Chapter 1

Pre'tu sighed, staring out of the starboard viewport of his father's Rolls Royce gravity car. He was being dragged along on yet another one of his father's diplomatic meetings. Of course, Pre'tu knew that he was only there as one of his father's little maneuvers. Bringing family along will help him appear more like a normal person, putting other delegates further at ease around him. Vreeno, even his car was part of the scheme. Showing up in a vehicle of Terran manufacture would make him look better to all the human diplomats. A civilized alien, Pre'tu thought bitterly. He had noticed the way the Terrans all looked at his father, him, and others of non-homo sapien origins. They all thought that they were inferior to them. No, Pre'tu corrected himself mentally. Not all of them look at us like that. 'Stereotypes' as the humans call them, are to be avoided. I don't want to be just as bad as the people I accuse of prejudice against us.

Vreeno, thought Pre'tu again. But why me? Why does my father always drag me into these ridiculous functions? Why not my mother? After all, she is his BondMate.

But he had also been smart enough to figure out the other part of his father's sinister little plan. He wanted Pre'tu to stop with his ambitions of joining the Skree'Varian (the military of the Skree), and to become a diplomat like him. Not a chance in Yul'Ta. Why would anyone ever want to be something as boring as a diplomat?

The car came to a halt, setting down on a landing pad on the floating embassy. Pre'tu looked at it through the viewport, not impressed in the least. It had been built by Terrans, who evidently knew neither of beauty nor grace. The building was large and rectangular, stretching even further towards the sky than the hover platform that it sat on raised it up to. But it had no subtlety; no gently flowing lines, no streamlining, and no elegance whatsoever. Pre'tu snorted incredulously; Terrans had long claimed that they possessed the best artists in the galaxy. This building was testament to the otherwise.

His father gently tapped him on the shoulder, indicating he should stop examining the embassy, and that he should exit the vehicle. Pre'tu pressed the egress button, the door swinging upward gracefully. At least the Terrans knew how to build their cars right. He stepped down onto the red carpet, walking forward a few feet and waiting for his father.

"Now, son," his father said to him as he exited the vehicle as well, "remember: speak English when around Terrans. Very few of these representatives would know Skree'Tulna. Most human brains are not as developed in the linguistic centers as ours are, so they have more trouble acquiring knew languages."

Pre'tu could accept this, as he had learned English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish all in under a year; the languages of Earth were ridiculously simple. The Asian languages weren't all that bad though. Chinese had fascinated him for a while. He loved any language that, when it was printed, appeared to be art... and yet the Terrans insisted on using English, a clumsy language that possessed no intrinsic beauty, and was derived from many old languages that were stripped of all inflection. Not only that, but slang was so prevalent among the Terran people that their entire language changed daily, new words coming into play, and old ones going out of fashion. It was a confusing, disordered language to say the least.

They walked up to the entrance, where a human servant opened the door for the both of them. They walked through the main hall into the ballroom, where fifty or sixty diplomats of about ten different species were mulling around, examining the food laid out on tables that circled the room. Some were talking to each other in soft undertones, or were listening to the orchestra that was playing on the stage. Pre'tu thought he recognized the current song as belonging to a Terran composer known as Ludwig van Beethoven. It wasn't too bad, but it had not been optimized for Skree hearing; Terrans only heard from about the twenty hertz to the twenty kilohertz range, whereas Skree hearing covered twice the frequency range. The song utilized no softly done high-pitched tones, or light extreme-bass tones as most Skree music would have.

Pre'tu narrowly dodged an incoming Bulkan diplomat as the man... or rather, as the being rushed past him to introduce himself to Pre'tu's father. Bulkans could not be characterized as male or female, as they had six different genders, and an immensely complex mating cycle. It was a true wonder of evolution that they still existed, really.