Here I was, suffering one of the greatest indecencies of the last… eh, forget it. A lot of years. Some number I couldn't count off my fingers. And I didn't particularly want to remember in any semblance of vivid detail the honest LAST time it happened. I was outside, sitting on Peter's shoulder, my nails lightly digging into the back of his wheelchair, and the back of his slightly tattered leather jacket.

Naked.

Well, mostly naked. I was wearing a plastic jacket that covered my back, and a harness (bright, bright yellow, with a carabineer to attach to a lead), but it certainly didn't cover anything a sentient person would consider the indecent bits. Frankly, it made me uncomfortable, and looking back, I think I would have actually just preferred to have gone totally nude. Some species don't feel the need to wear clothes, and don't suffer any indignities- seen plenty of A'askvarii ladies chilling at the last outpost and nobody bats an eye (granted, I didn't want to think how much you'd suffer if you crossed the lot of 'em the wrong way). Hell, Groot barely wears clothes. A jacket or something around his vitals when we need to go somewhere he could get frostbite, but not much else.

But the harness? The harness made me feel like a pet, not a person. And I wasn't terribly fond of what was written on the jacket, even if I couldn't read it (Seriously. They need to start making eye implants for translating text. I shudder to think about going under the knife again, but that would actually be pretty useful.).

Quill adjusts himself in the wheelchair, and I can see he's probably just as uncomfortable with this as I am.

"Well?' he asks.

"Well what?" I whisper under my breath. Nobody's here, but Terra hasn't had much contact with non-hostile extraterrestrials. Granted, we didn't totally qualify as non-hostile ourselves, but we weren't exactly here to blow anything up. Yet. And I didn't want to be picked up by their science labs for any reason. Nope. Not. Going. There. I'm keeping my trap shut as much as possible, thanks.

"We going to do this?"

"You're the one who asked, jackass. But, yeah, I'm here. Let's just get it over with."

"Thanks, Rocket."

"Shut up, idiot. And you look like one, to boot. Let's move." He presses forward on the joystick and it shudders to life… slowly. Ugh. Terran tech (or "tech" in this case)- utter crap. Me passing off as his service animal seemed considerably more plausible now that I was seeing just how utterly Neolithic this stuff was. It's only a few hours of extreme self-conscience. I can do this.

And honestly? The light breeze felt nice through my fur.

"I… I think I'd like to take a pit stop on Earth for a day or two."

Quill ran his finger under the ridge of his eyebrow, something he did when he was seriously thinking about something (so, not particularly often, of course). Drax, who was putting away the dishes from dinner, almost dropped a plate on the floor. Not that it would have broken. China is a luxury you don't want to own on a spaceship. His reflexes were pretty quick- if a flying metaphor existed, he'd make small work of grabbing it out of midair.

Gamora, stretched out in a makeshift hammock over the engine's internal exhaust system, wasn't so lucky, dropping her cup with a loud hiss into the metal pipe.

"Terra?" she quipped "Your home?"

"Yeah."

"We want to make this official?" Drax asked, sliding the last plate into place and locking the cupboard and sink.

"Sure, why not," Peter responded, "Cargo hold in five."

Gamora flipped out of the hammock, putting her reading tablet away and picked up the rolling cup. I grabbed Groot's squirt bottle and wiped up the brown mess, then scurried down to cargo. Groot was already there, holding on to the bay door as he practiced hobbling in the larger open space. Regrowing an arm took a few hours, but it seemed that growing him back to normal from being blasted to smithereens would take a few months. But he was still here, and I shot him with the bottle in the face three times for good measure. Groot nodded.

I hated when Gamora sprayed me once with it, but he seemed to like it. Music helped, too. And he was mostly back to himself again, about Gamora's size and strong enough to hoist me on his shoulder again.

He steadied himself, and pulled out a pallet from the hold so I could sit at eye level to everyone else, using it as a brace as he pushed it to the center of the room. He flopped down to the left and waited for everyone else to arrive.

"I am Groot," he bellowed, interwoven with a series of rustles and clicks saying "/What's the mission, today? Nova?/"

"The idiot suddenly wants to go home."

"The idiot," Quill quipped, directly from behind, with Drax and Gamora right behind on the hatch, "wants to issue a contract."

Gamora locked the hatch and sauntered over to our makeshift Jackass Circle, now reserved for strategy meetings and final decisions on accepting a contract, patting Groot on the head with a gentle smile on the way. "What's the bounty?" The official start of any contract decision. We were going to do this like usual- abnormal in itself as we'd often take side trips between jobs as long as it didn't cost too much in gas. But if Quill wanted to treat it like a job as a way to force himself to visit home, so be it.

"Earth doesn't use credits."

"We don't do charity," Drax replied, squatting to my right. "No payment, no work. Your rules."

"I didn't say payment-free, just not credits." He picked up the ragged backpack of his childhood, and flipped it upside down. Stacks of white paper with greenish-black ink tied together by elastic tumbled out. "Yondu must have snuck this in my bag when he paid out the bounty for you guys bringing me in." If it were anyone else, I'd have made a crack that they would have probably spotted their bag containing weird pamphlets sometime earlier than three months out, but something told me Quill had been debating whether or not to say anything about the- presumably gift?- for a while.

"Paper?" Gamora asked, holding up and examining one of the stacks. Groot grabbed one and passed it to me for inspection as well. It had writing I couldn't read on either side, identical on all of them except for a small set of text on the front. Some kind of serial number, I guessed. An old humy pictured on one side, a building on another. Shining it up to the light showed an image through the paper that wasn't visible otherwise. Anti-counterfeiting measures? This stuff must be some kind of humy-

"MONEY. A lot of it. I had some in my bag when I was picked up as a kid, but not this much. This is like, thirty k? Thirty three thousand four hundred and twenty seven, the twenty seven being what I've been holding on to since Yondu kidnapped me," he said, holding out an additional four bills, in three different types. I tried running through my head what the denominations must be for the types laid out.

"So? We have the currency already, there should be no reason to stop on Terra." Drax stated, a bit pleased with himself.

"Actually, Quill's right. Depending on how much that's worth in supplies. At least canned food. Your planet's at least learned food preservation, right?" I asked, as I mused that three different paper types adding evenly to 27 could be a whole bunch of different things, depending on what kind of base system humy numerals worked off of. "I mean, tell me how the hell else we are going to cash that in. I haven't seen too many planets that still use physical currencies. What's 33K in Terran money worth anyway?"

"I was six. I could buy lunch for less than five, eating in a restaurant. And this stuff, it doesn't look like what I remember." He tugged one of the stacked bills out and laid it next to the four in his hand. "These are one dollar bills," he said, "a five, a twenty. Just green and white. But look at the hundred," (Damn! I was wrong. I thought humys worked in base 15, and the three bills in his hand were 1,1, 10, and 15) "It has orange on it. That's new. Actually, all the bills are new," he said as he quickly counted off something on his fingers, "Heck, they're from this year. And they have the right watermarks. Weird. Orange Benjamins. Never thought I'd see that. Either way, I know how much we're sitting on, but not what it could even buy us. For all I know this could be half a sandwich, or it could buy us food for a lifetime."

"I am Groot. /Inflation halving former value in thirty years sounds in the standard range, I'd say a back of the envelope calculation would give us about three years' worth of food./"

"Groot says it's probably enough food for us for three years. Personally, if Terra's got some tradable commodities- tin, copper, gold- we get ourselves a treat and stock up on that instead. Hell, I'm in. That's more than what Yondu gave us in credits, and he actually paid your flarking bounty." I untied a cord around my neck and threw my metal disc into the cup in the center. I'd voted in favor. Because, damn, if Groot was even close to right that was a LOT of money. Groot detangled a vine on his side where he held his, and let his disc slip into his hand, pitching it into the cup.

"If it's worth even half that, it's certainly worth it. And we're not going to have to put our lives on the line for it." Drax flicked his coin, bouncing it off the rim into the glass. Peter dropped his in too. We had enough votes, now, even if Gamora said no. Slowpoke has to whine if we already have four votes. Can't look like we agree on anything, even if we do. Because, damn. That's a lot of money. But we always go to the client with a nonunanimous decision. Even if the client happened to be standing right there and in on our system.

"It still smells like a trap," Gamora huffed. "Or that those bills are fake. At the very least your 'Daddy Dearest' has some kind of ulterior motive." She paused, uneasily. This didn't sound like she was being a nag just because she was the last to vote and it had already been approved. She genuinely sounded worried.

"This. This was in the stack I picked up." One of the pieces of paper in her stack wasn't like the others. It was all white with black writing. I flipped through my stack, a little more carefully. There was one in mine, too. Ten more of the stacks had papers in them, twelve total. We laid them out.

"Quill, this one's on you," I growled. I hate not knowing things. Makes me feel stupid.

"They're… addresses. They're numbered, too. One," he said, pointing to the straight line. "Two," pointing to the paper that had a symbol that looked like a chair without legs. He arranged them in what was likely their numerical order. After nine of the papers the single line symbol cycled around again with a circle after it. Base 10. Terrans did math in base 10. Who the flarg uses base 10?! Base 15 or 20 are pretty standard, but 10?

"I think its… a scavenger hunt. I don't know most of these places, but they're all in my hometown. And the eleventh one," he said, lifting up the slip of paper, "it's my house."

"That doesn't sound like a trap," Drax said, wincing at the papers and hoping he could suddenly be able to read them. "It sounds like Yondu left you a birthday present. I did that for my daughter one year. The last stop was our house, and there was a giant plush toy waiting for her."

"Yeah, but he already gave me the cash. The hell else is there? Also, in case you missed the memo, I'm not ten." No arguments on his birthday though. Wonder if it was his? I looked at the numbered pieces sprawled out and noticed the first one had something in Kree scrawled on it in the bottom left corner. Finally. Something I could read. It was a date- three days from now, to be exact. That's why Quill waited.

"Well, we already said we were going, might as well?" Gamora said.

"Might as well," Quill mused.

About 48 hours later, when we were entering the asteroid field around Terra's sun, Quill turned on cloaking and shut the lights. "We're early. I'm landing on an asteroid", he yelled back to the bunks, where Gamora and Drax were playing cards. "If anyone want to stay up to keep watch, go ahead. I'm getting some shut eye. We leave for Earth in eight hours." He yawned, threw his jacket and vest on a hook at the foot of his bunk, and rolled the curtain over it. Drax and Gamora shuffled their deck and put the cards and chips away, and did the same. I'd given my bunk up to Groot, and he'd gotten too big for the two of us to share. At full size, he hardly slept, but he'd been needing a full night's recovery while growing. Plus, I didn't want his thorns up my ass if he rolled over. Those bunks are pretty narrow for something humy sized. I'd been taking Gamora's hammock, or whoever's bunk was empty if someone else piloted through the night. I wasn't tired enough yet, grabbing a piece of dried fruit from the kitchen and a vitamin tablet. Still not tired, I thought that we might actually be close enough to Earth to pick up some of their broadcasts, if I was lucky. I turned on the panel and tried to see what I could find.

Something animated, with giant mechs fighting each other, some overly sappy dramatical thing (with terrible acting), news? I noticed that each of the things I found was in another language, because of the slight lag in translation every time I changed between. How many languages were even spoken on Terra?

"Rocket, put on headphones or lower it please," Quill whined from his bunk. I'd never heard him sound so agitated.

I switched it off, lumbering to his bunk. "Problem?"

He pushed the curtain from his bunk open a little, the blue glow of the emergency floor lights reflecting off his half-open eyes. It was weird talking to him at eye level without craning my neck or sitting on something. "Nervous. Never thought I'd go home."

"And?" I asked. There was clearly more, as his voice dropped off at the end of his sentence.

"And, I'm probably going to have to do this alone. I don't want to do this alone."

"What, why?"

"Why do I have to or why don't I want to?"

"I don't care about what you want, jerk. Why do you have to do this by yourself? Not letting that much money out of my sight." We both knew the answer to the latter question, and I have a reputation to uphold.

"Earth's off the map, remember? Drax, Gamora, and Groot would attract way too much attention."

"You didn't say anything about me."

"You would be fine, walking around on your own… if you didn't wear clothes and kept your mouth shut… no offense. I know you're you, Bud, but there are animals on my planet that look exactly like you do. Not that that's really going to help me, other than moral support." Quill laughed quietly. "But I'm not going to ask you to strip and stalk me. I got this."

"With THAT much money on the line? Flarg no. Consider it done. And if it is a trap, I'll claw out some throats. You're way too squishy to protect yourself, and I sure as hell ain't letting you run off with that much cash on your own."

"Thanks, Rocket."

"Get some sleep, asshole."