Challenge #02615-G058: Useless? Never Heard of It
those odd coins in the bottom of your pocket or bag. Putting them to good use. – Anon Guest
As a member of the Loyal Order of Hitchhikers, it is prudent to clean out one’s bags regularly. Especially the bags one uses for currency. As one makes one’s way through several cultures and territories, one accumulates small change like a piece of sticky tape accumulates lint. This is most important as weight limits can prevent further travel and some coin weighs more than others.
This important and vital information had just occurred to Human Zer as they and their essentials were being weighed in the balance and found excessive. “How many Siwus[1] over?”
“Six,” said the captain. “I can’t spare the fuel to take you. You’re going to have to shed the unimportant stuff. I’m sorry.” They were. They were one of the freight haulers who knew the ways and the usefulness of Hitchhikers. It paid to know a Frood[2] who knew where their towel was. “I can delay a day. After that… You have to find another lift.”
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Challenge #02614-G057: Therapeutic Bonding Exercises
Humans quietly did not speak of it.
Speak of it and it makes it real, yeah?
One of the leftover prejudices from Pre-Shattering.
In reality, it wasn’t so bad. Young terrans unmeaningly latching on to inappropriate first beings when they were beginning their Adult Growth cycle. Receiving mixed and confused information due to age and species wasn’t so odd, with all the travelling.
You just had to know how to handle it so it went from “No, it’s okay!” and not “What kind of counseling do you need, small Terran???”
The growing little ones may need help, but when you thought of it in terms as them seeing their surroundings as Perfectly Normal, it made much more sense. – Anon Guest
Before Ships’ Human was an occupation, it was an infestation. Stations that had Humans lurking in forgotten or neglected spaces ran the risk of infecting other ships with Humans. There were warnings. There were precautions. Yet there were no fatalities, regardless of the fear of Deathworlders. Many who gained Humans on their ship gained them temporarily, and tended to view them as a wild animal that had decided to declare a truce so it could reach a destination.
After all, the reasoning went, who was going to stop a Deathworlder. Moreover - how did they plan on even trying? They were Deathworlders. Surviving having one on the ship was something of a badge of honour. Some Havenworlders even tried to gain a Human or two for long voyages. Even then, many travellers understood that Humans would protect even a temporary home. On those long voyages, the Humans would start to bond with the non-Human crew.
That was when other secrets about the Ships’ Humans were revealed. Many of them were juveniles. Some reached their maturation in the company of relative strangers. It was, owing to unfamiliarity, a rough trip for all concerned. The Infonets shared what they could, but confirmable information was as unreliable as the knowledge from the Humans.
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Challenge #02613-G056: Trash to Treasure
She lived in the United States circa 2020. Well, it was New Year’s. The first day of that year. Deep in debt, stressed, tired, her entire body hurt, she laid back on her recliner to sleep praying for something to help her. She’d ended up in debt because she’d bent over backward to save family members and they’d left her with their bills. But, before that, she’d drained her bank accounts nearly dry saving other people who were homeless, taking them into her home and helping them get back to their feet. Those debts, and a steep student loan, she just couldn’t keep up.
Then there was that flash, so bright she could see it through her eyelids. A voice whispering “you’ve saved so many, now we will save you”. When she awakened, she found herself sitting up in her recliner, but it was encased in crystal, her two cats asleep in her lap and she was in some sort of tent with odd…. bird people looking in on her. She was confused, dizzy, and other than her flute, her clothes, and her cats, she had nothing else with her. Then one of the bird people spoke gently telling her she was save, they were archeologists, they’d found her crystal and it’d opened to set her free. She and her pets, now safe, been asleep for 600 years. – Anon Guest
[AN: Obviously this doesn’t happen in my Amalgam Universe, but let’s call this a close neighbour.]
They had, according to the archives, called it the Deadbeat Bomb. Technology given to the powerful and fearsome by aliens who had been observing Earth from a hidden base on the far side of the moon. Being students of Human nature and the ways of the rich and powerful, they had expected exactly what happened next. The aliens told Terran’s powerful that they could encapsulate all the unworthy, as many times as necessary. Setting the parameters according to their whims.
Of course, the powerful defined the unworthy by fiscal bars to clear. They targeted the welfare queens, and were angry when the firing fizzled for finding none. They targeted welfare cheats, and were similarly annoyed when so few wound up in the encapsulating crystals. They refined the search once more, and hit what they thought was the jackpot. Those who had little, and wasted what little they had on others who similarly had little.
Luann had always joked that she only needed her cats and her flute. Those were her essentials. She paid for her little extras -mostly cat food- by busking at thoroughfares and life was… tolerable. Barely tolerable. At least she was used to it. Too tired at the end of the day to binge-watch anything, she usually fell asleep to whatever podcast she was listening to on her phone, with her cats for company and some kind of slightly-enhanced ramen in her belly. Her apartment was small and had cardboard walls and she shared one tiny bathroom with six neighbours. It was better than nothing, which was the only alternative. Just as she was wishing her cats goodnight, there was a bright flash of light…
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Challenge #02612-G055: Befriending Sunshine
I figured I would take a stab at hoping for a part 2 of a story? It’s from this prompt.
https://steemit.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02494-f304-mr-sunshine-s-new-friend
Ms. Lilcoon goes looking for her friend, Mr. Sunshine, after she has the surgery on her paws to make them more like dextrus hands. She’s grateful he saved her and had tried to keep in touch by writing him. But with her hands bandaged for a bit, writing would be hard. She told her family about what happened, of how he saved her, and was given permission to go and meet him for lunch and a chat. After all, everyone needs to have friends, right? – DaniAndShali
One of the allegedly nice things about modern technology was that hands were no longer necessary for writing. One of the drawbacks of speech to text was still that it couldn’t transcribe everything. Lil was at a further disadvantage because the painkillers also slowed her tongue and slurred her speech. Half the time, her family and carers didn’t understand her. The other half was spent in reassuring her that the Pax Humanis enforcer would not hurt her.
She tried to tell them that she was not a delicate and precious flower. She tried to tell them that she was not a fragile Havenworlder. She, too, was from Deathworlder stock, but the attending Mediks interpreted her protests as becoming upset or disturbed and ramped up the tranquillisers. It was a long time before she was able to make herself clear.
In that time, she feared that Mr Sunshine might believe she had abandoned him. It took some explaining, once she was on lighter painkillers, that Mr Sunshine had been nothing but protective of her and had even saved her from a Nufurrian who had attempted to claim her as both property and a bedmate. That was when the blocks between herself and him came down.
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Challenge #02611-G054: Strange and Confounding Customs
“I’m not a matchmaker, all I did was bring my friends to dinner and at first they were at each other’s throats but at the end they were ‘very’ close,” I shudder, pushing away the thoughts “Now all my friends are trying to get in my other friends pants and it is getting very awkward for being the third wheel for the seventh time" – Anon Guest
[AN: I mislike the hate-at-first-sight becoming Tru Luv™ by the third act because good relationships don’t start like that, and they definitely don’t maintain. Fiction needs more plausibly stable relationships.]
Deathworlders can get territorial and possessive. This is known among many. It is especially known to Thryx Maahalyk, who knows several Deathworlders and also loves throwing dinner parties for his friends. In order to keep things moderately civil, he only invited two Deathworlders at a time.
…who unfortunately faced off like cats who were strangers to each other. Hissing, posturing, and swiping at each other included. Again and again, two Deathworlders judgmentally sized each other up… and initiated hostilities.
“You also know this danger-magnet ball of fluff? Get outta here,” was the usual greeting, then one of them would punch the other in the arm. They would competitively compare ‘war stories’, barking at each other until the food was finally ready and then… Alarmingly for Thryx… they would share food. It was perplexing. First, they were fighting, then they were initiating mating signals with each other.
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