Page 4 of The Alien's Major Dilemma

Marissa wished she could see his face. She was definitely seeing scales on his hands, though, and that wasn't comforting.

“If they don’t then I’m going to be here for a while,” he said finally.

“And that’s going to be a problem,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“And if you do, that’s going to be a problem for me, isn’t it?”

He took a deep breath and she could hear the determination in his voice. “I hope it isn’t.”

She couldn’t sigh but she wanted to.

“What’s your name, anyway?” she asked.

“Cooper,” he said.

“Is that your first name or your last name? Or how do your people do names is more appropriate, I guess. Because I assumed you stole someone’s name tag to go on your fake BDUs.”

“I did,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it’s not a good name. And how could you tell the BDUs were fake? They looked accurate to me.”

“The pattern was off. And what do you mean it’s a good name? I didn’t say it was a bad one, just that it didn’t belong to you. What’s your real name?”

Cooper let out a series of clicks and growls and Marissa blinked.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, Cooper’s a good name, I guess. Is it the only one you’re using?”

“I borrowed a couple when I was trying to find my way to the base,” he said. “Nothing that really felt like it would stick. I got used to answering to Cooper so that’s what I’ll go with unless you have a reasonable objection.”

Marissa thought about it and wished she could shake her head. Her neck muscles wouldn’t even tense, but she wanted them to. “It just doesn’t feel like a very alien kind of name. It’s a lot like the kind of name I’d expect one of the boys from back home to have.”

“Do you want me to have an alien sounding name? I could call myself Althacar or something but it’d just be a nonsense word. Cooper at least means something in your language.”

“Does it? One of the boys I knew with the name was because his parents misspelled copper on his birth certificate. His brothers were Steel, Stone, and Mark.”

“It means someone who repairs barrels. Mark? Really?”

Marissa laughed. “Mom got tired of explaining the names and dad couldn’t think of anything else that obviously meant something strong. Mark went on to be a competitive weight lifter, I think.”

“Humans are strange,” Cooper declared after a moment of thought.

“Yes we are,” she agreed. “But you don’t come from a death planet without earning a few quirks.”

“You’ve got that right,” Cooper said. “And I don’t wonder that we assumed this planet was uninhabitable. The number of places I could safely land and function was so restricted, I didn’t think it would be possible at all. I’ve seen what your people have done to make it easier to survive on but without modern technology just attempting to live outside your ideal environments could kill you. Especially with how few physical adaptations your species seems to have.”

“And I suppose your planet is temperate all over and doesn’t try to kill you?” Marissa asked.

“No, it doesn’t,” Cooper said. “What is it about you death-worlders that you try to make living a competitive sport?”

“I just don’t know how you’d survive without summers that could boil you alive and winters where you have to trudge barefoot through the snow, uphill, both ways, to get to school so you can fight the grizzly bears on the way home to get enough meat for dinner,” she said.

“You did not.”

“How would you know?” she asked.

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