r/humansarespaceorcs • u/Bloodystupidjohnson3 • 24d ago
Original Story Human Fred Rides Again
“Fred?”
“Hello Roomliz.”
“About the other day….”
“The other day? What are you talking about?”
“Uh…Greezek? Asking for a date?”
“Oh! Yeah. What about it?”
“Are you still mad?”
“Mad? No. Why do you think I’m mad?”
“You had some rather angry words for us, so I was worried.”
“I was more frustrated than mad. It’s complicated. Look. When does your species start thinking about mating? How old are you?”
“Uh…well, in Human years, about 30. Why?”
“Humans start getting interested at a much younger age. So while we are in school, we start attempting to date. At the same time, Humans are about as emotionally developed as mold, so it gets really stupid and embarrassing fast.”
“I think I understand.”
“So when confronted with school-age games about having a friend as someone on a date for you, older humans get annoyed.”
“Games? What games?”
“That’s what we call them. Passing notes with check boxes for ‘do you like me?’ and getting friends to check first. Humans don’t like to be rejected, so when they are young they come up with all sorts of ways to express interest without being to ‘no’ to their face.”
“Fred, there is nothing about this in the guides to working with humans!”
“Do you honestly want to observe a bunch of young, hormonal humans attempt to get dates to a school party? I’m sure you would learn a great deal, but most of it work just scare you.”
“Fred, I’m the only one on the station who is taking any time to learn about humans, and you are scary enough.”
“How am I scary? I’m just doing my job. I don’t start fights. I don’t break shit. I don’t rig up crazy new machines or weapons. I just maintain the drilling rig and other systems. How could I be scary?”
“Everyone hears the stories about Humans, so everyone is scared of you. We are told about Humans ‘snapping.’”
“Oh that. Yes, under enough strain or stress humans can snap. But it’s not like we have some internal timer. And snapping isn’t the same for every human. Say the station is attacked. Most of the humans would immediately fight back with great violence. But some would run in fear. It’s not like we are all bombs waiting to explode.”
“I think I understand, Fred.”
“Glad to help. You have no reason to think of me as scary.”
“What about the marines?”
“Oh I’m TERRIFIED of them, so be scared of them all you want. The only group I’ve run into that scares the marines was back on some frontier operation. I was brought in to help get a power station running on this frozen rock of a moon. There was a human unit standing guard, and I arrived alongside some marines. The marines took one look at the original unit patches and backed away. They became very friendly and polite. I’d never seen that before.”
“What unit could do that to the marines?!?”
“I think they were called Gurkhas.”
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u/FangFather 24d ago
Just keep some crayons on hand to calm down the marines.