The pretty widow Andara Jacobsen, now a hairless lizard woman, tucked in her wrinkled blue-green chin and lowered her head. Her pale purple eyes fixed on the dull reddish-brown stripes of the cheap carpet as she reached for the cigarette pack on the table again.
"The Kree won?"
The woman drew out a cigarette and put it between her lips, asking in a flat tone. She struck the flint of her lighter, leaned in to light it, then shrugged and skillfully blew two clouds of gray-white smoke from her nostrils.
"Not exactly. This batch of Kree bastards may have been wiped out completely, and it seems they deployed a planet-killer. I haven't investigated the details yet, but you know what makes them truly terrifying: their strength lies in large fleets of starships and massive-scale warfare."
The lizard man's tone was far from passionate. If anything, it was low and tinged with melancholy.
He picked up a cream-colored cowboy hat with a wide brim and set it on his head. The strange, triangular blue-green face paired with the Wild West getup made for an indescribably bizarre sight. He idly flicked the brim and continued with a self-mocking chuckle:
"Heh! The Skrull Empire once wielded such power. The Kree were nothing but an inferior race for us to toy with and experiment on. The Asgardians had only just begun to emerge, while the Titanians were still 'going strong' and could stand alongside us. But now the Empire exists in name only. All that's left is a bunch of interstellar refugees."
"Mutas, I don't think the Howlett Family is certain to lose."
A trace of thought and memory flickered through the woman's eyes and vanished. She briskly tapped off her ash, crossed her long, slender legs, and spoke earnestly:
"During my first few