Challenge #02391-F201: Resisting Instinct Case Files
Creatures from earth evolved for four reasons called the “Four f’s”, fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fuc- fornicating. – Anon Guest
Four fine instincts to make life continue are very important on Deathworlds like Terra. Fight or Flight are just two of them. The third -Feed- keeps the living alive and the dependent upon them alive as well. The fourth… let’s call it Fornicate… continues the evolving population through preference-based selection. Deathworlds have many opportunities for fatalities, therefore the compulsion to breed is at a matching high.
Well. That is what’s assumed to be the norm. There’s anomalies for every situation, and every normally instinctual circumstance. Starting with the most controversial…
Fornicate: Allie took more precautions than normal. Well, what passed for normal on this world. She wanted to be unapproachable, but not overtly so. Those who did the unwelcome approaching were wont to attack those they found ugly, so she balanced on the razor’s edge between pretty enough to blend in and ugly enough to ignore. Her clothing was plain and staid. Another razor’s edge, this time between long enough to avoid attacks and short enough to do the same. There were authorised defense objects at her ready reach and, because this was one of those worlds, a chastity belt.
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Challenge #02389-F199: Be Prepared
There is always an outsider. One that, although they accepted the risks of space travel, are extremely hesitant to accept any OTHER risks. – Anon Guest
The Humans have a very apt saying: There’s always one. In this case, there’s always one traveller who takes certain aspects of travel way too casually… and others way too seriously.
The livesuit was one of the best ones on the market. In-suit cleansing, bio-attachments, and necessary padding in silky comfort. The manufacturers bragged that a Human could live inside of one for all of their adult life, and looking at Human Jass within it? One could begin to believe it.
They were never seen outside of their livesuit. Not in the halls of the Tantalus, not in their home-away-from-home at Crossroads station. If they stepped outside of its protective shell to sleep in their quarters, nobody saw, since Human Jass chose not to share their space with a significant other.
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Challenge #02388-F198: Nibbled to Death…
There is a myth about the Shattering. It states that the Shattering was put into motion by one human, one that had seen the future. – Anon Guest
Five hundred years makes all the difference. For Earth, it viewed all its sundry colonies as a form of backup. Not just for the Human race, but also for the data and knowledge the colonials took with them. Surely, they reasoned, the colonists would keep such vital information about their beginning days.
Of such reasoning, the Shattering was made. Human history was broken into pieces, taken to separate locations, and most of it has yet to be recovered. Vast swathes of culture and knowledge, gone because a single group of people thought it was ‘backed up’. Every subsequent graveworld is a lost chance. Every lost seed of a new civilisation is another hole in Human history that may never be patched.
Humanity - the bits of it that made it through the gauntlet of colonisation to become their own model civilisation - has a great want of someone to blame. A singular soul who made an executive decision to do the bad thing. Such is not the case, of course. Negligence through laziness doesn’t have one source, but that has never stopped a Human from seeking out a perpetrator. Ironically, the journey to do so involves numerous trawls through Terra’s surviving archives, some suffering from The Shattering themselves.
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Challenge #02387-F197: Very Strange Creatures
I always believed that humans were these unstoppable beasts, until I met one of their infants. – Anon Guest
Elsewhere Station. Here there be Humans. Seryk watched hir step. Ze only wanted to hire one human for the exploratory mission and this was one of the Edge Territory stations where they were reputed to swarm. So far, Seryk had seen numerous Edge species, but few Humans.
Those who were present were busy at other occupations. Seryk searched for hours, but found few willing to work for hir. The few who did want to work for Seryk and hir crew lacked the qualities that hir team was looking for in a Ship’s Human. The entire day was a vortex of disappointment and discouragement, which found a brief respite in the station’s biggest park.
Seryk found some amenable foods and a perch to rest on while ze ate. It was true that the Humans were unstoppable, as ze hadn’t been able to stop a single one nor interest the wanted ones enough to join their expedition. It was there, when Seryk was in a calming, nigh-meditative state, that ze met the extreme of under-impressive Humans.
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Challenge #02386-F196: Please Ask
When you have an interest, you have something to enjoy in the humdrum of daily life. – Anon Guest
Welcome to Podunk Station. Mind the legos. This is a natural result of leaving three to five Humans largely alone for long periods of time. Though their daily duties are many, Humans are naturally lazy and figured out how to streamline the humdrum necessities of daily existence… and then sought out new ways to keep busy during their non-active hours.
Fortunately, some of their organic crops’ inedible remnants could be turned into organo-plastics. Which the Humans aboard Podunk Station commenced to do. They then used those plastics to print a seemingly infinite supply of modular building blocks.
That’s when the true insanity had commenced. Colour was simply a matter of the correct chemical compounds, and the crew could essentially print any part they wanted, in any colour they wanted, whenever they wanted it. The crew of Podunk started making miniature scenery.
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