Gurren Exile

The Earth was crowded.

No one needed convincing of that. Ever since the war against the Anti-Spiral menace, when humankind had defeated the Anti-Spirals with the help of Simon and the Gurren Lagann, the world had been growing and shaping itself into a new place.

Some had moved out of course and begun to colonize new worlds. Mars, of course, was the first to be colonized, with its burning sunsets and constantly shifting red sands. It took no time at all for the poets of the new era to construct an appropriate planetary song and sing it whenever they had an event.

But Mars was old news.

Venus was next and humankind had continued moving out. New planets, with names like Rothgar and Nia (named, of course, after the famous princess who had once symbolized the doom of the human race) were discovered, named, and colonized.

And humankind was still moving out.

However, traveling to other planets still did take time and it was good to have a familiar face to greet those meeting the human race for either the first time or the millionth.

An unchanging face, since the human race’s lifespan was relatively short compared to the rest of the galaxy.

Also, a face that would not demonstrate weakness, yet at the same time not threaten to rip the arms/tentacles/other appendages off of the new race and beat them to death with them.

One out of three wasn’t bad.

“Why did it have to be you Lordgenome made immortal?” Rossiu bemoaned in a private video conference with the captain of the greeting ship. The leader of Earth and the captain of the ship had been in a mostly one-sided conference regarding the captain’s less-than-exemplary behavior towards the interspecies Leeron fanclub he had been instructed to deal with. The conference had eventually led, as it tended to these days, into how the captain wasn’t showing the best side of the Earth dwellers to their intergalactic contacts.

“Why not Simon? Simon had charisma! Simon didn’t look like he’d like to eat you, most of the time.”

“Simon was not a Beastman.”

Was. That was still a strange word in regard to Simon. Was.

His death had been publicized quietly, which was how Simon would have wanted it. He had been buried near the spot where he married and lost Nia on the same day. Few knew where his grave was.

“But you’re so--!”

“Who the hell do you think I am?” The blonde captain responded, baring his all-too-well-known serrated teeth in a grin. Being a mix of shark, feline, and human, a dangerous cocktail of genes, had its perks.

Namely being able to do and say largely whatever he wanted to the new races and get nothing more than complaints from Rossiu, who was too far away to do anything about it. It was a good system.

This new era had not tamed Viral, though it did tire him on occasion. Sleeping had become a foreign concept since Lordgenome had introduced him to immortality and everything about the ship he commanded had begun to bore him, due to extensive exploration and explanation to new recruits.

The places visited were interesting but at the same time offered nothing new. There was never anywhere to hunt and the cooks frowned on setting loose what little live food cargo they had so Viral could hunt it around the ship’s corridors.

This didn’t make sense. The corridors were large enough to hunt in, so why not hunt? Humans never seemed to look at the Beastman side of things. To be fair, this was because there were three hundred and ninety two humans above the ship and one Beastman, but Viral didn’t really care for ‘fairness’ off of the battlefield.

Flipping off the video screen, the captain yanked at the constricting uniform’s collar until the button snapped off, clattering away on the floor. Sometimes the urge to fight became an obsession that clawed at him, like a kitten needing to be fed.

He never had any food for hunting anymore. No human was not off-limits. No species was not off-limits, with the exceptions of the ones humans had decided were non-sentient and could be eaten as food.

But those were so bovine now that the challenge had gone out of it and Viral barely felt a rise to kill when he saw the creatures he had once hunted penned and humanely killed in Earth slaughterhouses.

The art had been perfected and there was no further need to stalk, pounce, shred and devour. Furthermore, those things had been demonized and he was regarded as uncivilized when he did them.

Not that Viral much cared. Simon had understood.
But Simon was dead now and had been for ten years. It should be far easier to accept it, but the man still plagued Viral with the fact that he had been the only person on Earth to accept and implement Viral into planetary affairs without complaint. He entered Viral’s memories without permission and offered unsolicited ‘advice’ or simply sent him into a flashback.

“Sss…” Viral cursed softly under his breath as the door behind him slid open. He glanced back with sharp cat eyes. “What?”

Yoko blinked, the chopsticks in her hair tilting with her high red ponytail as she tucked her hands behind her back.

“Is that any way to greet me?”

“No worse than you deserve.”

A strange feeling rose in him when Yoko was around but he refused to act on it.  She would grow old, age already appeared in her thirty-seven-year-old eyes and movements, and he would not act on the feeling that half of him called love and half of him called loneliness. Neither of these halves was accepted by the third half, which said that he was being an idiot and he felt nothing and cold ice ran in his veins.

He assumed this part was the shark genes, but wasn’t entirely sure and did not care.  

“Why are you in here?”

“Thought you’d like to know something strange they picked up on the patrols.” Yoko said, flipping a sheet of paper out of nowhere. Viral brightened; he liked strange things, but Yoko pulled it back as he reached for it with one massive hand.

“Ahh-“

“Human, if you do not give me that paper, there will be ‘ahh’s aplenty and they will not be mocking me.”

“Oh fine.” She relinquished the paper, watching his face carefully as he scanned it

“A human?” He finally commented, wrinkling his nose. According to the report, a human had been collected, floating in the atmosphere of the world below them. “Why tell us about something dead?”

“Because they’re not dead yet.” Yoko said, taking the sheet back from him. “Do you read these reports or just skim them?”

“You always summarize. Why bother reading?”
“Apparently, the body has been carried by the current, something the natives of the planet call the ‘Grand Stream’, for we don’t know how many miles.”

“And the human is not yet dead?”

“No, two of our patrols picked up the body about an hour ago now and it has been lying in the hanger bay. The patrols just got in.”

“Why ‘it’?”

“Well… gender is a little difficult to determine. There’s a pool going on among the staff; fourteen say it’s a boy, nineteen say it’s a girl, and four are undecided. The medic has not yet been called.”

“Call him—“

“The medic is female.”

“Call her and send her down. I’m going down to assess this human.”

Really, it didn’t interest him that much, but it was something to do and kept his mind off of Yoko.