Challenge #02675-G118: The Bad Old Ways
A human got tired of the crew saying that humans are insane, so they decide to show their crew what true human insanity looks like by taking them on a field trip to the nearby insane asylum. (Bonus points if Said asylum happens to be Arkham Asylum.) – Cheshire
[AN: Punishing the mentally disabled for being mentally disabled is not the best way to deal with that sort of thing. Besides, insanity is a matter of perspective, as I keep stating in my stories. Your perfectly logical is my mentally deranged, as it were. More thoughts on this over here]
“Please stop calling me that,” said Human Shay. “They’d lock insane people up and hurt them and stuff.”
Companion Lree stopped walking and said, “They do this where you are from?” They were immediately concerned. Not just for Human Shay, but also for her fellow citizens back ‘home’.
Human Shay fell quiet, as she was wont to do when someone asked her questions about her place of origin. Companion Lree read the mood and said, “You are free of them, now. You can speak without fear.”
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Challenge #02674-G117: Planet Pet-it
Whole planets dedicated to humans need to touch things. They range from your typical cat cafe walking with elephants, to even swimming with sharks. And that’s just the animals from earth! Each plant has a different variety of species to accommodate any human, Making them a great alternative for humans who keep touching the unknown animals on equally unknown planets. – Anon Guest
Humans look with their hands. This is a known, if confusing fact. Humans have reasonably reliable senses that use light to see things, yet they inevitably also have to touch. They want to see how it feels, or pet every beast, and in extreme cases, see what that weird-looking fruit tastes like.
This has caused multiple deaths. Not always in the humans, but also in the crewmates attempting to stop them.
Fortunately, planets can be customised. They started with one that should have been a Havenworld, if not for an accident of happenstance. Next, they stocked it with every plant and lifeform that was safe and interesting to touch. Not only those, but the ones that were safe to climb, and the ones that were safe to ride.
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Challenge #02673-G116: A Calm and Hostile Takeover
She was an avid inventor, had been ever since she was a small child. She had been born on a world controlled by DeReggers but her family had moved away from that place and into Galactic Alliance space finally settling on a haven world that allowed for havenworlders and deathworlders to live together. When she was 9, she’d found a way to improve upon the translators that allowed for better communication with other species. When she was 13, she’d graduated from school with honors and entered university at 14. And now, here she was, at 21 and having graduated universities with honors. She, with help from others for the project had begun when she was 17, had built a massive space station with all the reinforcements and luxuries a human could design into the thing for all species they could think of. And, thanks to the landing fees, and immense commerce this huge hub had, she had managed to not only grow quite wealthy, bring bring the rest of her family out from DeRegger space and set them up with good homes of their own here on the station.
The problem is, the Leaders of the DeReggers were NOT happy with this. Someone born from their worlds, even though her family had moved away with her when she was only a little girl, living in Alliance space and getting wealthy without THEM getting a cut?? And then now pulling away hundreds of people that had once been under their thumb to give them the lives that the DeRegger leaders had insisted were NOT possible for people like that? They were going to make sure their voices were heard! – DaniAndShali
They called it the Patriot Tax, and were trying to retroactively enact it for all ex-citizens of Greater Deregulation Lower East[1]. It was a debilitating tax and would, dependent on the gender of the “patriot”, reduce their effective income to nearly or beyond nil. In her case, it would put her income into the negative and place all her property and earnings into the greedy, grasping hands of her place of origin.
She would have none of it. Rylie spent the allotted time to comply in studying the very letter of that law in combination with all the other letters of their law. Such as they were. They of course had conflicting laws in place that could make life a living hell for the uninitiated and the underfunded. What she specifically went for was the loopholes.
Once she had them by the loopholes, she had them by the goolies. She had enough money to do it and, once done, it was next to impossible to un-do… which was the important part. Revenge may be a dish served ice cold, but in this case, it paired well with a side of boiling rage and retaliation. She therefore re-entered Deregger space with a slim folio and her head held high.
The board of CEO’s and Chief Executive In Charge sat on their polished thrones with a greasy smugness that expected her to cry or beg. Half of them were looking down their noses at her. The other half barely acknowledged her presence by looking her way as she entered.
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Challenge #02672-G115: Back From the Deepest Well
It had been years since ze had been seen last, though not nearly as long as had been estimated, wagered or theorised. When a derelict, cobbled together ship limped into The Blackstump research station. it had seemed to come from come from beyond what was known and explored space, and from the entirely the wrong direction from which the occupant was last seen.
The Return of Andi the Undying
https://steemit.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02156-e327-they-ll-be-back – Adam in Darwin
The ship was limping along through space. Parts of it were bleeding smoky atmosphere, and the rest of it looked like it had been hurriedly patched together out of at least ten different vessels. It was, as Humans were wont to say, one good sneeze away from falling apart altogether.
According to all sensors, it had come from the relatively nearby Galactic Core. In fact, they had traced it exiting at high velocity and gradually slowing as it used both velocity engines and gravity slingshot maneuvers to escape from the enormous gravity well from whence they had came. As soon as visual confirmation of the vessel’s identity was possible, the configuration didn’t match any recent records. More alarming, it didn’t easily match any historical records.
Naturally, the people at Blackstump Research Station attempted every known means of communication, including flashing lights and semaphore. The reply came in through standard comms. The voiceprint was of a cogniscent identified as deceased with a question mark. Human Andi, better known as Andi the undying.
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Challenge #02671-G114: The Mighty Paragon
What kind of man was Steve Rogers, to fight for America with his background?
In the original comics, he was Irish from the Lower East Side. This means he was probably Irish Catholic from the tenements, which meant he was considered by most Americans with power (maybe) one step above dirt.
On the other hand, he was a tall, blond, blue-eyed man, the Nazi ideal. The Catholic church coexisted with the Nazis without severe discrimination. Many Irish were allied with the Nazis.
He grew up in a multicultural multiracial neighborhood and would have known many people that the Nazis considered less, but he would not have been one of the people they considered less due to their genetics.
So what kind of man could look out, see the horrors that are being done to other people, and choose to ally with the people who treated him and many others like dirt instead of the ones who would treat him extremely well but commit atrocities against others, and continue to do so over the course of an entire war?
And for a laundry list of references related to this…
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-racism
[AN: Owing to my dreams of actually putting a price tag on my anthology, I can’t actually write about Captain America. So let’s make up a strikingly similar hero]
A hero fights, not because they like fighting, but because some evil must be stopped with brute force. Two factions are at war, and in some ways they are alike in villainy. However, there is a key difference. On one side, the downtrodden are still permitted to have a voice. People have the freedom to speak. The freedom, also, to choose who they listen to. The freedom to act upon their convictions or to choose to remain complicit in tyranny.
Interestingly, the nation with those freedoms had the other crib notes from it and turn the philosophies just three degrees more evil. But that’s not why we are here.
Picture a hero. Good. Now picture almost the exact opposite of that. Scrawny, weak, always sick. Culturally, they are the lowest of the low. The most reviled. The hated. However, this hero is lucky enough to exist in the nation that allows such people to live their own lives. This hero can speak. This hero can listen. This hero lives in a cluster of other such reviled and hated folks, but they do not hate. These rejected persons are their neighbours. Friends, allies, connections to acquire what is needed. A network who shares what little they have, for the betterment of all.
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