Humans are Weird – Too Much To Drink
Twistunder shuffled down the dry human corridor, his appendage ends dragging uncomfortably against the absorbent material that added so much unnecessary friction to every movement.
“This is an honor,” he reminded himself firmly, as an intense itch started spreading up one particular lagging appendage.
The corridor stretched before him in all of its very human length. The distance he had to cover from his assigned room, a cavernous space with a massive raised slab of a resting place, and his goal was well lit. Crystals crafted with artistic angles were set in the walls just above his dorsal surface. They cast a warm red light over the irritating surface. Twistunder was vaguely aware that the red color served some important, practical function to the humans during their nocturnal cycle, but he really couldn’t address the thoughts that wanted to branch off from there.
He was halfway to his goal when the floor gave a violent vibration followed by a series of thumps that indicated a human had floundered out of bed somewhere ahead of him. Though it was hard to tell thorough his desiccated appendages. Twistunder felt a rippled of unease at that which he couldn’t quite explain. The thumping resolved into the steady beat of feet and Human Friend Maribel threw open her door and staggered, quite literally staggered out of her room into the hall. She struck the far wall with a shoulder, paused to give a massive yawn and then used one arm to push off the wall.
Twitstunder, like most of his species, boasted very little predictive spatial reasoning, especially when it came to vectors at a distance. However the size of the giant mammal, the social implications of entering someone else’s assigned rest quarters, and the strict binary choice of direction the corridor presented narrowed down Human Friend Maribel’s vector choices quite effectively to one direction. It was with a drying feeling that Twistunder watched her pause in front of the watercloset door and then disappear into his destination. The door closed with a vibration that he felt even through the itchingly abrasive, cursedly absorbent, and frustratingly insulating floor covering.
Twistunder kept on moving but his raised appendages wavered as he pondered going to a water source on another floor. The stairs had not seemed impassible this morning when he, hydrated and rested, had insisted on scrambling up them himself rather than being carried. Then the friction offered by the floor covering had been welcome. However he knew that there was no way to calculate the time Human Friend Maribel would be in the watercloset against the effort he would have to make to reach another source of water. He kept on towards his original goal. By the time he reached the watercloset door his appendages were itching madly. He made an effort to scratch with his roughened gripping appendages but that did little good. Tempting moisture drifted out from under the door, he was so dehydrated that even the over sterile human water seemed divine. He stood, bracing himself against the less irritating surface of the wall and lifted as many appendages as he could off the floor. The moments stretched on, each seemingly as long as the red lit corridor. Until finally the door burst open and Human Friend Maribel stumbled out.
Twistunder felt himself scooped up on the dorsal surface of Human Friend Maribel’s foot, experienced a truly disorientating sensation of floating in the thin air, then slammed into the far wall. His appendages instinctively clung to the surface, but in their dehydrated state they had little purchase and he slid slowly down the surface. Human Friend Maribel meanwhile had produced a rather impressive sound, too short to be a scream, to high-pitched to be a shout, and certainly too incoherent to be a word. This was followed by a gasp and a few frantic breaths as she stared down at him.
“Twist?” she demanded. “Oh good heavens! I are you okay? What a stupid question I just kicked you into the-”
“Fine!” Twistunder said.
He cringed at how hollow and toneless the word was, but it was the best he could manage in his dehydrated state.
“Not injured!” he assured her as he shuffled towards the door.
What was the human word for needing water?
“Thirsty!” he rolled out.
“Oh!” Human Friend Maribel exclaimed, her eyes suddenly glowing brightly.
Before Twistunder could react she had bent down and scooped him up into her arms. In a moment he found himself deposited into the smooth coolness of the massive human bathing and soaking pool.
“Wow,” Human Friend Maribel commented. “You skin is all dry and stiff! Do you need warm water or cold water?”
Twistunder lifted himself up and hummed the instructions at the control panel. Instantly lovely warm water began to flow down the sides of the pool and he spread himself against the surface as he waited for the reservoir to fill.
“You got this,” Human Friend Maribel stated with relief as she bent her limbs into a rest position on the side of the tub.
She watched him without speaking for awhile as he swam in the water. Shortly the blessed relief that made the water delicious faded into the rather less pleasant awareness that it was sterile and tasteless. Twistunder swam to the surface to satisfy his curiosity.
“What are you doing about at this hour Human Friend Maribel?” He asked.
“I kinda think the opposite of what you are doing,” she said with a smile. “I drank too much water before bed and my internal organs woke me up yelling that I had to get here or they were going to hydrate my mattress for me.”
Twistunder felt an amused ripple at the irony but couldn’t quite manage a chuckle sound at the moment.
“Do you mind me asking what’s wrong with your personal water tank?” Human Friend Maribel asked glancing to the side with a frown, as if she could see into his room from this distance.
“My water was contaminated earlier in the day,” Twistunder stated. “Some crumbs from dinner fell in and the taste was strange so I drained my tank. I meant to refill it after dinner but I put it off do work on a report I am submitting. When I went to fill it I discovered the tap in my room wasn’t working.”
Human Friend Maribel gave a distressed sound.
“The leak in the north wall,” she muttered. “Had to shut those pipes off at the valve. Pa must not have gotten them fixed by now.”
“I suspected as much,” Twistunder said. “By then most of the house was asleep so I simply decided to make my way here and rehydrate.”
“Why didn’t you just ride your tank here in the first place?” Human Friend Maribel asked. “You could have filled it up and taken it back. Is the float base glitching?”
“I did not think of that until the length of the corridor set in,” Twistunder admitted. “Human Friend Jeb will be awake to repair the issue in a few hours and once I am fully hydrated I will be more than comfortable until then simply resting in my tank. Why did you not void your fluid storage organs before you entered your sleep state?”
Human Friend Maribel snorted at that.
“Fair enough,” she replied as she stood to her full height.
“That was not a rhetorical question,” Twistunder said hurriedly, sensing she was about to conclude the social interaction.
She blinked down at him and her face wrinkled thoughtfully.
“I just got distracted I guess,” she admitted, shrugging her shoulders up and down in a dismissive gesture. “Like you said, reports to do and then the bed was right there and I was proper tired. You sure I didn’t hurt you when I kicked you across the hall?”
“I am entirely uninjured,” he replied, wriggling in demonstration.
“You have fun hydrating then,” she said.
Please go and leave a new rating and review on my 3rd book!
Amazon!
Barnes & Noble
Powell's Books
Google Play Books
Kobo By Rakuten
What does it mean when your human friend says “Watch This?”? Why does this simple phrase seem to terrify any alien that has first appendage experience with humans? #HFY #HumansAreWeird #HumansAreSpaceOrcs #EarthIsADeathWorld #EarthIsSpaceAustralia
Hey! The books are moving well on Amazon and now have 300 reviews and ratings! If you bought the book and enjoyed it, it would really help me out if you leave a quick star rating on Amazon. A review would be great but just stars would be a huge boost *****!
QUICK NOTE: RE: everyone who asked. The book is avaliable in Amazon regions US-UK-DE-FR-ES-IT-NL-JP-BR-CA-MX-AU-IN. HOWEVER The above link only takes you to the US Amazon site. The one indicated by the .com ending. If it says "not avaliable in your country" that just means that you need to click over to your Amazon region.
Of course if you want a signed first edition you can email me at the email on my website and I can ship you a signed Author copy of the first edition until I run out of first run books.
AMAZON