My best friend Xalufet had just turned into a human.
"Bite it," I said. "Use your teeth. Like this." I tried to demonstrate the open and closing motion of the upper and lower jaws, but my physiognomy did not allow a proper example.
"Like this?" Xalufet chattered the blocky incisors and ended up snapping at the soft tissue of his human lips. "Ouch. These are sharper than I thought."
"Be careful. They're not going to want to get close to you if they think you have a lip disease." I looked at myself in the interdimensional mirror hanging over Xalufet's hairy head.
"What's a lip disease?" He wiped the drool on a handkerchief we had bought expressly for that purpose from one of Earth's more fashionable boutiques.
"It's something people don't want. Like leprosy or gangrene."
"Like herpes?"
I slouched in the command bucket. "Hey, so you were paying attention in invasion school. I thought it was just an act."
His two eyebrows did a strange little dance above the eyes with a black spot in each center for pooling light. "If I was acting, you still wouldn't know the difference." He laughed, but the sound was chopped and too warm in his fleshy throat.
I couldn't help but show my rows of finely-pointed teeth. "That's why you were chosen to scope them out."
Xalufet brushed his hair back. "Scope them out, please. You and I both know that as soon I get there I'm headed into the nearest nightclub and asking around for a happy Galvonian waiter."
I laughed at the familiar joke while he made practice faces with his open mouth. The textbook pictures were only diagrams of how the ritualistic eating process was seen from the outside - humans on Earth had not yet developed the internal quadri-dimensional cameras standard in even the most impoverished of the galactic schools. We had had to rely on their two-dimensional security lenses.
"So I pull up a chair and sit down," he was saying. He pantomimed his next actions. "I fiddle with the utensils, the sugar packets, and the lemon - "
"If there are any," I interrupted.
"Of course. Duh. So then, when I'm getting my food, I mutter under my breath, and then I pick up the first mouthful with the appropriate utensil."
"You know how to do that. I've seen you in the simulation about a hundred times."
"If it's soupy, I slurp it between my lips like a beverage. But if it's solid..." His faces slowly contorted the thirty-plus muscles controlling facial structure. "That's as far as I've got."
"I said bite it, didn't I? You sink your teeth in. Down, not side to side. We're not ripping, we're crushing."
"Like this?" He tried again on a small packaged snack we had tried to model on the synthesized chocolate cake. We were not certain we had the taste or texture right, but that was the purpose of Xalufet's mission: how to lure humans with their beloved sweets. In order for that to occur, we first had to send our reconnaissance personnel to mid-level establishments. The cake the technicians had tried to obtain crumbled into the handkerchief when the bundle was beamed aboard.
"Bro?"
"Huh?" I looked back at his abnormally round face.
"It's a shorter form of 'brother'. See? 'Bro' out of 'brother.' But look, am I doing this right?"
He slammed the lower bridge into the upper bridge. The pastry disappeared into the pink oral cavity, but reappeared in the bulges at his fleshy cheeks.
"Yeah...now swallow."
"Swawah?"
"Down your esophagus. In your throat."
"Wawrasrat?"
"It was in chapter eight." I slapped my third eyebrow, which could be a really offensive gesture, if you did it right. "Please tell me you read that far ahead."
Screwing up his face, Xalufet began to turn bright red. I though he was going to burst, but he swallowed the pastry and let out a massive sigh that fogged the mirror and filled the oxygen around my olfactory sensors with savory scents, which reminded me about dinner.
"Good job," I said, and slithered out of the command bucket. "I'm having Galvonian roast. Are you coming?"
"Let me mop up first." Xalufet coughed heavily into the handkerchief. The drool had bits of our synthesized pastry in it. Looking at it, he said, "I don't think this tastes right. I mean, how it's supposed to."
All of my eyes settled on him on what was definitely a rude gesture. "After the bar, go to a bakery and beam us back some chocolate cake, okay?"
His mouth opened wide as he practiced grinning.
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