After I had finished drying off, I stopped releasing heat. The entire process of getting dry only took a few minutes, and I now felt a lot cleaner, although I still needed soap and shampoo to be fully clean.


    Glasses was still staring at me curiously. He was muttering something under his breath, and started messing with the tablet. Pinky hovered nervously, but seemed to have calmed down. His cheeks weren’t green anymore either, thank god. What was his deal anyways?


    I stared at glasses, smiled widely, and mocked him. “You like what you see?” I did a little twirl before walking back towards my clothes, ignoring the perverts who liked to stare at almost naked aliens.


    I took a look at my clothes. They were completely, utterly beyond saving. I was more surprised they had lasted as long as they did. At least the underwear I was wearing was in okay shape.


    Ignoring the decimated clothes, I walked over to the plate of grubs, picked up a few, and hurled them at Glasses’ face. I went back for another handful and threw them at Pinky this time. Glasses just blinked at me, startled, but Pinky gave a much better reaction, running away and backing up to the door.


    “???  ??? ??”


    “? ??  ??? ? ???”


    Great. They were now leaving. Unfortunately carefully. Glasses was staring at me, making sure I couldn’t sneak past him as he exited. Rude.


    With nothing else to do in the now empty room, I walked over to the blanket, flipped it over to the clean side, and dragged it towards the window. With a bit of a struggle, I managed to hoist the blanket up with me to the very large windowsill.


    Floating is difficult for me, but jumping or throwing with a ton of force isn’t, so I practically threw the blanket up with myself.


    I cocooned myself into the blanket, staring out the window into space. While the service wasn’t the best, it definitely wasn’t the worst either, so I guess I had to begrudgingly accept the alien’s …goodwill? And not immediately try to punch through the glass. I’m almost positive I could punch through the glass, however thick it was. But that would be rude towards a group that fed me mysterious and suspicious food, offered a blanket, and put me in a fuckass metal scanning tube for some reason. Okay, maybe breaking out wouldn’t be that rude.


    There was a problem though. I really didn’t want to be free floating in space again, and although it was survivable for a while, it’s certainly not comfortable. Nor do I want to be that bored again. Floating in space is terribly cold and lonely, and I’d rather not willfully experience the same fate again.


    Okay, so I''ll stay on the ship. At least until it approaches a nice planet, or until there’s another ship to jump to that hopefully speaks my language. Case closed. No more thoughts of demolishing the ship, but harassing the inhabitants for harassing me is certainly fair game.


    So all that leaves is finding entertainment, eating well, and catching up on sleep and rest. I suppose that’s a good enough plan for now, until I recover enough to start experimenting with warp teleportation or other more magical methods of getting off this ship.


    I yawned and stretched. I was tired, as I had to be partially awake to survive in space, constantly regulating my mana-antimana barriers to prevent my body from becoming an irradiated, dessicated husk in space. I feel like I could sleep for a solid month, but my stomach (and the rest of my body) probably wouldn’t agree to that. For now, at least, I snuggled into the blanket and went to sleep with the distant stars watching over me.


    I woke up several hours later at the sound of the door opening. Jumping up, I turned around and came face to face with an alien I had never seen before.


    She (?) had long, bright red hair that reached her waist and fell in chunky waves. Combining that with a stern expression and blood red eyes gave her a generally intimidating presence, but she was holding something while carefully approaching me. I just stared as it didn’t seem like she wanted to grab me.


    Approaching slowly and quietly, she reached out one of her hands towards me while lowing herself to about my eye level. On her upturned, giant palm were two sets of clothes. I happily grabbed them, saying a “thanks” I knew she wouldn’t understand.


    The clothes were rather simple, one set in white and the other in black, both stitched with a thick red thread: drawstring pants and long sleeve shirts. I immediately put on the set of white clothes. The fabric was soft and slightly stretchy, but the clothes were loose fitting, with the pant legs and sleeves billowing out wide in a slightly unusual manner.


    Overall, they were probably a tiny bit too small, but because of the flowy nature of the clothes I actually preferred it this way, as the shorter sleeves and pant legs couldn’t get in the way of my activities.


    On the right breast of the shirt was some type of stitched emblem, looking like a leaf growing out of a test tube, sewn in black, red, and white. I didn’t pay much attention to it.


    The alien in front of me suddenly gave a beaming smile, softening every feature of her face. Uh oh. What’s this about? Is she that happy i''m clothed? Okayyyyy…


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    She then held out another of her arms, this time revealing a small sliver (well, okay pretty big for my size) of something, seeming to offer it to me.


    “??? ?? ??? ?”


    I walked over to her hand and picked up the large sliver. It was white and kind of creamy. I sniffed it. Soap? Soap! I looked back up at her. My savior!


    “?? ? ?”


    She cupped two of her hands together and beckoned. What did that mean? I’m not climbing on. No way. I won’t be carried around like some trophy.  Her expression gradually faded from a smile to a clearly despondent face. Giving up, she walked back towards the door.


    “??? ? ?”


    Instead of leaving, she stood at the door, beckoning. Ooh, would she lead me there? How reassuring, a bodyguard. I hopped off the windowsill and started following her.


    The spaceship was annoyingly large. Even for the scale of the aliens, the hallway was wide enough for three to walk side by side. Everywhere was made of metal, the walls painted white with green stripes in various shades accentuating the shape and texture of the metal. Relatively standard spaceship design, I think.


    As I followed her down the hallway, I noticed her face had returned to its impassive and stern expression. Odd.


    Passing a couple sleek metal doors, once again with no discernable handles, we ran into Glasses, who walked out of one of the doors looking surprised. The two said a few words to each other, which I won’t recount here. You get the idea, ??????, how useful. Some translation would be greatly appreciated.


    Wait. I smacked my own forehead and groaned, drawing looks from the two aliens. One of the few regular spells I knew was translation magic. Classified as old magic, it’s mana cost was immense, but it forcefully taught words between sentient races. It’s still indisputably powerful on colonization missions, where the amassing of enough magic can forcefully convert an entire city’s population into speaking Intergalactic common.


    The problem was the method. At the end of the day, it can’t compare to learning the language properly, instead forcefully rewriting word associations in the brain to cause one word to translate to its correct translation. It works for communication, but for nothing else, like writing, math, or explaining culture.


    Exceedingly high mana cost, severe limitations, and impractical. But I could do it thanks to my wife (read: mana singularity) providing me with a ton of mana. Thanks to eating a good meal yesterday (?), I was practically overflowing with mana, enough to start warp portal experiments soon. Hmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.


    Okay! I’ve decided. I’ll use a little mana to translate some words. Seems useful to get more out of my alien roommate buddies. Or maybe I should call them coworkers? I’m not entirely sure what relationship they were going for, as I couldn’t talk to them.


    I waved my arms and gave a couple “Hey!” shouts to attract their attention. At some point, Pinky had joined them, emerging from the same room as Glasses, as well as the head of someone new peeking out of the door. This new alien had what looked like split dyed black and blue hair, as well as painted nails. He (?) was gazing at me rather indifferently.


    Once I had everyone’s attention, I activated the magic and pointed at myself, standing as tall as I could.  “My name is《Mikatil.》”


    I was met with a few seconds of silence, before Glasses responded ““?? Mikatil ??.” Perfect, it works. Now they know my name, and can teach any others, assuming there are others. I ignored Pinky’s positively ecstatic gaze, and especially ignored the fact that his cheeks were flushing orange. What is up with these aliens??


    Actually, everyone’s cheeks were flushing orange, save the girl, who appeared as impassive. Weird. Is she two faced? A phony? Everyone started talking with each other, seemingly shocked by their ability to now understand my name.


    It still sounded like a lot of weird clicking mana wave incomprehensibility to me. What species uses their pitiful quantity of mana for communication and language anyways? What’s wrong with them?


    And I was down 40% of my mana just from a word. The cost of the spell increases the more different the languages and anatomical structures of the two species are, so I wasn’t particularly surprised. I needed to eat more and/or wait to regenerate mana.


    I also got a nosebleed. Whoops. I guess I shouldn’t overuse that spell, I’m not used to using regular magic at this point. It was always a careful game, avoiding the antimagic within me to execute a regular spell. I’m not very good at it.


    Eventually the female (?) alien waved off the other three and continued leading me down the hall, past a couple more rooms. It seemed like the spaceship was arranged like a giant donut on this floor, with a large circular hallway going all the way around.


    The second we were alone her expression softened a lot, and once we entered the bathroom she started smiling like an idiot again. What, enamored with my charm? I don’t find that flattering at all. A phony indeed.


    “Mikatil, ???? ? ?”


    I looked over. Okay, knowing when they’re saying my name makes communication a lot more reasonable. I watched as Phony filled up a massive tub with warm water, just until it was as deep as my chest.


    She then handed me the chunk of soap, and grabbed a pump of some product she pantomimed rubbing into her hair. Okay, shampoo. And the next one is probably conditioner. She placed the two in small dishes next to me, and then gestured for me to hop into the tub, smiling. Oh boy, another pervert. I’ll oblige.


    I jumped into the tub fully clothed, laughed at her disappointed face, and started using soap to scrub myself down inside of my clothes. Phony didn’t take her eyes off of me the entire time, looking like she found something adorable. What, me? Why?


    After washing my body, I used the shampoo on my hair, ears, and tail, before going for a quick freestyle swim to wash off the suds. The tub was so big there was basically no worry of being in scummy water, so I just enjoyed a bit of a swim. Afterwards I used the conditioner , rinsed it off a little, and hopped out of the water with a little difficulty.


    The tub was slippery, so I missed my first jump, prompting Phony to stick a hand in the water to help me. I grabbed on to one of her fingers and used it to launch myself out of the tub and across the room, rather than let her pick me up. Now standing on regular solid ground again, I started releasing heat to dry off.


    This didn’t startle Phony at all. Darn, I wanted to see her reaction. I’ll do something more dramatic next time.