Fellow academics, interested amateurs... I know you expected to read a purely academic piece on my time among humans, but I must ask for you to believe me when I say that this is utterly impossible. It is impossible because they are no mere chemical in a test tube to be cataloged down to the fine points and filed away. No mere equation to be written and noted for later study. In traveling with them, living with them, I found parts of myself that I never knew existed. I perhaps alarmed you when I called them 'infectious' before, but if you could imagine for a moment... a communicable cure that traveled faster than disease, that is what I experienced.

I wondered sometimes if their shortened lifespans were part of why they seemed so full of energy. They have a saying that a candle which burns twice as bright burns half as long, and if this was true, then it was why their race lived so short compared to so many of us.

If I could experience as much as they did... I would trade lifespans with them in a heartbeat. Of course, as you are reading this, you must surely know we survived the brief encounter with the pirates, but before you proceed on with this accounting, I want to make sure you note something. Our ship was not completely unarmed, we could have fought beside the human vessel, but our captain chose to abandon our rescuers. It was an eminently practical thing to do, and I had it checked into when it was possible, he was not reprimanded for it in any way, nor did I ever find criticism of him for it. Even me, at that moment as we fled deeper into human space, didn't think about what he was doing, and nor did it occur to me to criticize him for it.

I'm sure you are... in agreement, but then... compare the human ship captain's actions to our own. The human willingness to fight and die was far in excess of their own survival instinct, they sought the fight and rushed to it, while we ran away. Which course creates an empire? Who do you want protecting your ship when you travel... you may think the humans are mad, but their madness, if that is what it is, is not without purpose or value of its own.

Now, on with the accounting. As the days slipped past, our professor began to relay more stories to us of his time on Earth, of human customs, birthdays, drinking songs, sports, child rearing... it seems he became like a grandfather to a pair of human children, watching them grow up and have children of their own just before he had to leave the planet when his allotted time was up. In all his stories, my teacher never once sent his tongue near his eyeballs. It was more like he wasn't talking to us at all, really. More to himself, he knew the name of every member of the family, and those of their neighbors, and the days that they died. Reader, I'm sure I don't need to tell you how rare this is for anyone at all. And yet he did it for the members of another species?

The more I learned, the more interested I became, and day slipped into day with more history, more culture lessons, and more on human mental processes. I learned about bashfulness... see, some humans, strangely enough, find nudity to be troubling, even shameful. They come from a deathworld, the act of breathing corrodes their lungs over a lifetime, the place is riddled with natural disasters and their own sun is lethal to them, as such, they create clothing to cover and protect their bodies. They get so used to it that being without it is strange, so the end result is a species that is shy about their bare flesh... but can endure almost anything.

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But it was because of that ‘shyness’ that my professor held out to us each a set of clothing. My own was a pair of brown pants and a simple button down shirt. No shoes were needed at least, and the material was very thin, almost pointless really, but when I just stared at it, he licked his eyeballs and stared right at me. “When on Earth, do as the Earthians do. You are there to immerse yourself in their ways to better understand them. That means wearing their clothing. Going around naked might be fine on Dlamisa, but not on Earth.”

I reached out and somewhat reluctantly closed my fingers around the offered set, as did my equally reluctant classmates two by two, and tried it on. At least it breathed, but when I saw myself in the mirror I could only think, ‘You look ridiculous.’

The human body is strange, they have enough muscle to pull seventeen tonnes, but only if all muscles pull in the same direction... however they can't do that. Their limbs seem fragile and easily injured thanks to a lack of natural armor, but they produce a chemical in their brains that puts them into a frenzy of bloodlust that will ignore pain until they are bled dry. Essentially they can fight until they run out of murder fuel in their veins if they are triggered in just the wrong way.

There are stories of past humans called 'berserkers' who on losing an arm, would pick it up and swing their severed arm like a club, beating others to death with it. A feat we now know is perfectly within the realm of possibility, thanks to their brief ‘war’ with the Zenti.

They may sound in this sort of depiction like monsters, which... admittedly explains their media of 'horror' entertainment. Recall what I said about anything less than impossible being seen as ordinary and nothing special.

But it wasn't this that my professor was so drawn to, not based on his stories.

So I focused on that, and all that he had to say, until we saw tiny mote of dust caught in a sunbeam, and that mote of dust became a little blue marble, a nothing special world in a universe full of trillions of galaxies of billions of solar systems and endless planets within the whole... but this was going to be our home. I note at this moment that, when I was drawing close to the planet 'Earth', I didn't miss my own home even a little. But out of the corner of my eyes I watched my normally reserved professor press his hand to the glass as if he were trying to just get one bit closer to that world, one fraction of a second faster.

It didn't look like much, not to my eyes. But still, it was something, I could see the doubt in my comrades still, they barely looked at all. But I felt the excitement of the new experience ahead at least.

The world ahead grew larger and larger, and the voice came over the telecom, "Brace yourselves for entry. Docking in one span."

We raced to our security harnesses, strapped ourselves in, and waited for the rattling to stop. As our ship came down and the bright yellow sun became a dot instead of a looming monster, I noticed how very green so much seemed to be, it was a strange shift from the black and blue plants I was used to, but it was the least of the surprises I would face, and those would begin from the moment we exited our ship.