Kzxotos churned the mighty crank, one of many in the Jessica Talbot star system. The children of Sol needed dolls, and Kzxqotos’s position as shift manager imbued him with a sense of responsibility not seen in most Klorks.

Most of them couldn’t stand the little bitch.

“Turn faster!” Kzxotos barked to Zyndreela, his beautiful, squaracious co-worker. 

Kzxotos had initiated courtship pheromones before the ascension of her royal highness, but Zyndreel hadn’t given him a single return scent. Now she paid for it dearly, with every painful turn of the doll crank.

Kzxotos furiously rubbed his antennae, whispering out a laugh like that of grass in the whipping wind. He stepped up to the girl, antler-claws rubbing, and released a puff of pheromones in her direction.

Zyndreela’s antennae shuddered. “Not now, not in a thoussand cycless, you creep.” 

Kzxotos said nothing. He rubbed his antennae. She’d come around eventually. He reached an antler-claw onto the conveyor and pinched a doll from its dragging belt. How strange, these human objects were! He took another, long-haired and bulb-chested, naturally assumed to be the male of the species.

“Ohh Zyndreela… sss…” he said, holding the bulbs of the male doll to the feet of the female.

Zyndreela clapped her antler-claws once and rubbed her antennae. She released a puff of pheromones that said, “go away, but not entirely.”

But Kzxotos knew that game well. “Ssee you latter, my dear,” he said as he quickly turned away. To be entirely honest, dolls still in hand. The bulb-chested one started to cry then, for under his notice, his antler-claw had pinched too hard, cracking its left set of ribs.

“Qu-ee-en J-es-sica!” the doll cried. “Queen Jessica!” Red fluid dripped from several of the doll’s—what Kzxotos could only presume to be—pheromone holes. 

Bah! The damned things were always crying, Queen Jessica! Queen Jessica! And how they shat and eat! He clapped up the male doll into pieces with his antler-claw and tossed it. A terribly illegal act under the Talbot doctrine, but they didn’t pay him enough to put up with this stuff.

The second doll began to cry out. “Queen Jessica!”

“No! Queen Kzxotos! Queen Kzxotos! Say it, you foolish human child!”

Of course, the doll would not. In a puff of rage pheromones, Kzxotos bashed the creature’s head against the iron piping of a doll crank ventilator. There were fluids.

Kzxotos shrugged. So long as the Klorks made quota, a few missing dolls wouldn’t upset the humans nor their leader.

He returned to his mighty crank and turned.