Challenge #00754 - B023: What is Dog?

After other species have somewhat adjusted to the whole “vicious predator” == “family pet” thing, they run into this:



That is a predator larger than an adult human, whose head is roughly that man’s torso’s size.

He is a descendant of one of the scariest predators in the world casually flopped on the couch and he loves belly rubs and ear scritches and is just a big fluffy goofball that loves mauling tennis balls - well, maybe volleyballs are more appropriate, given his size.

If his master ever truly pissed him off, he could casually crush his skull, but he doesn’t because he loves him.

And humans think he’s adorable and fluffy. The reaction is not  “HOLY SHIT THAT THING’S HUGE, WATCH OUT!”, but rather “aw, he’s so cute! I wanna wrestle with him, and hug him, and call him George”.

[Image shows a man sharing a couch with a dog large enough to be twice his mass]

The humans’ pet carnivores were beginning to diversify. The cats generally stayed the same size, though there were some that varied in key aspects, but not so alarmingly as the dogs.

There were tiny ones roughly able to menace a keet. And the ‘normal’ size of dog that managed to make newcomer Numidid nervous despite their friendly demeanour.

And then there was George.

George was larger than some of the horses in Wiwazheer. Well… definitely larger than Tyrtyr’s shrunken steed. And larger than some of the other ponies that the humans had. He trotted alongside his human like an impossible thing. Yet he was real.

He could, T'reka couldn’t help thinking, easily predate on the human or her children. He could definitely predate on any Numidid in the colony. Yet, when the gigantic canine came up to her, it limited itself to sniffing.

T'reka froze, concentrating on her Science Breathing, as the mouth of a predator investigated the air around her. She let George sniff her knuckles and nervously massaged an ear as she’d been taught with smaller dogs.

The effect was exactly the same. The dog recognised her as an ally and not prey. Leaning into her touch and knocking her off her feet.

“Dog big enough for make saddle,” she said, learning how to brace herself against George’s affections.

The human laughed. She was one of the ones who had learned not to show her teeth to Numidid. Lyn. “For bird, be likely,” she answered, patting her dog on the ribs. “We could train dog for Numidid saddle.”

“Being remember Terra poem of Lady from Niger,” T'reka answered. “No wanting ride of predator.”

“Much wise,” Lyn the human clicked to George and he came to heel. “Bird be afraid, predators. Not train good.”

The children swarmed over the enormous dog. Hugging him or scratching various areas of his enormous, fluffy body. “Human make dog this big… make for what?”

Lyn shrugged. “Make for sing loud? Self not knowing.”

Humans had to be insane.

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Challenge #00753 - B022: Attempted Poisoning

Regarding Onions: The crazy food that turns our tears into sulphuric acid. Somewhere along the way some twit must have had the following thought process.

“AARGH MY EYES IT BURNS I wonder what it tastes like”.

Somewhere in the houses of the first cities…

Ari was sick of her husband. He was cruel and vile, and rough with her in their bedchamber. He expected a cooked meal when he came home, expected it hot, but never told her when to expect him.

And he never gave her enough oil for her lamps, forcing her to do most of her work by feel.

He would not let her eat until he had eaten, which made the longer nights insufferable.

Therefore, her only recourse was to poison him.

She’d been gathering them all day. The root of the tassel grass was well known for its eye-burning smell when cut. It served reason that it had to be poisonous.

She’d peeled them and chopped them carefully, and now they were bubbling in the stew while she ate the bread she’d made that day. Let him yell. Let him rave. Let him hit her. He would be dead, soon.

He was too drunk to notice any crumbs on her clothes. He just staggered in and slumped into his place. Thumping the table for his food instead of asking politely. Or asking anything at all.

She made certain he had plenty of the tassel grass root.

“What’s this muck?” he poked at it.

“Stew,” she answered. “It’s always stew. I went gathering them herbs all day. For your health, not that you care.”

He grumbled and growled, but was evidently too drunk to swing at her, so he fell on his food like a common pig.

She expected foam. Paroxysms of terror. The slow realisation that he was dying. She expected his face to change colour.

Nothing. He ate it, burped, and cheered, “That’s the best stew you’ve ever cooked, woman! What was that herb?”

“Uuuuhhhh… nyun,” she said in a fit of inspired desperation.

“Onion, eh? ’S good.” Another loud belch. “Use it more.”

She must have done something wrong. Ari, terrified of repercussions if she just made him sick on the morrow, dug through her stew for every fragment of the freshly-named Onion and crammed it all into her mouth.

It was delicious.

How?

And more importantly, what could she do now?

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Challenge #00752 - B021: Tea Solves Everything

Apparently there was an old prank tv show that faked an alien landing on an English lady’s front lawn. Her immediate reaction was to offer them tea.

Your prompt is the same scenario except it’s a real ship and a couple of extraterrestrials who had to make an emergency landing instead of a prank.

Somewhere east of Cricklewood…

There was no fire. Just a sad hissing of water vapour and the gentle ‘pink pink’ noise of cooling metal from the middle of her prize Begonias. Elsa tutted to herself and murmured, “Oh dear…” It couldn’t be helped, really. She could tell it was an accident. And the lizards inside were alarmed.

Lizard people. They had to be people. They were wearing clothes and shouting at each other in Lizardese. And there were some gestures that, it turned out, were truly universal and generally required most of an upraised fist.

Some of them were hurt.

Elsa scurried back inside for a moment and fetched all the medical supplies she had. And some clean rags. And hot water. And, since the kettle was going anyway, she made tea.

After a bad accident like that, they could probably use a cuppa.

*

The human encountered in our crash site was not the hostile beast we had been lead to believe they were. The creature intuited that we were in need of help and laid before us offerings of a medical nature.

How the creature knew that our battery acid was leaking is a miracle I can’t explain. Yet, after the repairs were finished, and we were puzzling how to restock the battery when the human offered us a cup full of the valuable fluid.

Engineer Zhonn was truly excited and made the human show its teeth. An alarming moment until we realised that the display was friendly. It was smiling.

The only disturbing part in the entire encounter was that the human drank her portion of battery acid in front of us. But, considering that we landed on a Class Four Deathworld and lived to tell the tale, I consider this incident to be minor.

It may be possible to train humans to be amenable to frailer species. It would take a long time and a significant effort, but a few examples show promise.

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Challenge #00751 - B020: When is a Troll Not a Troll?

*LOUD ANGRY-* Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so used to people getting it wrong it’s a reflex by now.

There are certain phrases that are bound to get a reaction from any fandom. Things like, “Star Trek… that’s the one with Doctor Spock, right?” or confusing Star Trek with Star Wars. Proclaiming the love for an almost universally-hated character is a good one. And for those who follow All My Daughters, the phrase, “Why aren’t there many men in this show?” is always good to get someone ranting about this new invention called ‘equality’.

The longer a fandom has been around, the more established the errors that people assume are factual, and the more tired the fandom is of hearing them. And for the human followers of the Consortium of Steam, it’s “Didn’t one of those girls used to be a guy?”

Shayde was so sick of hearing it that she began to dread checking their steam-powered merchandise site, because all the people who could decipher what she was doing through her eyescreen would inevitably say the wrong thing.

And she’d been a hardcore fan ever since she’d first seen them entertaining on a street corner near Walter Manor. Shortly before one of the Walter Workers broke it up and dragged them away because they had, once again, snuck out of the mansion and grounds to follow their programming.

She’d had lunch at that cafe, every day for a fortnight, just to see them do it again. She’d giggled at their ludicrous fake moustaches and adored their songs. She’d brought her guitar with her and very shyly asked for a jam.

The robots had been eighty-six years old, then. She was twelve. And she’d asked why Rabbit was done up like a boy instead of the girl she really was.

They’d come by the Galactic Alliance the long way. Down a wormhole to set up a new world, and through the years to the twenty-fifth century. Shayde had undergone a rather intense and painful shortcut through ten subjective years of being called a demon.

But still folks said it.

Someone was eyeing her off as she checked the forums for activity. “Can ye be helped?” she challenged.

“That’s the Consortium of Steam forum, right? One of the girl bots was misgendered as a guy for over a century, right?”

She took a deep breath for a full-out holler before her brain caught up with what the poor sod had said. As a result, her first three words were hostile. “Yeh ye can–” Damnit. “Sorry. I’m too used tae correcting people. Accidental rant mode. Would ye like tae know more about 'em?”

“I don’t know if I have the Time…” the young lady rummaged in her purse.

“Don’t ye fret. I consider this one a free service,” she offered a seat nearby. “I first met 'em in eighty-two when they were still callin’ themselves Colonel Walter’s Steam Man Band…”

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Sensible Economic Decision

“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.“ - Randall Munroe

[AN: I know I’ve done this twice before. Let’s see if the third is a stretch. Also, my laptop is still dead and all my progress on KFZ is in limbo. I’m using Beloved’s lappy and seriously praying I can at least recover what I’ve written in KFZ T_T]

(#00750 - B019)

They had made buildings to be almost indestructible. Yet the plants were still taking over. The animals were still moving in. Highly adaptable omnivores, all of them.

Tier hated finding graveworlds. There was an intense sense of coming there just a little too late. Even when the evidence indicated that they had arrived more or less a century too late. Whatever had happened here, the ecology had taken some significant time to reach the city hearts.

This planet’s answer to goats faced off in what was once a city square. Posturing and butting at each other.

There was no cogniscent life left on this world. They’d run all the possible scans. Even people regressed back to the stone age would have shown a sign of their existence.

Now it was up to Tier and her crew to unearth this planet’s cause of death.

Data centres, once revived by judicial jiggery-pokery, showed plethoras of information about environmental impact and how profits were more important than the planet’s wellbeing. Lots of arguments along the lines of, "When the last plant dies, we will realise that we can’t eat money.” But of course the profit-making organisations ignored the naysayers, cancelled all efforts to set up colonies elsewhere, and continued on their path to inevitable destruction.

Poorly-researched artificial foods also contributed, causing disease and metabolic failure in the surviving citizens. Monocultures were wiped out by one plague, and the people starved.

Cause of death: Combination trophic cascade disaster, climate change, and disease. Tier wanted to write: Corporate greed into her report… but the Galactic alliance frowned on that ever since they regulated how far bodies corporate could actually go.

They didn’t want the corporations who were doing it right to feel bad about themselves.

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Challenge #00749 - B018: Crazy Apes

http://imgur.com/gallery/IeLuO

something based on this lovely mini-story?

Understanding the entire concept took some time. Earth bombarded the Dracs with popular media. All the stories where someone made a noble sacrifice for the greater good.

How ingrained in us it was that one life for the betterment of others was the good thing to do. How selflessness was a virtue.

The Ambassadors were horrified. Perplexed. Confused. Bemused. And overall, plain confounded.

The Dracs studied us, of course. Examined Earth for the first time since they discovered us. They learned about the human ability to populate an area until overpopulation became a serious threat. About our ability to drain a resource to the point of scarcity and continue draining it whilst living in heavy denial. All whilst preventing the means with which to pursue alternate strategies.

They saw how our females risk their lives and health just to bring more humans into existence. They saw how our planet was a Class Four Deathworld. They saw how many species used the ‘populate or perish’ model for survival against the odds. And they saw us. A bumbling bunch of balding apes, struggling against the elements, a hostile environment, and each other to gain whatever it was we thought we wanted.

Then the most powerful species in the known universe offered terms of surrender.

Their surrender.

To us.

Decades after they filled the skies with their warships and declared the entire solar system to be a protectorate of the Dracaenin Empire, the Dracs surrendered to us. And many of us still didn’t understand what we did.

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Challenge #00748 - B017: Informed Decision

Keeping the groups that sing “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby” apart turns out not to be the hard part - the hard part is choosing which area to stay with. Do you want the eerie whispering, or the sudden heart attack?

[AN: For those wondering where this prompt came from, check out story #171 in One Leap Year of Instants, available for whatever you want on Smashwords. Please choose to pay a dollar value for this anthology]

Humans were strange creatures. Norix knew this. When using them as a labor force, one had to be supremely careful about which sort went on what missions. The primary test was to have them listen to a particular, rhythmic bass track, and note whether they screamed, “Pressure!” or whispered, “Ice, ice, baby.”

It was simply a matter of stopping fights before they started. Many pieces of Norix’s equipment wasn’t meant to withstand the slings and arrows of outraged deathworlders.

Which was why she had warning notes on the entrances to the human working areas. For the safety and sanity of her nonhuman employees.

One warning read: Humans make sudden loud noises within.

The other one, the one that was avoided most by both her and her employees, read: Humans whispering rhythmically within.

Loud noises could be dealt with. They could be anticipated. But the whispering… it reached down into the depths of eldritch terrors and grasped the fight-or-flight responses in an iron fist.

Norix held out for an entire Standard Year before she simply stopped hiring the ones that sang Ice Ice Baby.

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Challenge #00747 - B016: What a Voice

Following in from the last one, the musical shenanigans of Francoeur and Kurt.

Three weeks in…

Audiences loved the acrobatics. Carlotta could have done without the post-show bickering, especially now that Todd was picking up enough French to cuss in.

But this time, the froggy mutant slunk off into the depths of backstage, distancing himself from the slightly demonic Kurt.

Carlotta followed him. She didn’t understand much English and he didn’t understand much French, but she knew instinctively that he needed a mother. And it was backstage, between the flats, that she heard the voice of an angel.

The song was strange to her, but the sentiment was clear. Lonely and missing home.

“…and much have I seen. Dark distant mountains with valleys of green. Vast painted deserts the sun sets on fire. As it carries me back to the Mull of Kintire…”

He almost jumped out of his skin when Carlotta hugged him.

”[I wasn’t doin’ nuthin’,]“ said Todd, ineffectively struggling to get free. He wasn’t trying at all. Just making a show of wriggling loose for anyone who might be watching.

He wouldn’t understand her, but she could at least try to tell him. “Your voice is magic. Don’t hid your light under a bushel.”

*

Much, much later, when they were done with their cross-time adventures, Todd sidled up to Kurt and asked, “Yo. What’s ‘Votre voix est magique’ mean?”

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Challenge #00746 - B015: Unlikely Meetings

Kurt Wagner meets Francoeur. How do Todd and Emile get on?

It was the first show that the audience ran out on. But, to be completely fair, it was the first one that included the surprise appearance of a blue, fuzzy demon and some kind of humanoid amphibian thing.

Carlotta was ticked, of course. Especially at the fact that both creatures could stick to walls and ceilings, far out of reach of the diminutive cabaret hostess. There was something of a flap about what to do.

Then it turned out that the fuzzy demon spoke French. And German, Swiss, Dutch, a smattering of Italian, and enough Russian and Spanish to cuss in.

Most of which he rattled through as Francoeur approached, bare-handed and bare-footed so he, too, could cling to nonstandard surfaces.

“We’re mostly harmless, I promise!”

Francoeur startled with a dovelike coo.

The froggy one, now hiding behind the demon, rattled off something that could have been English in a kind light, but was simply unintelligible to everyone else in the room. The demon could understand him and immediately snapped, “Clappe!”

There were intense, topsy-turvy negotiations by the chandelier, and then Francoeur set them up at a table.

“Yofuzzywhattheheck?” mumbled the frog.

The blue demon - named Kurt - explained in two languages that he and his associate - named Todd - were temporarily temporal refugees. They came from the very far distant future of 2012. One hundred years in the future. And possibly another dimension, as a seven-foot-tall singing flea would definitely have caught a Professor Xavier’s attention.

Which lead to the question of how to house them until such time as whatever brought them there decided to take them back.

Neither of the mutants were at all musical. Kurt had physical limitations and Todd had more affinity with mechanical things than anything that made music. But they were acrobatic and, after a few training sessions, came up with something that sort of fit in with the rest of the cabaret.

Which lead to the problems of lodging.

Kurt shed. Todd was sticky, and allergic to anything that would help him be clean. Emile came to the rescue and offered his projection room as emergency quarters.

*

“What did you do to my projector?” Emile wailed.

“Uh…” said Todd. “[Got bored an’ fixed it.]”

Kurt, of course, provided translations.

“IT WASN’T BROKEN!”

“[Could'a fooled me, yo. That thing was whack. It works way better, now.]” He gave a demonstration, which caused some uproar in the Parisiennes who had wandered in.

The world in general and Paris in particular was not ready for three-dimensional, full hologram technology with surround sound.

Emile, at least, was rather glad to see them return to the realm they started from.

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Challenge #00745 - B014: Baldie

B’rka, the adventures of a goose Numidid with no feathers  (For the prompt inspiration, see Borka)

The chick had been left in her nest. It was weak and cold and hungry. Serka knew that she didn’t have the time to call emergency services. And, since it was night, there was a high likelihood that they wouldn’t turn up until morning. By which time it would be far too late for the newly-hatched keet.

She could see why her mother had abandoned her. There was no down on the tiny keet. No indication of any part of her skin that was meant to grow feathers. Not even a hint of down.

Serka loaned the trembling infant her warmth and regurgitated some of her dinner. She knew what the officials would do for this poor child. For the good of the flock. Serka could not bring herself to do that to a baby.

There was only one place that would welcome such an unusual keet. Which lead to the utterly sane decision to emigrate to Toxic Island, the definitive insane destination for a single mother with a child.

*

B'rka knew she was different. When others fledged, her human friends worked on improvements for her artificial wings.

For summer and winter, she chose clothes. And not just the typical Numidid vest and leg-wraps. She had clothes that covered all the areas where other keets had feathers. Some were bright and happy, while others were dull or matched the pattern of her Mama.

There was another difference. Other keets had as many as seven mothers. B'rka just had one. And no father. It was a lonely house in the middle of the Human city, Huatthehell, but they shared it with a dog and they had friendly neighbours and everyone knew her.

When she was smaller, B'rka would ride their dog, Harg, but now he was strictly for pulling her cart. Harg was a lot faster than even the fastest of her age-mates. And the cart was made specially to avoid any kind of accident.

But as time went by, B'rka could see, more and more, how she was different to the other Numidid. Her own name was an accidental syllable away from the word for ‘bald’, and some of the meaner keets risked expulsion from school for continuing to use it.

B'rka never let the names stop her. With the help of human intervention, she could glide just as well as any normal keet. She could glide so well that others accused her of cheating when she reached a race-point ahead of one of her feathered age-mates. And she could certainly climb faster than anyone she knew.

But her real passion was science. No other field would take her in just for the love of it. No other field welcomed her under its metaphorical wing like science did.

And, when it came down to the barest of essentials, B'rka wanted to understand why she had been born without feathers.

But her personal anomaly lead to so much other information. How heat retention worked, the genes behind hyper-plumage, how and why follicles appeared at all, the essential role of the body mite in immunity procedures… it went on an on.

Science loved her back. She learned as the humans had learned, that by studying the unusual, one gained understanding of the normal.

And because of her accomplishments, she was among the first to campaign for an end to mutation-related infanticide.

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