Humans are Weird – Peeling
 
Thank you all so much for your updoots and feedback. It gives me the will to go on. Want to see more? Think about becoming a Patreon. Tea refuses to buy itself and the more time one has to spend on a day job the less time there is for befuddled aliens.
 
 
Second Sister dipped her proboscis into the warm infusion and gave a contented flutter of her neck frill. She flexed her four legs one after the other and eased down onto the warm stone that marked the end of the cultivated area. She did truly love her work. But every year that passed the call of home colony got stronger. She was rapidly approaching full sexual maturity and First Sister was dropping increasingly blunt hints when she contacted her. That last message about the ‘stunningly beautiful First Brother’ of the next colony over had almost been an order. And family duties aside, five years time spent dealing with the madness the humans caused was quite enough civil service to satisfy even the strictest interpretations of the Mother Song.


Second Sister took another lap of the infusion and lightly caressed her badge of office. Being a xeno-psycologist was a trial at any time of life but when one’s hormones were screaming for a mate and offspring…well as First Sister had so pointedly reminded her, the gardens back home were far too large for one male to manage alone and the newly minted First Father really did need a companion. Fetching one home for him was a social duty every bit as much as riveting their place in the larger intra-galactic community was.  


Her musings were interrupted by an alert that made her frill snap up with surprise and confusion. It was one she only heard rarely and she scrambled to snatch up her comm without spilling the infusion. She licked her eyes rapidly and her antenna flicked in consternation. Emergency  psychiatry meetings  were not something she had even fathomed existing before she began working off world, but they did in fact exist as prolonged exposure to humans had taught her.

“Second Sister,” she announced into the comm after taking a moment to force her voice down into the universal tones.


“Thank the Mother Song!” chattered a voice that was not so modulated at all. “You will not believe what I just saw one of the humans-“


“Please meet me in the private consulting room,” Second Sister said putting as much sternness into her tone as she could.


The voice on the other end continued to chitter and she stood and began striding briskly towards the point of origin as indicated by the comm display. She almost envied the amount of emotion other species could put into their purely audio speech. Even vid comms didn’t properly convey body language. For instance, she rounded the corner on the blathering Shatar who had contacted her and arched to her full height, flaring her rather large frill, and extending her antenna straight up.


The caller, a Fourteenth Sister from a  mechanical colony immediately dropped into a submissive position and her trembling tactically calmed.


“Now,” Second Sister said, curling her antenna tightly in firmness, “please come into my consulting room immediately.”


Fourteenth Sister meekly proceeded her into the alcove and eased into a seat. Second Sister followed her and composed her own kinesthetics  into a broadcast of sympathetic attention as she had been taught. Within she was rather exasperated with the display. Even a teen sibling should have better control than this. Whatever was the inciting incident she hopped her own Fourteenth Sister would be calmer in such a situation.


“It was a human!” this Fourteenth Sister finally blurted out her collar flaring in distress. “He was peeling off his skin!”


Second Sister started in amazement.


“Did you report this to the proper medical personnel?” she demanded, revising her opinion of the other Shatar’s mental state.


“I did! I did!” Fourteenth Sister went on, her antenna rubbing spasmodically in a cleaning gesture. “Of course I did! He fussed at me for being overly dramatic but-“


Second Sister silenced her with a raised hand.


“Is the human in question receiving proper medical care?” she asked.


“Yes, yes,” Fourteenth Sister said.


“Then please start at the beginning of your story,” Second Sister ordered. “We are here for your sake, not his.”


“Yes, I was,” Fourteenth Sister began. “I was gathering up the sample of the detritus in the outer airlock as part of the grist survey. One of the humans came in, Second Field Ranger, I think I mean Ranger Mihata?”


“That is how they prefer to be addressed,” Second Sister agreed.


“Well Ranger Mihata entered and cleaned his, those foot armor they call boots,” Fourteenth Sister went on, “cleaned his boots in the required way and before he put on his base foot coverings sat down on the bench and twisted his limb up in that perfectly awful position they do when they want to examine their, what do you call them…”


“Soles of their feet,” Second Sister offered.


“Yes,” Fourteenth Sister flared out her neck frill.


 “Why can’t they just be normal and look over their shoulders like we do?” she demanded. “I know they can. I’ve seen humans do that!”


“What did he do then?” Second Sister pressed.


“He looked at the soles of his feet and then,” Fourteenth Sister twitched from talon to antenna tip for a moment before she went on. “He gave a grunt, I think of dissatisfaction from the way his fleshy face was all contorted. Then he reached down and grabbed a loose flap of flesh-“


“Humans don’t have loose flaps of flesh on the soles of their feet!” Second Sister interjected with rising horror.


“Not when healthy,” Fourteenth Sister replied. “Anyway he grabbed it and pulled.”


Second Sister began twitching herself at that mental image.


“He pulled and pulled until a strip of pale dead skin as long as my talon came off and fell to the floor of the airlock,” Fourteenth Sister went on with a set of horrified fascination to her antenna. “I must have made some noise because he glanced over at me and grinned. He assured me that he was just sloughing dead skin cells but those strips were nearly half a mil thick! Then -”


Fourteenth Sister gave a near convulsive twitch.


“Then he pulled at another and he bleed when it detached!” She burst out. “I clicked my distress and summoned the emergency medical techs. He yelled at me as I left that I was being nonsensical but-“ she gave another full body twitch and held still.

​
Second Sister, by an almighty act of will held herself in a calming position and began the usually soothing formula she had developed for this situation. However her true focus was far from the work she was doing. Yes, that First Brother the next colony over was looking mighty good. 

Humans are Weird IRL - Gaining Access 

Me in my best Ranger Voice: It really is a fascinating question. As a scientist I am bound to precise accuracy, but one must bow to common usage in many ways. I had quite the row with a co-worker this morning when she very pointedly said she was accessing the internet. Now I know she knows better but just to be sure I described the traditional use of access as a noun and how using it as a verb was a perversion of the late twentieth century. All this did was inspire her to make direct eye contact with me before stating that she was accessing the internet.  I calmly but firmly replied that she was gaining access. 

Glassy Eyed Tourist: But..I just asked what you were doing out here on the roadside in the snow....

Me: Oh, well that was when my boss kicked me out of the office. 

Thank you all so much for your updoots and feedback. It gives me the will to go on. Want to see more? Think about becoming a Patreon.  Tea refuses to buy itself and the more time one has to spend on a day job the less time there is for befuddled aliens. 


Humans are Weird – Call and Response


For one blessed day the shared data processing space on the integrated base had been calm, quiet, and in general an efficient work zone. The room was a massive dome to accommodate the bipedal members of the survey teams. Four gently murmuring streams divided the workspace into quarters that circled the central ponds. The ceiling was a network of exposed struts that contained and concealed the Winged’s offices. Certain patches, equidistant from the water, glowed comfortingly in the infrared spectrum.
It was on one of these that Observer Grisssk lounged. The warming stone might have been clawed specifically for him for how comfortable it was. His claws tapped lightly over the screen as he entered the rough data for the final observation he had taken. He still had to write a report for each of the bare-bones datasets, but at last, the neigh impossible task seemed manageable.
“It’s not easy being an Observer,” he growled to himself.
He took pains to pitch his voice to low for any of his colleagues to hear. He was no grumbling hatchling who needed a nice rub over his eyeridges to calm down. Given the humans were exceptionally good at that sort of thing but these were working hours and he had a professional reputation to maintain. Still one did need to vent their gasses before they turned to flame. His tongue flicked over the points of his teeth as he closed the file and leisurely stretched his tail.
Being an Observer on a base that contained seven separate species, living and working together was very trying. Every time he saw what he suspected to be a previously undescribed behavior he had to note it down. Hopefully one of the cracked-skulls at the University would be able to make a proper scientific study off of his notes.  He ran a critical yellow eye over the busily working researchers. To his immense relief he noted nothing that he had not noted before.
He pulled out his datapad scored for continuing observations and rested it comfortably under one claw. There was the Winged nutritionist flitting off for his rest period. There was the Shatar linguist gently nudging her smaller mate out of their work space. There was-
“She turned me into a newt!” A human voice declared from some dark corner of the room.
Silence broken only by the soft lapping of the water followed and then in the same warped human voice but from a different corner.
“I got bettah’!”
Raucous laughter burst from the clawcluster of humans in the room and even the slim, male Shatar shook his antenna in mildly amused annoyance before walking off. The laughter died down and the humans went back to their work without another word. Grisssk rubbed his clenched claws over his eye ridges and gave a tired sigh. He pulled out the new reports section and sent out a prayer that the University would send him an assistant. 

​Humans are Weird – Kiddie Class

“So, anyway,” Fifth Ranger was explaining as he gestured at the broad expanse of skin he had exposed along his abdomen. “That was the day we were doing our stop-drop-and-roll drills. By the time it was my turn to roll I’d completely forgotten about the bottle I’d hidden and it broke from the fall. I sure remembered the bottle fast when the glass broke. But I knew I shouldn’t have had it under there so I didn’t cry or let the teacher’s know what had happened until the cuts had bled through my shirt and the teachers saw.”
“Fascinating,”  Fourth Cousin said. “You genuinely did not consider massive laceration  to your dermal surface a problem?”
“Not one worth getting in trouble for,” Fifth Ranger said with a shrug. “But, hey. I was just a kid. My brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders. If you know what I mean.”
“I am constantly amazed by how casual you mammals are about damage to your outer membrane,” Fourth Cousin said shaking her head as her antennas twitched.
“Our skin’s designed to take a beating,” Fifth Ranger replied. “It’s not that big of a deal. Biological differences and all that.”
“So what is a stop-drop-and-roll drill?” Fourth Cousin asked.
“Training on what to do if our clothes catch fire,” Fifth Ranger said. “It’s about how to smother the flames.”
Fourth Cousin’s antenna curled in horror and her frill dropped to press against her neck. Fifth Ranger’s lips quirked in a sign of amusement and he tilted his head to the side.
“Just out of curiosity,” he said. “What about that horrified you?”
“Your training,” she said slowly as her frill began to flutter in confusion. “Assumes that small children will catch fire…”
“Accidents do happen,” He said with a shrug .
“Did you ever catch fire?” She asked.
“Well no,” he replied. “But I know what to do if I did.”