Challenge #00946-B215: The Houyhnhnms’ Arrival
A new species arrives on the station, and the humans Will Not Stop Staring.
New species is worried. Did it offend them somehow? Is it edible?
Meanwhile all the humans are thinking is “Holy ***,. a unicorn.”
G’pux soothed her new companion by petting her neck. “There, now. It’s all right. It’s natural to be a little tense when meeting the Galactic Alliance.”
Thrass tossed her head and stamped uncertainly, Though she fit the pattern for Horse, she was undoubtedly a cogniscent species. She was certainly more flexible and robust than a Terran horse. And the species’ gift for telekinesis did no harm, either. “This not being little tense,” she managed. “This being close to snapping.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” whispered G’pux. The lizard leaned closer to Thrass’ twitching ear. “You won’t be meeting planetary ambassadors. You missed the Meet by a year and a half. What they’ll have is -ah- unattached ambassadors. People with the title but little to no influence. And possibly some station-resident staff who handle matters for the planetary ambassadors. If they have nothing better to do.”
“So… I will being most important in room?”
“Oh yes. They’ll all be there to impress you.” G’pux thought about this. “Except perhaps Ambassador Shayde. She’s… kind of… a law unto herself.”
“Need I worrying about her?”
“No. You’ll be fine. There’s very few things that annoy her and you’re not prone to do any of them.”
The ship docked, and far too soon, it was time to make Thrass’ introduction formal. G’pux exited first, just to make sure there were no accidental ambassadors lurking in the corners. Shayde was present and actually standing to attention for a change. And Rael stood at her elbow so he was ready to preempt anything Shayde was going to try.
Five other humans were in the group of twenty and at least one had brought a gift basket. G’pux secretly hoped that it was actually full of gifts and not mostly cellophane. “Gathered cogniscents, Ambassadors and staff, it is my singular honour to introduce you to Ambassador Thrass of the Houyhnhnm. Planet H’ruh’hra.”
Thrass stepped out, resplendant in the golden copy of her former work suit. She had been a farmer before G’pux had crash-landed into her life. Her speech was heavily rehearsed. “Honoured cogniscents, I thank you for your welcome.” The rest, I bring peaceful greetings from H’ruh’hra, appeared to die in her throat.
The humans were all staring.
Bug-eyed, barely-breathing, slack-jawed staring.
“Is they think I edible?” Thrass whispered. “I doing some thing wrong?”
Then Shayde, most likely to blurt anything uncivil, blurted, “Holy fookain shit, that’s a unicorn.”
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Challenge #00942-B211: Skewed Threat Assessment
Someone aware of how beneficial, on the whole, spiders are to humanity asks why there is such a disconnect between the threat posed by and reaction to spiders as opposed to the threat posed by and reaction to mosquitoes.
(Let’s ignore the Sydney Funnel Web, for the purposes of this discussion)
“Statistically speaking,” allowed Nik, “your species has more to fear from the Mosquito than it does any arachnid. Or pseudo-arachnid, for that matter.”
“Logically,” countered Shayde, “ye got a point.” She was perched tensely on her stool, on the very verge of bolting for cover. Her gaze was trapped by the presence of several very fat Oshits in a holding cage. “But if ye put that lot anywhere closer to me, I’m off.”
“Oshits are proven harmless! They can not pierce human skin.”
“Still no’ takin’ the chance. Keep those fookers awa’ from me.”
Nik kindly scooted the cage further away from her. The Oshits inside, stimulated by the shift in air patterns, attacked everything they could reach.
Shayde murmured an note of pure disgust and leaned a little further away from the cage of dispute. “Look, I’m only here because ye said ye had a way tae eat them. Ye never said they’d be alive beforehand.“
“I’m rather concerned about you,” said Nik. “The universe’s bounty is meant to be shared. Insects are easier to farm on an industrial scale than mammals and avians, yet your diet is intensely arthropodophobic.”
“Aye. I’ve been taught tae see insects as filthy, ye ken. In my time, we spend all of our effort on gettin’ rid of ‘em.” Shayde managed to pluck up her courage enough to sit herself more comfortably on the stool. “But after the fifth time one o’ those little shits jumped on me face, I’m willin’ tae take me revenge any way I can get it.”
“Revenge feasting…” said Nik. He waved the steam from his wok towards his nose. “An interesting concept. But you still have not answered the quandary. Why are you less afraid of mosquitoes than you are of spiders?”
“Ye seen a mosquito move, aye?” she said, tracing a slow path with a dark fingertip. “When ye can see ‘em coming, they sneak up on ye. Spiders come at ye like ye just insulted their firstborn. And their bites are more… ah… immediate.”
“So there is room for a disconnection. I see. My apologies. It is time to fry them.”
The cage, boiling with excited Oshits, opened directly over the pan. They exploded outwards, attacking the steam and falling into the hot oil below.
Shayde had to pay a fine for Public Disturbance. It is not appropriate to shout, “DIE, YE LITTLE BASTARDS!“ in a restaurant. Especially not that gleefully.
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Challenge #00937-B206: Living Proof
Another Humans Are Crazy point: most bright colours in the animal kingdom are for either a mating display or are a poison warning. The brighter the colours, the more likely it’s poison - see snakes and frogs, even compared to peacocks they are brighter (if less visually spectacular overall).
Most other animals, on seeing the fluorescent poison warning colours, are rightly horrified.
Meanwhile, humans think they are pretty.
Of all the ambassadorial mistakes Harry could have made, this one pretty much topped the metaphorical cake. During one of the mandatory mingling exercises, She sidled up to the nervous Ambassador Q’vath and murmured, “I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but your colours are very pretty.”
“I AM WEARING TOXIC COLOURS! SELF IS NOT BEING TASTY!” Q’vath back-pedalled away from her as if she were a rabid predator. “STAY BACK, DEATHWORLDER!”
Harry immediately put her hands up in surrender position and stepped away. In retrospect, it was the hard way to learn that many in the Galactic Alliance still considered her species to be highly dangerous.
And she was very glad when the ambassadors from Amity turned up with positive proof that Havenworlders and Deathworlders could co-exist.
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Challenge #00933-B202: It’s Just Physics
“Oh, so attempting to mind control the entire planet is fine, but steam engines, now THEY’RE too much…”
“Steam powered machines just wouldn’t work in space,” argued Ken. “It’s just physics. You wouldn’t need a fire, the water would just boil from lack of pressure. And don’t get me started on how the cabin pressure works.”
Kyle sighed. “It’s not supposed to be taken seriously.”
“Yes, but science that bad manages to filter into the heads of the ignorant.”
“What?”
“You watch,” said Ken. “Three weeks, tops, some asshole on youtube will be using this movie as an example of advanced alien technology.”
“It’s. A. Parody. No way in the world would anyone take it seriously.”
*
Two weeks and five days later, Ken sent Kyle a link to a youtube video.
It was titled, Aliens Among Us, the Conspiracy Continues.
He included a handy time reference to where Super Steam Space Ninjas was heavily referenced.
[Muse food remaining: 13. Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
Challenge #00928-B197: To See What is There
In a typical moment of human curiosity, when a rip in the fabric of space and time appeared in the lab, they did not explore it with all possible instruments, test dummies, cameras or animals. Instead, after poking it with a broom, and ensuring a potplant didn’t combust when put in for a minute, they stuck their heads in to see what was on the other side.
It was shaped roughly like a kumquat. If that kumquat was about five feet tall and capable of hovering in mid-air.
It hurt to look at it, but nobody could say why. Nobody could say, exactly, what colour it was or what seemed to be inside it.
“That’s it,” said Professor Ng. “One hole in our universe… leading into another.”
“How do we even test it?”
Sudden realisation hit the team like a truck. They had already spent their budget on the machines that kept the rift stable. What they had to hand was all they were getting for seven more months. And somehow, standing around and staring at the rift and occasionally going ‘whoah’ for seven months didn’t seem to justify the expense.
Kev was the one who volunteered to do the testing. He said it “was going to be as trippy as fuck.”
First, a broom that an unlucky janitor had left in the office. The handle received no observable harm. Neither did the bristles. The office aspidistra, duct taped to the broom, also survived unscathed.
Kev shrugged, muttered, “Yolo, dudes,” and stuck his head inside.
Nobody heard his screams. Nobody in this dimension, anyway.
The parts of his body still on the observable side of the universe sheared off as they left the range of the rift. Cleanly. Bloodlessly.
And it did the same to the parts of the Thing that came through from the other side, when Professor Ng slammed on the big, red button that shut everything down.
She knew it was the right thing to do, because she had seen it casually begin consuming what was left of Kev’s left hand.
So many questions paraded through her mind, but the one that escaped her mouth was a whispered, “How are we going to explain this to the investors?”
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Challenge #00927-B196: Just My Type
The opposite to the last one - a being that is unattractive to their own race that a human finds beautiful.
Rae usually disliked going into the lower-gravity realms of the station. She had a pathological dislike of insects that included antisocial actions like screaming and flailing if one of them touched her.
Only the Huf’nuf’ruf remained unoffended.
Her intent was to go down, do her job, and then retreat into one of the luxury spas to soak the imagined pricklyness of a million little claws off her skin. That had been a very good plan.
That is… until she met Xzzxzzxzz.
She was beautiful A mixture of iridescence and gossamer. All poetry in motion with a side of grace and poise.
This one, said Rae’s hind-brain, can touch me intimately for the rest of time.
“Can you being help?” said Xzzxzzxzz through her autotranslator.
“I think you’re gorgeous and I want to share time with you,” said Rae, almost hypnotised by her. “And this is a big deal for me because I’m usually entomophobic.”
Xzzxzzxzz looked around. “Many apologising. Friend circle is to hire you for joke?”
“What? No! I’m here to fix some plumbing. Promise. I am not in the entertainment or offending industry[1].”
“You is tell I am…” the translator hiccoughed. And burped out, in a default voice, “AESTHETICALLY PLEASING.”
“Yes. I mean. I did say that. I wasn’t paid to. This is no joke. You’re glorious.”
She ran her mandibles over her forelimb in nervousness. “Is lie,” she said. “My folk is call me… ugly. Carapace wrong colour. Too shiny in wrong spectrum.”
“Well I think you’re exactly the right kind of shiny,”
Rae smiled. “May I give you my contact details? You can ask me out any
time.”
[1] There is an overlap between the two.
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Challenge #00926-B195: In the Instincts of the Beholder
“I want a sci-fi series to have an alien race that literally every other race but humans thinks are the hottest fucking thing but it just completely goes over humans’ heads. Like instead of the Asari or some neon skinned space babe, every other race is just fucking fawning over some bizarre spider race. When humans don’t get it they’re just like, “What the fuck’s wrong with you? She’s hot, dude.””
(feel free to edit language)
Freshly-minted Ambassador Harry didn’t think this was going very well. So far, she’d made one of the artificial intelligences break down, and was accidentally involved in a mishap involving a member of the Consortium of Steam.
And now some highly-appreciated Ambassador had just arrived in a cloud of fawning and cooing. One ambassador even had hysterics and had to lie down.
Ambassador K’thrikk looked like some bizarre insectoid centaur, with a hairy, spider’s thorax and abdomen, and a thorax of a preying mantis. Its eyes were the dull black of empty space.
Her carapace was an unusual colour. As if puce and olive khaki had had an abomination of a love child, who was then sick all over the creature.
Harry found Ambassador K’thrikk to be both fearsome and revolting. She didn’t know whether she wanted to throw up, run away, or launch herself at its head and start bashing it with whatever came to hand.
She gripped her desk with white knuckles, grateful that it was bolted to the floor. Focussed intensely on her bladder and its role in being well-behaved in this very unfamiliar public arena. And also attempted to re-hydrate her tongue.
Her assistant, a Cuidgari administrator nicknamed Jamie, gave off cooing to check on Harry. “Are you well? Many people who view the Hek’rath for the first time are overcome with awe.”
Harry swallowed nervously. If she looked at her desk, she would not feel the urge to regurgitate every meal she’d ever had. “I’m overcome with the urge to kill it,” she whispered. “But I know that would be very bad.”
“I’d heard your species was insane, but I thought that was an exaggeration…”
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Challenge #00925-B194: The Feel When No Sex Life
http://thentheresthisspazz.tumblr.com/post/123284811011/mythological-creature-aus
Last one!
If you’ve already done them all, your challenge is to write a prequel to one of them
[AN: Last one, haimaee :3 ]
The social scene is really fucking awkward. So many of them expect so much of you and you never know who wants what until you’re rejected. And it hurts. It hurts worth than starving.
I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I really don’t. I come on strong and they run away. I try the gentle approach and they leave the club with someone else.
It’s like I’m invisible.
Or worse than scum.
Hi. My name is Kylie and I’ve been a succubus for three months.
If I was a guy, I could call myself ‘incel’ and have people to talk to about it. But no, I’m a girl. And that just makes me a ‘loser’.
I get bitter when I’m hungry.
And I am very hungry.
Yeah, you think being a succubus is fun, right? All the hookups you can eat? An absolute buffet of meaningless sex?
Wrong.
Try doing any of that when you’re like me. A little too chubby. A little too dark. A little too not-hourglass. A little too hairy. A little too nerdy, but never nerdy enough.
Even the pube-bearded trilby-wearing pick-up artists won’t fucking touch me. And I previously believed they were desperate.
No, seriously. It went like this:
Him: “You would look fantastic if you just dropped a few pounds.”
Me: “You’re absolutely right. You got any tips? I hear vigorous sex is a great fat-burner.”
Him: (Long, boggling stare) “You’re a creepy fucking slut.” (runs away)
And that’s the closest I ever got to eating properly.
And before you ask - no, I can’t just roam the streets waiting for someone to try raping me. I need actual lust, not a desire to “put me in my place”. I’ve tried it. It’s just not satisfying.
But the good news is, the rapist population of my area has hit rock bottom. There’s something about finding dead male husks drained of all life force, every single one with their dick out, that makes people think twice about raping.
Going to nerd cons in costume is not as effective as you might think. Especially the game cons. I get the nerd quiz to see if I’m a fake geek girl when most of the time these idiots wouldn’t know Duella Dent from Steampunk AU.
If I can’t answer their quiz, I’m a fake geek girl and get ostracised.
If I can ace it, I somehow just read that on a wiki to impress them and I’m still a fake geek girl.
If I know more than they do, I’m a fucking poser.
I can’t win.
Not even on OK Cupid. I don’t know. Maybe “Succubus seeks lust” is too forward.
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Challenge #00924-B193: Witnessed
http://thentheresthisspazz.tumblr.com/post/123284811011/mythological-creature-aus
Doot doot.
If you’ve already done all 7 by now, your challenge is to cross over two of the prompts into one.
[AN: OK for future reference and my current incompetence, I’m using a checklist.
[ ] (In/Suc)cubus
[X] Siren
[X] Werewolf
[X] Cursed animal
[X] Dragon
[X] Frog
[X] Vampire
thank you for your patience with me. Oh, and haimaee? Here’s more]
“No. Just no, okay? Francis Drake did not write Shakespeare’s plays. Elizabeth the First didn’t write his plays either. You know who really wrote them? William fucking Shakespeare! The whole ‘mystery’ about the authorship was started by a bunch of little gits in Eton who wanted to believe that only blue blood is capable of creating real art. They didn’t want to admit that William Shakespeare was an unwashed commoner who came from parents who could barely read!” Ed came to a panting halt. His normally pallid face held the vaguest hint of a blush. And since he never blushed, Courtney could guess that this was a source of agitation. “And he didn’t write the fucking Bible either. He was a fucking atheist.”
“Wow,” said Courtney. “You don’t even take history. Why so bent out of shape about stuff that doesn’t even matter?”
“Because it keeps happening. You don’t want to believe that black people built the pyramids, so you say aliens did it. You don’t want to believe that the same people who sacrificed humans on pyramids in South America were the ones who made the Nazca lines. Aliens again! You don’t want to believe that the son of a couple from Snitterfield not only wrote those magnificent plays, or coined half of the language you use to deride him… so you say someone else did it for him.“ Another pause so that Ed could recover his breath. “It’s everywhere. And I am sick of it. I want to stop people shitting on his art for as long as I can live.”
“Why do you even care?”
“Because he was my boyfriend! He was bi, an atheist, and the most gifted person with words that I have ever met. I only wish I could have convinced him to…” sigh. “Fuck.” Ed slumped back into his chair. “Please don’t call anyone about that, okay? I don’t want to spend another century in an asylum.”
Courtney boggled. “Another?”
“Every time I let it slip that I’m a vampire, they lock me up and I spend fifty to a hundred years trying to convince them that I’m telling the truth.” Ed sighed. “They’d probably dope me up and tie me down for years before they tried talking to me.”
“You don’t… kill anybody. Do you?”
A very sharp-toothed grin. “I used to keep pigs before I discovered coconut water. Thanks. That’s always the first question.”
“I’ve seen you in the sunlight…”
“Only underfed vampires get hurt by the sun. Coconut water. I literally live on the stuff. And before you ask, no, I do not get hurt by silver. It’s gold that hurts a vampire. Can’t be corrupted, so my kind has no defense.”
“I can’t use you as a source for my paper, can I?”
“No, for some reason, history professors really hate the people who lived in it.”
“Probably because you keep telling them they’re wrong.”
“That’d do it.”
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Challenge #00923-B192: Unblinking Stare
http://thentheresthisspazz.tumblr.com/post/123284811011/mythological-creature-aus
Aaand again!
[AN: OK for future reference and my current incompetence, I’m using a checklist.
[ ] (In/Suc)cubus
[X] Siren
[X] Werewolf
[X] Cursed animal
[X] Dragon
[X] Frog
[ ] Vampire
thank you for your patience with me. Oh, and haimaee? Here’s more]
When you get down to it, there’s lots of things worse than being turned into a lizard. Bearded dragon, to be precise. Just so you know.
You know, once the dysmorphia wore off and I got used to it… it’s not that bad.
I can sleep through the night. Easily.
And -sure- Animal Control got on my case. They were right to. They didn’t know I was a human being in a lizard body. And it’s really hard to communicate when you’re concentrating on feeder crickets. Trust me on this.
Crickets are actually very tasty. Don’t give me that face.
Animal shelters are colder than they seem. Promise me that, if you want an animal companion, you are going to adopt one from the local shelter. You’ll be doing them a favour.
And speaking of favours… I owe my life to the rangy goth who volunteered there. He ripped admin up and down about the size of my tank (too small) the variety in my diet (crickets or starve) and how often and to what temperature my heat rock should be heated (three times a day, and warm but not scorching).
He bought me, in the end. And under that Nine Inch Nails T-shirt? My boy is stacked. Lithe, lean and supple. Just the way I used to like them when I was human. How I still like them.
Trev didn’t have a tank, but he did have a heat lamp that he jury-rigged to a timer. And I’m free to roam pretty much where I like.
The hunting’s good. It’s a cheap flat and the neighbours aren’t exactly the cleanest people in the world. The cockroaches are very well fed.
What? I’m a lizard, now. Get over it.
And… there’s a little unexpected bonus.
He likes to be nude when he’s home.
I could watch him going about his daily business forever. And at night when the heat lamp goes off full-time? I get to snuggle up against those lovely warm pecs.
Mmmmmmmmmm…
I don’t want him to kiss me. It would lead to way too many questions.
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