humans look absurdly like predators to the first species we meet. so much so that the standard practice becomes to cover ourselves almost head to toe to avoid terrifying every diplomat we come across. our eyes remain uncovered, but pretty much everything else stays hidden. my story follows a scout group, mix of thrak’yans (a photosythesising species) and humans, when they encounter a predator and are forced to flee. Thrak’yans look vaguely humanoid, but are incredibly thin and fragile – they’re essentially sentient trees. they have pale green skin and what look like long, flowing robes but are actually huge stretches of leaf that they can use to gain more energy from the sun. on their planet, Son’uu, their main predators were hunted into extinction long ago (a prerequisite for their civilisation), but they still have instinctive fear of anything with teeth or fur.
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Jess had been training to work on this research vessel for years – learning the language, studying the culture, and prepping for zero-gravity inter-shuttle trips. There was no-one at the Galactic Port readier than she was to leave Earth that day.
Thrak’yans were a skittish race, to say the least. She’d been briefed on all the protocols; as the only human on the vessel, she was to always wear her coverings, reveal her face only in her quarters, speak softly, and move slowly. Giving humans a reputation as the “intergalactic warrior death species” wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, considering they were the only known sentient predator species in the contacted universe, but it wouldn’t be helpful to their ambitions to enter the senate as a budding quadrant trading power, either.
humans are terrifying, and i wrote a story about it
Published
A Glitch Named Anti 