Ziggy's Cultural Exchange
“Ow! Watch the floof, it’s getting all caught up in it!”
The little Xero could only laugh. “It’s not my fault you’ve got so much of it. I love that you just call it fluff outright.” Amusing as the interaction was for him, Ziggy was actually struggling to help get this costume on the alien. “I’ve heard it called fur, fluff, fuzz, hair, what have you. Never heard somebody use the word floof unironically.”
The bat-like alien shrugged. “Well, it is what it is. Fluff doesn’t quite describe it, and hair… just feels wrong to say.”
“Eh, fair enou-”
“Ow!”
“Ah, sorry...” Ziggy winced that time. He knew that he’d caught the visor on his new friend’s ear. Again, difficult not to with how big those ears were, but even so he knew the pain of getting nicked there. And this was considering that the person that crafted this costume had accounted for the alien’s body proportions.
He called himself Quill, though somehow Ziggy had made a good enough impression for him to have admitted that that was a family name, not his own true name. He was quite a bit taller than Xeros were, though not as tall as a lot of other bipedal species. He had bright, white fur on his head, his belly, and his fingers, while most of the rest of his body was covered in midnight blue fur. His arms doubled as big wings, though he’d told Ziggy that on most planets, including his own, they weren’t quite good enough for true flight; not for very long, anyways.
“So, I have a question for you.”
“Hm? Go for it,” Quill answered, reaching up to rub his ear.
“You said that you’re out exploring, expedition type stuff, right? How come you stuck around here for so long?” Finally, with a click, the visor was fitted around Quill’s head, just above his glowing, cyan-colored eyes.
“Intrigue, really. A species brought back from extinction? Not the brink of it, but past the line? That’s something else. Plus this is the first time since I left my home planet that I’ve encountered a culture as open as yours. Mine is… open and friendly, sure. But we’re a very wary people.”
“From what you’ve told me, that’s not surprising. I hope that Xeros aren’t putting up any red flags for you.” Ziggy stepped around in front of Quill, leaning this way and that and starting to pace around him, just to make sure there wasn’t anything sticking out of the bat’s outfit. It took a few moments of poking and prodding, but eventually he was satisfied. “Everything just about fits. Gotta say, your suggestion for the baggy shirt paid off, I can barely tell your wings are folded up in there.”
Quill shrugged, poking at himself to show where his wings were. “Kinda had to. A regular shirt would’ve been painful to try. Now, as for you...”
Ziggy’s eyes lit up, glowing just a hint brighter as Quill got to his feet, standing almost a full head over the Xero. “I wasn’t able to get anything to resemble wings for you, but I was able to figure something out. Rather, a friend of mine did.” He headed over to his pile of belongings, and opened up a luggage case. From inside, he pulled out a big, tapered sleeve of some kind. It was built with some kind of tech, segmented to contain it, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what it was for. It took a moment, but Ziggy managed to notice the proportion, and skittered over. He grabbed his tail and held it up, almost in offering with a huge grin on his face. “It’s not quite like the real thing, but this is a costume, so it’ll serve its purpose.”
Quill carefully slid the sleeve over Ziggy’s tail, making sure to not let the Xero’s fur get caught on any of the segments. Once it was fitted on, he flipped a switch on the underside of the sleeve. Ziggy felt the hum of energy as the device activated, and a pair of holograms flipped on, generating images of a tremendous, aquatic fin on the top and bottom of his tail. “Okay, you gotta tell me how its keeping the fin on my tail tip when that’s exposed.”
“Trade secret,” Quill said with a grin, digging into the luggage case some more. “But to be honest… I don’t actually know.” Ziggy snickered and stepped closer to see what all Quill was grabbing. Effectively for the day, they were fitting each other with cultural attire from the other’s species. Ziggy was being outfitted with some gear to help him wear some clothing from Quill’s homeworld, while the bat boy had been dressed in some kind of Xero cosplay. It really overplayed the geeky look, but Ziggy assured him that all it did was add to the charm and help make him look unthreatening.
“The sleeve was the only thing I could get crafted, so the rest of this… is gonna be kind of big on you.” The first thing to come out was a cloak. It was silky and a deep, dark blue, and as soon as the whole thing was pulled out, Ziggy was reaching up for it. “Hold on, lemme just-”
“No, that’s all I need! It’s huge, I can totally run around with that and hold it out like wings!”
As soon as Quill let go, Ziggy was pulling the cloak around himself, and indeed, it was probably enough. It draped down all the way down to the Xero’s shins. He flung the ends out just to see how wing-like it could be, revealing the speckled pattern on the inside, with faint blue and purple colors almost “sprayed” on, not unlike a view of distant nebulas. “Hey, isn’t this-?”
“The Cold Star Nebula? Yeah, it is,”Quill replied, still digging through the case. “Every once in a while, g Here! This is what I was looking for.”
“Hm?” Before Ziggy could properly turn to look, Quill had draped a necklace in front of him, and snapped it around the back of his neck. It was plenty loose, so it was a simple matter to lift it up and look at it. “Oh these are cool!” In his paw, the necklace was a string of leather adorned with a series of glowing gems, each of different colors.
“Also these.” Quill stepped before Ziggy and knelt before him so he could hold out a pair of bangles, each glowing the same neon color that Ziggy did. They were almost soft, with a little hint of give, but cool to the touch. “These took some searching, but it wasn’t too hard once I knew where to look. Think this is enough?”
Ziggy gave him a big grin and a thumbs up. “Yeah, this is plenty!” He snatched up the bangles and pulled them onto his wrists, then pulled the cloak’s hood up so that his ears could poke out through the appropriate holes in the top. “Okay, yeah, for sure. It’s a relaxed night anyways, so we can go ahead and get going!”
Quill raised an eyebrow, looking towards the door of the place. “Get going? Where?”
“The smoothie place, of course,” Ziggy answered, already walking with a bit of a strut, his “finned” tail swaying behind him. “One of the best methods of immersion is food, so I figure you can get a good treat to start the night off right!”
“...You just want another lantern fruit smoothie, don’t you?”
