Seriously, you can just write some coyote lady calling for extraction from her space-gunboat-owning friend because she’s gotten herself into trouble with some rival treasure hunters…
Nothing about the coyote’s smile indicated any sense of mortal peril. “If you hadn’t showed up—which you always do, by the way—I would’ve gone with Plan B. I talked to someone a while back about using the deflector to dump some of the impact energy back into the batteries through a converter. Like my TD-920.”
“Was this ‘someone’ another coyote?”
Xocoh snickered, leaning back in the copilot’s seat with another wave of her paw. “I don’t kiss and tell. Point is, I would’ve been fine.”
He looked over, examining the coyote’s field jacket. “That’s new, right?”
She rubbed at the scorchmark he indicated, and winced. “Almost fine. I’ll check it out in a couple minutes. Once we’re done with the smalltalk, right? Anyway—you made it! You kept the ship, too!”
“I… enjoy it.” And, though he might’ve been slow to admit it, he enjoyed her knowing smile, too. They had salvaged the gunboat together, several months previously, when ground fire forced down the ship he had been using to transport the coyote.
The ‘ground fire’ was from a long-abandoned Pictor turret, patrol gunboat H22 had been half-buried in the sand for more than two centuries, and Xocoh’s plan for disabling the turret involved baiting it so that Anatolyi could open fire with the gunboat’s cannons.
Xocoh had been the bait—a detail of the plan she hadn’t revealed to her friend until it was already underway. Coyotes. Still, he returned the smile. “Consider the gunboat a souvenir. Besides, I like the way he handles.”
“And his name is Rarog?”
“Indeed.”
He considered explaining the source of the name, but the coyote’s smile widened to a fanged grin. “Zhar-ptytsia,” she said: firebird. “Because it arose from the ashes, like the phoenix? Or because you see yourself as Prince Ivan?”
“I do, on occasion, encounter some difficulties in my journeys…”
Her laugh said the coyote knew all-too-well her role in those difficulties. “You manage, Tolya Tsarevych. This wasn’t even much of a trial for you, I’m sure. You’re a good pilot.”
—“Firebird,” by Rob Baird
…And then you can also just have her know enough Slavic folklore to know where the name the beleaguered Ukrainian wolfdog gave it came from, and have her make an on-topic joke with him about it, and then they kiss and everything. There are no rules at all! It’s so cool!
You can read this story in its entirety over on SoFurry. Or you can subscribe to my Patreon, which lets you see these stories early when they are less polished and make even less sense, and then you can read the version that has footnotes that relate the story of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird to you and translate the profanity and stuff and link to all the stories and references that exist in my weird mess of a head :3
Yeah!