Challenge #02520-F330: Teach to Learn
You know the one student that’s always alone? The one student that, for some reason, just seems unable to make any friends? Often they’re bullied while everyone else turns a blind eye even when they ask for help. A student can turn one of many ways in this kind of situation. They can turn into a killer, they can harm themselves, they can bottle it up and explode later, or, for the unusual few, it can make them even gentler even when their heart’s broken. School.. they graduated almost 20 earth years ago. But still, some nights, they woke up crying. The cruelty they endured in their youth had left a long, harsh, scar upon their heart, matching the many physical scars, like the burn marks that caused permanent stripes along the arms. The alarm went off, it was time to get to work, they had a mixed class of haven worlders and humans to teach. A gentle smile on the kind face, while the broken soul hid within the heart. – Anon Guest
[AN: I get the feeling that this is very important to OP, so - Nonny, wherever you are, take heart. Those scars stop hurting so much, after a while. That, and we can all take steps to be certain more children don’t gain the same scars.]
There’s a certain feeling that comes from growing up in an era that introduces all the things you need after you’re done needing them. Whilst you are clambering at the cracks you fell through, struggling to create coping mechanisms and falling afoul of every single unforeseen pit-trap… others who follow you walk calmly along on paving-stones laid by someone who never saw you there. It is, very loosely, frustrating.
Imagine fighting for a lifetime. Imagine struggling along a rocky and weed-strewn path, only to find that someone behind you has been making a better path. Yet you can never turn around, go back, and use the path that’s been made because that way lies even worse ruin. Imagine the exhaustion. Imagine the frustration. Imagine the tears one could shed. Now imagine becoming a guide for all those who need that path, and would benefit from that guidance.
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Challenge #02519-F329: For the Greater Good
Several Enforcers of Pax Humanis teamed up and took down a pirate’s ship. They were tearing the ship apart from the inside-out when one hears crying in one of the cargo holds. Tearing the hold’s doors off, they find dozens of children, human and haven-worlder, locked in cages with price tags already printed on the tops of them. Now they have children to care for, and the potential buyers? Were about to get a lesson in what it meant to mess with the innocent on Pax Humanis’s watch!
Before anyone gets any really bad ideas, this harkens back to a disgraceful era in human history when children were sold off to become zoo attractions. Or, if they had odd deformities, sold to circuses to be part of the freak shows. – DaniAndShali
[AN: Actual shitty things Humanity has done to other(ed) Humans. You can google this yourself. Actual children - usually children of colour - were exhibited in zoos like animals. Though the freak shows used to contain the crown stars of circuses, it wasn’t that great to know your own parents sold you for profit. Nowadays, the deformed have to fight tooth and nail for any assistive devices/living helpers they need and get stared at when out in society. Hooray for progress? /end rant]
They had been sent to deal with space pirates. They knew what to do with those. Though the Faadraxi had thrown up their hands and pleaded incapability when the Alliance attempted to get them to enforce Galactic Law… they were quick to attempt amelioration when Pax Humanis was put into play. Too little, too late, by far.
Now, a suspiciously military-esque Faadraxi vessel was dead in the water, so to speak, with a team of five nasty brutes making certain there was nobody left to pull any stunts by methodically pulling the ship to pieces. Bulkhead by bulkhead, they searched the vessel. They found drugs, porn, secret stashes of pastries and treats, photos of home that also included suspiciously military backgrounds. Those were good evidence.
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Challenge #02518-F328: Specific Listing Please
Traveling with Humans was, or rather is, a dangerous prospect. Freelance Freighter captains quickly learn that it is usually best to keep your human away from anything that can, could be made to, or might explode.
Hauling volatile chemicals? Heck no!
Mining equipment? That’s just ASKING for trouble!
Precious metals? Why not just let the pirates know you’re coming and save some time?
Logging equipment? Like, to record data? Seems harmless enough. Even fledgling colonies need some way to keep track of goings on.
Havenworlders quickly learn that there are two very different types of logging and when the pirates come, the significance of the most intimidating tool/weapon ever created by humans.
The Chainsaw – Paladin
Just as Humans have many words for the same thing, they also have one word for many things. Sometimes, the same-sounding word may have a different way of spelling in their own language that makes everything perfectly clear. Alas, such fine details don’t make it to GalSimple manifests. Always pay attention to the units. It might save your life.
For instance, the Human soft dessert or the hair treatment comes in volumetric units. The wide-horned cold-climate ungulate comes in ‘heads’. Unfortunately for Hox, units of measurements do not always help when there is a difference between creating journals and cutting down trees. Not even when such items come in shipping containers.
The Humans escorting the cargo didn’t bother him, they kept to themselves and didn’t try to pack-bond with him and that was the way he liked it. So when the pirates attempted to attack, Hox warned them about the Humans, told them about what he assumed to be journaling materials, and let nature take its course from there. He expected a brief tousle between pirates and Humans, followed by some minor property damage that could easily be paid for by the bounty on the pirates’ capture.
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Challenge #02517-F327: Kintsugi Badass
The person was a bodyguard, and damn good at their job. However, others did not realize this when they saw the person. Sure the legs could have been replaced long ago with what they made from their work, but it was rather amusing when an enemy saw the bracings and the skin suit covered stumps, and assumed the lack of legs meant being helpless. – Anon Guest
Sometimes, when the Human was in a good mood, they called themselves Brad the Broken. Certainly, this Ships’ Human had been through more than their share of the wars. That was a metaphor. Human Brad has never seen combat, but they are certainly injured as if they had done so. One leg was gone below the knee. The other was just a stump below the hip. They had, perhaps, half of a hand left on one arm. The other arm was artificial below the elbow.
Human Brad had broken every bone in their body. Their synthetic replacement parts potentially outweighed the mass of their original ones, so to speak. They had had most of their internal organs replaced, including one eye and a delicate, artificial tympanum inside one ear. Sometimes, they would joke that they were more scar than skin. In just their Skins, it was easy to believe that they were almost entirely helpless.
That was what the Pirates of Zendrassi thought, too. They managed to hack Human Brad’s livesuit and, while they were incapacitated, the pirates stripped Human Brad of every replacement technology that could be easily removed. Surely, they reasoned, a Human with one eye, half a hand, and possibly seventy percent of one leg could not be much of a problem. They didn’t know about Human determination very well.
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Challenge #02516-F326: Once a Sword
Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
Humans, while striving for peace, prepared for war. – Anon Guest
Let’s go in the garden, you’ll find something waiting… – Terran children’s song.
This is a gardening planet. Call it Agraria. It has been specifically engineered for farming food crops for Terrans by Terrans. The people who choose to live there are called Vegans and they are, by and large, peaceful. They do not eat animal sourced nutrients and cultivate many plants that substitute for nutrients only found in animals. All in all, they’ve been very clever with their moral choices. They’re also possibly the most sanctimonious of peoples in the Galactic Alliance and are at near-zealot levels of trying to convert others into their lifestyle choices.
One would think that -apart from an obvious social impairment- they would be the least likely to fight any living creature about anything. At least physically. The Vegans of Agraria will debate any other life form to death about healthier food choices, but that’s not the point. This is about Humanity in all its forms, and how Humans revert to type in extremis.
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