said, causing more than a few curious looks to aim up at him on the stage. “Think about it; the humes of this world were just starting to finally come around on relations between their own ethnicities and backgrounds, and then WHAM!, here come all these different species of people altogether, you know?
“But we’re not all that much different from them, just like our folks weren’t much different than the humes of Caldea,” he went on. “We have different biology, different cultures, customs, languages, yeah. But at the end of the day, we all have the same basic needs- food, water, shelter. Community. And that’s what we have here, folks. We have a community. And we have to keep it safe. In that vein, for the time being, we’re going to continue having these meetings every other Wednesday. However, we’re going to ask the City Council to take the name of our group and the information regarding it down from the papers in the displays, and to stop running ads for it in the local papers.” There was some grumbling at this, but he held up his hands for quiet. “I know, I know. It feels like we’re giving in to fear.
“But let me tell you something about fear, folks. Fear is a very real, rational response to threats in the environment. We don’t know how many of these Humanity First people are hanging around, how far they’ve spread out. All we know is that they’ve been a lot more active the last six or seven months than they ever were before, except maybe back in the days and months right after our parents arrived here. They’ve been around a long time, and we have to acknowledge that, even though what they think is reprehensible, it’s what they do about what they think that we actually have to be on the lookout for.”
A somewhat shrill voice rang out from the group, saying, “They have their own website, for the gods’ sakes!” There were some nodding heads, some murmurs of agreement.
“Okay, yes, they do,” Crick said.
“And they have links to regional chapters on there,” someone else chimed in, almost angrily. “They have a whole message board on there about Minneapolis!”
“And that is part and parcel of why we’re going to go quiet about these meetings, folks,” Crick said, cutting off any further chatter on this topic. “We’re going to look out for one another. We’re going to offer whatever support we can for each other. Now look, I’m no good with online stuff, maybe someone wants to volunteer to maybe set up a Facebook Group or something for us, or maybe over on Minds? Some corner of social media where we can talk outside of these meetings. Anybody?” One of the gotrin brothers, seated near the back of the rows of seats, raised his hand. “Excellent. Before we all leave tonight, let’s all make sure we get with Peter over there and get a friend request off to him on Facebook, he'll figure out where to lead us from there.”
There were murmurings now of acceptance, and Crick used the distraction to extricate himself from the stage, coming back down to sit with Velis. “That almost got out of hand,” he muttered darkly to her.
“Damn near, yeah,” she replied. “So, hey, I got some sick time to use up. Want to head back to your place when we’re done here tonight?”
“You’re actually gonna stay overnight?”
“Well, I figure, what the hell? Gotta happen sooner or later, right,” she said with a mischievous grin.
A nice, subtle explanation of the major similarities and differences between the fantastic races in here.