Really Just A Mess

Imagine this:

Alien: what the hell is this? Why is there a knife taped to the “Roomba”?

Human: oh it’s Mr Stabby!

Alien: you NAMED it?!

Human: watch out Stabby is gonna get you!

Alien: *backing away* so what you are telling me is you not only strapped a weapon to this Roomba, but also gave it a name?!

Human: well it wasn’t just me it was all of the humans on this ship who agreed to it.

Alien: why?!?!

Human: because it’s funny.

Alien: because it’s funny?! This could injure one of us! Then what would you say?!

Human: we would probably laugh at them because it’s a Roomba moving slower than walking speed.

Alien: …

Alien: well at least it won’t actively try to pursue people because it’s a cleaning robot.

Human: yea about that, one of the people who brought up the idea changed it’s programming to identify moving things as things to clean.

Alien: …

Alien: I swear… you humans will do anything to imprint yourself in onto anything…

Human: what do you mean?

Alien: this Roomba is now an incoherent, unpredictable and dangerous, and it is this way because “it would be funny”, does that sound familiar?

Human: …

Human: we get it you find us insane and dangerous.

Alien: you taped a knife to a Cleaning robot!

Human: what if I told you we have been taping knifes to Roombas for 70 years.

Alien: 70 YEARS?!?!

Human: we don’t plan to stop either.

Alien: if it wasn’t for your ability to do the jobs no sane being would ever do I would eject you all out of the ship right now.

Alien: By the gods……what did you do?

Human: What do you mean?

Alien: Luminal III was a desert world, and you’ve been on the world for half a century and now it’s a lush planet.

Alien: What did you do?

Human: Simple.

Human: Space ice.

Alien: What?

Human: Space ice.

Alien: I….I still don’t follow.

Human: Well it’s a desert world with almost no water, so we went out and got some.

Alien: You got some….in space ice?

Human: Well yeah.

Human: There are literal hundreds of thousands of chunks of frozen ice just floating in asteroid belts or orbiting planets in rings.

Human: So we sent a couple dozen harvester ships to grab them and then bring them back to the planet.

Alien: ………………..

Alien: Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?

Human: What do you mean?

Alien: Do you have any idea what was in that ice?

Alien: Possibly frozen organisms or diseases that are in those chunks of ice.

Human: Yeah we knew all about that.

Human: We’ve watched “The Thing” enough times to know what could be frozen inside random blocks of ice.

Human: We had each block scanned and detoxed before introducing it to the planet’s surface.

Human: By the end of twenty years into the operation enough water had been distributed that several large underground lakes were filled to capacity.

Human: Water on the surface continued to evaporate and condense into clouds causing temperatures to slowly decrease. This coupled with the underground water supplies resulted in land masses becoming more temperate and damp.

Alien: Thank you for explaining basic science class processes to the species that mastered inter-dimensional travel.  

Human: Well if you’re so god-damn smart why didn’t you think of this?

Alien: *Opens mouth to counter but stops

Human: You’ve encountered at least a hundred desert worlds and never thought, “Hey, maybe if I add water things will get better?”

Alien: *Stares in angry silence.

Human: Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Human: Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go make a second amazon rainforest called “Amazon+”.

Alien: But why?

Human brains pick up rhythm and patterns so quickly compared to other species and alien musicians are heinously jealous. That’s not to say alien species don’t have music in any capacity, of course they do, but it’s less omnipresent in their cultures compared to ours. Music and singing to aliens are held to the same standard as sculpting marble. It’s a very difficult and precise art form that takes years of practice to get ‘right’.

And then there’s human children singing with each other as they jump a skipping rope. Using the beat to keep perfect time.

Humans sing to show each other every emotion under the sun. They sing to show reverence to their gods or ancestors or spirits. Humans will sing to anything that will listen and even things that won’t. Hell, Humans sing to pass the time. They sing when they can’t get a song out of their head.

That’s right, humans are so perfectly wired to understand music that their brains get hooked on musical stimulus and continually loop it. Involuntarily. Sometimes for days at a time. To the point of annoyance of the human.

Humans use music and rhythm to help them remember things because remembering something with a beat is easier than remembering something without one.

“Humans don’t actually feel anything at all, they just mimic emotions to trick others into believing them”

“Never trust a human. They lie like the rest of us breath”

“Humans spend so much of their lives acting, it’s impossible to tell when they’re being truthful”

“In human culture, great respect is awarded to ‘actors’ who are able to mimic other persons and emotions with startling accuracy”

“Some ‘actors’ are able to ‘perform’ hundreds of unique characters”

“Acting is so ubiquitous in the human culture that many consider it polite to lie”

“Sarcasm is a common, casual game played between humans, where one human says something untrue and the other human must guess what truth they are thinking. Humans unable to perform this ritual are often ostracized by their peers”

“If you see a human crying, do not immediately assume they are hurt. Humans have been known to use their ‘acting’ abilities to trick unsuspecting travelers into giving up an unreasonable number of belongings”

Can you imagine being an alien and this thing just broke its bones at you?????

I'd be scared tbh

Why did it make that noise

That's a bone breaking noise

Which is very odd to the galactic community.

Rest comes in all sorts of forms across the galaxy, some having sleep similar to ours, some having hibernation/brumation cycles, some going into meditative states, some retreating to cocoons, some photosynthesising, some even being technologically advanced enough to simply just plug themselves in and literally recharge. But the seeming inescapability of human sleep is…a little concerning.

If a human is tired enough, they will be able to sleep just about anywhere. Bed, sofa, armchair, the floor, a table, three chairs lined up, propped up like a doll against the wall, on top of another person, on a rock that’s even vaguely flat, on a gnarled tree branch, sometimes even floating in water or suspended by a harness. Wherever. So long as we can breathe, we can and will fall asleep.

The same can’t be said of aliens, they’re a bit more picky by comparison, or they can stave off their exhaustion through emergency chemical reactions long enough to find somewhere appropriate to rest. Some are so specialised that they require their environments to be utterly perfect before their body allows them to rest. Those aliens are deeply jealous while waiting around at the Spaceport for their shuttle to start boarding and seeing humans clumped together on a bench in a very uncomfortable looking pile, snoring away.

And then, an alien species named the Khak’Cthrax, a species known for their aggressive behaviour and bodies covered in rocky scales and dangerous barbs, discovering this aspect of humans.

One Khak’CThrax soldier being deployed to assist in saving some human civilians from a war zone and ending up having to carry a teenager for a while due to there not being enough gurneys. The juvenile human ends up nodding off in the soldier’s hands and at first he thinks the teenager has perished because the Khak’CThrax are not the type of person you would consider comfortable to rest on much less feel ‘safe’ around inherently, but after the field medic explains that the child is only asleep, unsurprisingly from the day they had had, the soldier practically becomes a broody mother hen for the human. This little one trusted him??? Enough to rest while held in his arms??? They are his baby now???

Alien: "What. What..?"

Human: *HUNTING down a mosquito it saw*

Alien: ".... yeah I am really uncomfortable...."

Human: *quiet footsteps, pupils dialated, intense focus,*

Alien: *WAR FLASHBACKS*

Human: "Found you." *absolutely desimates the mosquito, squashing it into a million pieces as it's guts and various body parts liquidize into blood of the bloodthirsty, now stained on the palm of the human. A living being now reduced to a useless corpse as the human wipes the remains on their pants*

"I'm a pretty bad reference." You joke one day during meal time, picking at your tray. "I'm autistic. That's already going to throw off your studies."

"Yes, but you're still human." Kyle insists, studying you with his eyes. You weren't sure where his eyes were, but you could feel them on you. "Humans are predators. My species are prey, and so is Simon." Simon lets out a sharp grunt, his form resembling what a snake looked like on your planet.

Only much larger.

"We are not prey. Ambush predator." Simon insists as he coils around your shoulders. He liked soaking up your body heat like a snake, too.

"Humans are endurance hunters. We're pretty far removed from using our instincts because of modern evolution, industrial revolution, all that. But they are still there." You explain as you finish your food, pushing your tray away.

"How can you be an endurance predator? You don't run." Johnny teases his fungal flower spiral opening and closing slightly. You'd learned quickly that his fungal growths worked almost independently of him, expressing his emotions for him.

"Want to see?"

Simon was fucking exhausted. The ship had two places for you that mimicked a human atmosphere. Your room and one that looked like a small forest with a lake. You hadn't run once, but every time Simon thought he had shaken you off, you would find him again. And again and again. For hours, he had tried to evade you.

He wound his way up a tree, high enough that he was sure you couldn't climb up and find him. He needed to sleep just for a few minutes, and then he would move. He woke to a soft rustling in the leaves beside him, body stiffening as he slowly opened his eyes.

We may be seen as objectively adorable. We're tiny predators, vicious and mighty with teeth and nails, but also easy to pick up and hold and swing around while saying "Babyyyy"

We're quiet and sneaky in the wild, hard to catch and contain, very effective hunters and climbers. But when domesticated who wouldn't just lounge around if we're given free food, unlimited sleep, and constant enrichment?

And same with cats, there's a variety of how humans act and feel about these huge creatures taking care of us. Some of us might be very chatty, very affectionate, some probably clingy if we trust our Alien enough. While others don't screw with their personal space, would scratch and bite if you do something they don't like. The affection is at their pace cause otherwise you'll come out with a few scars.

As small as we are, the more wild independent humans have the strength and means to take down predators so much bigger than us when the situation becomes dire enough. There's been cats who've gotten dogs, wolves, and bears singlehandedly.

A human that's been in an alien family long enough would probably chase off a huge threatening space creature to protect the alien young, just as cats have done for human children.

Imagine after a few years of integration with aliens, some humans don't get by well with taking care of their children so they find an alien that looks responsible and careful enough and they leave their young on their doorstep so they can grow up with all the food and shelter they could ever need.

Maybe they have a human distribution system where a person who's just tired of the human world picks a ship to stay on, and the aliens on board just accept it because that's how humans are. Maybe they help provide pest control for those space creatures small enough to hide in hard-to-reach areas of the ship.

And even amongst all this agility and predatory instinct, humans can still be pretty dumb and airhead and ridiculous. Imagine how hilarious aliens would find it when we get jumpscared or sneeze or feel the random need to stim and run around. Alien puts a long sticky parchment on that crevice of our backs that's hard to reach and watches as we struggle to reach and take it off cause it's annoying, same way we might put tape on a cat's head. Maybe they find the funky way a human mom tries to carry her too-big baby funny the same way a mom cat dragging her too-big baby by the scruff is funny.

Maybe there's a language barrier, but Aliens notice our odd human sounds and mimic them to get our attention, but they struggle with the different sound and pronunciation we just hear random gargled calls of "Molasses!" "Tree!" "税金!" when they're just trying to greet us. And you learn to recognize the pattern of noises that mean whatever name they gave you in their language.

Would have different connections, depending which alien you ask.

Answers would include but not be limited to;

The human was quiet and gentle until...

1) The day we were attacked by space-pirates. We found them covered in blood. None of it their own.

2) That member of the Kamodo race decided to "bully" the human as a means of displaying dominance. I guess they pushed the human too far.

3) The human and I developed a close bond. You could say a romantic bond. Well, one thing led to another and we entered our mating chamber and ... HOO BOY!!!

Humans are space gnomes: wired

Look for humor in everything

Smart despite our silliness

Have remained hidden from view for millennia despite constant scouring of our woods (the universe)

Will just do whatever absurd thing we can "for the bit"

Form pack bonds with everything, including stuff that could outright kill us

Go out of our way to help animals when we see them injured

Comparably underdeveloped, but wise beyond our years

Enjoys parties and festivals

I love humans with jewelry. Humans that like sparkly crystals and wear them on their fingers and wrists and necks and ears, in their hair and decorated on their clothes. Honestly chances are, all aliens have jewelry they value from their planets. It's a space-wide thing to cover yourself in treasures from your world.

Alien 1: "Captain, I assure you, our ships can't be breached by anything weaker than a concentrated proton beam. They barely have lasers. We'll be fine."