It’s a testament to the infectiousness of humans that I actually even considered withholding knowledge of my actions. Keeping it from the Walkers would have been a very dlamisa thing to do, though in some circumstances ‘revealing it’ would have been more like us. As it was however, revealing my actions would have likely eased some of their tensions, but they would have reacted unpredictably. Dlamisa love our routines, and that works generally well enough for us.
But when I finally broke myself free of the headpats and scratches just behind my ears and sat with my coffee opposite Fauve, my resolve to do what I did was matched by a resolve to do what I could to alleviate their concerns.
“You’ve been worried, all of you.” I said after a long slurp.
Fauve just gave a tiny nod and looked down into her own coffee cup as if she thought the right thing to say would be found somewhere just beneath the surface of her drink.
It was a strangely awkward moment. I say ‘strangely’ because humans tend to be very uncomfortable with extended silences, like extended eye contact, it disturbs them. Especially if the cause of the silence is in some way emotional or driven by a sense of shame. Given what I knew was sent to Fauve by the ‘flying monkeys’ of Wolfbeard, by which I mean his little community of what passed for friends, I can’t say I was surprised by her silence.
Human maturation is slow, at fourteen she was in no way experienced enough to know how to handle the things that were thrown her way by a range of ages, many of which were well beyond her own. I resolved later to give time to studying the phenomenon of the Neckbeard & Incel communities, but I knew from the very moment of that resolution that I could not undertake that study while I was invested in the wellbeing of the human they were now targeting for their abuse. My human.
Fauve’s eyes welled up a little, and she shook while she tried to bring herself under control, her gaze averted from me and went toward the master bedroom where her mother and father slept. My gaze reflexively followed hers, she was checking to make sure she wasn’t going to be interrupted.
“I keep getting these… mean, evil DMs over my Chaos server. I block the senders but they just keep making new accounts. They say horrible… vile things and I try not to read them. I've started blocking every new sender as soon as I get them, but they just make new accounts.” Fauve’s cheeks turned red and she chewed on her lower lip.
She was clearly unhappy, and I was fairly sure that I could detect the smell of fear on her while she spoke in a quiet voice like she was afraid of giving life to her fears by speaking them aloud. “Some of them…they’re scary. Before I started blocking automatically, I read all the messages I got. I don’t want to tell my mom or dad… they’ll just get mad, not at me, I mean, but dad almost hit that last lawyer to come by the house, and I think that was the goal. I was watching through my bedroom window, I couldn’t hear, but if he’d hit the man, he’d go to jail… it just won’t stop… What is wrong with these people? I say I’m not interested and now I’m supposed to be what, punished?”
She was angry as well as scared, Fauve didn’t go out much in the first place, but in the weeks since this had all begun, she now barely left the house except for work. She hadn’t gone back to the water park, and her father or mother took to driving her to work instead of letting her use ride sharing apps.
The instinctive desire to protect their young is especially powerful in humans, and by the same token, despite their sometime protests, the young want the security of knowing their parental units are ready to mind and protect them. Fauve was an independent human girl, but she was still a child, despite nearing her maturation in only a handful of years, and wanted to feel safe.
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Wolfbeard and his friends took away her sense of safety and control, and as much as her parents were trying to restore that by ferrying her to work and letting her remain in the home, there was little they could do about her digital life. Especially if Fauve kept that knowledge from them. It was only a matter of time before the parents became targets of online harassment too. They got my datapad information, sooner or later William and Rebecca would find their own being sought. I was frankly surprised it hadn’t happened yet, though as I thought about it, since they didn’t realize I was an alien, they probably assumed I was William, not knowing another intelligent being was living in the same house.
Fauve’s sniffle brought my wayward mind back to the moment and I said, “You won’t have to worry for long. I promise you.” I said, I wished I could smile like humans did, but baring teeth was an act of aggression for dlamisa, and we couldn’t shape our lips the way a human could. Trying to think of something that might offer some comfort, I cocked my head in the way humans seemed to love and said again, “Trust me, everything will be fine. Just give it a day or two.”
Fauve didn’t frown, and that she didn’t do so was reassuring to me that she at least somewhat believed what I said. “Bailey, not that I’m not grateful or anything, but shouldn’t you be more worried about yourself right now? If this gets to be too much for me,” there was her stubborn pride again, it was hard not to admire that in humans, they were not a species of quitters, “I can just disconnect for as long as I need to. But they still might find some way to charge you even after all the statements made to support what I said.”
Like she wanted to reassure me, or maybe just because humans loved it when I cocked my head at an angle, she reached over and scratched behind my ears. This seemed to be so natural to her that it was routine, humans I suppose, can be creatures of habit too, and those habits shape them a great deal, good and bad alike. I filed that away for later and added it to my inventory of things about the neckbeard and incel communities to examine. I could already see the paper title, ‘An Anthropological Study of the Habits that Form Failed Humans’ or ‘How the Habits Unmake the Man’.
Despite losing a bit of knowledge on the stress management methods of a human family, I was still a dlamisa of science and the prospect of opening up such knowledge with my outsider’s perspective and maybe even being well known among humans themselves was more than a little appealing.
But when Fauve said that, the truth was I was more moved than anything, despite what she was going through, she was still thinking about me, about worrying about her family and what her problems might mean for them. Perhaps the strongest takeaway here is that humans cope with their problems by relying on their powerful connections. Each one supporting and backing up the other, like emotional weight redistribution. In short, when one human who is beloved of other humans suffers, the others share in that emotional state to aid in treating the mental wound until the injured one is recovered.
This sharing of inner strength lends humans enormous reserves of fortitude which are unmatched in the less socially complex intelligent species. To hurt one human is to rile the lot of them, in a strange way, much as I hate to admit it, those who had targeted my human were doing the same thing. Supporting a member of their community in a time of emotional distress.
I filed that away too, much as I felt a distinct distaste for them at the outset, it the power which communities lend to their individual members was considerable. They were trying to ‘help’ Wolfbeard. Isolated humans with no community were clearly more vulnerable, weaker, and lacked the strength of that reinforcement.
I wondered, if a community formed around a self destructive and self reinforcing set of beliefs, could the individual, by their own strength, find the courage to leave it? Would they even be able to realize how they were harming themselves? Even if they realized the problem, would they remain just so that they would not lose that support network?
There was an unpleasant thought. It clearly required more study, but until then, I had my humans to look out for, and one of mine was worried about me. She had no idea how little reason there was to worry, and the truth was, neither did I.
I just leaned into her scratches of my scalp and said, “Trust me, Fauve, everything will work out just fine.”