Challenge #01518-D057: Hazards of Companionship
...well... thank you... I was suffering from a shortage of waking up screaming, this should help for the next month. -- RecklessPrudence
Humans are the most advantageous crewmembers to have. Especially in what they insist on calling 'crunch time'. They will walk, or run, into danger and saunter back out again with barely a scratch. They are fiercely protective of any being they view as part of their pack, insanely profitable to have in a ship's crew, and invariably adaptable.
They're also indomitable, indispensable, and doubtlessly insane.
Case in point, the human that the crew of the Probing Feeler had nicknamed 'Fluffy'. His actual name had too many S's and F's for the mouth-parts of the insectoid crew. Since the Probing Feeler was a science vessel, it had a higher likelihood of finding trouble before it was lost. And the human named Fluffy was in the thick of it.
Shore leave came and most of the crew vacated the ship for relaxation opportunities well inside their comfort zone. Fluffy bid his crew and pack-mates a cheerful farewell and journeyed to the 1 Standard Gravity Zone[1] for his own brand of entertainments. Since this effectively isolated him from his pack-mates, some members of the crew were prone to... concern.
K'trizz, nicknamed 'Katie' by Fluffy, was the closest to the human and the most concerned. She rented an augmentation exo-suit and journeyed down past all the warning signs to where Fluffy's locator said he was enjoying his shore leave.
There, alarmingly, the hirsute human was playing with gravity and hurling himself around a complicated tangle of beams and other random architecture elements with little in the way of safety equipment at all. He noticed K'trizz and hurled himself down, close to ground level, only slowing down to brachiate to where she was standing and desperately trying not to soil herself.
Fluffy dropped the final half SDU to the floor. "Hey, Katie. Is everything good?"
"I... came because I was worried about you... You might be missing us."
"Aaaawwww, that's so cute. Thank you. I'm okay. I've made a few friends here in the parkour playground. I'm fine." Fluffy pointed upwards where three more humans were hurling themselves around at even more insane heights. None of them were wearing much more than their Skins.
"This is a... relaxing activity?"
"It's fun," said Fluffy. "You should try it, sometime."
"Uuuhhh," muttered K'trizz. "Thank you... I was suffering from a shortage of waking up screaming, this should help for the next month..."
Fluffy laughed. "Okay, I wasn't even thinking of starting you on the advanced set. But yeah... you guys are a lot more fragile than my kind. I keep forgetting."
Humans. They were so willing to adopt anything into their pack-group that they could forget simple things like relative fortification against accidental damage. To his credit, Fluffy made certain K'trizz was calm and safe back in her own gravity zone before returning to his lunatic acrobatics and his new friends.
[1] Galactic Standard Units are in decimals. Even gravity units. A Standard Distant Unit (SDU) is within scraping distance of a metric meter, and gravity is measures in fall accelerations of SDU per second per second (SDU/s/s). 1 Standard Gravity is 10 SDU/s/s. Earths is, by comparison, 0.98 Standard Gravity Units.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Vadimsadovski]
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