Keeping their actual body count a secret, I knew at least that they had fucked at least one of the deceased candidates. "Okay. We've talked a lot about us. Now, I want to know more about you." Dolan said seriously. I nodded. I would answer whatever I could. "Why didn't you care when you saw all of us getting ready to flare up in the locker room?" he asked. "I think what people want to do in private is up to them. If it was just me, I might have joined in. The one that stopped me was Haroon. You know how zealous some people can be." I answered. They nodded. They both had a lot of experience with that. Corey spoke up now. He was smirking at me. "Now I want to know something: did you want to suck or get sucked? How do you like to flare up?" he challenged. I said "I wanted to get sucked off. I like girls more, but guys are okay for me too." They looked at me skeptically. I raised an eyebrow and asked what was wrong. They did not believe that a person could be bisexual. "You guys can believe whatever the hell you want. I know what I want and like." I said as I turned the radio on.
They did the same thing. As fun as it was, we had work to do here. The others were all very upset that they could not contact us. It had been about a couple hours since we had shut it off to talk. We had seen lots of grass and not much else. We had wandered on the plains. The ship had landed on a rock formation's plateau. The other group had found a deep river. They followed it for a while and found life forms. We had to hurry and catch up to them. The fact that were able to jump and run faster was a good thing. Eventually, we found them. The life form they found were essentially mermaids. They had red fishtails and humanoid torsos and faces. Their seemed to be multiple rows of sharp teeth in their mouths. None of us could understand what they were saying. It seemed that they were peaceful as there were 10 of them just looking at us from the water. Some of the more adventurous ones came to the bank of the river to get a closer look. They did not do anything threatening. In fact, when a large crocodile-like creature came they lifted it with some unseen force and gave it to us.
All the others wanted to attack the merfolk. I told them to back off of them. "Did you see how they sent that creature our way!? They're dangerous." Alyas said. "The only reason we waited this long is because you were off doing who knows what!" Haroon added. "If they haven't done anything when you were clearly outnumbered, it's likely they won't attack. We should see if they are sentient and try to get some way to translate what they are saying. As explorers, that's our job." That was clearly not what they wanted to hear. "Our tenants say we shouldn't give quarter to other races." Corey said. I just looked at him incredulously. "Didn't we just have a talk about those following all those tenants earlier? C'mon now. Don't play around." I scolded. He looked down as he scratched at his head. Dolan knew better to voice his opinion. There was still a look of bloodlust on the face of Haroon and Larl. "Why do you feel the need to barge into fights with large groups of people that could kill us, Haroon?" I asked him. "Because my faith demands it!" he snapped back. That was a good enough reason.
I was not going to stop them if they wanted to fight that bad. I just hoped they would not get one shot and die. We were not in our power armor. If something happened to them here, it was all over for them. Instead of fighting, I went to collect a big sample of the river water and the soil at the riverbed. If it was drinkable, we could have a nice settlement in the area. Irrigation systems could allow us to grow crops if the soil was fertile and compatible with crops humans could grow and eat. Larl then slowly approached one of the male merfolk. I watched and looked at Haroon. "Get ready to bail him out if he gets in too over his head." I told him. He was the only one I trusted to be able to actually do something if things went badly for us. He just nodded. "I can't wait for our first fight with aliens. This will go down in the books." he said. Larl was right in front of the merfolk when it gurgled something at him with a pleasant look on his face. Larl bopped the merfolk on the nose. The merfolk just blinked in shock. I also could not believe that was what he went with. Larl looked at it. He then did it again.
