"The Ambassador" Preview

Ark lay back in his bed, staring out the adjacent window into the beautiful black of nothing. Aboard the Hyperion, his entourage's issued shuttle, the world outside seemed nonexistent; back at home, on purified Venom, the world outside seemed nonexistent. But he knew that he was about to be in a place where that was very different—the city of glittering metropolis: Corneria City.

The ETA had been one day. Now, one day later, he knew that the time was coming near. His entourage all thought he was asleep up here, but he'd hardly slept a wink since departure, and he still didn't feel tired. He'd trained—albeit lazily—for this for the last four or so years, and the thought of being the first native Venomian to see Corneria left him restless.

The ping of the speaker system startled him, making him sit up in bed. A mellow female alto—the voice of his friend Milan—said, “Ark, we'll be pulling into port in half an hour.”

“Gotcha.” He dragged himself out of his bed, groaning a little. He entered his private bathroom, pulled out his uniform, and began to dress himself.

The golden pin on his vest read Ark, Venomian Ambassador. He ran his thumb over it and adjusted it a few times until it was perfectly straight, then flexed once, grinned at himself, and stared at his lupine figure in the mirror for a few seconds, trying to straighten his tie.

A few moments later he was out of his room into cold, metallic halls of the ship, and met by two others who fell into step beside him so naturally he didn't bother to glance at them. Members of his entourage, he knew.

An unfamiliar voice said, “Sir, are you ready? They're about to dock, you know.” The guy who spoke was a cheetah, beady black spots dotting his muzzle.

“I'm fine,” Ark said, eyes analyzing the other. He'd never seen the cheetah before, but he didn't have any time to dwell on that or ask anything, because his other escort cleared her throat, and a glance at her told him that she was the cold vixen that he knew as Sheva.

Not good.

“Chancellor Debs will want good report,” Sheva said. He could feel her eyes burning his fur. “It's not cheap to send you over here.”

Ark stared back at her. “I know,” he said. “You mind your own business and I'll tend to mine.” He paused. “Is there anything you want to share with me about this?”

She frowned, but nodded, and when she spoke her voice was strong. “The governor's name is Isaiah Parker. Flatter him and he'll be your best friend for life.”

“Got it. Dismissed, Sheva.”

She didn't move. Instead, she pointed a cold finger at his chest and whispered, “Look, Tornas, if you screw this up, it's going to be the death of you. And I don't mean that Dash would kill you for it.” She turned the finger to herself. “I will. Got it?”

He sighed. “Yes, but I assure you that your concerns are all in vain.”

“I know you,” she said. “I have known you. And I...” She frowned again, cutting herself off. “Nevermind. It's not worth the trouble. You're hopeless.”

She was gone in a few seconds, fuming over nothing, as usual. Ark stared after her, watching her tail's erratic swinging. Damn near impossible to please her, he knew, and she was a nightmare to have in a place like this. He'd ostracize her, but the trouble was, she had connections—but he had his own connections, too, and because of that an icy stalemate existed between them, tipped slightly in his favor.

“Sir?” It was the cheetah.

“What?” he barked.

The other backed up, looking wounded. “Milan's waiting for you.”

He sent another glance in the direction Sheva had gone before saying, “Very well then. I'll be right there.”

He shouldn't be worrying about her, anyway; he had a new world to explore.



The low-pitched alarm sounded, signaling that the Hyperion had begun its docking process. The sound continued for all of five minutes, which Ark spent waiting in the bay, casting an eye over at Milan every once in a while.

Milan, a short husky, had been his adviser for as long as he had been into politics and his friend for far longer. They had attended school together and had dated a few times, but nothing more ever came of their relationship. If not for her, Ark knew that he would have been replaced a long time ago.

So it was with expectant eyes that he looked at her now. As soon as the alarm cut off, he asked, “Where are we going after this?”

She fake-sighed and started pushing him towards the big bay door with the red Exit sign over it. “We go to the embassy, silly.”

He walked of his own accord now, turning his head back to talk to her. “And then chaos ensues?”

“That pretty much sums it up. We have to check in with the gov tomorrow, then it should be smooth sailing from then on.”

“Sounds good to me.” He was at the door now, and he pressed the button to raise it. It retracted with a mechanical whirl and click, and then he was face-to-face with that old hound...

Gods, he couldn't remember the guy's name.

“Hello, ambassador Ark,” the hound said, offering a paw. “Welcome to Corneria, and I'm sure you'll enjoy your stay.”

Ark grabbed the other's paw and shook it with his own. “Glad to be here, ah...” He cleared his clear throat. “I'm sure I'll enjoy my stay.”

Milan cleared her throat. “Ah, General Pepper, if you would be so kind as to give us the address for the headquarters and our embassy, we would be greatly obliged.”

Ark blinked at her. “Yes, General.”

“And who is this?” The general gestured at Milan.

“Her? She's my adviser, General. Been working with me for years.”

“Very well then.” His face wrinkled, then he pulled out a letter from... somewhere. “This has all the information that you'll need for your stay, including the address for the city hall. I trust that you two can handle it from here?”

Ark grinned, eyeing at Milan. “Of course we can.”



The embassy, as it turned out, was nothing more than a single floor of an upscale apartment complex in downtown Corneria, and that suited Ark just fine; at least he had his own room. He carried his luggage in—just a few bags, nothing major—and set it on the bed, and just that quickly was out of the room again.

He rode the elevator down to the lobby and stepped out into the parking lot, which was bleary in the bright midday sun. He only had to wait a few seconds before Milan was at his side.

“You got the packet?” he asked, and she picked a folded sheet of paper out of her pocket and handed it to him. He took it, got in the hovercar's passenger seat, and began trying to make sense of the map.

And of course, they were intercepted by traffic. Of all the things they could be doing in the glittering metropolis, getting a scenic view of the dent in the back of the dated HoverStar in front of them didn't rank very high.

Milan was thinking the same thing, because she yawned and growled. “Lucky bastards,” she said, pointing back at the apartment building.

“Yeah...” He thought he found their current location, but the road he'd been looking at on the map turned out to be on the other side of the city. “I wish I were sleeping, but no, we have to do all the work around here.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just shut up and tell me where to drive. I mean, it's not like we're going to a meeting or something grumbletastic like that.”

He stared at the map again. “Uhh...”

She sucked her teeth, then snatched it out of his hands. “Give me that...”

Ark sighed and reclined back in his chair. He resolved to let her have her way and find it herself, and focused on watching the façades of the city fly by. While Milan had her eyes on the map, his drifted elsewhere. He took note of the shops, the malls, the cozy cafés, the bars… he had seen very few of any of these before on Venom beyond what was deemed necessary for survival, and even they had been government-run. The clever, catchy names displayed by sundry signs and boards seemed peculiar to him, but they solidified that he was a part of a freer world where work and rushing weren’t the only things in existence.

Several long minutes later, Milan punched him on the shoulder. “We're here, doofus.”

He lifted his head up and took in the surroundings, trying to memorize the layout of the buildings that surrounded the place—not that he needed to. The city hall itself was an enormous complex, at least the size of the apartment complex he was staying at, located in an immense, gated (oddly blurry?) courtyard. He remembered thinking that you would have to be pretty oblivious to miss the place—it was like the Grand Bastion of Venom City times four—but later he couldn’t remember where it was for the life of him.

It was there that his memory began to wane. There were glimpses and flashes of scenes from the drive back, but they were fuzzy and distant, as if they were pictures taken on film that never fully developed. Standing in the middle of the chaos like an oasis in the wastes of Titania was a strip of memory that was so vivid it was almost surreal.

In it, the stench of alcohol and musk dominated all else. He sat in a knotty stool (ever heard of padding before, sweetheart?) in some run-down bar he had passed earlier that day—shoddy even by Venom's standards—but dammit, he felt good, and why he did, he didn't understand at first. As a bonus, the world buzzed and spun not unpleasantly, and through the haze he could see that same doberman that had been trying to get him drunk for the past ten minutes.

“Have another round?” the guy would say. And Ark would nod and say, flashing the vixen-snaring grin that had gotten him this far in life, “Yes please.”

Ark wasn't sure what he'd had at this point, but he knew he had a whiskey mix in front of him just then, and he'd be damned it wasn't the most disgusting drink he'd ever tasted in his life, but it felt so good that he couldn't stop. When the doberman asked him if he wanted another, he just nodded, not trusting his voice.

A new taste hit his tongue, and he found it more despicable than the last. It burnt like wildfire as it went down. He starting caughing, and the doberman—an ugly son of a bitch, Ark realized, as if seeing him for the first time—looked at him, laughing and asking him if he was alright.

“I'm fine,” Ark said. He shifted on his stool to relieve some of the pressure on his tail, but slipped on the uneven surface and nearly fell, instead ramming into the overweight tiger sitting on his other side, who pushed him back and said, “Watch it, ya lightweight mutt.”

The room swirled around him, and he had to grab on to the counter to keep balance. This place is terrible. Coherent thoughts like that were rare that night, and it stuck in his memory. He tried to think of how it could get any worse, and imagined an Enforcer stomping up beside him like Carrie Nation, yelling at him to get back to work, you; imagined Pancho Wheatly, that snotty fennec who'd kill for Ark's job, flaunting his progress and daring the wolf to do better. But as soon as such notions entered his mind, he felt silly because none of that could happen in this world, and he knew in that instant that it was what made the booze drinkable and the atmosphere tolerable.

The doberman was smiling now. He had matched Ark's drinking glass-for-glass, had a stern look that the wolf knew from experience only challengers wore, and had a fiery glint to his movements that bespoke overconfidence. It was a different kind of challenge—not the Wheathly-esque ones Ark was used to, instead lighthearted and meaningless—and he accepted it willingly.

But Ark wouldn't let the dog win. Ark was a wolf, way better than this lowly mutt. He managed to get halfway through the second glass when he felt his stomach spasm, and then he got up and rushed to the bathroom.

He ducked into the first open stall he could find and the alcohol singed as it came back up, the poison leaving his body and painting itself on the toilet. In the shock that followed, he crouched in front of the commode and rested his head on the nasty floor, gritting his teeth and choking back sobs at the pain.

Contrary to before, the world around him now seemed very real, and he could feel acutely the pain in his head and was aware that, on some level, he was no longer connected to the world; he felt as if he and Corneria and he were two discrete entities, as if it had ostracized him. Above all that, there was the shaming fact that the dog had won and the ridiculous mess Ark had been (and still was) reduced to, and all those factors combined into a crushing force that made him chant the mantra, never again, never again, never again…

The memory began losing its clarity, and the world became a blurry oblivion before Ark had moved an inch.



He drove back. He had no other choice. With all the spinning and the cloud of haze blackening the already-black night, he considered himself lucky that he didn't die that night.

But die he didn't. He made it back alive, albeit as a stumbling mess that collapsed into the elevator and hit the wrong button twice before he found the floor he was on. He fumbled with the key for way too long and finally managed to get the door open, but the thing took him in with it and he ended up tumbling on the floor, whimpering.

And that was when he realized that either he was really drunk, or his room smelled weird. His mind might have deserted him, he reasoned, but his nose never would. He sniffed the air for a few long seconds and came to the conclusion that there was somebody in the room. Something male, something... feline?

“Hel—hello?” Ark said into the darkness.

He heard a start, and then somebody must have dropped a flash grenade because he groaned and clutched at his eyes, his head pounding.

“Sir?”

He knew that voice, though he didn't know how he knew it. What was more important was what the fuck the guy was doing in his room. He'd meant to say that, but what came out instead was a garbled, “What're you... here...?”

He didn't get a response. Instead, he felt warmth around him and a sense of weightlessness that he later registered as being picked up. Someone set him down on something soft—a bed, he reasoned—and that was the last thing he remembered.