Challenge #02715-G158: A Delicate Mist
“They played us like a violin!”
“Actually violins are quite difficult to play, I played you like the cheap kazoo you are” – Anon Guest
There is a vertiginous feeling to being betrayed. It’s worse than falling because the damage has been done before the sinking of the heart even begins. It’s the realisation that kills. It kills trust. It kills faith. It kills hope. Once those are dead, there is very little left to lose.
Nevertheless, there are those who insist on twisting the knife whilst their victim is down. This one smiled indulgently as their victim said, “You played me like a violin.” They believed their victim to be powerless and vulnerable. Ready to break in an instant. All they needed, the villain reasoned, was one final push to fall apart.
“My dear,” they said with the same fake adoration they had used all the time. “Violins are troublesome instruments to learn and play. I played you like the cheap kazoo you are.”
The victim had nothing left to lose. With nothing to lose, there was nothing to fear. They did still possess a weapon and as their heart fell to breaking, they lashed out.
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Challenge #02714-G157: The Extra Option
Humans love stories. Humans also love adventure, and choice, and danger. Thus was born the “choose your own adventure” style of story. A small group of level 5 havenworlders, in an attempt to improve their genetics, undertake reading one of these stories, with the goal to “survive” to the end of the book. They quickly discover that survival alone does not always a “good” ending make. – Anon Guest
Level Five Havenworlders should not exist. Just as Level Five Deathworlders should not exist. Their place on the scale was, until such were discovered, purely theoretical. Naturally, Humans made friends with them both. Humans will befriend anything.
Humans were also able to understand that Level Five Havenworlders were far too fragile to meet in person. However, they had tools with which to help. Humans always have tools to help. They’re a helpful species, for the most part. There are always outliers but other Humans are more than willing to step in and stop them. In this case, the tool was one of Humanity’s oldest - the story.
Humans have a great love of stories. They collect them, they share them, they invent them… they use them to teach, to explain, to predict… they create worlds inside their heads and, if you are lucky, they will invite you in. Sometimes, they come up with stories you can create with them, sometimes, they make stories you can manipulate on your own.
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Challenge #02713-G156: Pax Origins
A shockingly smart and devastatingly cruel crew track, hunt, raid, and kill the biggest threats to peaceful ships. – LatinoThor
They called themselves Dragons, for the ancient tradition marking hazardous seas with, Here There Be Dragons. Their territory was astonishingly vast for what encounter logs suggested was one ship. The last records in the surviving black boxes stated that one ship was seen, but that didn’t mean that just one ship was there.
Authorities were slower to act about the attacks, since the Dragons were routinely attacking bands of pirates bothering the Alliance shipping lanes. The Dragons were selective, picking the worst offenders who killed passengers and crew to get what they wanted. Some of their first targets were those who blew up the ship and used any survivors in livesuits or life pods as target practice.
Authorities only knew their name because they announced themselves before their attacks. When one black box revealed that the Dragons were also Humans… there was even less inclination to track them down and apprehend them. Not even when the space pirates were “licensed privateers” from an antagonistic polity in the Edge Territories.
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Challenge #02712-G155: But I Want It
Everyone’s heard of the Terrible Twos. Well, everyone who’s familiar with raising human infants. A piece of information that’s been surprisingly slow to make its way around, though, is that those years are only so terrible because the little ones have wants and needs and thoughts that they don’t know how to communicate; a combination of not being exposed to the words for what they feel and having tongues too big for their mouths, making it near impossible to articulate the words they do know.
All of this can be circumvented with any form of sign language and a bit of effort to introduce more vocabulary on the part of the caretaker(s).
That said, toddlers are universally curious, not so good at thinking ahead, more mobile than expected, and surprisingly good at disassembling everything they come across in an effort to find out what’s inside. What happens when a mixed-species daycare, meant for the young offspring of ship-board passengers, finds itself saddled with a toddling human who, while familiar with instructions to be “gentle” with soft, furry friends (in an effort to get them to stop yanking the poor skitty’s fur and sticking their fingers up the dog’s nose), hasn’t gotten the memo that the whole of the universe isn’t familiar with the cobbled-together signing vocabulary they use with their parents to communicate such vital things as “baby eat waffle” and “baby drink juice” when they want something specific. – Anon Guest
The Human toddler is a primer on Human instincts with a negative impulse control. They are all action and very little in the way of reason. Even the Humans who spawn them are shocked by the mobility of a small being with legs less than a quarter of the length of an adult’s. Their capacity for improvisation can boggle even the most experienced minds.
As for the inexperienced minds… Meet Laeth. Ze has had the presence of mind to keep the Havenworlder children separate from the Deathworlders, but this was the fourth time ze had captured the very small Human Pip attempting to open the keycard-locked door to get into the Havenworlder rooms.
“Pip, you should go back to the room you came from. That is a better place to play.” Laeth, one of the many who were carers for the children, moved hirself to gently herd Human Pip back to the chamber from whence they had come.
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Challenge #02711-G154: Helping Companions
An instructor greets his new students in the class known as “Know Your Human” A class meant to prepare various individuals for the maddeningly wonderful work known as being a human’s companion.
It is well known that humans are insane, dangerous, and violent. And yet, they are also the most gentle, kind, thoughtful, and soothing species in the galaxy. You will find they are wild, yet tame, they are beyond stupid, yet terrifyingly brilliant, they brought their furry headaches known as cats, yet those animals turned out to be so valuable there’s not a single station without one. They’re as terrifying as a very large, very hungry, Oshit, as destructive as an exploding star, and yet they are the least terrifying and most creative species yet discovered.
For those studying humans, all of these facts are 100% true. There is not a single lie anywhere to be found. But, my students, don’t be fooled. This species, and this course, will test the limits of your endurance both physically and psychologically. However, in the end, after your training here, you will be able to better work with, and handle, the humans you are assigned as your companions. And, you will find, it will be the most rewarding, and the most heartbreaking, career you’ve ever had. – DaniAndShali
Humans are a contradiction. They can be, as they have said themselves, the smartest dumbasses in the universe. They can be the kindest, most protective aggressors known to intelligent life. They can also be the biggest, meanest bunch of softies to ever walk and talk at the same time. They can be both needlessly cruel and illogically compassionate depending entirely on the circumstances around them. They could be both the strongest and the weakest of all known cogniscents at the same time.
It was hard to remember any of that when meeting an actual Human for the first time. They were not much taller than Companion Thele, certainly not very much bulkier, even with their livesuit on. They looked… weird… but then all different lifeforms looked weird until one got used to them.
“You’re new at this, aren’t you?” said the Human. They had a remarkable grasp of GalStand for a barbarian just introduced to Galactic society. The instructor had said they were remarkable mimics, but this… This was another of their contradictions.
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