So a species of humanlike aliens, or maybe a group of humans who colonized a planet really far away & have been out of touch with the rest of humanity a loooong time.
Either way they find humanity & make contact & all is well, we’re all living on the same planets & stuff, not melting pot but definitely gumbo. Learning about each other’s culture.
They’re FASCINATED by our concept of gender. Like, what an interesting way to divide people into groups!
Viewpoint Human Character discovers it’s become trendy in Other Culture to select a human gender to identify as. To the disgust of conservative humans this does not merely include male & female but also a number of other genders.
… it’s kinda like taking a ‘where would the Sorting Hat put you?’ test. In fact, that’s exactly what it is. ‘I’m a Hufflepuff woman!’ ‘Awesome, I’m nonbinary & in Slytherin!’
… my brain is a strange place. Anyway, if this appeals, run with it.
Tag: aliens
//There needs to be more diversity in Trills and it got me thinking that black Trill spots might show up almost like vitiligo. I need more of this, okay? This needs to be a thing.
She is beautiful
Mom Friend
Ok but imagine how the aliens would react to the idea of the “mom friend”. Like the crew is losing their mind over the fact their human is reckless, doing so many dangerous things that would have killed any other race but of course it’s fine because it’s a human and those things are so hard to kill anyway.
The only planet that is a danger to a human is the one it came from.
So when the human-Kat comes into the control room with that adorable hopeful face a lot of the crew members are instantly on guard. The last time Human-Kat had that expression they almost lost Xe’rex to the waves of that one planet that Human-Kat just had to “Surf”.
“Can my friend Lola come meet us for the 34-OJ mission? She’s right in our pathway to that new planet? Please?” Huamn-Kat says and though they want nothing more then to say no, the crew of 626- Launch can’t say anything else other then yes. They know how humans react when left alone for too long. Humans claim that their greatest criminals are placed in “solitary confinement” as punishment which goes very far to show how much bonds affect their life spans.
Human-Kat needs human interaction to stay alive and sane (or as sane as humans can be)
So the crew agrees to have Friend-Lola on the voyage, slightly terrified of having two humans. But when the new human arrives it is not what they expected.
“Kat, have you finished your paperwork? Come on man, you know it’s due in like a day. Get on it.”
“Whoa dude, I love you ok. But no. You are not going to go surfing down there. It’s for your own good.”
“Girl you got the promotion?! Yes! Ok Ok! We need to celebrate with girls night in!”
“Hey I have some tissues in my bag somewhere hold on. There ya go.”
“Look at this game I picked up on RE-vr’. It’s just like Cards against Humanity but space!”
“Go. To. Sleep. Kat.”
“Remember that pact we made in high school? The one where I would stop you from doing something that will get you arrested or killed? Yeah well I’m calling it into action and saying that you do not lick anything on a unknown planet!“
This Human…holds common sense? That is possible for that race?!
After Friend-Lola leaves they ask Human-Kat about this and she merely laughs while swiping through photographs she had taken with the other human.
“Well Lola is the mom friend.”
And the crew of 626-Luanch are so confused because they have already seen photos of Human-Kat’s birth givers and they look nothing alike not to mention Human-Kat already has a Mom. Do humans have more then one “Mom”?
“Oh you know a mom friend is the one friend in a group that keeps everyone else from dying.” Human-Kat jokes.
But the crew is amazed. They have learn the reason humanity haven’t killed itself off. They send a message to every out post in the area.
If xe have a human on-board make sure that they are accompanied by a Mom Friend. These are the humans in charge of keeping other humans alive and well-behaved.
Oh my god
The human classification system is in constant evolution, but the addition of Mom Friend has helped with establishing parameters for the care and well-being of human crew members. There have been cases of incompatibility, especially with sub-class Asshole of the designation Cranky, but the provision of a designated “Ship Mom” has generally created greater stability for vessels with multiple humans on board.
An important note for Mom Friend humans is that they must be provided with designated human crew to care for. Even with said provision, some will expand their interest to monitoring and nurturing all sapients on board. Such monitoring may include anything from restructuring the mess to provide optimal nutrition with occasional “treats” to engineering a way to ease molting with the application of a warm, nubby cloth and soft cooing. Some Mom Friends can be stopped from this; there is a ritual surrounding the phrase “I was just trying to help” that is still being investigated for potential use after it is properly translated and understood.
Care should be taken to ensure that Mom Friend sub-class “Mama Bear” is kept away from weapons storage if there is any interest in survivors after a ship is boarded.
Any Mom Friend designated human using “that’s it” in a declarative manner should be treated with level III diplomatic protocols. If the phrase is accompanied by some variation of “had enough,” evacuation of the immediate area is advised.
on the subject of Humans Are Space Orcs i keep thinking it would be funny if ‘pursuit predator’ humans got together with an ‘ambush predator’ feliform species. and like. humans enjoy walking around with their friends! and the feliforms enjoy huddling in a concealed location with their friends! and it takes all of half an hour for a human to pick up a scarf and make a sling to take their pal with them while they go grab some lunch.
our new friends are like ‘are you sure this isn’t an inconvenience’ and the humans are like ‘are you kidding we do this with terran cats whether they like it or not’
also the team-up of humans and the feliform species gives most herbivore species in the galaxy screaming nightmares because here is a mobile tower that will follow you for 16 hours straight and it’s carrying a bag full of sneaky murder like it’s a baby this is not okay
YES
An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.
[Imgur]
That is some fine writing.
The Imgur link is broken so:
[Series of posts on 09/16/11]
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts – acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets – was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
This makes me cry
It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.
Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five,
A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field.
Waiting.
When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”. The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace.
Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.
We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice. In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off. It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.
Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.
Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.
We find it terrifying.
Story 215: Cultural Exchange
The human steps onto the station from her shuttle, and walks into the scanner. It flashes – no weapons. I pity her, though there’s nothing I can do for her. By tomorrow she will be a slave the same as me; the Gaunvans collect ambassadors like trophies.
“Hello there! Amanda Thorn, ambassador for the Empire of Humanity. You’re a Ixian, correct?”
Mimicking human body language, I nod my head. "That’s correct. Ix Malasan. It is an honor to meet you.“
She smiles, reminding me again that she has somehow modified herself to breathe atmosphere suited to the Gaunvans rather than wear a respirator like myself. Other than that she appears to be a standard human, something I am led to believe is less and less common as they pursue the bizarre compulsion humans have to alter their bodies. Changing hair color, adding pigments to their skins in patterns and pictures, growing long tails or ears that mimic other species from their planet. No other known species tampers with their bodies like this.
“Not to be undiplomatic, she says, “but the Gaunvans enslaved your people. Why are you here?”
“We… reached a mutually beneficial agreement. We would have lost in combat and been eliminated, so we chose to preserve what we could of our culture. The Gaunvans are not naturally skilled at diplomacy, so they bring me along to assist and to show that peace can be made.”
She nods. "Understood. I can respect that choice. How much freedom do you have, personally?“
Smart of her, to start planning for her future. “A fair amount. I have free reign on the ship when we are in transit. At the homeworld I have reasonably comfortable quarters.”
“Have you ever met the Empress, or…?”
“Oh, no. No, while on the homeworld I am confined to my chambers – but they’re quite spacious.”
“Shame. Okay, plan ‘A’ then. Let’s get this over with.”Despite my attempt at encouraging diplomacy, the Gaunvan commander starts with threats. I don’t know why I bother. He looms over the human, chitinous plates almost black in the dim light. His pod of six is posted around the room, for show more than for actual security since she followed orders and came alone and unarmed. "Failure to surrender will bring the full wrath of our army upon you. Humanity will be crushed, and wiped from the universe.“
To her credit, she looks very calm. "We live in a post-scarcity society. Bloody conquest just seems silly, doesn’t it?”
“It is for the glory of Gaun!”
“Well, I’m not prepared to get into a religious debate with you,” she says, “since I doubt there’s anything I can do to change your mind. Since you’re committed to this course of action, what are you willing to offer if we surrender?”
Now he goes back on script. Maybe I am getting through to him a little? He talks about the benefits of being enslaved, mainly the protections for up to twelve designated culturally historical sites. They’ve been mostly good on their word on my homeworld, though they did use the area just outside of the Hahhn Memorial as a waste dump.She nods as she listens. There was a part of me that was worried she would argue, because the humans are somewhat childlike. They don’t understand the horrors of war. Certainly they fought in the past, but the last time they had to battle was more than two of their generations ago, so these ones have all grown up coddled and soft. They play games with each other instead, silly competitions. They make art, and play pretend, and alter their bodies for fun. They don’t have weapons anymore, and wouldn’t know how to use them if they did.
“Well then,” ambassador Thorn says, “this is about what I expected. On behalf of humanity, I would like to formally reject this offer.”
Oh no. Foolish humans. The galaxy will miss your innocence. The commander makes an excited clicking noise, looking forward to combat. He reaches a blade-tipped hand towards ambassador Thorn, but hesitates as every device in the room bleats out an alert – we’ve all lost communications with the outside.Like one of the dances humans do, she gracefully pivots around while taking his hand. She ends up close to him and places her other arm against his thorax, then… oh gods. Gods, what… she’s ripped his arm off. It’s not possible. The commander is clearly thinking the same thing, staring in mute shock at his dripping limb.
“I’d like to extend a counter-offer,” she says, and flips the arm around before jamming the bladed end into his neck. The warriors around the room are fidgeting, uncertain. They haven’t been told to attack, and don’t want to dishonor their commander by intervening in a fight with such a small creature. She’s still holding the commander’s severed arm in his neck, but she rotates and heaves, lifting him off the ground with it for a moment… and then his head pops off, landing squarely on the conference table. She allows the corpse to slide to the ground, and straightens her clothes as if they aren’t covered in ichor.I don’t understand.
The warriors, now with no orders at all, finally act. She smiles as they come for her, I suppose because she has done her duty to send this powerful message of resistance. She can die in peace. Or… no… She’s killing them. She’s smiling because this is fun for her. Though they’re partly killing themselves; if there had been two of them, prepared, strategic, they might have prevailed. Watching six panicked fighters get in each other’s way while trying to stop a smaller, faster, and somehow impossibly stronger foe is almost hypnotic. At least one is killed by the stab of a friendly lance due to pure confusion. It’s over faster than I would have thought possible, severed limbs strewn across the room. I’ve got some fluids splashed across my clothing. Only one yet lives, and he is retreating. She seems to be allowing it.
She follows behind, holding a lance. The wounded and scared warrior scurries down the hallway towards his ship, looking back behind him as he goes. She’s just… walking. Calm. And for some reason I’m following. The last Gaunvan reaches the airlock and the second he enters his code she throws the lance – throws it! – and spears him.
“Come on, we’re stealing their ship.” She says it like this is the most normal thing in the world.
“There are thousands more on board! Thousands! Almost all warrior caste!”
She smiles again, and keeps walking. I see errors on the screens that we pass, messages indicating communications have been lost. They can’t tell anyone what is happening here. Even the communicators within the ship are on nodes rather than being wired, so the warriors at one end of the vessel won’t be able to coordinate with the other end. Do they even know they’ve been boarded?
“How?”We enter the bridge after she kills a handful of other guards with ease. They’re too shocked by her presence to act in time. Once the door are sealed and she is working on the control systems she starts talking to me again.
“Well, you know, we do like to be prepared.”
“But you… you ripped his arm off.”
“Yeah, that was super satisfying.” She looks at me appraisingly. "Oh, come on. Is it really that surprising? You knew we were into changing ourselves, right? Being strong enough to pop an overgrown bug’s forelimb off isn’t rocket science.“
“Your people are so peaceful…”
“Oh, sure, most of them. But we did that, too. Tweaked ourselves over the years to decrease aggression and some of our tribalistic tendencies, increase empathy… all stuff that can be undone if needed. Though for a good cause even the nicest of us can squish a bug or two.”
“You bond with Ry’ling devourers!”
“Those are the big fuzzy guys that look like cats, yeah? Those guys are adorable! But… look, liking some things that could kill us doesn’t mean we’ll sit back and get enslaved. We didn’t put up with it well when we enslaved each other, and we certainly aren’t going to go for it now that we’re… finally… on the same page about slavery being unacceptable. It was, uh, a longer time than we like to admit before the last hold-outs were convinced of that one.”I can feel the ship un-dock. We’re moving. "What about all the warriors on board? They’ll break through the doors eventually!“
“Not according to this control panel here. Take a look.”
It says there’s no atmosphere in the rest of the ship. Life signs are negative on all but two of the warriors, presumably the only ones that got to their suits in time. She disabled all the safety measures, somehow. She just killed… I check the life signs readout again to confirm the number… three thousand, six hundred, and fourteen soldiers. Wait, how is it tracking that unless… “Are communications back up?”
“Yeah, I’m calling some friends. The military is right around the corner, so to speak.”
“But Earth doesn’t have a standing military.”
She laughs. Not just a little bit. She’s actually doubled over for a moment, unable to catch her breath. "Sweet Jeebus, you guys actually fell for that? No standing military. Have you read about us at all?“Three ships appear seemingly out of nowhere, and one docks with the Gaunvan vessel. Once the atmosphere is restored we head to the airlock to meet them, and I’m surprised by an entire platoon of Gaunvan warriors. Speaking English.
“Okay boys, send your last goodbyes! This is in all likelihood a one way mission. Commander Thorn! It is an honor to see you again, and might I say you look exquisite drenched in the blood of your enemies!”
She bows to him, blushing, and then salutes the Gaunvans. Or… humans? Can they change themselves this drastically?
“You’ve got two holed up in here somewhere. Bridge is clear, have the techs bring the new brain on board.”
“New brain?”
She looks at me like she’s forgotten that I’m here, and then turns back to the others. "Men, this is our new friend Ix Malasan who has just been liberated from his captivity. He’s going to be helping with our intel. Malasan, yeah, a new brain for the ship. Once this vessel is cleaned up and back in service with a new crew we’ll be able to take it over whenever we want even if all of our boys get killed. We cooked up a really sadistic AI for it.“
“But how do you know the protocols? This was your first contact with the Gaunvans, they’ve never lost a ship anywhere near here!”
“No? There wasn’t a mining colony disaster two years ago?”
“But that was just an accident… and you weren’t even involved in the war yet… and…”The faux-Gaunvans have finished boarding. The one that was talking to them before puts a bladed claw on ambassador – commander – Thorn’s shoulder. "You coming with?“
“Naw. Orders said I could only come if they allow ambassadors near extremely high value targets. Malasan here says they don’t, so I need to wait for my next mission back on Earth.”
“It would have been nice having you with us, Thorn. Well, maybe we’ll see each other again. Suicide mission or not, I think I’ve decided to live through it.”
“Bold choice,” she says, and kisses him next to his lower mandibles.
He nods at me, then turns back to his men. “Okay everyone, we are now officially on the job. And what is that job?”
In unison, they start chanting.“FUCK! SHIT! UP! FUCK! SHIT! UP! FUCK! SHIT! UP!”
For a moment I nearly feel pity for the Gaunvans. Nearly. Commander Thorn leads me off of the ship, and I start thinking about what useful information I can provide the ‘harmless’ humans. Fuck shit up, indeed.
On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions of Gonzo the Great:
Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it.But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?
- Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
- Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
- Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
- If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
- This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
- Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.
Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.
We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.
The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.
And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous.
YESSSSS
Humans Are Weird
insane-male-alphabeticalsymbol:
So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather?
What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.
Earth being Space Australia
Words cannot express how much I love these posts
Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”
Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”
Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”
Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.”
Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”
Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”
Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”
Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.”
Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.”
“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.”
“What, the molten rock?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–”
“You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?”
“Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”
Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?”
“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”
“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”
“… well, actually…”
“… what?”
“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”
“…”
“…”
“…what?”
“we sent-”
“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”
“y-yeah”
“and they didn’t… die?”
“Well the first few did”
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”
My new favorite Humans are Weird quote
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”
aka The History of Russia
aka Arctic Exploration
aka The History of Alaska
Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:
1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.
2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)
3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.
4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)
5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.
“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?”
“Those worthless rocks? Yeah.”
“80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”This would be an interesting read if this was a book.
Like, an alien invasion is about to start and the book is a chronicle of how the aliens couldn’t handle both humans in general and the range of environments and ended up being destroyed through the eyes of one of the aliens.
Like a caption from the book would be something like
“So we sent a recon team to this place called Russia, but all we’ve heard back thus far is about the temperatures, giant monsters with fur the humans call “Bears”, and that once again, we have been reminded of how heavily well armed almost ever human settlement is.
Thus far we have lost more than a good chunk of our forces through experiments gone wrong, unsuccessful fire fights, and above all else, the humans seem to be more worried about these strange variation of their species calling themselves “Clowns”.
I don’t know what a Clown is, but sounds as if it is the dominant faction of this planet, and considering we only just found out humans practically poison themselves with this thing called beer and only get stronger and more violent, I don’t ever want to encounter such a being.
I believe this invasion was a mistake.“
I’ve been reading a bunch of these and all I can think about now is aliens finding out about our insane ability to walk away from accidents.
“Human Colony SDO435**, this is Gxanimi survey vessel 3489. We regret that we must inform you that the wreckage of your ship ‘Gecko Flyer’ has just been detected on planet F56=K=. We offer expressions of sympathy for this catastrophe.”
“Shit, thanks for telling us, we’ll be right there.”
“Why?”
“To find our people, of course.”
“… you wish to retrieve the corpses for your traditional death rituals, of course, we understand. We have sent the coordinates.”
“What do you mean, bodies? No survivors at all? There must be some.”
“Official mouthpiece of Human Colony SDO435**, the ship has crashed. It has impacted the planet’s surface at speed. Moreover, this might have happened as much as five vek ago. We do not understand why you speak of ‘survivors’.”
“Oh, there’ll be survivors. There always are.”
“(closes hyperspace voicelink) How sad that they are unable to accept the reality of their loss.”
*
“Hey, Gxanimi survey vessel 3489, thanks for letting us know about the Gecko Flyer. More than half the crew made it!”
“Made what?”
“They survived! A couple of lost limbs and so on, but they’ll be fine.”
“… but that vessel was destroyed! Images have been examined!”
“Oh, well, everyone in the fore-below compartment was crushed, obviously, but the others made it out.”
“… but the crash was vek ago! Excuse we… at least eighty of your ‘days’! How could they survive without a ship? Without shelter and supplies?”
“Well, the wreckage gave them some shelter, and of course the emergency supplies kept them going until they could start growing stuff. It’s actually a nice little planet, they said. Quite a lot of edible flora and fauna. T-shirt weather, in summer, too.”
“What is… t-shirt weather?”
“Oh, you know, when it’s comfortable to go around with only modesty covering over the epidermis. Exposed limbs.”
“That planet is so cold that even water solidifies in its atmosphere!”
“Well, in winter, obviously. But we like that. Listen, our people have been raising crops down there, and that’s usually how we rule a planet as ‘colonized’…. is anyone else using it, or can we call it?”
“Er… we have claimed the warmer planets in the system, but we believe we could come to some arrangement.”
*
It was really nice, the humans thought, how carefully most of the aliens kept an eye out for downed ships after that, once they found out that humans tended to survive anything less than explosive decompression or… well, explosions generally. They’d immediately inform the nearest outpost of a wreck’s location, or even ship survivors back themselves. It was very thoughtful.
They didn’t find out until a long time later that the Gxanimi had put out the word to every species they were in contact with. It was vital that everyone knew the things they had learned about humans after that first encounter.
1. Humans can literally walk away from an impact that renders a space-worthy hull so much scrap and would have actually liquefied a Gxanimi.
2. Humans will eat just about anything not immediately fatal to them – including, in extremis, the corpses of their dead crewmates. In fact, most human vessels keep a list of those willing to be eaten and those whose socio-religious scruples forbid it. They have a ridiculously high tolerance for dangerous substances, and if they can breathe on a planet they can probably eat something on it too. They also have something they call the ‘Watney Protocol’, which requires them to carry live soil samples, seeds, and simple tools that will allow them to start farming their own native foodstuffs on any remotely habitable planet immediately in the event of an accident.
3. Once they’ve farmed a planet, they bond with it. They’ll be polite, but it’ll take significant effort to get rid of them even so.
Conclusion: If a human ship crashes on a planet you like and want to keep, get other humans to come and get them immediately. Remove them yourself if you have to. Even the worst crash can result in a thriving colony in a few vek.
And don’t, for the love of gravitational regularity, try to solve that problem by killing off the survivors. Just don’t. It won’t work and it just makes all the rest of them mad.
So imagine the aliens have no concept of bilingualism. They learn their first language and than it’s fixed, and they can maybe understand a tiny bit if they meet some other alien who speaks a different variant of their language with plenty of gestures and stuff.
So they come to earth and see a new sentient spices and freak out cause they’re afraid it’ll get violence like it did on the border in home-world where they are fighting over water rights for decades now (or at least they think it’s water rights, but nobody’s sure) but than humans learn a bit of their language and the aliens minds are absolutely blown away.
And maybe their language is just super weird, do it’s really hard to learn, but kids are awesome in languages so they soak it right up. And it’s like
Alien : “Oh no! If we speak more than a few words near your children they’ll pick up the wrong language and have trouble communicating with their own kind for the rest of their life! How can you let them near us?”
Human: “false…cubs… lick? learn? Oh… damn it” *turns around* Amy sweety could you helf us out here ?”
Amy: “Hello alien sir! I am Amy, and I speak English, and Russian and Greek and a bit Alien. –Daddy can I bring Mr.bumblesniff next time to meat Mr.Alien?– Mr.
bumblesniff is one of my best friends! but He’s a stuffed animal bunny, so he might be a bit confused about aliens though…”
And so, for the first few years, all translators are under 12. They are paid in cookies and a college fund, ( except when Amy told all her class mates the aliens eat puppies, and her parents decided she’s not getting cookies for a month.)
All communication sessions end by 8, cause the translators have to be in bed by 9.(feel free to add to this if you want)
Aliens thus become the substitute teachers and babysitters of the human translator children
Aliens reacting to someone with braces? Thanks!
The human problem was growing bigger at an alarming pace.
Back when they first started travelling through space, most had viewed their
efforts as cute. Some had even cheered them on from afar. Of course, that was
before they realised what kind of creatures humans really are and what kind of
planet they originate on. Before they knew what humans did for fun.The humans as a whole hadn’t attacked yet, but it was only a
matter of time before they gathered their forces. The Ktynarian species had to
be prepared.As a result, they had commandeered a human craft, and with eight Ktynarians to every human, they’d managed to gain control of the vessel
and the horrible creatures within.Unfortunately it was common knowledge that getting a fully
grown human to talk was a near impossible feat. Fortunately, there were several
younglings on the ship. The majority were younglings actually, which was a
surprise. Upon further investigation it was revealed the ship was operated by a
training facility of the category ‘school’.After separating the humans into smaller groups to minimise
the risks of organised resistance, Commander Yldrik picked one of the medium
sized younglings to interrogate – having heard that the bigger posed a threat
in size, but that the smallest were often quick and nimbleYes, the medium sized one were surely the easiest to make a
first attempt on. And if that failed, they still had a plethora of other humans
to interrogate. One of them would surely give them some useful information.Some of the humans were secreting some sort of fluid from
their optical organs, some making noises the Ktynarians couldn’t identify, but
instructing them to be quiet seemed to just make them more intent on making the
noises. Deciding it would be best to leave xir soldiers to deal with it,
Commander Yldrik turned xir focus to the youngling xe had selected.“What is your objective,” xe asked. Getting straight to the
point had seemed like the best method, but the human didn’t seem to comprehend.“What?”
“What is your objective? What are you here to accomplish?” xe repeated, seemingly surprising the human. Perhaps they hadn’t expected to be
confronted, or for the Ktynarians to be suspicious of them. Clearly the humans
had underestimated them.“Well, I mean, a B would be great, but I’d settle for a C
too,” the human responded, something in their mouth gleaming slightly. Under
different circumstances Yldrik would have paid it more attention, but xe was
preoccupied deciphering what the human had said.A bee was a creature from the humans’ home planet, and
apparently vital to their ecosystem. A sea however, was a large body of a
particular kind of water, and their planet seemed to be largely consisting of
it. Why would they possibly want more of it?“Why?”
“It’s not my best subject,” they said, elevating an upper
part of their anatomy. Yldrik knew xe had been informed of the meaning behind
the movement, but xe had finally noticed something different about the human’s
teeth. Something worrying.“Bare your teeth.” The human seemed surprised by the order,
but complied after a brief hesitation.The sight that met xem was terrifying, even for someone with
as much experience as Yldrik.“W-what are those?”
The human looked perplexed at first, but seemed to
understand what xe was referring to fairly quickly.“You mean my braces?” the human asked before baring their
teeth further. A grin. At least that was what xe thought the action was named
by the humans. “It’s just metal. You see, my mouth had too many teeth in it, so
they got a bit out of order. Crooked and all, you know? So when I was about
thirteen my parents took me to a dentist who basically attached metal to them
to force them to stay in place. Cool, huh?”The tone in which the human spoke did no justice to the
horrors that laid in their words. They spoke as if they didn’t realise how terrifying
this information was – no, come to think about it, they spoke as if they enjoyed the horrors they’d clearly been
put through.“And this was necessary for your survival?” xe asked, seeing
no other reasonable explanation.“No, no it’s just because it looks better,” the human said,
repeating the elevation of an upper part of their anatomy. They did something
else too, with an appendage of theirs, but Yldrik was done paying attention.In record time, every single Ktynarian had vacated the ship,
control of which had been returned to the humans. Fortunately their ship had a
far higher maximum speed than the humans.Their only chance at survival would clearly be to stay as
far away from the humans as possible. If they attacked, the Ktynarians would
have no other option than to flee. A species willing to do things like that to
their own young – for aesthetic reasons no less – was not a species one wanted
to go to war against.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 