Omake Week 2014, Day 2: My short drabbles about Alys and Joss were the first omake series I ever wrote, even before I knew of the word "omake," so it's pretty inevitable that there would be a story with them for something I'm calling "omake week"!

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"And that's pretty much all there is to it," Alys Brangwin told her friend Fenris. "You need to turn over your wrist at the point of release. If you use your elbow, the throw will start turning back to you short of where you want it to go, and you'll never hit the third target. Here, watch."

She flicked open the blade of her slasher, then turned towards the baked-clay practice dummies at the other end of the target range and whipped her arm across in a backhand arc. The boomerang-like weapon shot out spinning, its blades sending out a spray of fragments as they tore across the front of three targets, then sailed back to Alys. She caught it by the central handle in a practiced motion, then closed the blades and sheathed the weapon.

"Hmm, I'm not sure that I quite see…"

Fenris held out her arm, moving it slowly through the path it would take to throw a slasher, trying to duplicate Alys's movements.

"No, it's like this," Alys said, then took hold of Fenris's wrist and upper arm, moving the limb through the throwing motion and turning it at the appropriate points.

"Oh, I think I get it."

"It's been a while since you've had a lesson in how to use a weapon, I'm guessing?"

"I wouldn't say that." The redhead smirked at Alys and added, "Jason's been giving me pretty regular lessons on how to use his sword."

Alys groaned.

"I should smack you for that one, Fen. Rubbing your good luck with romance in the face of someone who's trying to help you is a pretty low blow."

"Oh, come on, Alys. You're gorgeous, you're smart, and you're a famous hero. You could have your pick of nearly anybody you wanted."

A loud bellow rose up from the far side of the practice grounds.

"Hey, Alys!"

"You were saying, Fen?"

Joss Howland, veteran hunter, genial idiot, and walking example of Alys Brangwin's bad luck with love, swaggered towards the two women.

"Good afternoon, ladies."

"Afternoon," Alys replied, specifically omitting the word "good." She really preferred not to tell bald-faced lies if she could avoid it.

"Hi, Joss," Fenris chirped. She got along better with Joss than Alys did, probably because Joss's crush wasn't on her. Almost immediately after, though, she sniffed at the air. "Do either of you smell that?"

"Come to think of it, yeah, I do," Alys said. It was a sour, thick odor, one that Alys vaguely remembered smelling before. She crinkled up her nose. "What is that? I can't quite place it." Context was the problem; wherever she'd smelled it before was definitely somewhere else, not the practice ground and probably not even in the city of Aiedo.

Joss gave her a broad smile.

"It's the aroma of love, baby."

Fenris pinched her nose.

"More like the aroma of spoiled cheese."

Alys, meanwhile, took a second look as Joss. It was her general policy not to examine him too closely (which was really too bad, given that looking decorative was by far his best attribute), but on this occasion she realized she'd missed something on first glance: his face, and the portions of exposed skin his outfit showed on his arms and torso, were slick and shiny as if rubbed with some kind of oil.

"That stink is you? What have you got all over yourself?"

"You ever hear of pheromones?"

"No."

His smug look increased, driven by the rare occasion for him to tell Alys something she didn't know.

"It's the latest thing they're researching in Piata. They're the chemicals our bodies give off, letting other people know that we're an attractive mate."

"So you…doused yourself in those things?"

"Exactly! What Roth did was to distill down the all-natural pheromonal scents into an oil that's guaranteed to make a man desirable and appealing. It's nature's own love potion!"

Alys glanced at Fenris.

"Are you finding him any more desirable?"

"No, I can't say that I am."

"Good. I'm not, either, and I'd hoped that didn't mean something was wrong with my pheromone-sniffing glands or whatever."

Joss looked at them in confusion.

"Wait, you mean that you two aren't feeling anything?"

Alys shrugged.

"Mild nausea at the smell, maybe. What did Roth use to make that stuff, anyway? He's a snake-oil salesman, but at least his goop usually doesn't put you off your lunch."

Joss's sense of dramatic timing being as impeccable as ever, Alys got her answer almost immediately. There was a low rumbling, and then from out of the dunes and scrubby bushes popped several caterpillar-like creatures about eight feet long, colored green with yellow bellies, waving their two front pairs of legs in the air, faceted eyes gleaming.

"Carrion crawlers?" Fenris yelped. Unlike their desert-dwelling orange cousins, carrion crawlers typically haunted the moist, dark passages of caves and underground tunnels. Apparently, though, they had reason to leave that natural habitat.

"That makes sense. After all, Roth probably doesn't have a room where Parmanian or Motavian men are sweating out these pheromones so he can bottle them. He needed another source. Crawler musk counts as 'all-natural,' after all."

Joss might not have been the brightest egg in the basket, but even if his reasoning brain was still several steps behind Alys's deduction his survival instinct was working fine. He turned and bolted for the city walls, hotly pursued by a swarm of crawler ladies whose scent organs were insisting that they'd found their dream man. Several of them spat the sticky threads they used to paralyze their prey in his general direction.

"I didn't realize that crawlers were into the kinky stuff," Fenris mused. "Do you think we should help him?"

"Who are we to interfere with the course of true love?"