Published: May 14th 2024, 11:14:22 pm
Well this was a very silly thought based on a one-off joke Jonas made for a commission a while back. Classic pulp sci-fi, only slightly horny. This is pretty SFW though. Just a little silliness.
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Dirk stopped in his tracks. He spotted one. A Felidian, eyes unmistakable as it watched him from the bushes not sixty meters away. They were very much like earth tigers in the face, though it was hard to get more features than just the edges of its dark, round ears.
For a long moment, Dirk considered drawing his electrostunner. He settled for merely bringing his hand to its hilt, hoping the motion was not too provocative. While the scientists insisted that the Felidians were not a severe threat, they had been wrong about many other aspects of this mission. Maybe the Felidians were, on the whole, nice people. But any one Felidian? Who knew what its intentions were? Who knew if it saw him as a threat?
He stared at the bushes for a long moment. Those colorful eyes, now knowing they were being watched, narrowed, and then vanished from sight altogether. There was a rustle in the underbrush, and then silence.
Dirk perked his ears, but heard no indication the Felidian had circled around. Sighing deeply, he relaxed his stance and turned—only to jump back in surprise. He reflexively swung his hands around in a practiced, circular ju jitsu move, hoping to scare it away, but it was too late. He had come face-to-face with the alien. Or rather, face to… clavicle. Dirk was himself a mountain of a man, but the Felidian stood nearly a full head taller than him. That face fell somewhere between a tiger and a wildcat, though it belied human intelligence.
Also, she was not wearing any clothes.
In fact, she wore no clothes in such a way that suggested she’d never even considered the possibility of clothes. She was quite covered over in fur—so no need in the cool climate—but it was not as if she were a shaggy lump, either, as sci-fi movies with cheap costume designers would have suggested. Her whole body was defined. Though she carried no weapons, that sheer musculature suggested she needed none. Stripes painted her bright orange fur like well-coordinated and immaculately designed chic fashion. Not to mention, as Dirk first noticed, she had huge… eyes.
Her eyes—Dirk struggled to keep his gaze up there—were previously terrifying, but now had almost zero malice to them. They seemed full of curiosity. She turned, almost ignoring Dirk entirely, and instead inspected the Extremely Scientific Instruments he had been setting up.
“This is a curious one…” she said, her words automatically translated for Dirk’s benefit. “Building a hut without a roof. I don’t believe I have ever seen a monkey do that, but I suppose if a monkey were to build a hut, they would fail this spectacularly.”
“I am not a monkey!” Dirk protested. “I am a man.”
Her attention was suddenly back on him. He stood as rigid as a statue as the Felidian circled around him, her eyes taking in his entire appearance, as well as his spacesuit. She seemed to pause when her eyes grazed his backside, though it was perhaps curiosity on his lack of tail. At least, Dirk hoped so.
“There…” she said, plucking from his shoulder the universal translator. “Hello there, box. You are speaking to me, aren’t you?”
Dirk panicked, plucking the translator back from the Felidian at once. “Excuse you! You can’t just going about messing with other peoples’ extremely expensive stuff! Besides, the box isn’t the one talking to you, I am!”
The Felidian seemed taken aback, blinking and tilting her head. “A monkey is speaking? That’s ridiculous. That only happens in stories.”
“Well, I can assure you it is happening,” Dirk nodded, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to stare at the Felidian’s rather copious assets. “You can see my mouth move, the box translates for me.”
“Where are your genitals?”
Dirk blinked. “What?”
The Felidian folded her arms. “If I am to talk to you, monkey, I cannot tell if you are male, female, or otherwise,” she said. “I have been addressing you as a eunuch, but you speak in the masculine fashion. Or at least, your little word-mimic does. Would you prefer I address you as a male?”
Dirk’s hands gestured in wide circles as he fruitlessly kept the embarrassment off his face. “I am a man!”
“Yes, my apologies,” she said with no apparent change to her tone. “One should not presume. After all, I’ve not seen a monkey of your type before. This proboscis of yours is quite weird, and you seem to be missing fur on much of your face, not to mention the rest of your body…”
Dirk turned around, taking several deep breaths to ease himself. He was torn on matters of his pride—which this alien had so expertly shredded in such a casual manner. Dirk Brumley was a man of many facets: A decorated war hero. The first astronaut on Io. The lead singer in the band Dirk Brumley and the Brumlies. Oh, how the ladies threw themselves at him. But he was not so shallow as to lead a life of hedonistic fantasy—he was a patriot through and through, and jumped at the opportunity to put his life on the line for his country. Still, he could not deny that he had a way with the fairer sex.
The problem was, the Felidian female could in no way be described as fair. Buxom, yes, as well as smoldering, Amazonian, and rather terrifying, but not fair.
So what was he supposed to do? Dirk recalled one of the dozens of film strips shown to him during his mission briefing.
“When meeting another culture for the first time,” said the audio voiceover as a man silently greeted natives of some South Pacific island, “do not presume their views are, or should be, the same as your views. Put aside your differences. Your goal is peace and communication. Their ways may be strange, even primitive, but they are—click—SAPIENT HUMANOIDS—click—just like you.”
Yes, indeed. Dirk had, actually, already gotten past the hard part. This Felidian, obnoxious as she was, was not hostile. That was good! Many First Contact scenarios were all about having to talk down a hostile alien force, or confusing a supersentient AI into self-destructing, but making friends was the goal here. Hopefully, he could use this chance encounter as a foothold into mutual good.
“I apologize for my lack of decorum,” Dirk said, turning around, and again getting an eyeful of the Felidian’s chest. He twitched, and returned to her curious eyes. “I am Captain Dirk Brumley of Planet Earth. Whom am I addressing?”
“Well,” she said, her real voice rumbling deep and low, as she shifted her stance. “Greetings, Dirkbrumley of Peleneterth. I am Patara of the Clan Ro-Kytria. What are you doing all exposed in the middle of this open field?”
She thinks I’m exposed? Dirk thought, but he resisted the temptation to quip.
“My mission is one of science,” he said. “And science… well, it doesn’t do well inside of forests or on mountains. For instance, my rocket ship…” He pointed in the direction of the huge machine standing like a pillar some distance away, “could only land with a great deal of open ground.”
“Huh,” Patara said, looking out at the tower. “I wondered what that was doing there. I thought perhaps Clan Geni had started to erect a watch tower in a stupid location, but the material is strange. It’s a ship, you say?”
“Yes, but it sails the stars instead of the oceans.”
“How interesting!” Patara said. “Assuming you aren’t making up stories, of course, but then again you seem to be a creature straight out of stories. Maybe you do tell the truth.”
“I have no reason to deceive you!”
“Then take me up to the stars,” Patara said. “I am very curious what it would be like to sail them.”
Dirk was, for a brief moment, elated. The curiosity of the Felidian was starting to seem like an asset—he could leverage this into more dialogue, perhaps even trade of information for supplies! He raised a finger, then thinking further, lowered it again. “Unfortunately, I only have the fuel to make the return trip home,” he said. “So unless you want to come back to Planet Earth and be poked with sticks a lot for science, let’s save that for… later.”
Patara snorted. “If you insist, but you are not making for a convincing case. You claim to have something that wondrous and will not show it to me?”
Dirk flailed. “Is the universal translator not wondrous enough?”
“That word-mimic is also a science?”
“Yes,” Dirk explained, placing his hands firmly on his hips. “It contains a mathematical formula that analyzes the frequency of your and my speech and, utilizing a complex algorithm, transforms it into the equivalent frequencies in the others’ language.”
Patara blinked. “It must be broken, because I did not understand any of that.”
“Yes, well… it is a work in progress,” Dirk grumbled.
“What’s this do?” Patara asked, turning away and poking repeatedly at the instruments again. “Is this a science?”
Dirk rushed after her. “That’s the weather monitor! That’s critical so I don’t get caught in a storm!”
“It can predict the weather?”
“Well, when I set up enough of them… But it does provide a lot of useful information right now.”
“Like what?”
“It can tell you the current temperature.”
Patara looked around curiously. “I think I can tell you that it’s a little warm without a science.”
Dirk scratched his chin. “Well… it can also tell you the barometric pressure.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the… the pressure… of… the air,” Dirk started. “Look this stuff is all very complex and explaining any individual thing would take a book in and of itself.”
“What’s a book?” Patara asked.
“Oh God,” Dirk muttered into his gloved hands again.
“What’s a God?”
Despite being an ordained priest, Dirk was in no mood to be a missionary—besides, he couldn’t be sure that the Felidians were not somehow prelapsarian. In fact, their lack of clothing seemed to suggest they were. That explained it! But that created another problem—maybe this was all a bad idea; he did not want to be responsible for introducing sin into their society!
He was about to tell the Felidian that perhaps she should look for other things they had in common, but she was already rummaging around in the crate. From inside, she pulled out a vacuum-sealed bag. “Is this a science?”
“That’s my lunch!” Dirk exclaimed.
Now even more interested, Patara turned away from Dirk as he reached to grab the package from her. She held it up and away from him like a bully playing keepaway, until she tired of their little dance and kicked Dirk to the dusty ground. His suit protected him from any impact, but when she placed a clawed foot on his chest, the bulkiness of the thing meant he couldn’t move at all.
“Stop that!” He struggled on the ground fruitlessly. “I only have enough for the month!”
Patara ignored him, biting into the package, then spitting at the taste of the wrapper. Quickly, though, she figured out it was only the outside that was inedible, and tore the end off, taking a large sniff of the ham and cheese sandwich inside. She took a bite, and her eyes lit up.
“Well!” She said, looking far down at Dirk on the ground. “This science seems particularly good! I will choose to believe you, Dirkbrumley. But I’m afraid I have to go now—I must meet up with the hunting party on their return round.” She held up the sandwich. “And if they’re to believe me, I must show them this ‘lunch’. I’m sure they’ll have many more questions for the strange monkey and his word-mimic box.”
Dirk blinked. “…you’re bringing more back with you?”
“Tomorrow at the soonest, we may need to discuss the implications of your presence here. But don’t worry—with that huge landmark you planted in the middle of an open field, we won’t have any problem finding you again, will we?”
Dirk swallowed the lump in his throat.