Big Damn M-fing Snakes on a Transport

BIG DAMN MOTHERFUCKING
SNAKES ON A TRANSPORT

It wasn't that Zoë was so powerful angered about the situation.'course, it wasn't that she was so terrifically cheerful about it neither.'course it wasn't that like with Zoë you could much tell the difference between the two, no ways.

Unlike with Mal, who was powerful angered, and everyone could tell. Everyone excepting, of course, for River--on account of her being crazy and all. And excepting of course for Jayne on account of him being stupid and all.

And excepting maybe for Kaylee...and also for Book who was a lot like Kaylee in that mindset, which was awful interesting as in that he was kinda opposite from her in 'bout every other way. They both sort of reckoned that if angered fell in the universe, but there wasn't no one who cared to pay it no nevermind, it couldn't stay angered for long, could it? And so the two of them pretty much decided to keep it that they couldn't tell if anyone was angered...even if they could.

Which pretty much eliminated everyone who mattered, seeing's how hard Inara and Simon worked to stay as far away from Mal as they could when he wasn't angered, much less when you could tell that he was.

If you could tell that he was angered, that is.

And seeing's how Wash was with Zoë regardless of what happened, and seeing's how Zoë was with Mal regardless of what happened, and if Zoë noticed Mal being angered, well, it wasn't like anyone could tell, then it seemed that Mal being angered didn't change much at all on board Serenity...which sort of meant that the stupid and the crazy folk had been in the right all along.

Such a revelation might have been a tad disturbing, but it wasn't at all surprising to anyone, least of all to Mal. Those who had lived through Serenity Valley know what floats to the top in life and what sinks. Stupid and Crazy would always be floaters. Always. That's why Mal looked for them in them those who would be his crew.

Like most things on Serenity, the whole gorram mess started with talk of a job. A job would bring money, and money had seemed like a good idea at the time. Money always did. When it was coming in, that is; not when it was going the other way. That part weren't so good, but that ain't what's being discussed.

This time, the money came with a traveling circus troupe going from Beaumonde to Greenleaf--one way. Mal preferred one way trips. He'd never been one fond of looking back. Leastways, not for the last seven years he hadn't been. Hadn't seen much point. Seemed like the better view must be ahead. He figured that's why eyes was set up front where they was—for a reason. If someone wanted us to look behind, well, we'd a had eyes there instead of assholes.

At first, everything had slid along smooth as fresh niufen off a daxiang de pigu The days had gone by like, well, like a trip to the circus. There had been a little bit of something for Jayne had passed up an invitation from the equally blond and buxom Wazinski Triplets and their flying trapeze act and had taken up with the Fat Lady instead. Who knew!

Who wanted to know?

River did, but she was crazy, and Simon wouldn't let her tell him about it no ways. And Simon had taken up with the conjoined Siamese twins--Wing and Wang-–although he swore it was only for medical research purposes and a wee bit of curiosity, tho' he didn't say what kind.

"Good things come in threes," said River. "Wing, Wang, Wong! Ding dang dong! Schling, schlang—"

"That's enough, mei-mei." Simon had blushed as he scooted her off to bed.

"Come in threes," she giggled over her shoulder.

"She's getting worse." Mal nodded ominously.

"Huh? Uh, yeah, Right, Yeah. Sure," said Simon as he hurried her through the hatch. Was his walk a little swishier than usual? Was there a little more spring in his step? A little more bounce in his behind? Inara said them sly ones always did know how to dress.

Anyway, Kaylee had hit it off with the aerocycle maintenance crew. All three of them. "Good things come in threes!" River hollered to her as Simon trekked her through the lounge on the way to their cabin.

Oh, Kaylee was well aware of that. They'd rebuilt the K-23 capacitor, super-powered the gamma transinjectors, and broken Jayne's toe doing stunts on the cycles in the cargo bay.

Then the fun had really begun.

"Wanna come in and see my engine?" she'd purred. The three guys moved through Serenity faster than any aerocycle ever over a drag strip. Fortunately, they'd taken a good bit more time moving through Kaylee.

Inara—after an initial bit of one-upmanship about who could do the oddest thing with which body part—was off trading secrets with the India Rubber Man. He claimed it was possible to stand on your own shoulders. She said she hadn't much use for the standing part, but with modifications, she could see how the position might have some unique advantages. They'd begged a tube of cream, a vial of anesthetic and a bottle of analgesics from the doc and been holed up in her shuttle for going on a solid day now.

Mal worried about starvation and dehydration given such activities, and had offered to bring Inara, well...anything, but Zoë'd said it shouldn't be a problem, which, to be truthsome, gave Mal more than a little pause as to how she would know such a thing and what else he didn't know about his crew. But Inara had water on the shuttle, and light refreshments at least, so in the end he went back to his bunk and tried not to realize that he was the only one who wasn't crazy yet was alone.

Which in fact did make him sort of crazy, one could argue.

So when the Strong Man had come knocking aiming to show him his mallet collection, Mal hadn't turned him away. He weren't sly, but he weren't one to pass up opportunities neither. That wasn't a survival characteristic, and one thing he knew was that he was a survivor.

And it gets mighty lonesome at times in the Black. 'specially when his boat was the most full of people, fun and frolic it had been in a long time and his cabin was the most empty.

Even the shepherd had found a niche. Preserved from Earth That Was, the circus had a family of Black and White Ruffed lemurs with young needing tending—not hardly resembling no sheep—but in need of keeping nonetheless. Strange to see 'em fuss bout with black body, white hair sticking straight out in rim around the head, bug eyes, big nose, rough whiskers, knobby fingers and such.

And the lemurs were odd looking critters too!

A match made in heaven, one might say to look at them together.

Things went so well the first few days out of Beuamonde that Mal was even willing to overlook the awkward (and more than a mite bit nauseating) misunderstanding that occasioned over the 100-year-old egg exhibit and the unfortunate and distinctly unhygienic situation between Simon, the twins and the hippopotamus. You would think a doctor would know better, but after judicious application of soap, water, elbow grease and hippo tranquilizer, it became clear there would be no permanent harm done. The hippo even seemed to be in a better mood, so despite the little...incident, it all come out all right in the wash.

When Book reported that little Yi-yi had gone missing, however, that's when things began to go downhill.

Not that Yi-yi missing was any kind of a problem--except to Book who took the loss to heart like he might one of his very own. A teenage lemur wasn't much of a threat to nothing 'cept maybe a vegetable patch—and there weren't a vegetable patch on Serenity, less you counted what ever that was growing 'tween Jayne's toes, and that was more correctly labeled a fungus patch than a vegetable patch really—but it was a bit of a mystery as to where she could have got to.

Inara was the one who had suggested Mal talk to Aathilali about it. "He's the Snake Charmer; you're a—" Inara shrugged and bestowed a beatifically ingenuous smile upon him. "I'm just offering the suggestion that certain signs indicate it might be a harmonic fit."

Turns out she'd been right, which did nothing at all to improve Mal's temper. By coincidence, Aathilali's trained cobra, Saherima—his fifteen foot long, twenty-pound, trained King Cobra, Saherima—showed out to be,perhaps not so coincidentally, missing as well. And it turned out that the bottom of her basket was filled with eggs and had now become a right cozy sort of nest. If you were the sort to find King Cobra nests cozy under any circumstances.

And those eggs were not the kind of eggs a snake might keep for eating; they were the kind a snake might keep for having recently been laid by her own self. And to make matters worse, some of them snake eggs wasn't snake eggs at all, but only empty shells of snake eggs!

Now, there are two funny things about girl King Cobras—not funny ha-ha exactly, more funny strange. One is how they can make babies without having no boy King Cobras 'round them for years. Kaylee was mighty curious to know how that might be accomplished. Seemed like a useful skill, even if not much fun. Not that a boy cobra would be fun...'less you was a girl cobra...in which case it would be, she guessed.

The other funny strange thing about 'em, is how they leave their nest to find food just as their eggs are about to hatch. Now, for sure, no one on Serenity thought that was funny. Certainly not Book—who was terrible broken up about Yi-yi—and very certainly not the presumptively late Yi-yi. Well, maybe Zoë mighta thought it was a little bit funny, but it's not like any one could tell.

But we've covered this topic in painstaking detail before, so let's move on.

"How many of them there have hatched?" Mal called out to Jayne, who poked around the bottom of the basket with the tip of his rifle o' the week.

"Eleven, twelve, thirteen...I dunno! Some!"

"Some?" Simon asked. "In exactly which language, pray tell, does 'some' come after 'thirteen'?"

"The shells are broken into pieces, dumbass," Jayne sneered. "You try counting."

Simon put his face down toward the cobra nest—briefly. "Some" looked about right.

Okay. A fifteen foot venomous snake slithering around his boat on the prowl for a meal, with an unknown number of smaller scale younguns doing the like same thing: this would be the situation that had Mal definitely angered.

"Has she been de-venomed?" Mal asked before he sent his crew out to search.

"Erm...Mostly." Aathilali looked distinctly uncomfortable.

"Would you care to define 'mostly?'" Mal asked.

"Not really. And you do know that the babies are highly venomous too." A baby cobra—about a foot long—slithered across the floor. Aathilali picked it up by the tail and tossed it in the basket.

Oh, look! Yet another egg had hatched in the interim.

"Tamade! Oh no, you don't!" Mal was nearly sputtering now. "Don't you just...just leave them there!"

"Well, Mal, Captain, sir, what do you want us to do with them?" Wash asked. "Put 'em in a space suit and send em out for a walk? L'll problem there with the no legs and all." Snakes were about as close to dinosaurs as Wash'd ever see. No one could really expect him to take this seriously. Hell, he'd probably be making up dinosaur plays with them for months.
"Bake 'em, boil 'em, make 'em into thermocouples, I don't care. Just get those gan ni niang snakes off my boat!" Mal blustered.

"Cap'n!" Kaylee sounded as horrified as if she'd just been told to strap her best friend onto a Capissen 38 and shoot him out of atmo.

"Fine." Even a captain knew when he'd lost.   A ship can't fly without her engines, and her engines won't run without her engineer.   "Just make sure they don't get out. Have Jayne's girlfriend sit on the basket—"

"Hey!"

"-- if you have to, but find that mother snake pronto and then round up the little ones!"

River's eyes rolled back and she pointed with one arm straight out and eerily stiff. She pivoted on bare toes and shot up the steps to the cat walk. Or the snake crawl, I guess it'd be best to call it now, for there it was: thick, black and wrapped around a steel support in the shadow.

"Zoë, what is that?" Mal squinted into the shadows.

"Big, damn, motherfucking snake, sir."

As River approached, it raised its head, fanned its hood wide and hissed!

"Mei-mei! No!" Simon dashed after her, but he was no match for her speed. River was already to it, and had the snake (and judging by the ample swelling working its way down its midsection, probably the remains of the missing Yi-yi, too) draped around her neck.

The crew stood around her in a semi-circle, as if riveted to the deck, and gaped.

"Snakes are the quintessential symbol of man's primal libido and fertility with emphasis on the penetrative dynamic and the resultant psychosexual power disequilibrium that ensues and mesmerizes the involved parties." As the other nine stared at her slack-jawed, River stroked the cobra in an all but obscene fashion that could have easily earned her fifty credits per hour on any core world, seemingly oblivious to anything else.

After a moment she looked up and smiled. "And they're pretty, too. See?" She held the head up for display.

"Sir?" Zoë just stared.

"Crazy floats," said Mal, as if that explained everything.

"Yes, sir," said Zoë. "You've convinced me that's so."

"She's legal now, right?" said Jayne, watching her every handstroke, his voice thick with a heady timbre that he usually saved only for the finest precision firearms and cuts of real red meat.

"Yes," said Inara and Kaylee.

"No!" bellowed Wash, Book and Simon all at once.

Simon took a step toward Jayne with a fist balled, but Zoë got expertly in the way, stepping on his foot and twisting his arm, reminding him that if he chose to, Jayne could hurt him much, much more than she would. Not could, but would.

Simon yelped like a girl. Not like Zoë, but like a girl girl. But Simon got the message and kept all his blood and vital organs and stuff on the inside, which was generally considered to be a good thing, or so they had taught him in surgeon school.

"What?" said Jayne, looking genuinely confused. "I was just asking."

The Snake Charmer was heading toward her on the stairs. "There, there, little one," he soothed. It wasn't entirely clear whether he meant River or the snake, but the snake ended up in the basket and no one ended up being bit ('cepting probably for that lemur), so I suppose it doesn't much matter now.

"Looks like the big problem's solved. That just leaves the little ones," said Mal.

"Eight," said River.

"What?" Simon asked, stroking her hair.

"Eight," she repeated, pointing to the snake basket.

"It is possible. Mother cobras have been known to eat their young," said Aathilali.

Mal considered. "Ate 'em? Could be problem's solved for us."

Just then Inara came running down, her hair flying about like the lethal fury of a desert sandstorm. One baby—almost the exact same color and wave of her curls—flew from her hair as she batted at her head. "Malcom Reynolds, wo cao ni ye ye de sao pi yan! Ni men ba jei zhi cao ma de she cong xing hang na diao le!"

"Wow," said Kaylee. "I didn't know Companions knew words like that."

"Man," said Jayne to Mal. "I ain't never seen her that mad for something you ain't done."

Mal shrugged. Could be the problem weren't entirely solved yet.

River picked up the baby cobra. "Seven," she said. She kissed it on the mouth. "Ewww! I liked the big one better." She made an unmistakable motion with her hand demonstrating just what it was she had liked about the big one.

Jayne leapt for the stairs. "I'll be in my bunk."

"Jayne!" Mal called. "There's work to be done!"

"I'll be doing it, Captain. I'm checking for...snakes." Jayne grabbed his crotch to punctuate the last word and continued on his merry way.

In the manner of so many existential thinkers through the eons, Wash found himself wondering how many baby cobras could dance in the folds of a Fat Lady.

"Six," said River, with her pointed gaze held at Wash.

Wash blinked. Six?

Simon sighed and hugged River to him. "Yes, mei-mei; Jayne is always on about sex, but there's no need for us to be dragged down into that feihua.

River rolled her eyes. Boys were so dumb.

Zoë didn't get it, but she was with Wash regardless. Mal didn't get any of it, but he knew that the good kind of crazy would always float, so he figured they'd be all right. "Come on, crew; let's keep looking. There's work to be done, and snakes don't find themselves."

They may not be the sharpest crew in the 'verse, but they was all his, and that made them the only ones he wanted.

Also read the G-rated good-time remix, Come One, Come All, by Liquideyes