Deathworlders
Humans meet a species from a different deathworld.
(#00580 - A215)
Things around the negotiation table were tense. It wasn’t often that the humans met another cogniscent race that could kill them with ease. The fact that both sides were willing to keep their hostile actions in check was a telling victory for the mamalian side of the negotiations.
For a long time, Trodonti and Human stared at each other.
“We have studied your home planet,” said K'ress. “It is something we would consider as a holiday world. Your species is much weaker than us. How in the known universe did you manage to fight us to a standstill?”
Admiral Eig smiled. “You should have studied our evolutionary path, Captain. In our species’ infancy, we regularly hunted down meat many times our size. We regularly settled in or near volcanic cauldera because the soil is fertile. If something kills one of ours, we have a habit of either making its species extinct… or taming them. We have millennia of experience in taking a threat and turning it to our advantage.”
A minor adjudant whispered in the Captain’s tympanum. “The Gympie Gympie tree?” repeated K'ress.
“We’re still finding a use for it. Weaponizable neurotoxin seems promising.” She idly inspected her own nails. “Of course, we’re still working on ways to process it without harm to the manufacturers.”
“We would have eradicated such a hazard,” said K'ress.
“We might be able to bottle a small sample for you. According to our DNA scans, you might find it a tasty spice.”
K'ress couldn’t believe her senses. This mammal was offering her a violently aggressive toxin for their own species as casually as any other trader would offer beads and trinkets. “Why would you even try?” she boggled.
“We have an expression: one being’s trash is another’s treasure. One being’s poison is another’s medicine.”
“And sometimes both at once. I’ve read up on your ancient practice of ‘kee-mo therapy’…” K'ress shook her head. “The rumours were correct. Your species is insane.”
“Probably,” agreed Eig. “But we also firmly believe the expression 'waste not, want not’. Even something as poisonous as the Gympie Gympie or the Box Jellyfish may have its uses elsewhere. Even - and you may thank your Gods for this - people such as yours.”
Yes. The humans had fought them to a standstill. Not, K'ress noted, extinction. Though many other species would have if they could have. Many even urged the humans to do so. And now she had to be thankful that the humans wanted to see if she and her kind might come in handy at a later time.
“That,” she noted aloud, “I have fully noticed.”
Nods of understanding from the assembled mammals. One passed Eig a data tablet. Which Eig, in turn, slid towards K'ress.
“This is a list of what we consider to be sensible reparations. We’ve added the irrational ones in an appendix for your amusement.”
K'ress resisted the temptation to look at what an insane species considered irrational. These humans were capable of logic, after all. “My superiors won’t like this.”
“Your superiors need a tour of our weapons arsenal.” A smirk. A casual lean across the table. “We could have been worse. Always remember that, eh?”
It was painful, but not impossible. And not impoverishing to the point of generating another war. K'ress found it to be a very calculated balance. “I’ll have to pass it along, but…”
“Yes?”
“For mutual peace of mind…”
“Go on. Ask.”
“Explain to me how your kind managed to 'Rickroll’ the entire empire?”
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Challenge #00586 - A211: Imaginary Union 1475
Monthly union meeting of trolls, ogres, and TUTBs (Things Under the Bed).
“All right, all right. Let’s keep this in order so we can all be back in our haunts before sunset.”
Grumble grumble mumble.
“If you don’t wanna be here, you can always skip on your fees,” threatened their president, Gruuh.
“Point of order,” said Oogle.
Sigh. “Yes?”
“Fees are hard to obtain. Kids are scared of less… traditional monsters. That newcomer Slendy is taking all the fear ichor.”
“We’re discussing the sliding scale at the AGM, Oogle. You still have the market cornered on the under fives.”
“What about trolls? Trolls are cute, now…”
“I’m well aware,” Gruuh rolled his eyes. “And Ogres are lovable. We only have the power humans give us. Perhaps the muses can help inspire something?”
“Are. You. Kidding. It’s all deconstruction. Making the heroes villains and vice versa. It’s mayhem out there. Mayhem!”
“I just want my fair share,” complained Oogle.
“Then maybe you can work on a solution for a change?”
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Challenge #00556 - A181: Mwa-hahahahaha
Mad scientists are real, lurking in academia. Sure, they may not wield death rays and threaten the populace, but when a presentation ending in “Today, Australia! Tomorrow, THE WORLD!” receives thunderous applause, and your adviser’s name is literally Dr. Fatal, you begin to realize that your childhood dream of showing them, SHOWING THEM ALL is more realizable than you thought…..
Doctor Fatal was still giggling as she stepped away from the podium. That was a good sign.
“I’m almost obligated to do this,” said Dr Fatal. She pointed and sang, “You’re a me-ga-lo-may-nee-ac! You’re a me-ga-lo-may-nee-ac!”
“When your name’s Yvil, you gotta do a few things. It’s obligatory. Especially with a supervisor Fatal.”
“You’ve still got the bigger hurdle of getting the government to agree with it.”
Yvil made a face. “Urgh. Yuck. We all know the Australian government doesn’t do anything sensible until America does it. Maybe I should convince them.”
“I suppose robots programmed to quell opposition are out of the question?” joked Fatal.
“Yeah, nah. You can’t get the funding.”
Which turned out to be the best joke of the evening.
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Challenge #00544 - A169: The Fine Print
If you’re going to make a year-long agreement, you’d better be sure you know whose year you’re using.
“What do you mean I’m still under contract?” Terry demanded. She tried not to make a fist around all her vital documents. “It says five years. It’s been five years. And forty-eight hours, and that’s only because it took that long to get all the forms filled out.”
“I’m very sorry, but they’re not local years.” The clerk, a quiet and inherently nervous Lorraine, looked just about ready to cry in sympathy. “This codicil, here, stipulates that the contract is using the definition of ‘year’ according to the drafting lawyer’s planet of origin.”
“Okay… so where’s that lawyer from?”
Takatta takatta takatta. “Oh no. Oh, no… I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry… The company you signed on with? They exclusively use Ghiishemite lawyers.”
“Let me guess,” Terry braced herself for the inevitable, metaphorical impact. “Ghiishem has a really long calendar.”
Cogniscents waiting to gain access to the Visitor Help Centre flinched at the outraged scream of “SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE DAYS?”
Terry waited once again for Lorraine to dawn over the cusp of her desk.
“Sorry. You still have three Standard years, two weeks and three days on your contract. If you’d like? I could help you contact the Cogniscent Rights Commission? They have a standing Class Action Suit against contracts like this one?”
Three more years. Three more flakking years. And two weeks and three Powers-cursed days. “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes please. I would love to talk to the Cogniscent Rights’ Commission about this one.”
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Challenge #00526 - A151: Names Shape Reality
Early explorers and colonists gave the best new worlds names considered “unappealing” to those back on earth, so as to discourage overcolonization and protect what they viewed as offworld paradises. This led to beautiful worlds with names such as Gehenna, Sheol, Yomi-no-kuni, and New Jersey. Over time, as these worlds became popular, their names lost their old meanings, and thus, the phrase “as beautiful as a New Jersey summer” was no longer seen as satirical. This made interpreting history/old texts somewhat confusing, and in some cases, nigh-unintelligible.
[AN: This doesn’t quite work with one-way-wormhole colonisation, but I’ll give it a go]
During the first wave of Terran Colonisation, The humans left behind couldn’t help but notice a certain pattern. Places named after paradises inevitably came to ruin. Even places where the paradise was subjective.
Citizens of Earth did not like watching the residents of New Q'onos perish of starvation or malnutrition as they insisted they hunted all their food. Neither did they admire ominously loosing contact with Heaven, Hope or Gaia Regis.
And the less said about Greater Deregulation, the better.
Therefore, the humans came up with a typically human solution: stop naming new worlds after paradises. No optimistic names at all.
Thus, there are an abundance of colonised planets with names like Hell, Gethsemane, Yomi-no-kuni, Purgatory, Sheol, New Jersey, Skegness, Minnesota, Woodridge, Bognor and Cauldera.
Which is why Shayde has permanent employment from the Archivaas Collective.
They had a very long list of originally unpleasant places, both real and mythological, for her to define.
Because sometimes, the true key to unriddling ancient narratives is understanding the joke.
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Challenge #00518 - A143: Salvation From the Lessers
(since you’re a DS9 fan like I am) It was ironic that after the war, the Cardassian/Bajoran hybrids that Cardassia had neglected and cast out were instrumental in its rebuilding, and its rebirth.
Cardassia was in ruins.
It had never been in ruins. Not in all of its glorious history. Certainly, there had been wars in the pre-spaceflight days, but only individual areas ever became ruined.
An entire planet - and entire planetary empire in ruins… Just sucked the very soul out of the Cardassian people. They wandered through the rubble like ghosts. One would stop and pick up a piece of rubble, and half-heartedly add it to a pile.
This had never happened before. Nobody knew what to do.
Or at least, nobody who lived in the Cardassian empire knew what to do.
They came in bright colours and loose clothing. They came with water purifiers and soil reclamation units. They came with Pulaku and Tokta seedlings.
They came with Cardassian faces… or faces that were Cardassian enough. Despite the Bajoran earrings and the Bajoran clothing and the Bajoran accents, they were Cardassian enough for the lost souls to flock to them.
They were Cardassian enough for other Cardassians to listen to them. To follow orders. To forge a new world based on need and skill, not heritage and social standing. To give to those who needed, to make that which worked out of whatever they had to hand.
They came with Bajorans, who said things like, “We’ve been doing this for fifty years, it’s about time you learned how.”
And some remembered. Before it was done unto them… they had done it first.
The Bajorans, the Bajoran-Cardassian hybrids, and the orphans they left behind had no reason at all to help Cardassia. They had every reason to leave the Cardassian Empire - or the ruins thereof - to stew and pickle in its own feculence and slide back to a more primitive standing for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Which was why the most important thing was that, though they came with some old grudges, they also came of their own free will. That they came without hate.
They came to show Cardassia what could be done without being conquerers.
And for the first time in thousands of years, Cardassia learned something new.
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Challenge #00469 - A094: Otherwhen
A terrible idea, and feel free to ignore if need be- but based off of Bunny’s recent reply to an ask, about her once-upon-a-time imagined persona for being in a band-
SPG/Blues Brothers mashup?
[AN: Bunny and David Bennett are not fictional characters and I never want to even pretend I have control over their life…. but a prompt is a prompt…]
Between one blink and the next, she had gone from adjusting her headdress to adjusting a blue fedora.
No more makeup. No eyelashes. No dress.
She knew that suit. She knew that look. She knew this personality.
“You okay, Chris?” asked David. He had the same get-up.
“…dunno…” she wanted to have at least some lipstick on. Or a touch of lace. This was all… wrong. Bunny did not want to go back to faking it again. But it looked like she was going to have to.
The show must go on. Even in a parallel reality.
Good thing for her, she flipped back the instant she stepped out of her dressing-room door.
“You okay?” said David. “You went a little weird, there, for a bit.”
Bunny grinned. “Weird is relative.”
“She certainly is,” he grinned in return.
Smartass.
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Love will find a way…
It’s a pity that things like true love and soulmates and finding that special someone aren’t more obvious in their identification and verifying - would be so much easier if there were a special personal sort of dim glow or subtle sound or faint scent or somesuch to point out the one we’re destined to be with the rest of our lives. Far less troublesome or confusing than all this dragging-on about dating and courtship and marriage and divorce and all that other rubbish - just spot someone across the room or street or whatever, the signals match up, and happyjoy forever. Sounds good to me, anyway. Would save tons of folks so much pain and heartbreak and jealousy and such when they found that the one they thought was “the one” turned out not to be, not for them anyway… this way, it’s clear - no signal-match, no true love. It would kinda ruin all the slow building-up of the drama and tension in all those romantic films, however… Ah well. Nothing’s perfect, I guess.
(#00459 - A084)
They called it TruHartz and it swept the world so thoroughly that it overtook the whole planet in a whirlwind.
A subcutaneous chip, installed in the nape of the neck, would record the likes and dislikes of its host and, thanks to nanotechnology growing in close to the skull plates, manifest a holographic heart in the air when the user was within fifty feet of their true love.
Upgrades included helpful arrows.
Those cost extra.
Society adjusted, of course, to various people stopping the flow of traffic to meet with the person who was going to be the love of their life.
It never stopped casual sex. Nothing in the world could stop casual sex. In fact, it multiplied it. Thousands were desperate to have their wild fling before settling down with that special someone.
Or someones.
The news that there could be plural true loves was the death knell of the conservative movement. And the scandal rags. Which also made the world a better place.
And it disrupted all the pedophiles when they discovered that their TruHartz completely failed to lead them to any minors. They either had to re-define what love meant to them - or reach heady new heights of denial in the face of evidence to the contrary.
And there were few, a rare and almost shunned few, who elected not to get their TruHartz installed. Like Remi.
She saw no point to it. She felt she had little to offer any partner, since she saw no point in relationships, romance, or sex. Friendship was just fine for her.
Which worked right up until she met Kev.
The first Remi knew about it was the gaudy holographic heart jumping up and down in the air at her like an excited puppy. Doing the heart equivalent of the international pee-pee dance. With arrows and little ‘doot doot’ noises.
“I am so sorry,” apologised a voice like chocolate presented in velvet.
She was dressed plainly in comfortable clothes and had her hair done up in that style Remi always called I don’t give a shit. She was also blushing up a storm.
“My mom made me have the damn thing installed on me, and…” a sigh as she joined Remi at her table. The holographic heart ceased its infernal dooting in a shower of twinkling, smaller hearts. “I was kind of hoping this would never happen. Prove her wrong.”
“I never had mine installed,” said Remi. “Seemed like too much expense for something that only works once.”
“I’m Kev,” said Kev. “Short for Kevrannah. But I always thought that was pretentious.”
“Remi,” said Remi.
They shook hands. It would have been nice to say that there were sparks, that something tugged at heart-strings and made beautiful music, but love doesn’t always work that way.
It took them both five weeks to realise that they were, in fact, soul mates. Even though love meant very little to either of them. There was no hand-holding. No flowers. No dating.
Just serial hanging-out and companionable leanings. And that was enough. And mutual understanding. That was more than enough.
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Challenge #00444 - A069: The Test
SPG in the far-future of your own universe. Because robots + space. – Weirdlet
Rael was ostensibly taking Shayde on a tour of the station’s Ambassadorial Meeting Chamber. What he was covertly doing was testing her. If she really was who she said she had been. If she really had existed on Earth at the time she stated… she would be able to recognise Them.
The Consortium of Steam.
The only artificial intelligences who had been thrown out of the Artificial Intelligence Alliance for being too human. And who viewed that as a compliment.
They always turned up early to sort out who wore the gold sash on their customary black-and-red outfits. By playing ‘Spuds’.
“This will be your desk. Because you don’t technically have a home planet or a population to fight for, you won’t be getting what passes for a formal introduction.”
“'Ere, why’m I Nineteen Eighty-Six when I left in Nineteen Eighty-Seven?”
“Because you didn’t make it all the way *through* Nineteen Eighty-Seven. You can’t have half a year.”
“Ye say that like it’s happened before…”
“We have previously made allowances for the temporally inconvenienced.” After sufficient proof…
And there they came. Four sharply-dressed metal humanoids. One in a dress. Accompanied by the beat of their own drum, and the clank and rattle of gears and the hiss of steam.
Shayde took one look at them and shrieked. It was not the yawp of terror that some would have vented, but the squeal of a fan.
“Omigidomigodomigodomigodomigod… It’s THEM!”
Rael should have won an award for his nonchalant, “Who?”
She grabbed his shoulders and shook him like he should know this was the greatest thing to happen since clootie dumplings[1]. “Colonel Walter’s Steam Man Band! They been knocking’ around the traps since Eighteen Ninety-Eight! Igottagosayhullo!”
She let go of him to drop through her own shadow and leap out of one much closer to the steam-powered Ambassadors. There, she hugged each of them in turn while shrieking, “It’s you! It’s really you! I’m so glad ye made it! It’s you! It'syouit'syouit'syou!”
“It’s us,” said The Jon.
“Do we know you?” said Hatchworth.
Shayde stopped hugging Rabbit. “Hangonasec. I gotta look at ye with real light. I ain’t seen any o’ ye since eighty-two.”
“Which eighty-two?” said The Spine. “We’ve been through more than one.”
Shayde made a complicated gesture over her eyes and shrieked again. “Rabbit! You got RESTOOOOORRRRED!”
“I got restored,” Rabbit smiled. “Refurbished. Reupholstered. And ridiculously gorgeous.”
“Pft! You were always ridiculously gorgeous.” Shayde dismissed. “Who’s the new fella?”
“Hatch-worth,” Hatchworth touched his bowler as he bowed. “I was in a vault be-tween Nine-teen Fif-ty and Two Thou-sand, Thir-teen.”
“Aw ye puir darlin’. Ye need extra hugs. C'mere.”
The Spine, the only Ambassador Shayde hadn’t hugged yet, vented steam in exasperation. “Once again, I wind up feeling like chopped liver…”
“That’s 'cause I’ve been savin’ ye fer last, handsome! Look out!”
It was the first time Rael had ever seen a combination flying tackle, french dip, french kiss, and outright groping session. It was very clear that Shayde was rather over-fond of The Spine and had been so for an extended period of time.
It made a noise like… snog.
She set him back upright with a wicked smirk. “I’ve been saving that one up since Nineteen Eighty-Two.”
“Nineteen Eighty-Two…” said Rabbit. “We were busking, that year…”
“I dinnae expect ye tae remember wee skinny Katie Walker. All blushes and tyin’ myself in knots about a jam?”
“Like this?” said The Jon, and did a scarily accurate imitation of a softly-spoken, shy tweenager about to implode from star-struckedness. He even got the accent, which was thicker when Shayde was emotionally overloaded.
“Aye, ye nailed it. Even the accent. You remember little ole me?”
“We remember everyone,” said The Spine. Still checking his lips to see if they were in one piece. “Do you still have the guitar?”
“Na. I left it at home when I went tae college. Too valuable to me.” She shrugged. “But I got an axe ye can all sign again if ye don’t mind it.” Shayde pulled it out of one of her inter-dimensional pockets.
“On one con-di-tion,” said Hatchworth.
“Aye?”
“You jam with all of us to-night.”
“SOLD!”
Rael sighed and sent a comms message to all debating parties. Shayde recognised CoS. They recognised her by her former name. Temporally Challenged status officially confirmed.
[1] In Rael’s opinion, sliced bread isn’t that much to write anywhere about.
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Challenge #00388 - A023: The Sad Misadventures of Hwell Barrow
“So that’s how I accidentally wound up in an alien porn film.”
Bailing Hwell out of legal custody was nothing new. What was new was that he was naked, save for layers of assorted, melted and melting cheese. All of which he was busy licking off of his hairy arms.
Ax'and'l looked down at Hwell and his expanding mess and squeaked, “In your own words: what the flying hell, Hwell?”
Hwell continued chewing a long string of something chunky from his left arm. “Uhm… It’s kind of a long story…”
It involved being drunk, a usual state of affairs whenever Hwell hit a port. It also involved three unregistered sexual therapists (one slightly underage), an ‘underground’ film crew, several varieties of irradiated cheese (of course), fifteen tubs of similarly irradiated strawberry yoghurt, twelve different ungulates, a case of aphrodisiacs and a crowd of onlookers taking bets. And, for some reason, a dozen live mice and a pumpkin.
“And then I woke up and they told me I was booked for filming pornography without proper licensing. It was an accident, I swear!”
Ax'and'l turned to the officer in charge, “How many more incidents like this before I’m allowed to call him my pet and keep him on a short leash?”
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