A Librarian with a Master’s and No Place To Go

I like that outfit on him; he looks like a dad at a family barbecue

Imagine, after decades of your world becoming colder and colder, you are saved. A single Eridian, the only one of twenty three to survive, arrives in an alien ship, accompanied by a creature you can barely conceive.

Everything about the alien is so loud, hinges formed from tissue thumping and stretching in constant movement, even while unconscious. Completely organic, reliant of oxygen and hydrogen. Instead of a protective carapace, it regrows its damaged tissues. It has senses you do not, and technology so unlike your own, both able to utilise a force you have never heard of. The same force that killed almost your entire mission team. Highly adaptable, able to teach itself how to fly its ship in under a week, able to become fluent in the engineer's dialect in less than four years.

And if Erid's best engineer is correct (and there's no reason it wouldn't be), this creature not only managed to breed a predator of the warmth-taker to survive in various atmospheres, including Threeworld's, but also turned around to provide aid when it discovered that the predator could escape xenonite.

And you think: Surely, this creature which protects itself without a carapace, which sleeps so lightly and knows so much and learns so quickly, which saved two planets at the cost of ever returning to its thrum, surely, a creature so extraordinary must have a name to match

And you think: Perhaps it is strength, Mountain-Base or Lonsdaleite-Carapace. Perhaps it is intellect, Diamond-Claw or Lockpick-Mind. Perhaps it is courage, Song-Through-Silence or Path-Carver

And you think: None of these names hold the true weight of what this creature is to them. How do you describe something like that, which aids without expectation of anything in return, which risks its own life for the sake of a species it cannot touch, which performs miracles simply because it was asked.

humans are the moms

compared to other species on earth, humans have a really outsized "protect baby" instinct. you give a human a thing and tell them it's actually a baby thing and many humans will suddenly develop a complete and total aversion to harming it, even if it's like, a writhing mass of slimy tentacles in no way reminiscent of human infants

cats domesticated us by figuring out that they could leave their kittens with us when they went out hunting and come back and probably still have the same number as before they left. there is a decent chance that wolves did the same thing

word gets around the less parenting-inclined species and they're just like, are you doing a long haul space voyage? going to have to lay some eggs in the course of the trip? take a few humans with you. yeah they'll just start training the young and keeping from them climbing into the machinery themselves you don't even have to find specialists. I know a guy who budded unexpectedly on a freight hauler halfway through a four year trip, and not only did the humans not eat his spawn, they set up this thing called "babysitting" where they'd take turns monitoring its survival and helping to teach it basic skills

I rarely see them and if I do it's only one at a time, but their names are Radish and Turnip anyway xD

I NEED MORE PICTURES PLEEEEASE.

Here it is again. You might want to save it just in case an accident like that happens again

 ˙⋆✮ Succeeding and immediately wondering if it was enough or just the minimum expected

˙⋆✮ The praise that came with conditions so embedded they felt like personality

˙⋆✮ Being held up as the example and quietly hating everyone it was held over

˙⋆✮ Achieving something huge and feeling nothing where the feeling was supposed to be

˙⋆✮ The performance of okayness so practiced it became indistinguishable from actual okayness

˙⋆✮ Never being allowed to be the one who needed something for once

˙⋆✮ The sibling dynamic that was never chosen and never fully escaped

˙⋆✮ Internalizing standards so high they became the ceiling and the floor simultaneously

˙⋆✮ Being told they made everything look easy and never admitting how hard the looking easy was

˙⋆✮ The fear of a single failure dismantling an identity built on never failing

˙⋆✮ Helping everyone else because being needed felt safer than being known

˙⋆✮ The version of themselves that existed before they learned what was expected and lost the instructions back

˙⋆✮ Receiving love that felt like a performance review and learning to prefer it to nothing

˙⋆✮ Never throwing tantrums because they learned early that being difficult had consequences

˙⋆✮ The exhaustion of being the responsible one before they were old enough to be responsible for themselves

˙⋆✮ Secretly envying the one who got to be the mess because the mess got held differently

˙⋆✮ Being proud of themselves for exactly one moment before moving to the next thing required

˙⋆✮ The therapist's office where they first said out loud that they were tired and meant it about decades

˙⋆✮ Realizing the validation they were given was never actually about them