Floating in Otter Space

So, humans are rarely ever innately good at anything besides breathing. We have to learn how to do everything: walk, talk, eat without spilling everything everywhere because our motor skills don’t start out great. Sure, you have the prodigies, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

In order to get good at things, we practice. Walking, something which takes a lot of us over a year to learn, eventually becomes something that can be done without thinking about it. When we learn to drive, it takes a lot of focus to remember everything and pay attention to everything, but eventually it becomes almost second nature.

We have to ability to, with enough time and effort, accomplish almost anything we set or minds to. You want to do a cart wheel? Practice, you’ll get it eventually. You want to type? On a few years you won’t even have to look at the keyboard. You want to bend yourself into a human pretzel. Are you sure? Doable.

Some of us use this ability to accomplish amazing things. We are constantly innovating, constantly evolving our technology to make it better, faster, more durable. Some of us spend their lives dedicated to a singles field of study to change the world. Some of us rough it in the jungle with apes and come out being able to communicate with them and reach a brand new understanding.

And some of us spend weeks practicing flipping bottles so that we can land them the way we want to.

Aliens would probably be astounded by this behavior.

Human Alexa, a chef who can cook food from all corners of the galaxy fit for any species on the ship can also, for some bizarre reason, operate her communicator with her toes. She is the only human on board who has learned this skill, and when asked why, her response was simply “Why not?”

The human engineers, Human Alex, Human John, Human Macy and Human Chloe, spend every break they have holding bottle flipping competitions, keeping a scoreboard in the room with the tools. There is no apparent prize for winning this competition other than so called “bragging rights”, the meaning of which continues to elude everyone else on board, yet they will practice for hours just to win the next match.

Human Tracy, who works in communications, can bend her legs behind her head. When asked why she can do this, she shrugged and responded “I bet my friend that I could do it in 6 months. I got 20 bucks.”

Human Taylor, an explorer, is a “beer pong champion”. They have explained that no, this does not give them any particular advantage in combat, they just wanted to “show that one frat boy fucker in college who’s boss.”

Human David, who helps to keep the weapons on good condition, can balance 12 books on top of his head at once, “just for the hell of it.”

There have been multiple requests to include this change in the Human Manual, but no one is quite sure how to. They can’t all do the same thing, as evidenced by Human Taylor failing to balance one book on their head and Human Chloe attempting to flip a bottle and breaking a light in the process, and not every human even has a strange ability like this.