[https://imgur.com/gallery/qKXUQXA]

Chapter One

It was strange to me still, to feel this kind of warmth around me. But I felt like I could get used to it.

But the thing about that sensation is, once you have it, you greatly fear losing it. My professor kept in touch with his human hosts for decades to the point where he was well known even to the ones he hadn’t met, and he spent years arranging for us to get to Earth just so he could go again.

So now here I was, happy as could be, and yet I had to worry about being deported. Wolfbeard’s constant legal motions were delaying the question for now, but that couldn’t and wouldn’t last.

But eventually?

We have a saying on Dlamias, ‘Eventually every question has to be answered.’

After I wrote that line I heard Fauve shout down the stairs, “Bailey! Breakfast!”

Fauve’s voice had a lot more vigor and pep than before, the stress and strain melted off of her like ice on a summer sidewalk and like the once water, it evaporated and disappeared like it was never there.

With her verbal assailants arrested, fined into poverty, imprisoned, or outright barred from the internet for life where patterns of harassment were uncovered, she was back to her old self. Now, a mere two weeks after it was over? Why you’d never know she’d been put through hell.

“The coffee is fresh but if you don’t hurry you’ll need to make the next pot!” She added. Such was the penalty for finishing the last drop.

Humans have a lot of funny rules and traditions, one of the most ubiquitous is ‘Who will finish, must replenish’ when it comes to coffee drinkers, and other than Michael who was still too young, everybody in the Walker household was a coffee lover.

I think it says something about how well I was adapting to life here that I stopped writing when she said that and rushed upstairs to get my cup and my share of the bacon.

I resumed writing only when I was seated at the table with eggs, bacon, and coffee on my plate.

But I was not the only dlamisa at the table. Beside me was one of the security guards who was in turn flanked by his human counterpart.

The human’s name was Byron, I knew this because on his first evening shift he was quick to introduce himself. He was a giant of a human and the wooden chair in which he sat creaked a little when his weight came down. His arms were like tree trunks, and he was clean shaven save for a mustache with wisps of gray amidst the brown.

He wasn’t much for smiling, and he didn’t say very much. Truth be told I’d barely heard him say a dozen words since he first got to the house and started guarding it. The only thing I caught clearly was his informing William that he would reach out to the ‘old friend’. That old friend turned out to be Percival Terrance Barnum, one of the human world’s leading media experts who gave the household an impromptu class on media savvy and advice that helped end the storm around the Walker household.

The male dlamisa at his side was almost a reflection of the human, towering, broad, and with thick short fur. He and Byron seemed to get on well in a kind of amiable silence when not engaged in shop talk, and even had Byron choose a name for him since dlamisa names are all but impossible for humans to manage, and for reasons unknown to me, the name Byron chose was ‘Boatswain’.

They were at our table on this particular morning because a few days before, Percival Terrance Barnum did not wake up, and we were going to attend his funeral. We were invited by his granddaughter who was handling his final affairs,

Here I want to write a little about the oddity of human death rituals. Despite the world of humanity being unified, there were still many cultural distinctions and one of the most prominent among them is how a community of family, friends, and neighbors deals with death. In writing this, I issue a call to dlamisans or other species who have chosen to study Anthropology, come to Earth, there are more cultures on this one world than there are intelligent races in the known galaxy. I couldn’t study them all if I had nothing else to do but that and lived ten thousand times ten thousand lifetimes! There are stories to be told that will enrich the whole of the Galactic experience if only there is someone to tell them.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Now having said that, ‘My’ humans as I will refer to them forever, were part of the North American continent, an area that was once dominated by a religion that treated their death as a kind of transition. This religion at its peak was believed by some ninety-nine percent of the population before it underwent a long decline that accelerated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Today on that continent it is clung to by only tiny rural and mountain communities far from the larger civilization. But because of the long dominance it held, many modern behaviors still have their ties to that nearly vanished belief system.

What we were doing, a ‘funeral service’ was a way for the living survivors who cared deeply for the deceased to come together and mourn in common while the dead are interred in their resting place. In the past this meant a burial amidst the grass and an open field full of headstones or being put into a small stone building.

But now things were different.

Fauve was wearing a white dress, unusual for her, as I had never seen her wear white anything, but then, so were the rest of us. I was wearing a white shirt and pants, as was Byron, who wore it over his tactical vest, and as was Boatswain. William and Rebecca went a step further, each wore fake bald wigs just like Percival wore the day we met him.

I cocked my head and looked at each of my humans in turn, waiting patiently for the explanation. It was ‘Fauve’ who provided it.

“Cosplay.” She said. I did not uncock my head.

“Dress up. A game, sort of,” she said and picked at her dress, “where you pretend to be a fictional character from a fictional universe. Last year for my last day of public school I went to every class dressed as ‘Liln’ from the classic novel series, ‘How Misunderstandings Made a Demon Lord’ and I pulled it off pretty well.”

“So… Mr. Barnum made this request? That we ‘cosplay’ him at his funeral?” I asked, and William answered with a shrug.

“That’s what his granddaughter said, apparently he figured ‘the planting’ would be more interesting that way.”

I looked Fauve up and down, “Did Mr. Barnum wear a dress?”

She shrugged and took a bite of her plate of eggs and after washing it down with a sip of fragrant coffee that had my hand searching for my cup while I waited for her answer. She chewed, swallowed, and flipping her fork upside down she pointed it at me and said, “I genderbent him. If he objects, he can wake up and tell me so.”

Fauve’s parents said nothing to that, and here I must point out how unusual the Walkers were, in particular Fauve, whose words might have been taken as callous or even disrespectful to the man. But I didn’t think that was what she meant. I recalled how he first mentioned having her ‘dress younger and more innocent’ for the cameras, and her unflinching refusal. Not only did he take her refusal in stride, he didn’t ask her to change anything about herself, only showed her how to present herself best.

I think if anything he would have approved of her cosplay choice. Fauve was an odd one born from odd ones, so odd that every now and then I wondered if they were the best choice to teach me about humans, but the oddballs are the splashes of color on a canvas that you never expect, but never forget either. And I couldn’t help but think she had some affection for the old man who stepped in out of nowhere to help her in her time of need.

Wanting him to wake up and give his disapproval after all, was like saying she wanted him to come back, even if we all knew he would not.

Rebecca dabbed Michael’s cheek to wipe away a milk stain and addressed Boatswain and Byron directly on a practical matter. “Are you sure it’s fine to leave your friends here by themselves?”

Byron grunted and set down his cup of coffee while Boatswain continued to chug his oversized mug down. “Yes ma’am. They’ll have rear monitoring drones to let them know if anything happens, and with [Wolfbeard] locked up, the threat level is down. We must still be cautious, but the worst has passed.”

“Okay, Latunde will be watching Michael in here while we’re gone, are you sure he shouldn’t just be over at his house…” Rebecca asked, and it was Boatswain whose low rumbling voice gave her an answer.

“You’re supposed to live normal. Anything not normal, you might make a new risk by doing it. So if that’s not normal, don’t do that.”

Rebecca seemed doubtful, I say this because she neither agreed nor disagreed, and given her vocal nature I could only conclude that she was unsure of whether to argue or not. Instead she looked to her husband. Interestingly, most species mate pairs tend to be very hierarchical, but humans seemed to take a more egalitarian approach, with mates consulting with one another on their areas of expertise, William, having once been a soldier, was her go to ‘expert’ to settle her mind.

“That’s fine, we won’t be gone long, the planting will last for just a few hours.” William said and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, I was accustomed to the little nuances of their gestures now and noticed the way his fingers contracted a little when they squeezed her shoulder, Rebecca’s anxious pheromones began to settle down after that, and just in time, as a moment later there was a knock at the door and we could all hear the voice of ‘Tuna’ on the other side chatting with the two guards who would remain behind.

William took one deep breath and clapped his hands together, “Alright, let’s go.” He said, and those of us with less than empty plates scraped up our food into forks and spoons to savor every last bite before we went to bury the dead.