Surprisingly, they were sexually compatible, so Aekh could teach him the forty-one forms of the Shin Ratda, as well as his native planet’s Kama Sutra and Ars Amatoria. She stood fully one meter taller than Quinn, and he marvelled that her elongated limbs and torso could hold her upright. Of course, at the moment, they were both prone, with her arms and legs encircling him like ivory pythons.

Within his thoughts, he called her “the Albino,” but all Uok’ahr were chalk-white and completely hairless. The iris of her eyes were a faint pink, except when she was angry or climaxing when they turned blood-red. Her body temperature was slightly higher than his, so when he entered her or even touched her skin, he momentarily thought he was going to be burned.

She spoke standard Castailian with just a faint accent, but he could never quite place it. No one off of her homeworld could speak the Uok’ahr language or languages, but then, no offworlder had been permitted to enter their solar system for several centuries. The last who tried, Birooli pirates, had vanished in a brilliant flare of incandescent light as their ships passed the system’s first warning marker. The type of weapon used was unknown.

“My Kikroot.” It has her term of endearment for Quinn. It meant something like “little one” but could also be translated as “student” or “child.”

He was reclining in the afterglow of their lovemaking while contemplating going into the kitchen for a sandwich. However, she always got bored first and he felt her fingers cease their gentle exploration of his hair, body hair at once fascinated and repulsed her, and then she slipped from beneath the sheets.

The next morning, began with fencing lessons, then hand-to-hand combat, her superior reach and strength making her particularly formidable, and finally some light calisthenics before lunch.

Of course, this was a lesson as well, since she was grooming him to be a gourmet chef in addition to being a diplomat, starcraft pilot and engineer, data systems analyst, musician (on twenty-seven instruments no less), and fifty-nine other professions including their hundreds of subclasses.

“It is a shame my taste buds and digestive system do not tolerate most humanoid culinary forms, but I’m told by the tasters I employ in the city that your Strebbokx is quite good.”

“Thank you, Aekh. If I have to cook for myself, I might as well enjoy what I’m eating. You know, I’ve been meaning to ask.”

“Yes?” She tilted her head to the left in anticipation of his question.

“If you can’t eat what I prepare, how can you teach me to cook?”

“I do not learn the same way you do, my Kikroot. You must experience the doing of a thing, and in the case of meal creation, the tasting of it. My species has fourteen senses while you are limited to a mere five. I cannot explain the process of our learning in terms you would understand, but I am skilled in over one hundred and fifty general categories of activities in which I cannot personally participate, eating humanoid-compatible food stuffs being one of them.”

She was a gentle teacher, making her perfectionist streak was almost paradoxical. Quinn had been selected as her sole student for these past five years because he was, if not the brightest student, the most characteristically aligned with the Uok’ahr teaching style.

Governments and corporations on the eighteen inhabited colony planets as well as mother Earth competed fiercely to have one of their citizens accepted as her student, which she did only once a decade, and this cycle. Graduates were usually selected to be government leaders or industrialist giants.

Quinn, who didn’t even know his name had been submitted by his wealthy and unusually gifted family matriarch, had become the chosen one. He was only fifteen at the time. Since then he learned why, and even Aekh didn’t know the full reason. This was the only thing keeping Quinn alive. If she knew he possessed his grandmother’s gift, the teacher would have killed him in an instant, using any one of several hundred different methods.

Quinn’s graduation, if it could be called that, had arrived. She taught each student for five years, then retired to her homeworld for the next five for concealed reasons. It didn’t matter this time because she wasn’t going anywhere having given Quinn everything she had to teach.

Her private estate on Rote was the size of most cities on the industrialized planets and boasted, among other things, its own spaceport. There were only two craft, Quinn’s, which he had personally prepared for a return trip to Earth, and Aekh’s, preprogrammed for Uok’ahr.

“I shall miss you, my Kikroot.” Long, pale arms encircled him in an oddly human hug.

“I shall miss you as well, teacher. You don’t know how hard it is for me to do this.” He could feel her muscles tense as she tried to interpret the unanticipated statement. Then he mentally depressed the trigger.

He had concealed the emitter in the palm of his hand, and when they embraced, he placed it just over her heart. The discharge took thirty-one nanoseconds and burned through her spine, several other skeletal structures having no humanoid corollary, and put a 19.05 millimeter hole in the center of her cardiac muscle. Aekh had just enough time for her face to express pained betrayal before she died.

The twenty-year-old human looked down at the dead female. “Thank you for everything. I really will miss you, but you were only my teacher. My family’s demands outweigh my feelings for you by a great deal.”

He peeled the now spent emitter off of his hand and dropped it on Aekh’s lifeless body. Then he began removing the life support modules from his ship and installing them in hers. She had taught him the intimate details of maintenance and piloting of multiple vessel designs including those used by her race.

As he examined the navigational array of her craft, he sifted through the complex mathematical calculations necessary to plot a course safely into the Uok’ahr system. Inheriting his grandmother’s gift for telepathy which included an expanded memory capacity had made it all too easy. He would never understand how Aekh’s additional senses and learning pathways operated or the information they may have contained, but the accessible parts of her mind were as open to him as an elementary reading primer.

Once he was ready to leave, he walked back over to the teacher and addressed her one last time. “Thank you also for the gift of your ship. Once I use it to disarm your systemic defense grid, it will be child’s play for the armada of my family’s corporation to form a blockade around your homeworld, jam its communications, and then invade in force. We are already wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, but with the Uok’ahr database and technology in our possession, we will rule this arm of the Galaxy for the next ten-thousand years.”

Quinn knelt down and kissed her cheek, noticing that she was finally cool to the touch. Then he left her on the tarmac to slowly decay under an uncaring sky as he soared upward to his destiny.

I wrote this for the Sunday Writing Prompt hosted at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie. Today’s prompt is the word “Teacher.”

Some suggestions for a response include:

We all had one or some as we grew up. Some made a lasting impression on us, some good and some not.

Some of us have been or are teachers and we all have tales from the chalkboard.

Your story can be about a favourite teacher or about school and your recollections of the teachers who taught you.

Did you enjoy going to school?

Did you have a crush on any of your teachers?

Did you leave school early and later regret it or look back on it was the best decision you ever made?

Did any teacher impart a valuable lesson you have held onto throughout life?

Alternatively you can make the whole thing up.

Obviously, I chose the last option.

Oddly enough, my first thought really was “Surprisingly, they were sexually compatible,” so I just took it from there, and although I had betrayal in the back of my mind since I began writing, the plan didn’t become fully formed until I had just about finished.