---Misunderstanding---

---Treg's perspective---

"WOAH!" I yelp as, with a lazy wave of her arm, the immensely dense and stocky woman utterly flings me across the path in front of her by the wrist, forcefully enough that I almost lose my feet!

She barely had to shift her weight to accommodate for my (slightly more than) 100kg of mass! She just sent me into orbit around her like a moon around its planet!

I straighten up and, walking backwards, look down into her eyes (about 30cm below mine), up into her girlfriend's (30cm above), then back before saying "Oh my god, Sis!!!… You weren't jokin' 'bout bein' the strongest in the galaxy, were you!"

"Strongest unaugmented woman." she corrects with autistic straightforwardness.

"Could I… have a feel of your arm?" I ask, hopefully.

Unusually for me, horniness is barely a factor in the ask… I'm genuinely medically curious as to what her muscles must feel like!

The Tshwane woman chuckles and smirks as my Neandersister yanks up her right sleeve with her left hand and holds out the arm to me at the level of my diaphragm.

I extend my tan hands to the much paler skin of the muscle-Mommy's wrist.

I grip lightly and run my hands up her forearm.

I audibly gasp as my fingers reach her extensor and flexor carpi.

I squeeze.

Nothing!

I squeeze harder!

Nothing!

The muscles have absolutely no give in them at all!

It's like feeling the arm of a perfectly anatomically correct (if wildly out of proportion) statue of carved marble!

Only the heat and the (unnervingly slow) pulse give it away that what I hold in my hands is flesh and not stone, metal or very dense wood!

I've never felt anything like it and, as a doctor, that's saying something!!!

I frown down into Hunter's Euro-featured face and ask "You… get your heart checked regularly, right? I assume you know you're hypertrophic… You know the risks of that?"

"I know and I do." she says, neutrally, blinking her mossy green eyes.

"Good!" I say, firmly, before sliding my hands up, past her elbow, to wrap them around her biceps and triceps.

My eyes widen as I realise, though my middlefingertips are touching eachother on the underside of her arm, my thumbtips are nowhere even close to touching over the top!

My two hands aren't enough to enclose this girl's roided out muscles!

"Jesus-fucking-Christ…!" I mutter to myself as I feel the iron hard flesh between my hands.

At this point my brother appears on the right (my left) of the girl where we've stopped on the path and I whip my head to him.

"You felt these arms, Vicky?!"

"I been sailin' with her for years and trainin' with her for most of that time, Tea. Of course I've felt her arms… Basic'ly everyone gets to the point where they ask to have a go, just most of us take a few weeks instead of a few hours to be comfortable enough(!)… Maybe give Thran her arm back? She's gettin' embarrassed!"

I whip my head back to the short girl's face and find it utterly devoid of expression, the way it's been since I met her.

Her cheeks, however, have a blush of pink to them.

I immediately release the muscles that feel more like steel cables and apologise "Sorry, Sis! Forgot my manners!" sincerely.

"It's fine…" she lies.

The tall queen Tshwane reaches a spindly left hand over to her girlfriend's beefy left shoulder and pulls (or is allowed to pull!) her right one against her left hip to smirk down at me "My girl's body tends to have that effect on people(!)… Forged in the heart of a dying star(!)"

Their height difference is outright ridiculous to make shoulder to hip contact possible like that!

I can't imagine all the other fun things it'd make possible… and I consider myself quite imaginative(!)

The auty girl pulls down her sleeve and I turn around to keep walking.

Not to break a scapula by patting myself on the back too hard but I have to say, I picked a good route for this hike based only on online research!

This place kinda gives me the same vibes as… I don't know, Washington? No! Oregon!

Not as hot as Oregon's been every time I remember going but otherwise definitely gives me the vibe of hiking through a forested valley in Willamette!

It's so lovely, I take out my holo and save my current coordinates so I can call a capsule to bring Lloyd and Sig here at some point before we go home.

I'm just putting it away again when I hear my brother's voice hissing "STOP!" from the front of the column.

Everyone in earshot immediately comes to a dead halt with those far enough back in the line taking an extra second to work out something's up.

He blasts a brief, hissing whistle that I'm guessing he's calculated to be audible exactly as far as it needs to be and no further.

Bounding from the undergrowth up to his side is a long, black mass with two giant amber eyes visible on the front.

Fluffy reaches Vicky's side and looks up at him, expectantly.

"Stay, girl." he says with a serious tone, bringing a hand to briefly brush the top of her head.

My brother turns and takes a few steps along the natural rocky wall that lines the path to our right, his giant hexapedal cat staying firmly planted where she is with the rest of us.

Vicky sweeps his head, scanning every direction something might appear from, visibly sniffing while he does.

I sniff too.

There's something on the air that wasn't there before… some kind of animal smell, I'm guessing.

Embarrassing as it is to have my nose outdone by a Sapiens's, I'm not gonna take it too hard(!)

Bro's an exception to a lot of rules of thumb about which lineages do what best(!)

He goes past the end of the cliffs and looks right, down the hill, in the direction the path turns.

Immediately, he turns around and silently jogs back to where he left us, beckoning for those at the back to come forward.

He reaches the huddle and hunches down to quietly explain "Alright guys, so, about 130m down that hill, there're some trolls. Spotted three, could be more. These things are big but, good news is, they're herbivores… Same rules as for any herbivore that can kill you; they ain't gonna come lookin' for a fight with us just 'cause they've seen us. Just can't make 'em think we might be trynna hunt 'em or nothin'! They're pretty spectacular animals so I think everyone should go an' have a look at 'em (in groups of 2-3 at a time) but, 'cause they're on the path, when everyone's seen 'em, we gotta find a detour that'll take us around where they-"

He stops dead, midsentence.

He straightens back up to look over everyone's heads.

His head and eyes dart back and forth a few times, widening in horror as he leans to look around the Tshwane.

"Where's Hsek?!"

---Hsek's perspective---

My suit marches across the terrain of this treacherous deathworld biome, myself secreted within its cushioned interior, entirely safe from harm for being encased within the impenetrable exterior of Terran miracle alloy.

I approach the brutes, each substantially more than twice my stature and of orders of magnitude greater bulk than I!

Doing battle with these beasts shall indeed be arduous but shouldering this burden alone shall surely ingratiate me to my fellow questers!

They shall come upon me, standing atop the vanquished forms of these monsters, and shall utterly lavish praise upon me for my gallantry!

Now… how best to assure my triumph?

My helm scans the bodies of the creatures and identifies numerous vulnerabilities I might exploit to close the vast gulf in magnitude and (even my augmented) power.

I've just settled on attacking the back of the nearest one's leg to sever its achilles tendon when my sensors sound a proximity alert.

Something is rapidly approaching me from the rear!

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I open my rearview camera just in time to see a blur, a fraction of a [second] before it hits me in the small of the back!

The predator transfers such momentum into my armour that the actuators lock to prevent my vertebral column from shattering and even my mechanical plantigrade feet don't have a fraction of the length they would need to keep me from being hurled to the ground!

I'm winded by the force of my landing knocking the air from my lung.

No sooner has this vile assailant knocked me flat than they have seized my suit's left ankle and begun dragging me backwards, away from the beasts with which I was about to do glorious battle, at a velocity to make the firmament itself recoil!

I just witness a fleshy, lilac skinned nose and pair of steely grey eyes being turned in my and my attacker's direction from [60m] away and [6m] in the air when a mineral outcrop comes between the ogre and I.

The predator releases my leg.

Now that it has succeeded in bringing me away from any competition, it likely means to attempt to kill me.

No matter: It is exceedingly unlikely to happen upon any means of penetrating my defences before my fellows have reached our location.

I only regret that, not only will I not have defeated the beasts I meant to, I will myself require rescue from this new aggressor!

An appendage is wrapped around my right shoulder and another at that elbow, to lock that arm and keep me from deploying my blade rearward into its belly, as the predator rolls me onto my back.

What is revealed is not a snarling beast with a mouth full of fangs but, rather, my nemesis!

I swivel my head, this way and that, to see where the one that attacked me ran to but find nothing.

"Where's-?"

"Did I hurt you?" he hisses, managing to twist his features into the most obviously furious expression I've ever seen on a nonKreskar face.

"Pardon?" I query, bewildered.

"Are. you. hurt?" he restates, slowly, as if he thinks me dullwitted.

"I'm unhurt." I state, confused.

"Good!… Now, you mind tellin' me what in the actual FUCK you was thinkin' there, Don Quixote!?"

"I know not this 'Donkey Oaty' you speak of but I was-"

"Steppin' up to a fight with 60 tonnes of troll was what it fuckin' looked like, mate!" snarls my nemesis, baring his metallic teeth in anger.

"Precisely… You… don't seem pleased? Are you concerned such odds would have been too insurmountable without-?"

"They would've fuckin' flattened you, Hsek! 'Less you somehow managed to fit inertial fuckin' dampenin' into that suit, wouldn't've mattered that they couldn't get through it! Wouldn't've mattered how strong it was!!!… I'm a 115kg Human, Hsek!… I managed to rugby tackle you to the ground, easy!… Each of their arms prob'ly outmasses me twenty times over!… Think 'bout what'd've happened if one of 'em landed a swipe on you! Or don't 'cause I'll fuckin' tell you what'd happen! Your brain'd fuckin' purée itself on the inside o' your fuckin' skull, first from the acceleration imparted by their hand, then from the deceleration imparted by whatever you hit!!!… Same goes for all your other internals in your ribcage! Words can't do fuckin' justice to how dead you'd've been if I'd've let you fight those things!"

In a rare moment for me, my nemesis' tirade has left me speechless.

I have become so used to always being the most intelligent individual in whatever space I happen to stand in that hearing the (obviously correct) physics I hadn't come even remotely close to intuiting be explained by this man (to whom they seemed to come as naturally as breathing) leaves me stunned.

I finally manage to find my voice to ask "Then… in what way do you intend them to be dealt with?"

The man scowls "Who says they need 'dealin' with', Hsek?"

Confused, I answer "You yourself explained how effortlessly those animals could and would kill us? How do you mean to progress beyond them if they aren't neutralised?"

Looking at me the way one might at a particularly dim spawnling, the deathworlder crouches into a squat and asks "Sooooo… let me get this straight… In your mind, any time a deathworlder wants to take a walk somewhere and finds an animal in our way, we have to kill it?!"

My intestines twist as I realise that his precisely correct assessment of my thought process is, in fact, an obviously incorrect assessment of the conditions of deathworld life.

My nemesis brings the fingertips of his right hand to massage the flesh of his forehead while sighing "Hsek… I've been a Terran Security Officer for over a decade at this point and I don't think I've ever had someone manage to be so wildly off in their estimations of deathworld danger, in both directions at once (fuckin' somehow!!!), as you just were!… Kay, Hsek… for starters: No! You've massively misunderstood how much an' often deathworlders need to fight eachother! Deathworlds may be more violent places than gardenworlds but the same logic applies to both! Deathworld animals don't wanna get into avoidable fights any more than gardenworld ones do! 99 times out of 100, when one deathworld animal sees another coming, they can both immediately tell whose job it is to give way to who without a fight needin' to happen about it! In this case, it was our job to give way to them!… If you hadn't slunk off to try soloin' 'em, you'd've been there when I was sayin' after everyone'd had a look, we should find a detour so we didn't spook 'em and add to Fennoscandia's troll death stats(!) You sneak up on a megafaunal herbivore like you were just trynna, they're gonna think they're under attack an' need to defend 'emselves! You ever heard the phrase 'selffulfillin'' fuckin' 'prophecy'?!… Also, it ain't just needlessly risky to fight an' kill everythin' in your way, it's cruel too! Those guys are mindin' their own business, munchin' on leaves! They didn't know we was comin'! They didn't wanna get in our way! They defo didn't ask to get attacked out here just for existin' or to suddenly need to choose 'tween killin' you or bein' killed! Especially not when there're sooooo many alternatives!… You can't go round? Go back! Can't go back? Go through quietly, without makin' noise or sudden moves! You can scare 'em off if that's feasible but fightin' 'em off should be a port of absolute last resort! Second: As I already explained, you've massively overestimated the leg-up a powersuit of dura'd've given you if you did need to fight those things! No one I've ever chaperoned has managed to simultaneously under and overestimate the risks of a deathworld so far as you just did!"

Mucus is pouring off my face in shame at the man rightfully explicating my foolhardy hubris.

"Are… are you going to send me away, Taylor?" I ask, quietly.

He takes a breath and narrows his eyes down at me, appraising.

Finally, he says "I have conditions, Hsek… Three things I want you to agree to if you don't want me callin' a capsule at the next point there's space for one to land, frogmarchin' you onto it and tellin' it to take you back to your hotel. These are nonnegotiable and I need you to agree to 'em with your whole chest, alright?"

"What are your conditions, Taylor?" I blink, bewildered by this apparent second chance.

He holds up the digit II of his pentadactyl right hand, his palm facing me "First; you ain't to go more 'an 20m away from me again for the rest of the trip unless I've said it's OK!" he holds up the III "Second; any instruction I give you needs to be followed without argument. Explanation and discussion's fine if I'm talkin' at a normal volume, pace and tone but, if I'm shoutin', speakin' quick or agitated, you need to do what I'm sayin' in the moment an' ask questions later!" the digit IV comes up "Third; you wanna do anything other 'an just walkin' on the path again, you need to tell me first! You wanna pick up a rock as a souvenir, I want you to point it out to me an' wait for me to give the all clear(!) All clear, Hsek?"

He stands and holds the hand he just used as a simple abacus down to me.

I reach my nondominant hand across myself to grasp it, sealing the pact with the words "Agreed, Taylor."

"Good!" he answers, using his bargaining hand to pull me to my feet "Now, follow me and try not to make any noise until we're well away from the trolls!"

I follow my worthy nemesis as he stalks away from the animals I had just so foolishly thought to battle.

After a little while, he straightens back to full height and resumes a standard Human walk.

He turns to me and asks "Outta curiosity, Hsek… How'd you even know about the trolls? I know you didn't manage to slink away after I'd sniffed 'em out!"

I tap the side of my casque and answer "Nova Fennoscandia maintains tags on all living members of their species that they are aware of… They were flagged on my heads-up display several [kilometres] ago."

His eyes widen in disbelief as he laughs "You thought of includin' a bloody troll-tracker in your helmet but didn't think of, I don't know, lookin' up any advice on what to do about 'em if you wasn't gonna ask me?!?!?"

---Treg's perspective---

fff♫ I must confess That my loneliness Is killin' me nooo-o-o-o-ow Don't you KNOW I still believe That you will be here And give me a siii-i-i-i-ign? HIT me, BABY, one more TIME!!!♫fff belt out the crowd of nicely drunk people singing and dancing around a massive bonfire in the middle of a ring of tents.

The next moment the forest echoes with what I'm sure, to a person standing 2-5km from here, would sound like an eery 'wail-of-the-damned' as we all scream at the top of our lungs in appreciation of a good song, well sung!

The handful of gardenworlders present are all visibly bewildered by the display of instant-barbarian behaviour from the Terrans. (That was the first song of the night to get quite that reaction!)

While the next song choice is being mooted, I spot the armoured frogman lean close to my brother and say something.

Vicky gives a nod and Hsek steps away from the fire in the direction of where my brother told him to set up his tent (at the back of camp with cliffs behind, obviously to give him the least chance of being able to sneak away without waking anyone else up during the night(!))

Excusing myself from the company of the pretty Persian girl in the blue hijab, I surreptitiously follow the Kreskar back to his tent.

I catch him just as he's pulling aside the doorcurtain of the gigantic looming yurt (that looks like it was designed after Megamind's Black Mamba cape(!)) revealing an interior lit by red fairylights.

"Hey there, most sagacious and perspicacious Hsek…?" I call out to him, loud enough he'll hear, not loud enough to risk attracting anyone else behind me's attention.

The looming, armoured man turns his sensor bar around and, in a voice that's calmer and more reserved than I'd've believed possible this morning, says "Dr Leaf… may I just say your skills in organising this expedition have not gone unappreciated. You really have performed splendidly as the mistress of merriment."

I smile "Thank you. I appreciate it… Are you feeling alright?… I'm not sure how much good I'd be in checking you out since I'm only a Human doctor… but, I'd do my best if you weren't feelin' well?"

"I am in fine health, Dr Leaf… I simply wish to retire to be well rested for the morrow… It is neither a commentary on my internal state nor external conditions." gesturing over my head to where the middle of camp have started another rowdy number.

"OK, glad to hear that… Listen, just wanted to say, whatever Vicky said to you earlier, don't take it to heart, alright? I'm sure mosta the folk here've been on the receivin' end of at least one Victor-'Cuddles'-Taylor-I-can't-believe-you've-done-this bollockin'(!)… I've had a few(!)… Don't mean he hates you or nothin'! The opposite actually! Means he cares about you an' wants you to do better!"

"You're wrong, Dr Leaf." states the armoured man in the flattest voice I've yet heard him use.

"Wrong how?" I frown.

"To heart is precisely where I should take Taylor's words! Precisely because that is what will allow me to do better, as you say! Taylor reaffirmed my choice to make him my avowed nemesis this day! He challenged me! Exposed weaknesses in my thinking! Gaps in my logic! Flaws in myself that require correction!… If I don't take this to heart, I shall be proving myself unworthy as his nemesis!"

I smile at the lanky amphibian (who just got a lot cuter with the revelation that 'nemesis' is apparently his culture's equivalent of a shōnen rival character(!)) and answer "Well said, most sagacious and perspicacious Hsek!"

"You may call me simply Hsek if you wish it, Dr Leaf…" he invites.

"Alright… You can call me Tea if you want… Goodnight, Hsek. I hope you sleep well…"

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