It was late morning when Megamind woke up. There was a moment when he wondered why there was another person in bed with him. Then he remembered: the wedding, the walk to the blues joint, the champagne, the discovery on the dance floor that his style and Roxanne's worked so perfectly together that before long the other dancers cleared a circle to watch them while Minion traded licks with the lead guitarist. Then more champagne, more dancing and her introducing him to the slow "belt buckle polisher" style. Closing time, breakfast in an all-night diner, returning to the jetboat. They were far enough out on the water that the lights of Wolf Lake were no brighter than the stars, when she asked "Did you ever ride all the way up front?"
"What do you mean?" he'd asked.
"Show you. Menang, could you turn off the stealth mode and put the top down?"
"I'm kind of scared of where you're going with this," the fish had said, but he'd nevertheless done as she asked, slowing the boat at the same time, while behind him she shed her shoes and, reaching under her skirt in a maneuver so quick and modest that he didn't realize what she was doing until she did it, peeled off her pantyhose. Then she had stepped past Minion, climbed up on the boat's long deck cover and walked barefoot up its length to the point where it became narrow enough to straddle with her legs dangling on either side, like riding a horse. And that is what she had done, settling her white dress under her and looking back flirtatiously over her shoulder in the moonlight.
"Well?" she had asked. "Gonna join me?"
"Sir, I don't think this is a good idea," Minion had objected, but Megamind was already unbuckling his boots.
"Nonsense," he'd said. "You're skillful enough driving this thing to avoid dumping us in the lake, and if we do hit a freighter's wake wrong or something, you'll just pick us up, right?" Minion had slowed the boat until it was barely moving while Megamind got his boots and socks off. Then the blue alien had climbed over the robotic suit and executed a leap that looked wild but was, in fact, carefully calculated. He landed on his bottom, legs open, and slid to a stop spooned behind Roxanne. He put his hands around her waist and nuzzled her neck. At that point, the fish had startled them both by engaging the stealth mode again, so that they seemed to be sitting on nothing a few feet above the dark water, and gently opening the throttle. They'd ridden all the way home like that, with the wind in her hair and the spray flying on either side. They did hit the wakes of big ships a couple of times, but Minion had steered straight across them, Roxanne had held onto the forward spike, Megamind had held onto her and, although the ride got pretty rough, they'd managed to stay aboard, both of them whooping with delight. They'd rolled right into the hidden boathouse sitting out there, counting on the lateness of the hour to make complete invisibility unnecessary. Dear God, what a woman. She hadn't minded being chilly and wet, or getting a hole in the back of her white dress. "It served its purpose," she'd said with a shrug and a smile when Minion pointed it out as they were disembarking. They'd left the dress, along with the rest of their sodden clothes, in the hamper in the master bathroom.
She had temporarily lost her smile then, and her eyes had widened. While he had told her that his endowment did grow, he hadn't said how much. "I don't think it's going to fit," was what she'd said. At that point, he'd led her into the bedroom and opened a nightstand drawer to reveal his technological solution: a series of dildos in a range of sizes from barely larger than a tampon to almost as big as he was. He'd demonstrated that all of them heated up and and were capable of more intense vibration than was usually available in battery-powered toys, and there were also clit massagers and butt plugs and several kinds of lube. It had been a very experimental, exploratory wedding night, and the plan he'd figured out had, for once, worked. Every time she'd had an orgasm, he'd switched to the next larger size of dildo, gradually opening her up until, in the end, he did fit. By that time, he'd been so aroused that he hadn't lasted long, but after seven orgasms, she'd had no complaints.
Without otherwise moving, he did a fist pump in the air above the bed. Then he lay still, waiting with unaccustomed patience and a smile of contentment until Roxanne moved a little and made a little "Mmm" noise, indicating that she was close to waking up. Then he rolled over next to her, embraced her and nuzzled her. She returned his attentions with interest. She started asking him for the words in Tseri[gulp]uu (the alien language) for various body parts. So they had a kind of erotic language lesson.
It was mid-afternoon when they finally got out of bed. While they were showering, a brainbot notified Minion. By the time they wandered into the kitchen area, he was heating up the leftover stew and setting out bread and butter.
"How are things going, Minion?" Megamind asked.
"Tsreya[click]or [squish]aili Tseri[gulp]uu kvi?" asked Roxanne. She had decided that, whenever she heard them speaking English, she would ask how to say it in Tseri[gulp]uu. Her husband obliged, and the rest of the conversation proceeded sort of at half speed because everything was repeated in both languages.
"I've finished writing the modifications to the orbital construction software, Sir, but I want you to take a look at it before we implement. Same with this list I made of all the construction materials we'll have to get."
"Good. I'll get started on the list first. Have you given any further thought to cyborg shipment?"
"Not really, Sir. You're better at that stuff than I am."
"Cyborg?" asked Roxanne. "What cyborgs are you bringing?" She was thinking of the humanoid cyborgs depicted in movies.
"The brainbots are cyborgs," Megamind explained. "They'll be extremely useful at our destination, but the ship only has so much capacity, so we'll be scrapping most of their bodies, bringing the brains and counting on being able to build them new bodies when we get there. The way things look now, we should be able to bring ten or twelve with bodies, plus the central controller. They'll be able to start reassembling the others as soon as they can get the materials."
"And don't forget Spider Bot," added Minion.
"Yes, yes. The eight-legged design will do wonderfully on the uneven surface of unexplored lands. I wouldn't be surprised if Spee-ider Bot ended up being cloned several times."
"Maybe you could send plans for the bodies in this message you're sending ahead of us," she suggested. "That way somebody might have some materials waiting for us."
"The message!" exclaimed the blue man. "That's what we need to work on next. Roxanne, can you write us a script?"
"First, I want to see the incoming message again, this time with you translating from the beginning, and pauses for explanations until I really understand what I'm hearing. That will give me the correct forms of address and things like that."
"We'll do that first thing after we eat."
###
For the second showing, Megamind had brainbots put the two kitchen chairs side by side, facing the hand print on the message drone. Once they were seated, he told her how to pause, reverse, fast reverse and fast forward the hologram projector by selected touches. Forward was the same as Start, which she had already figured out. She wrote it down in her little reporter's notebook, then touched Start. The first thing she noticed as the fish narrator appeared again, was how odd seemed that this fish wasn't in a suit or a tank or anything. It was as if the camera had been in the water with him.
Megamind began to speak as the fish did, while Roxanne took notes furiously. "Greetings to you, my fellow survivors of the destruction of the-" The blue man paused the projection. "-Alpha Upsilon Sagittarius group of stars, about sixteen hundred light years from us. In Tseri[gulp]uu it's just called Me Weä [Squish]iyey, the Home Star Group." He started it again. "My name is Sa[squish]ikwuë Nawa. In Me Weä [Squish]iyey, I piloted a commercial space liner traveling between Lup and [Click]ëalup. As the liner was boarding in Lup High Orbit, I along with the pilots of all the other interstellar vessels in Lup space at that time, received an overriding order from our military high command, informing us that a previously unknown hostile civilization had targeted the suns of all the inhabited worlds of Me Weä [Squish]iyey with a weapon called the Star Eater." Roxanne gasped at the idea that her beloved's home world had been destroyed on purpose, but she didn't stop the message. "We were ordered to come to this planet, Harolup, which lies a long way outside Me Weä [Squish]iyey and therefore had a chance of escaping the destruction. Fourteen of us obeyed, assembling here in Harolup High Orbit. Our initial population, passengers and crew members, was one hundred and eighty-nine members of each of the Tseri[gulp]uu, plus forty-three Glau (that's Metro Mahn's species), seventeen Colna and three Ekwa. (Those are the two other intelligent species from Me Weä [Squish]iyey.) The non-Tseri[gulp]uu, all except for one Colna, immediately took two of the vessels and departed for planets claimed by their civilizations, where their species might be numerous enough for an adequate gene pool. That one, Ileala-Atii, is in an interspecies marriage with a woman of my species and chose to stay with her wife." Megamind paused it again. "They actually have a word for interspecies marriage. It's emkla, literally cross-bond."
"Not only that, they're accepting enough of it so this Ileala-Atii person felt okay about staying with them. Good news for us. But wait a minute. When you said, your species, you meant separately from Minion's species, right?"
He nodded.
"So are there separate words for the separate species, different from Tseri[gulp]uu?"
"Tseri[gulp]uu means the Paired Peoples. My people are the Yi[gulp]velit; Yi[gulp]vi is the singular. Minion's are the Opuulu, singular and plural."
"Got it. Okay." She wrote as she spoke.
He started the projection again. It almost immediately switched to the image of the Milky Way. "This was Me Weä [Squish]iyey's location within the galaxy." The view zoomed in until it was centered on one group of stars. "The last of us to depart reported that, not only the stars hosting inhabited planets, but every star in the cluster was destroyed. There were known habitable planets around Me Weä [Squish]iyey in all directions. We who came to Harolup knew of Earth but were advised to avoid it because of the uncertainty of our welcome from the natives. Whoever made the decision to send you there was acting independently." As the speaker paused and the camera zoomed in on Harolup, Megamind commented "The way he says that word, 'independently', makes it clear that he does not approve." The fish's voice started up again and Megamind resumed translating. "We have joined the largest of our vessels into a high-orbital habitat. With it, we have been able to produce several food species and establish a colony on the surface. Thus we maintain the Tseri[gulp]uu way of life, the only place in the Galaxy that it survives, so far as we are aware. There's a regularly scheduled shuttle between the orbiter and the colony every six days, but additional trips are common. Functions are gradually being moved down onto the surface as the colony is developed. As this is being recorded, children are still born, reared and trained in orbit, going to the surface only when they are-." This was the scene of the naked people around the pool.
Roxanne paused it at an image of a Yi[gulp]vi woman breastfeeding a baby. "This is pretty smart advertising," she remarked.
"You mean, not just tempting me with naked women, but tempting me with the possibility of a family."
"Yeah. So we should talk about that. I've never wanted to be a mom, but I think I'd be okay with being, like, a non-custodial stepmom." She smiled. "Especially of a kid who looked like you."
He smiled back. "Well, given what they said about the barely viable gene pool, I think they'd take my contribution, and Minion's, under whatever circumstances we'd be willing to give them. And Minion passionately wants to be a parent. Look." He ran it backward to the shellfish-farming scene. Yi[gulp]velit (wearing transparent bubble helmets and nothing else) and Opuulu worked together, using little hoses attached to a large tank to squirt something into each mollusk. He paused it, then walked around to stand almost in the image and point out what was happening in the upper left corner: a large Opuulu with a hose attached to it by a sort of harness was speaking to both a smaller one and a blue girl who looked about seven or eight years old. "When he saw that, he literally sobbed with longing. And we are expected to reproduce in pairs. His child would need a child of mine to bond with."
"So it sounds like you'd reproduce out of duty but you wouldn't be looking forward to it."
Her blue husband took a breath. He looked at the image of the little blue girl as he spoke. "Parenthood requires certain qualities: patience, thoughtfulness, self-discipline; qualities I haven't got. Minion says I can't even take care of myself, and he may be right. I would dearly love to have a child in my life, but... I don't know whether I could be trusted with one." He looked so mournful that she rose, came around the projector and hugged him.
"If every parent had to have all the qualities children need in a parent, before they actually had any kids, the human race would have died out a long time ago," she reassured him. "But, for one thing, you don't need to stand alone as a parent, and for another, it's not uncommon for people who have kids to grow the qualities they need. Just because it looks impossible from here doesn't mean it is. And I bet Minion told you that when you were talking about being a parent here."
"Yes. It was right after I got the cloning technique for brainbot production worked out. I immediately started thinking about cloning ourselves. He was very discouraging."
"Well, it is pretty much unheard of for supervillains to have kids. And can you imagine a three-year-old running around this place?" She gestured to indicate the lair around them.
The blue man smiled. "Yes, cannibalizing my projects to build his own. I'd hardly be able to keep a piece of equipment intact."
She gave him a skeptical look.
"Oh, yes, I was inventing and building at that age, whenever the opportunity arose. The warden and the guards had their hands full to keep me occupied without doing damage. Well, much damage."
"Sounds like you should definitely wait to reproduce until you're among people who know what to do with little blue geniuses."
"And until we've lined up a potential mother who's willing to put up with a human stepmother as part of the package."
"Maybe they'll pair you up with that woman who's married to the, what did he call it? Colna?"
"Remember, by the time we arrive at Harolup, twenty years will have passed since they sent this message out. That woman will be middle-aged and will very likely have done her reproducing already. No, we'll just have to see who's available when we get there. Do you want to see the rest of this?"
"Yeah. I've almost got enough to do a simple linguistic analysis. Just let me go get more paper." Linguistics had been her minor in college and she was eager to see whether the first known extraterrestrial language fit into the theories developed on Earth.
"Linguistic analysis? Menang and I did a linguistic analysis of Tseri[gulp]uu years ago. Let me print it out for you. And there's more paper in the cabinet under the printer."
###
Roxanne spent the rest of the day scrutinizing the language. Every once in a while she would interrupt one of the aliens with a question about it. Fortunately, they were both doing very interruptible things: Megamind was testing the computer code that would tell the brainbots how to build the starship, while Minion was shopping for materials and components online and on the phone. Just before bedtime, she gathered up her nerve and called her mother. The conversation went more or less as badly as she expected and she was glad to have her new husband to turn to for comfort and distraction afterward.
The next day, she got the email from Professor Slausson. The professor was very enthusiastic. She attached a copy of the three pages of advice given by the department to all anthropology grad students departing for their first fieldwork assignments and included a list of suggested books on coping with culture shock and doing ethnographic research. Roxanne forwarded the document to Megamind and Minion and ordered three copies of the culture shock books, since in many ways the culture of Harolup would be new to them, too. Over the course of the next week, she and the professor arranged for the first of her videos from Harolup to be received by the professor's department in twenty years, even if the professor herself was no longer there. Roxanne also gave notice to her landlord and to her boss at KMCP, broke the news to her sister, and arranged for Goodwill to pick up her furniture. Finally, she finished the script for the message to Lup. She had a silly impulse to buy a safari suit and a pith helmet, but limited herself to a pair of good hiking boots. Meanwhile, stuff began to arrive at the lair: a gross of weather balloons, a quarter-kilo of some rare mineral, sheets of specially treated glass and spools of wire. On their one-week wedding anniversary, they filmed Roxanne's script, loaded it into the message drone, and watched the little spacecraft lift itself off the floor of the Lair and vanish through the hologram wall.