“Come in, come in.” The manager was an orc; that much was clear even without looking at him. He had a UV light near his desk to help nourish the chloroplasts that gave his skin its deep emerald hue, and had a small but functional shield—more a targe, really—painted with his clade’s distinctive glyph was hung prominently on the wall.

As he rose to greet Sheniqua she could see a small, dull axe—about tomahawk size— dangling from his belt. That and the targe represented him following the letter of the Hamurabash if not its spirit: an orcish male or unmarried female was always to carry their axe and have their shield close by.

“Now, Ms. Washington, what can I do for you?” This particular orc, a Mr. Shamash to judge from his name plate, had apparently gone to greater lengths than most to function comfortably within a polyspecies world. He’d either filed down or removed the large canine teeth, so necessary for proper Hamuraorg speech, that made many orcs appear to slobber or growl when they tried to speak other languages. Shamash had given himself a speech impediment among his own people to communicate better with outsiders.

He also had close-cropped, well-groomed (if receding) hair. While there was nothing in the Hamurabash about one’s hair, cultural traditions led most orcs to take an all-or-nothing approach, either letting their hair grow unchecked and dreadlocked or keeping it shaven billiard-smooth. With a little foundation makeup and a bit of nose putty, he could have passed for human or perhaps half-dwarf.

Sheniqua couldn’t help but wonder if she would be willing to live under the strictures of the Hamurabash or use a dental prosthesis to give out bank loans in the orc homeland.

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