Eaurp E.W. Guz's Personal Log, O27/Y20/M3/D14. (2375 A.D.)

I'm writing this entry in my locked diary personal log, because I do not want anyone else seeing this. If you see this, no you didn't. The idea of this getting out, transmitted through the inter-library network for everyone to see, is so scary that I think I'd rather boil alive.

It's getting harder and harder to avoid thinking about gender and sex. I just don't get it! It's basic biology. Mellanoid Slimes reproduce asexually and so have no sex... and so therefore we have no gender. That's the territory of strictly animals and aliens. It's scientific fact, and if I want to keep my internship at the Space Program it is adherence to scientific fact that I must uphold.

But I've known for a long time that Slamtha isn't lying about her experience. She really is a woman, the same way that a Zaldan or a Human might be. When I first met her when we were little, all our teachers and mentors and parents were convinced this was just a fad, or a phase. When she got older and started shapeshifting and buying her own clothes, they said the same thing. But I've known her for half an Omicycle. This is not a phase. Slamtha is a woman.

I accept that. I always have. It doesn't have to be scientific, minds are weird and strange and I don't care what Eurgus and Dr. Worm say, any kind of diversity of form and thought can be beautiful.

But not for me. No no no. I'm training as a scientist and an engineer. I have to stay objective about these things.

But sometimes I look into the mirror, and I just can't find myself swimming around in the green ocean staring back at me. I have known this face my whole life, it's familiar enough, but it looks dead, or like some kind of puppet, and the older I get the deader it looks.

I made the mistake of telling Slamtha about this in passing. She got kinda quiet, and told me she wanted to show me something at the library next time we went.

We never got that far. Instead, I [eraser marks, green splotchy stains, ripped paper.]

---------------------

Slamtha Uzgoel returned to the cylindrical dorm complex from her history class. She left her bag behind, so she carried her books in her arms. As she walked up to the glass doors she saw herself in the reflection and she smiled. Three bright, cheery eyes facing the glass, a smiling mouth in profile on one side, and a strong, precision-crafted nose on the other side. Her pony tail was a little rough, the naturally blobby slime upon her scalp had once again defeated her attempts to keep it fully smooth, but it wasn't a big deal. Her figure was tall and slim as always, but had all the curves and proportions you'd expect of a human female.

She only had a moment to study her form in the glass before she entered the dorm lobby, but in that moment, she was again satisfied that things were way better than they had once been.

She found her and Eaurp's dorm, and put her hand inside the latch, and dropped her books in shock.

Eaurp was sitting at Slamtha's vanity with their shirt off, trying to shapeshift their chest, pulling round protrusions of slime out with their hands. They didn't notice Slamtha at first, but when the books hit the floor, it startled Eaurp enough that they rapidly covered their chest with their arms and swivelled around in their desk chair looking as if they were going to melt.

"Slamtha! Hi. I was. just. uh. Practicing my impression of you!" Eaurp said, haphazardly shoving their mouth off to the side of their face, and blinking a false eye into existence on top of their nose.

"Eaurp... cut the gack," Slamtha said, narrowing her eyes. She closed the door behind her, which let Eaurp relax slightly, and then picked up her books and put them on a shelf.

"I was just curious, that's all! Those slime blobs you put on your chest just seem like they'd get in the way, you know? I was wondering what the point was."

"And you didn't think to just ask me?" Slamtha said.

"Well," Eaurp said, "I'm an experimentalist."

Slamtha put her hand on her face, covering up her eyes, but her mouth was smiling. "You're such a dork nerd."

"The 'blobs' are there because they're there on the majority of female convergent bipeds in the galaxy. They serve all different kinds of evolutionary purposes. For Humans, it's secretion of a nursing-slime-like fluid called 'milk.' For Vulcans, it's a fat and water storage structure. For Zaldans, it's thought to have evolved as a floatation device. In most cases sexual dimorphism of breast size corresponds to evolutionary development of the convergent biped face and body plan, in accordance with Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development."

"That doesn't make sense. That's not how evolution works, and anyway, what purpose would they serve for Mellanoids then?" Eaurp said.

"Haven't you ever seen a fat person?"

"N-not without their shirt on!" Eaurp said.

"We really need to get you out of the dorm more..." Slamtha said. "It's the same as our hair. Just storage of despecialized slime. That's probably why you were struggling so much, you were trying to pull out your actual skeletal gelatin and viscera, when you need to treat it more like hairstyling."

"But you're not fat, and I'm only a little bit fat, so why do you have them?"

"Again, I'm going for sexual dimorphism. And it kinda seems like you are too."

Eaurp blushed and their hair dripped down their face.

"Eaurp..." Slamtha said. "is there something you want to tell me?"

Eaurp carefully adjusted their arm to still cover their chest, while their other arm went to cover their face.

"I..." Eaurp said, but then they made a gurgling noise. "It's really hard to say."

"Take your time," Slamtha said. "I'm going to do some reading. If I can have my desk back."

Eaurp perked up, looked around, saw she was still at Slamtha's vanity, and then carefully stood up, only to reveal that she was wearing one of Slamtha's skirts.

"Eaurp. What is that."

"It's a... skirt?"

"But you don't own any skirts," Slamtha said.

"And you only wear skirts, I just wanted to figure out why?"

Slamtha rolled her three eyes. "Well did you figure it out?"

Eaurp's eyes teared up. "They're really flowy and spinny... I'm sorry. I'll... I'll take it off."

Slamtha sighed. "Don't worry about it."

Again, Eaurp's anxious, tense body relaxed. They sat down at their own desk and pulled out their journal. After a moment, they started writing in their locked diary.

Slamtha pulled out a binary calculus book from the shelf and put it down on the desk, then opened it. She worked out some problems, slowly. She could have really used Eaurp's help here, but now was probably not the right time.

Eaurp made a frustrated gargle and furiously erased whatever they had just written, then crumpled the paper, then shouted.

Slamtha looked over her shoulder to see the strange sight. Eaurp's naked back, rising and falling with each frustrated breath.

"Slamtha," Eaurp said, muffled, their head in their arms on their desk.

Slamtha turned around from her desk and knelt down next to Guz.

"Eaurp," Slamtha said. She put her hand on Eaurp's back, and an electric tingling sensation sparked between them. Eaurp let out a small gasp.

"I think you're so gorgeous, and so pretty, and you're so much happier now than you were when we were kids, but I'm more miserable than ever. I want to be like you. I don't know anything about women, you're the only one I've ever met."

"You've definitely met other women here at Gooniversity," Slamtha said. "and um. I know you've seen the USS Voyager mission report tapes enough times. There's lots of women in those tapes. Voyager's captain is even a woman. And also I've told you all about xenofemininity at the library!"

Slamtha's mouth tilted into a soft smile, but Eaurp couldn't see it.

"I... don't think I like not having a gender. And I don't know what that gender is supposed to be... but I'm pretty sure I like the one you do better than the uh... the other one?"

"Show me your breasts," Slamtha said.

Eaurp shot up from their desk in shock. "WHAT?"

They forgot to cover their chest. When they saw Slamtha staring at their chest, they quickly covered it.

"Hmm. No, no, the shape is all wrong. It's like you've just put tiny little hemispheres on your chest. Here, hold on," Slamtha said.

She dug around the bookshelf until she finally found what she was looking for, a Zaldan anatomy textbook. She flipped it open to a page that was clearly more worn than the others. It was a picture of a Zaldan woman's breasts, as well as an illustration of tricorder scans of the interior structure.

"That's what I did, though," Eaurp said.

"No, no," Slamtha said, "The breasts hang from the chest and armpits, like this. They don't just pop out of nowhere. It's like, imagine a fat mellanoid slime's chest, then make it rounder and larger."

Eaurp stared, unthinkingly and unblinkingly.

Slamtha rolled her eyes and grabbed the bottom of her shirt, then pulled it up.

Eaurp closed her eyes and looked away, holding her hands in front of her face.

"Do you want to learn how these things work or what?" Slamtha said.

Eaurp peeked, then closed her eyes and turned around, making a high pitched whine.

"Ok ok. We'll. Build up to that, I guess?" Slamtha said.

"Let's just put our clothes on and not show eachother our skeletons and vital organs or chest blobs, and we can just talk like... like normal mellanoids."

"Oh, Eaurp... Neither of us are normal Mellanoids." ------

A few months later

Eaurp Guz stood in the common room of her parent, Dr. Worm's, house. She wore a blouse and a skirt, which would not have raised any particular suspicion if not for the fact that she never used to wear anything other than T-shirts and sweatpants or shorts.

"I've, um, gathered you all here--my friends and family, to uh, to tell you... something important." Eaurp said. She looked to Slamtha, who was sitting off to the side of the group. She gave a thumbs up.

"This is. Um. Something I've been thinking about for a while," Eaurp continued, "I am uh. Oh globs..."

Eaurp's parents shared a confused glance between them. Her friends just watched expectantly.

"I'm a girl. I'm a woman. A female. A-and I want you to use the Federate pronoun 'she' and 'her' when referring to me in the third person."

Eaurp's rocketry club friend just stood up, shook their head, and left.

Her friend from the astronomy club just laughed. "That's uh, pretty funny, Guz. But for real why did you bring us here?"

Slamtha glared at them.

The fellow astronomer gurgled and dripped. "Guz, you're joking right?"

Eaurp looked almost like she was going to cry, frozen in place, her new longer hair drizzling down the front of her blouse, her legs bowing under her own weight.

"I don't think I get the joke," Dr. Worm said.

"No no, I think it's great," Eaurp's other parent, Waral Slaup, said. "Every celebrity needs a gimmick, this can be theirs!"

"Celebrity?" Dr. Worm said.

"Yeah, you know, when they become an astronaut," Waral Slaup, "and they're the first mellanoid to set foot on, I dunno, Glerbuh."

"Isn't Glerbuh made of gas?" Dr. Worm said.

"Hey Eurgus? Glerbuh, made of gas or what? Eurgus?"

Eurgus Fleud, Eaurp's other other parent, narrowed their eyes and stared at her. "I'm not sure why you feel the need to inform your parents about your gross fetish."

Eaurp stared in disbelief. "No, no, I, what?"

Slamtha shot up. "It's NOT a joke, and it's NOT a mucking fetish!"

Eurgus shot up. Waral reached up to try to hold them back.

"I don't wanna hear another word from you. If I had my way you and Eaurp would never have seen eachother again after I found out what you were."

Eaurp ran out of the room. Waral and Dr. Worm ran after her.

"It was all you!" Eurgus shouted, "corrupted! Corrupted by these, these, these FEDERATION values. I knew you were no good. When you were kids I thought oh well, just playing pretend as an animal. I should have KNOWN."

"Hey! This isn't all on me!" Slamtha said.

"You gunking xenos ruin everything. Not even my children are safe from your disease!"

"Fuck you! Fuck off! This is not a disease! This is who I am. And it's who your daughter is too!"

"MELLANOIDS DON'T HAVE DAUGHTERS! ANIMALS DO!" Eurgus screamed.

"Call me an animal again! I swear to the globs!"

"Oh! You wanna go?"

Eurgus started to step forward, when the astronomy club member, still sitting down, put their hand up. "Fleud. Please."

"This doesn't concern you, Jenry!"

"Slapping the slime out of eachother isn't gonna solve anything," Jenry said.

"I want my child back," Eurgus said.

"Well too bad," Slamtha said. "My parent doesn't own me, no matter how hard they try, and you three don't own Eaurp either. And now that we're grown, you can't control us so easily."

"You did this to them. You fix it."

"I did not do this to her. I helped her do this to herself. Because she wanted to. Because this is a free planet."

"Federation bootlicker," Eurgus said.

"I've heard that 'insult' my whole life. Well, maybe the Federation is bad, or maybe it's not. But I was miserable before I found out about women, and Eaurp was miserable before she decided she was one too."

"They seem pretty miserable as it is!"

"And why shouldn't they be, with how we all treated them!" Jenry said.

"Jenry, I'm giving you an F on your next intern report," Eurgus said, "If you don't shut up."

"Fine. I'm going to go apologize. Uzgoel, please help me," Jenry said.

"Unbelievable," Eurgus said, to themself in the now empty room. "I knew it. I KNEW it. I knew if I wasn't careful, that yellow stain was gonna turn my babyguz xeno." -----

Without Slamtha there with her, Eaurp Guz sometimes felt that she had stagnated in her gender experimentation. Oh yes, she had trained her body into a soft, curvy figure, her hair voluminous and styled, and now she actually cared to have her clothing fitted to her body properly rather than loosely hanging on her, but since leaving Mellanus she'd spent most of her time in various Starfleet uniforms.

Well, at least there was still some room for experimentation.

Guz looked around to be sure no one was there, then faced the replicator.

"Computer. Engineering skant, fitted to specification Guz-Alpha-Nine, short skirt, duty version."

The replicator whirred, and then Guz pulled out a minidress version of the uniform she was presently wearing, and took it away to the privacy of her bunk.

Springs couldn't abide things being out of order. It vexed the doll.

I am an ecstatic mystery! Furtive, fast, feline! The epitome of grace, the hunter with no equal! I arrive, I take, I am gone.

Please ignore the residue. Or if you focus on it, at least ignore that mis-aimed jump…

@relia-robot made a set of daily prompts for slime stories for september, which I started doing and then my motivation swiftly dropped off a cliff when Cohost was announced to be shutting down at the end of the month. Still, got two done!

This away mission to the airless moon of Beta Gamma AdIV had turned south rapidly. The colonists had taken deep offense to nearly everything that the landing party did. The final straw was when Lt. J.G. D'vana Tendi and Lt. J.G. Eaurp Guz were found holding hands while taking readings of the colony's aging life support system. That was "completely inappropriate and unacceptable." Guz had pulled her hand back, ashamed, and Tendi tried apologizing, but she got what she was apologizing for wrong, and that enraged the colonist even more.

Well, things on the colony were clearly a lot less stable than the first contact team had indicated, and a riot broke out in the tight compact space over whether the orion woman and the mellanoid slimegirl had been acting inappropriately or not.

Lt. J.G. Sam Rutherford pushed between brawling colonists, expertly dodging punches and kicks and lunges to try and reach Tendi and Guz. Lt. J.G. Beckett Mariner was taking a more direct approach, double-hand-punching and all, and Lt. J.G. Brad Boimler was trying his best to calm the situation--"now now, let's all settle down and talk about this like civilized--" before he got punched out. Mariner was then torn between trying to help out Guz and Tendi and saving Boimler from being trampled.

"I got them!" Rutherford shouted, and Mariner nodded, and scooped up Boimler to try and drag him to safety.

Mariner tried her combadge, and eventually made contact. But between being a half mile underground and the tight crowds, the Cerritos' transporter could not get a lock.

Guz and Tendi were grappled by two or three of the crowd and being brought who knows where. Guz stretched out her hands and tried to grab handholds on the wall, but she just ended up stretched too thin, and had to pull her arms back before they snapped off altogether.

They ended up shoved into a room-perhaps a prison cell? Tendi was shoved in first, and landed on her back, and then followed by Guz, who was still trying to hold onto the walls to keep from being forced in. When she finally gave up, she splattered on the floor and over Tendi's uniform, too exhausted to form a skeleton.

Finally, a brief break from the commotion.

Guz tapped her combadge. No signal.

"I'm sorry Guz, I didn't think something that small would be a problem!" Tendi said. She gently petted the top of the green slime puddle that was pooling around her.

"No, no, it's my fault," Guz said, slowly reforming her face. "I was getting overstimulated, and that's why you held my hand. If I had hid that better, then you wouldn't have held my hand, and we wouldn't be in this situation."

"Maybe I wanted to hold your h--"

"WE'RE IN AN AIRLOCK!" Guz said as she formed her eyes, and she immediately tensed up into a humanoid form and stood up.

Tendi stood up too, and looked behind her to find a hatch identical to the one she'd just been shoved through, with a small rectangular window on it. She peered out at the dark gray surface with the red ringed planet in a pitch-black sky, and she froze for a moment, and then sprung into action.

The low gravity made the backflip easier but no less impressive to Guz, and Tendi landed at the inner airlock hatch--through that window she could see they were down at the end of a long hall. Mariner and Rutherford were running towards them, but the two colonists who had grappled her and Guz were there, trying to override the airlock's safety system. She used her tricorder to scan for something--anything--a weak point in the hatch, and lever. She grabbed at the lever, but it didn't budge. The other colonist was holding it shut, and even though Tendi was a heavyworlder, that colonist was bigger and heavier than her. A test of raw strength wasn't going to do much--even though she was probably stronger. She jumped up and stepped on the lever, using all of her weight--but here she only weighed maybe 20 kilograms. She tried the lever again with her arms and just ended up lifting her feet off the ground. She looked around. There was an access panel... but Guz was already working on it.

"Guz, can you get more leverage?" Tendi said, gesturing at the inner hatch.

A red alarm started flashing.

Guz hit the mechanism she was trying to hack into in frustration. There must have been a redundant backup, because what she'd just done should have rendered the airlock nonfunctional.

Guz turned around to the other side of the airlock. There was a locker with space suits inside. Guz tore the locker hatch open and threw a space suit at Tendi.

"There's not enough time!" Tendi said.

"It's our only hope!" Guz said. She poured herself into a puddle and then into the space suit, put on the gloves, and then took the helmet.

Tendi started donning the bulky space suit. She couldn't just pour herself in, she had to quickly put on the liquid cooled garment, then Guz tried to help her with the bulkier pressure suit leggings, and then the airlock hatch started to open and--

it all happened so fast. Tendi took a deep breath--immediately regretting it, since it would mean her lungs were about to collapse. At the same moment, Guz lunged out of her own space suit and covered Tendi's face.

The rapid decompression caused Guz to bubble up. Tendi and Guz were ejected from the airlock and onto the dark gray surface. Guz was now completely covering Tendi like a puffed up balloon suit. She went tense and rubbery when she hit the ground, something Tendi had discovered some time ago was a severe pain response.

Tendi couldn't see well through the green helmet protecting her, and she was already starting to run out of breath. But she was out of the colony--maybe the Cerritos could reach them!

She stood up, and stumbled forward with uneven weight, and bunny-hopped as far away from the overhang of the lava tube, and out into the valley where an older lava tube had collapsed long ago. She reached her slime-covered hand through the slime covering her torso and tried to tap her combadge, but Guz was too rubbery and too puffed up. This was going to be it. At least they had each other.

Guz reached a shaky, rubbery tendril out of the slime that covered Tendi's chest, holding the combadge out.

Tendi took the combadge, and tapped it, and then fell to the scalding gray ground. She broke her fall with her hands, but Guz tensed up again in pain and tried to dragged her arms away from the regolith. Guz strained to pull Tendi upright onto her knees, but by now Tendi had finally lost consciousness. She had, what, 15 seconds left? 30? Guz wasn't sure how well she'd be able to fare herself, aside from vaguely a little longer.

Guz reformed her eyes, protected behind that blurry shield of dry, more rubbery gelatin that had formed at her skin. She could now see the other pieces of the space suit, which had also been ejected from the airlock.

Guz poured her body into the legs of Tendi's space suit and tried to stand, but she was losing her own strength rapidly. She stood, jumped forward in the lower gravity to the torso unit and helmet, and then fell down to the surface. Her rubbery skin started to soften back to goo, then bubble up again, and then... and then... everything got dark.

And she woke up in sickbay, in a bio-tank, surrounded by sterilized medical jelly. She formed her eyes, and then looked at herself. Her whole body was sore. Sounds were muffled. Guz formed large gills in the amorphous blob that was supposed to be her torso and took in the oxygenated substance that surrounded her. A privacy curtain surrounded her tank, thank gooness, because she didn't have her uniform. She reached a tendril out of her amorphous body to touch the LCARS touchscreen inside the tank, and call for help. The doctor stepped into the curtain.

"Welcome back, Lieutenant," Dr. T'ana said. "You're going to be just fine. You suffered decompression trauma but since you don't have any actual organs, you're already healing. You'll probably be sore for a few days, and I want to keep you under observation until you can form a skeleton again."

Guz slowly formed a mouth. Shapeshifting, even to her default form, still hurt. "Tendi?" Guz said, raggedly and muffled by the fluid surrounding her.

"You did great, Lieutenant. If you hadn't played pretend being a suit of armor, Tendi would have lost her lungs, and probably a lot more too."

"She's okay?" Guz said.

"Eh she'll be fine. She's on bedrest in her quarters. Oh, right, she wanted to see you when you were awake. Do you want to see her or what?"

Guz emitted a sound somewhere between a bark and a chirp that the universal translator was pretty sure was "YES!"

T'ana nodded and tapped her combadge. "Dr. T'ana to Lieutenant Tendi. Guz is conscious and she wants to--"

Tendi appeared in the privacy curtain before T'ana even finished her sentence, out of breath.

"Holy [bleep]ing [bleep] Tendi you scared the hell out of me. Were you just waiting outs--i told you to get some god[bleep] sleep!"

Guz's tissue oxygenation rate increased when she saw Tendi come in. Tendi looked up pityingly at the amorphous blob, and held her hand up to the tank. Guz tried to reach out, but the slime that had used to be her hand was covered in hot regolith burns, and was still crispy and gray.

"I hate seeing you like this again," Tendi said.

"Nevermind me. Are you okay?" Guz said.

"Oh me? I'm fine. I have a head-splitting headache that comes and goes and i'll need this hearing aid implant until Dr. T'ana can finish regrowing my new ears. Ooh, do you think I should ask for vulcan ears? That could be fun!" Tendi said, smiling. "Or... logical, haha," she said, narrowing her eyes and holding up finger guns.

Guz stared at Tendi, unblinking, and Tendi wasn't sure if that was just because she didn't have eyelids or because she didn't get it.

"Just, uhh, kidding," Tendi said. She coughed. "My outer ears are fine, I only need new inner ears."

"What about your lungs?"

"Dr. says they're fine, even though I held my breath. I'm supposed to go through some more training to make sure I don't do that next time I get thrown out of an airlock. I'm so lucky I had you! You saved me."

"Why not hold your breath?"

"Humanoid lungs collapse when you hold your breath in a vacuum!" Tendi said.

"That makes sense; so do mine," Guz said. She temporarily turned her amorphous gills into foamy lungs, even though it hurt to do so. "But I can make new ones," she said, and then lungs relaxed back into gills.

There was a quiet moment, and Tendi's smile dropped. "But, really though, Guz, are you okay?"

"Everything hurts. But. Small price," Guz said. "You're alive."

Tendi smiled softly, bittersweetly. "I think you make a better girlfriend than a space suit."

The goo-filled tank emitted a warbling sound which the universal translator picked up and couldn't decide between a "giggle" and "random key-smashing."

"I dunno. Forget knights in... shining armor. I can be your knight... of... shining armor... princess Tendi," Guz said.

"Then who would take care of you, my dear?" Tendi said, feigning a sense of gravitas and pomp.

"Maybe some kind of... solid metal alien?"

"Maybe we should just both wear space suits next time we go on EVA," Tendi said, giggling.

No one said anything about how BORING being a giant mass of mysterious goo in the underbelly of a half-failed Kerbal colony would be.

Kerbals are such fascinating and intriguing creatures, always finding something to bolt together haphazardly, only to reveal at the last minute that they were explosive bolts, or that they had used fireworks as structural beams (accidentally on purpose, no doubt!). That's why you wanted to go on that exploration ship full of them. Well, them and the other colorful little aliens they had invited along.

But Kerbals have a problem with safety culture, and no matter how competently engineered their component design is, they always seem to muck something up, eventually, and so at the tail end of the five year exploration mission, of course they ended up crashed on a barely habitable hell world.

They call it Armstrong. A reference to an early aeronautical explorer who discovered that below a certain atmospheric pressure, Kerbal blood at body temperature actually boils. It just so happens that your body also boils at that point. And you'll just never believe what the atmospheric pressure of Armstrong is.

(These days, the astronomers make reports of other planets in the system with thicker atmospheres, maybe even ones that could natively allow for respiration, and you wish you had a head to slam into a wall.)

All the other Kerbaloid aliens had found their niches within the society that eventually cropped up, but you were just. Lonely. You had gotten big and strong. You had decided to be your own Great Goo Mass. You would surpass even the goo world you originated on. You would become the Greater Goo Mass.

But you realized, after a millenia, that just growing bigger wasn't enough. The diversity of thought and opinion that flowed throughout you when you were in the Great Goo Mass was astounding, completing, magnificent, and you were just a stagnant puddle by comparison.

The Kerbals (and Parbles and Klingbals and Kerbolians and Marbals and Eurydites and Mesbinites and--) of Armstrong would come to you for advice and wisdom and truth. You are effortlessly intelligent of course and, having been around now for longer than any Kerbal alive on Armstrong, you were able to settle a fair few disputes. You began anticipating when the Kerbals would visit you. You're not proud to say you may have even caused some minor emergencies just so that they would come back asking for help.

(not that Kerbals need help creating minor emergencies. It's just that they usually have a pretty good idea of how to fix things for themselves by iteration)

You couldn't keep going on like this. So you thought, if the Kerbaloid form--a large rounded cylindrical head with a small bean-bag belly and short, stumpy legs--worked for so many aliens... maybe it would work for you.

You reached a tendril of mysterious goo out of the goo mass. When it was, oh, perhaps 0.045t mass, you pinched the tendril off. You stared at it, until, at last, it took the shape you had intended for it.

"Who am I?" You--that is, the other you--said.

"You're a Goobal. Go up to the surface settlements. Learn from them. When you are ready, return to me."

You were impatient. This was to be a trial run. But when the Goobal did not come back, you got worried. That was a part of you. And you just... threw it out into the danger of a Kerbal colony on a hellworld where it could boil alive?

You made three more goobals, and told them that they should find the other one.

They nodded, and you hoped they understood, and then with a pang of guilt you added, "but don't forget to enjoy life!"

The first goobal came back. There were three others with them. Finally, your pieces had returned. But in the dim light of your network, you hadn't parsed at first what you were really looking at. The goobal was with two Kerbals and a Parbal, not in fact the other three goobals.

"See?" You said--the other you--the... It. It said.

"This is where you came from?" said a Kerbal.

"It's the greater goo mass. This all makes sense now," the Parbal said, gravely.

"I didn't mean you harm, I swear it!" the other you said.

"We know sweetheart, we know. And now we can tell everyone!" said the first Kerbal.

"Hey do you think your mom or whatever would let us like. Take a swim?" the second Kerbal said.

"Billbobfred!" scolded the first Kerbal, "don't be rude!"

"Don't let's play pretend at being a boat. We're trying to start a space program! It would be improper!" said the Parbal.

Space... program?

Your mind conjured up images of starships powered by fusion bombs, solid rocket boosters falling apart in a massive explosion, precision-engineered spaceplanes gracefully entering the atmosphere, convoluted grand tour missions bolted together with struts, space stations, planetary colonies, and entire spacecraft/launch vehicles massing only a couple of tonnes taking long winding gravity-assisted paths to get to their destination.

Kerbal engineering at by far and away its most distilled form. Terrible, awesome, excellent, and haphazard.

After all this time, would Armstrong's peoples finally reach towards space again?

Well. They'll need your help to get off the ground.

...

You had been to space many times by now. You had made little automata from your mass, knowing full well they'd never come back and rejoin you. But those automata had already returned the first up close pictures of the moons Buzz and Desmet, of gas giant planet Zhandar, and of some of the Arriprit Belt's minor planets. Your automata needed no electricity, just sunlight--which Armstrong's three suns provided in excess--and were far more compact than electronic computers.

Even when they had invented compact electronic computers that could control space probes, you went to space for science, testing the habitability of far off places. It's harder to kill you than a Kerbal, after all. These sentient but not sapient offshoots of your mass were designed--by you--to help Kerbals best understand the habitability of the worlds they would intend to visit. But of course, these probes were one-way tickets, even though recovering them and allowing you to interpret their experiences would have been vastly more scientifically useful.

And of course you were many, working with the Kerbals as engineers and scientists and administrators, because the United Armstrong Space Probe Administration couldn't get enough of you!

But now you were going to space for the first time in a millennia, and you were going to really feel it. Because this time you would be sapient, and you would get to come back.

Your Kerbaloid form fit perfectly in the space suit, one that had been slightly modified to account for your different respiratory system. You watched on the television as you... as it... as she boarded the spacecraft. It was a great big winged spacecraft, taking advantage of what little air Armstrong had to help slow it down, mounted atop a tall, broad booster rocket with many engines, necessary to fight Armstrong's punishing gravity. It had already flown once, and sure, it had fallen apart a little when it landed, but the engineers assured you that it was well within tolerances for crew survivability.

Not that, at this point, you could have convinced your other self that she should not go, not after all the work she put in. She didn't just look like a Kerbal, at this point.

You watched, fear pulsing through you like tidal waves, as one, then two, then four of the rocket motors failed. But there were so many that the rocket just kept rising. At stage separation, the lower stage disintegrated altogether. The upper stage had many engines as well. The television feed cut out as the rocket went over the horizon, but the telemetry would keep coming at least until after they went over the scorched Pyri-facing side.

It was a harrowing few days. Your other selves would visit you sometimes and tell you the news, the mission milestones, etc. You hadn't been this terrified in a millennia.

One morning, the dim light of the Ilio suns poured into your realm. It was you! Her. Sorry. Her. It was her.

She was grinning madly, and she jumped into you, shouting "cannonball!"

As she dissolved into you and you took in her thoughts and experiences, you realized how different you and her really were. You couldn't imagine wanting to go back into space after a harrowing experience like that.

You were not you anymore.

You glowed, shining in pink and yellow and green tones, and your other self giggled.

You both laughed. You were not alone anymore.

The other goobal pulled herself out of you and went to catch the train back to the space center.

She was one hell of a good trial run.

Eventually you lost yourself. You split yourself thin, becoming so many different kinds of people. But you wouldn't have had it any other way.

Eventually that first goobal didn't come back. It was tragic, but such is the plight of Kerbal Spaceflight.

But you--all of you--will remember her.

Erica rolled over as the morning sun hit her face. She expected to sink blissfully back into her goolfriend, but instead hit a hard, rubbery outer shell. She sleepily protested as she levered her eyes open to took at Gleria. "Baaaabe..."

"Sorry, Love," said Gleria, whose phone was currently floating inside her charcoal-tinted spherical mass and texting furiously. "Bad news from work, gotta respond." She stretched out of bed and extended a handful of pseudopods to skitter upstairs to her office, still writing the response of per my last email.

Erica blinked from the waterproof bed as her goolfriend vanished. "I'll make breakfast for us, okay?" she called.

Eaurp held up the bright yellow disk cassette with one hand and shook their other hand until their fingers threatened to fling off. They emitted a high pitched whine, and a hissing sound, in addition to the sounds of wobbling jello from their shaking body.

"What is it?" Slamtha said.

"ITS! MY VERY OWN COPY!!!" They said, still vibrating with an intensity that never failed to amaze her.

"Of..." Slamtha said.

"Whuh? Oh! I told you about it!" Eaurp said. "During History class?"

"Oh right. Starship simulator?"

"SHUTTLECRAFT SIMULATOR!" Eaurp said. "Come on! Let's get to a library computer!"

"Oh... I dunno," Slamtha said. "I'm not sure I'd be very good at it."

"Oh pleeeease Slamtha? I'll go clothes shopping with you even though thinking about clothes for too long makes me want to dessicate!"

"Hmm. Alr--"

"Come on! It'll be fun!" Eaurp said, grabbing and tugging Slamtha's hand so hard they almost melded together.

Slamtha laughed. "Ok, ok, fine, let's go."

At the library, Eaurp plugged the disk cassette into the disk drive, and opened up their account on the desk terminal. Slamtha scooted up next to Eaurp with a laptop terminal in hand.

"I got to try this before, at the Starfleet booth at the job fair. Apparently they don't even distribute these for personal use, I had to write a letter to Starfleet's public relations department, and then I had to use the disk burner in the computer science lab."

"Oh, why didn't we just go play in the computer lab?" Slamtha said.

"They're running on like 15 year old mainframes. I think it might still work, but only if I set the computer up as a single partition. And I don't want to get kicked out."

After the disk drive lit up green, Eaurp grinned at Slamtha, who stared back with a neutral gaze.

The menu loaded in as a faux-LCARS display. Eaurp had already been through the training level on a Type-9, so they skipped it and went right for the Class-F, the vintage shuttlecraft that they used to use on the original Enterprise.

There was a barebones character select function, since they were in multiplayer. Slamtha chose a generic human woman. Eaurp figured they may as well do the same. The session began, and Eaurp walked their character around the shuttle, taking in its details. The graphics were so realistic, they must have been based on original schematics to look this good.

The mission was simple--land the Class-F on the M-class planet in a storm, drop off supplies, then take off and return to orbit.

Slamtha and Eaurp's characters sat down. Eaurp leaned over Slamtha's console, pointing out all of the individual displays and controls. Eaurp sat to Slamtha's left, so they couldn't see her frown.

"I... don't think I'm cut out for this," Slamtha said.

"Oh come on, you haven't even tried it yet," Eaurp said.

"Ok, well, don't say I didn't warn you."

Eaurp flicked the internal power switch, then used the communicator item to call for the airlock doors to be opened, and then engaged the antigrav tractor-pressor, and slowly rose the shuttlecraft off of the hangar deck. Eaurp looked around, scanning for the manuevering thrusters. She flicked a switch, and the simulated computer made a satisfying clickit-a-clickit-a sound. She pressed the arrow keys on her keyboard and the translation joystick on the shuttle moved forward.

"As soon as we get out of the shuttlebay, we'll be outside of the Constitution's inertial dampeners. Be prepared to keep us pitched right. Crossing through space doors in three... two... one..."

"Ah!" Slamtha shouted, as the stars suddenly lurched and spun.

"Woah! Woah!" Eaurp said. "Turn on auto-inertial dampeners!"

Slamtha frantically looked across the simulated console and the keybind popups and grimaced. She settled on hitting the spacebar. Both character's views got thrown back into the seat as the impulse engine was activated. From there, it all happened fast. The game lagged a few frames, then the warp nacelle got larger and larger, and then the shuttlecraft clipped into the nacelle. The shuttle shook and vibrated violently as horrible collision sound effects overlapped.

"Woah, look!" Eaurp said, switching to the external camera. The shuttlecraft was clipping through the great big cylindrical warp nacelle, with the impulse engine still firing. "They simulated the reaction control system on the Constitution!" Manuevering thrusters shot bursts of gas from the ends of the Consitution's warp nacelles, from behind the covered grates, fighting the impulse engine exhaust from the shuttle.

"WHAT DID I DO?" Slamtha shouted.

"Haha! I think you mixed up the stabilizer key and the impulse engine ignition, right at the same time that I mixed up the ventral translation key with the throttle keys!" Eaurp said.

"So... it wasn't my fault?" Slamtha said.

"It's both of our faults!" Eaurp said.

"Oh. Hah. Hahaha!" Slamtha said. "Ahaha. I thought... nevermind."

"What?" Eaurp said.

"I... I dunno. I was nervous because I knew you'd be so much better, but, ahah, we both just really suck at this!" Slamtha said.

"Let's go back to the tutorial level and try again!" Eaurp said. "The LCARS layout of the Type-2 is a lot simpler, and they do a pretty good job of simulating it here!"

"Ok, ok."

5 years later

Tears and melted sclerae rolled down Slamtha's cheeks, dripping onto the command console. She was pretty sure she still remembered how this thing worked.

Why had Eaurp left her. Why had Slamtha's kin turned their backs on her. Why had everything fallen apart so quickly. Things were finally good. They were finally good. She was a glob-dam astronaut candidate for the United Mellanus Space Program. She was going to get to do archaeology on another planet!

But! She tore it all apart! This little psychological episode was gonna make sure she'd never see the inside of another spacecraft again. So she'd better make this one count.

Slamtha sobbed, barely able to see the LCARS display and the front window. She saw the mellanoid space program safety officers running back to the shuttle. Now or never. She tapped the impulse engine control and the engine ignited. The shuttlecraft slid on its nacelles like skids, until she pressed her fingers to the steering widget, just barely managing to pitch up in time to avoid hitting the wall at the edge of the spaceport.

Ascent to orbit usually only took a few minutes, but Slamtha had other plans. She tilted straight up, climbing in a straight line path out of the atmosphere, rocketing ever higher and faster. She wiped her eyes clean and tried to reform them, and got one last look at the planet below.

"Alright," sniffled Slamtha, "which one of these is the warp engine?"

Slamtha swiped up on the main control panel and then found a promising looking button, then tapped it. The rescue shuttle jumped to warp, aiming no particular direction except for far, far away.

Slowly, Slamtha's cardiovasculature calmed down, and her skin softened, and she thought about what had just happened. Then she started crying all over again. What had she done. Maybe... maybe if she just turned back now and explained what she had been through, then... no. She'd just stolen one of the only warp capable ships on Mellanus, and taken it on a joyride. She'd never be able to go back. What was she going to do? Set a course for San Francisco and run into Eaurp? Slamtha didn't even know what star Earth orbited. Maybe the LCARS in the shuttle did.

She didn't want to see Eaurp again. That backstabbing good-for-nothing so-called "friend" who abandoned her just because she couldn't handle a fraction of the transphobia that Slamtha had to put up with her whole life.

She had her own ship. She could go anywhere. She could go places that didn't care if you were a woman or not. She could find some... alien university, maybe? And finish her archaeology internship somehow? But... but... no, no, none of this makes sense. Eaurp got to escape! Why couldn't she escape? Why couldn't she--a red alarm flashed on the screen, indicating a ship was approaching. They were hailing her.

"Fuck." Slamtha said. "It's probably the Feds come to arrest me. Ok, ok, act natur--"

The ship shook violently as a bright green light fired at her.

The display panel read "shields down."

A green tractor beam locked on. Slamtha tilted her head to look up above her. That wasn't a Federation ship. It was huge, dark green and orange, winged, with glowing red spikes coming out of the hull.

"Computer, identify?" Slamtha said, her voice shaky.

Vessel is a heavily modified Orion Class-II freighter. Klingon derived engines and type-V disruptor strips.

"That doesn't sound like a freighter."