Did that really work?

"A King?" Vespira hummed, leaning her face right against the chitin bars, her antennae stroking Jack’s cheeks with a ticklish, electric sensation. "You have quite the tongue for a piece of soft-shell meat. A 'lover'? A 'friend'? might suit you better perhaps. you seem almost intellectual compared to what I'm used to mating with. The drones don't even know what those words mean. They just have the sexual urge the 'Pulse' and the sire 'Duty.' But you... you’re bargaining, claiming you can perhaps offer more, offering me Status. whilst i assure you as a male you do no such thing as to change the status i am to serve, but conversation and the idea of pleasure during sexual matings well that is intriguing."

She looked him up and down, her jewelled eyes tracing the lines of his body. "If I walked into the Great Social Spire with a talking, 'Aware' mate on a leash... the other Matriarchs would think me mad for a moment. But perhaps we miss understood the humales intelligence or perhaps more likely you are but one of the few in your species worth conversating with. to own you as a mate, it would be the ultimate accessory and if every female could also own her own humale well I'm sure at that point your little race would be so thankful for their own survival wouldn't they be. And if you can actually make the 'Pulse', the sexual intercourse mating, pleasurable?" Her mandibles clicked sharply. "That would be a biological revolution of unprecedented proportions."

She reached out and tapped a sequence into a control panel on the side of the cot. The amber chitin bars hissed and retracted into the floor. Jack was no longer caged, but as he stood up on shaky legs, he realized just how small he was compared to the seven-foot Vespian towering over him.

"Humale... You’ve talked your way out of the nursery." Vespira whispered, her pink tongue flicking out to taste the air near his ear. "But talk is cheap. If we are going to make you a 'King, of mating' my own perfect lover. Well, we have to fix your primitive biology. You’re too soft, and your genetic 'key' won't fit my 'lock' I suspect without some... heavy editing. perhaps even for the both of us."

She reached down, her strong, silk-soft fingers locking around Jack’s wrist. She didn't lead him like a prisoner; she led him like a prize.

"We are going to see Zorina," Vespira decided. "She’s the Lead Genetic Architect. If she can bridge our species, you’ll be my consort and after that we shall figure out how our species intertwine with one another and the after math of the result. If she can't... well, I can always bring you back here and use you as a Nanny later. I do love a man with a deadline, don't you?"

The two continued on, the vespian female leading Jack throughout the alien ship to a new location.

The Scene Shift: Zorina’s Bio-Boutique

They exited the nursery and moved through the hive ship. It wasn't industrial; it was beautiful. The walls were made of translucent, glowing wax, and other Vespian females in high-fashion silk wraps watched with wide eyes as Vespira paraded her "talking meat" through the halls.

They reached a set of massive, iris-style doors that spiralled open to reveal Zorina’s Lab. It looked more like a high-end surgery-spa than a laboratory. There were holographic strands of DNA floating in the air like neon decorations, and several "prototype" improvements for drones were standing in glass tubes, their bodies being edited in real-time.

A Vespian woman with lab-white chitin and four arms instead of two looked up from a console. She had a magnifying lens over one eye and looked stressed.

"Vespira, unless you’ve brought me a solution to the drone-fertility crisis, get out," the scientist snapped.

"I’ve brought you something better, Zorina," Vespira smirked, pushing Jack forward into the light. "I’ve brought you a 'Premium' humale Mutation. One that seems to talk and have intelligence enough to barter with us. A humale that wants to negotiate his own evolution. He wants us to make him a King of mating and I am eager to hear and test his claims, if he can give me pleasure during sexual intercourse then perhaps I shall spare him from feeding our young and instead own him as his queen. The male is intelligent also perhaps he might also have a solution to your small 'fertility crisis' which doesn't surprise me in the least, vespian drones are so useless it doesn't even surprise me that perhaps they might be slacking in their purpose of supplying sperm either."