#humanononsense

Imagine an alien species that evolved to be semi-aquatic watching humans (a species evolved to climb and run on land) jump eagerly into the water to swim with them. No safety equipment, no flotation devices, just a thin modesty suit and sheer glee.

And humans, by the alien’s standards, are terrible at swimming. Just…truly awful. They can’t hold their breath for long, their bones and muscles are dense, their lungs make them too buoyant, their hair creates drag, their gangly limbs are slow and clumsy, and they can’t open their eyes underwater because the water will hurt them.

And yet the human laughs and splashes with their alien friend and alien can’t help but marvel as the human seems to adapt in real time right in front of their eyes.

The human streamlines themself to glide through the water as best they can, trying their best to turn their grasping hands into paddles, their feet into flippers. The human watches and copies how the alien moves and mimics them, learns and copies them until they move almost gracefully.

We humans consider it disgusting and disrespectful to show up a formal event smelling like natural body odour. We scent EVERYTHING just to not have to smell like ourselves.

The aliens often gets terribly confused on who’s who as a result of our efforts, much to their dismay, especially when it comes to diplomatic meetings. One day their human friend changes their shampoo and suddenly doesn’t smell like them anymore or someone borrows someone else’s perfume and now there’s like four people who all smell exactly the same. And the poor alien is trying so hard to not lose track of who they know and who they don’t but it’s the equivalent of trying to find your friend in a crowd while wearing a headset with psychedelic visuals playing on it, they’re just super disoriented.

And what’s more, some smells for the alien are used to signal willingness to breed, so some human wearing a fancy perfume they like is the alien equivalent of wearing lingerie to a board meeting and it’s super distracting and more than a little embarrassing to try and be conversing professionally with someone who smells like ‘SEX ME UP SEX ME UP SEX ME UP-‘

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???

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.

Alien planets have experienced an extinction event maybe once, perhaps even twice if they’re just that unlucky during their evolutionary history and had to start the long process of rebuilding and adapting from the rubble. And then they look at humanity’s evolutionary history and…’What the F**k?!’

Humanity has had no less than FIVE MASS EXTINCTION EVENTS.

F I V E.

We’ve have space rocks dropped on us, had the sun blotted out, had that one time where everything just fuckin died (Literally called the Great Dying) and our evolutionary ancestors still managed to squeak by. And that’s not even mentioning the ‘less dire’ events in our history including multiple ice ages, at least three wide spread and lethal plagues, two really really bad just truly awful wars, and a whole bunch of other natural disasters that very much should have at least slowed us down for a lot longer than they did.

The aliens learn about all of this and turn to their squishy, delicate human companions and say

“Why does your planet want to kill you so badly? Do you need help?? Do you want to come with us???”

Humans are attention seeking by nature. Attention is sought after because there is historically safety in numbers, so humans are naturally inclined to mimic the behaviours of others in order to subconsciously identify ‘hey, look! I do as you do just like the rest of your group so you can trust that I am not dangerous. Can I be a part of this group??’ and the other human sees this and says ‘Ah yes, another one who does as we do so they must be safe, come sit with us’.

Aliens see humans copying each other’s behaviour so fluidly that it almost comes off as creepy. It’s even creepier when humans mimic THEIR actions, too. Like, no, do not rope me into your mind melding species cult, please and thank you.

Even to the modern day, this intensely social instinct is still alive and well, as humans will unconsciously mimic positive actions of others even when they don’t understand the context. For example, clapping.

An alien and a human are sitting having a conversation when suddenly hoots and hollers and the clapping of hands erupt from across the room. Immediately, much to the alien’s surprise, the human starts clapping too as they look around trying to see what is happening.

The reaction was so immediate that the alien is taken aback by it before remembering that humans were known to be strangely in tune with each other compared to other species so they just wait it out.

Once it dies down, the alien asks

“So, what was that about?”

“No idea.”

“But you…joined in. You didn’t know what you were celebrating??”

“Well, no, but I don’t explicitly have to know what’s going on to guess that it’s something good and join in. It would feel a bit rude if I didn’t clap.”

Not in a military way, but in the way you get when someone insults your best friend or sibling.

Sure, Earth is a bit of a shitpit and tries to kill everything on its surface all the time and is slap bang in the middle of the Space Boonies with fuck all else around except MORE deadly stuff, BUT THAT’S OUR HOME. YOU KEEP HER NAME OUTTA YOUR FUCKIN’ MOUTH.

Human: Yeah, Earth’s just a massive dumpster fire, but once you look past the wonky axis and viruses and terrible people and numerous crises going on all at once, it’s a pretty decent place to set up shop.

Alien: Yeah, like I’d ever want to visit your shithole of a planet.

Human: *deathly serious* Call my home a shithole again and I will cook and eat your organs...

He’s following the map points when he finds a massive hunk of twisted metal a little ways away from his designated path, like a downed terrestrial rover but mangled and made of a metal alloy he’s never seen before. There’s shattered glass on the ground around it and small, oddly shaped footprints leading away from it. Too small and too thin to be someone else from the platoon.

Cautiously, he returns to his designated path because he can’t turn around just because he got spooked by what could very well have been an animal walking away from some old rover model he didn’t recognise. As he’s walking forward through a wooded area near a clearing, he hears a hissing noise out in the grass of the clearing in front of him and he’s quick to flick on his headlamp. It lands on something small hunched over in the grass.

It’s not an animal.

Not one he had ever seen. It’s wearing cloth with concerning red splotches all over it. It seems to know it’s been spotted because it freezes mid movement and seems to be breathing very slowly and quietly even as its body shakes. Why is it shaking? The soldier draws his weapon and freezes, expecting it to bolt away or turn to attack him, but it just sits there, it’s back exposed.

Suddenly, it twitches and its limbs start to rise above the sea of grass around it. Its limbs are long and stringy, and sit at right angles from its body, both ending in flat, square…paws…feet? Both with five long, thin, fleshy digits protruding from the palm.

Still trapped in the spotlight from the soldier’s headlamp, it begins to stand and the soldier fires a warning shot into the ground close to it in hopes of scaring it away, but it just jolts, freezes and then continues to stand, much more slowly.

Up and up it stands on two legs far too long for its body, balancing precariously between one good leg and one that seems bent at an odd angle. And it’s still shaking at him.

Why is it shaking at him?!

An intimidation tactic?

Slowly, almost cautiously, the creature begins to turn around, its upper limbs still raised. It seems to pivot on one foot and the soldier wonders how the hell it’s still upright until it turns to face the light completely and he sees it’s face.

Flat, white and almost featureless, it’s eyes pressed deep into its ovoid skull, it’s mouth a flat red line beneath the two black holes at the base of a small boney protrusion in the middle of its face. It’s looks almost embryonic, underdeveloped, all pink and fleshy and boney. The eyes are small and white and blue with two minuscule black spots in their centres, both pinned on him.

Predator’s eyes.

It doesn’t blink. At least, not until the same red liquid on its clothes trickles down its white face from a welt and into one of its eyes, making it wince and scrunch up its face, finally allowing the soldier to see that the bloody thing has teeth.

Lots of them.

He finally brings himself to move while it can’t see and turns to book it back the way he came, hearing the thing behind him shuffle through the grass just as quick. Is it chasing him?!

He doesn’t stop running at full sprint until he’s back on the hard concrete of the platoon base, and even then he only stops to draw his weapon again at the space behind him, his headlamp shining up into the nearby trees. He doesn’t budge even as his platoon mates ask him what the hell he’s looking at. He just waits. Nothing.

His sergeant is none too pleased with him for abandoning his exercise and running back to base like a coward until the soldier shows him his bodycam footage.

All rookies are ordered to stay inside for the night as senior soldiers scout out in groups to potentially find the thing from the footage.

No such luck.

The only thing they find is the mangled metal pile, the footprints and a trail of browned liquid leading to a tree that suddenly smells like rotting flesh.

The officials guess that the creature got hunted by one of the bigger predators in the area and dragged up the tree to be saved for later, but the soldiers are never truly convinced. No matter how much trouble they get in for deliberately missing a navigation point during exercises, no one dares to go near that tree again. The ones who do venture near it by the behest of jeering mates often claim to have seen a flat, white face among the branches, staring down at them. Some claim to have felt long, thin limbs that they almost mistake for part of the tree drift over their shoulders before they look and it’s suddenly gone.