“What the fuck are you?!” Kristi exclaimed.
It was her first night after landing at the consular mission, and after a long day of settling in, going through the ridiculous rituals involved with meeting all the alien dignitaries, laying prostrate before the windbag of an UN ambassador with his beady little eyes while he reminded her of her low rank in a low ranking department on a low ranking planet, and choking on the noxious saccharine sweet shit they called atmosphere on this continent, Kristi was desperate, like fucking angrily, on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown, crazily desperate for some time with nobody else around. Nobody to ask her anything. Nobody to imply that she needed to do something but couldn’t be fucked to ask it. Nobody to test her mettle as a fledgling first-year xeno-cultural attache officer.
She’d just peeled out of her uniform-slash-envirosuit, and she needed this fucking bath, and her bath did not fucking need this, whatever the fuck floating pink octopus bullshit thing was. It wasn’t one of the aliens, she knew that, it looked nothing like their hulking, furred massive bodies, or any of the various pets they kept.
Also, well, it was floating, which was weird.