The rest of the day when we returned was of little note with but one exception, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that everything but that exception was a blur. I was still abuzz in my head over the unexpected level of fun and Fauve’s engaging interest in my home. Human curiosity is… is something else. It takes getting used to. Charming most of the time, once you are used to it, but it can be vexing since the boundaries of what is acceptable to ask are not always immediately clear.

It was pleasant though, to have her show such interest in me, in where I’m from and how I lived. I was settled in my room and making the notes that would become this narrative when I heard Fauve calling for me.

“Bailey, dinner! Are you hungry? You want something to eat?!” Fauve’s voice was drawn out, it’s a strange thing that humans do, their shouts are always longer than words spoken at a normal pace, and none that I spoke with ever really knew why they did it. They just ‘did’. My personal suspicion was that it was a kind of echolocation, wherein the continued noise made it easier to find the source, but the humans themselves never seemed to give it a second thought, even when drawing out their words was utterly unnecessary.

Unlike most predatory species, they tended to be a noisy lot, a reflection of their social nature and perhaps a reflection of how high they were in the food chain. They didn’t worry about attracting attention since there was nothing they could not kill. Before I detail the dinner, I want to relay something I heard once, which explains just how little humans have to worry about, and why they can make as much noise as they please.

I did confirm that the story was in fact true, having heard it directly from my professor who was traveling with the humans at the time on his way home.

It seems that a human cargo ship carrying a handful of colonists was forced to lay over on the planet Maxik Nine, a planet where the only intelligent species evolved from a socialized prey animal, and which was still prey to the wild gaxa, a vicious slithering creature that, while not intelligent, was capable of burrowing through almost anything if given enough time.

The maxiki are a timid, fearful species, and having learned that a group of apex predators were laying over on their station, were more than a little nervous, and my professor sought to alleviate their fears with a demonstration. He invited a handful of women with childcare experience to join him on the planet's surface and took them to an area where large numbers of gaxa attacks took place. Many maxiki infants were taken and devoured.

I will relay the rest in his words insomuch as possible:

“You want your children to be safe, don’t you?” Professor Sxlith asked while looking down at the little blue four armed maxiki. The nursery watcher looked up at the group of towering two armed apex predators, thickly muscled as most ‘pioneer’ types were said to be, it was only their seeming lack of obvious hunger and the presence of Sxlith that kept the maxiki calm.

“Yes… but is this wise?” The watcher asked. “They won’t eat our young themselves?”

Sxlith’s tongue teased at his own eyeballs a few times and he turned to the handful of human women. “Keep an eye on these children for a short time, will you? Just be careful of predators that may get into the walls, gaxa serpents will horribly mutilate a maxiki infant. The little things are so helpless with no one to care for them, they’ll die horrible, horrible deaths with nobody between them and danger. Their parents can’t be here, so you are all they’ll have between them and being dissolved alive.” He then picked up a nearby infant and held it out to the nearest human woman.

Maxiki infants are roughly the size of a human baby, they are soft, fleshy, their heads a little large and their eyes are all the size as those of a human infant’s. The women who followed Sxlith nodded their heads and after being given a short care routine, the Sxlith led the maxiki watchman away.

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They returned four hours later to the smell of blood thick in the air. The maxiki watcher rushed to the door, threw it open, and found one of the human women standing there covered in blue blood and holding a very large knife. “Oh no…” The maxiki whispered, ready to let out the keening wail of his kind when their children were slaughtered by deadly monstrous creatures, only for the chirp of a maxiki infant to draw his attention past her.

“Hi there.” The human woman said without noticing the maxiki distress, she stepped aside and revealed the other pioneer humans similarly coated with bloody viscera, but the infants were all fine. “Sorry we didn’t get a chance to clean up yet, there was a little incident with those snakey things. You were right, they went right for the little ones, that certainly couldn’t be allowed, so me and the girls we sliced em up real good. Moxi went chasing after one that got away, she just radioed in saying she cleared out the whole nest of those filthy things, and she’ll be back shortly.”

She wasn’t lying, a half a dozen gaxa serpents with deep cuts and gouges ripped into their heads lay piled in one corner, one of the pioneer humans was holding up a gaxa corpse and skinning it on a table, “The meat seems edible, so we were just going to harvest it, waste not, want not, you know?”

“See, I told you.” Sxlith said, “If they feel a maternal or paternal call to something, predators can make the finest care givers.”

And as my professor relayed the story to me, that is how Maxiki ended up hiring a group of human colonists to stay long term. And that is why it doesn’t matter how loud a human yells or how much noise they make as a group. It doesn’t give them away, it warns away their other living things that danger is near and to avoid them or they may add to their meal extensive diet, which so far seems to include anything they want.

Trying to adapt to their way of doing things, I opened the door and called out “Yes, I’ll be right there!”

I want to add here that parents will frequently give their children the task of rousting and gathering the rest of the household for meals, and children rarely refuse such chores, but they also do not do them as intended. I am very sure that William asked Fauve to see if I wanted dinner, but that he intended for her to come all the way down the stairs and ask me.

Instead however, she stood at the stairs and shouted the question. Human children are as loud as they are charming in some of their actions. I put away my datapad and ascended the stairs for my first evening meal with my host family.

I won’t say I wasn’t nervous, I’d seen enough deaths at dinner tables in human entertainment media, but even knowing those were mere dramas, fictions and the like, I was anxious about doing something wrong and making a bad impression. What if there was some hidden taboo that would get me kicked out of the house if I broke it? And the truth is… such a taboo does exist.

Never discuss religion or politics at the dinner table. The reason being that both of those are divisive topics, and meals are meant to build bonds of affection, to unite and tie a group together, and those topics serve only to tear people apart.

I sat down at the table just as Rebecca was placing down plates, Michael sat in a specially built chair of unusual size that made him sit at equal height to an adult, while William tore up small bits of infant sized cheese slices and held up bits of soft vegetables that the tiny human ingested. Fauve was at the refrigerator and drew out a pitcher of dark cold liquid that I learned was called ‘tea’ and set it at the center of the table before returning for more cups. I felt a little uncomfortable being the only one doing nothing, but they were done before I could offer to help.

The division of labor in this particular human household was not universal to the species, I have to add, while children helping is fairly normal, the tasks performed by caregivers, or ‘parents’ has no single standard. If one partner works for pay and the other does not, the one who does not is considered responsible for the administration of the household, typically paying the bills, cleaning, cooking, ordering chores. Though the other laboring partner may contribute to some degree within the house to allow the home worker to take a break as well.

If both work on paid labor jobs, then it is common to divide the household duties, and in this way they each ensure that the other is given a fair amount of time to relax relative to the other. Some of these chores, even tedious ones, may be bonding activities of their own. William I would later learn, was not an excellent cook, but he would often assist the far more talented Rebecca, or perform ‘companion’ tasks such as running to the store to pick up a forgotten ingredient needed for preparing a meal.

It may appear to you that their affection is bound up in just doing things for each other, but I must caution you to note that this is quite the opposite.

The human species does not ‘love others because they do things for them. They do things for one another, because they love.’