When we reached the ticket area and without missing a beat, William drew out the tickets he’d printed out and handed them over to… yes, him. He still smelled absolutely foul, like milk and cheese left too long in the sun. Golf cap still on his head and a black shirt with a gray wolf howling at a bright white moon.

I have been informed by my editor at this stage that I should add one unrelated segment before I relay the events ahead, and that pertains to my use of idioms common among humans. After fifty years, they are so integrated into my vocabulary and speech that I find I can’t do without them. ‘Missing a beat’ is a musical idiom. The idiom can refer to either the music maker making a mistake in the notes they play, or to a dancer whose movements have lost their pattern to the music. Humans are unique in their propensity to create things that seem unnecessary to much of the galaxy.

‘Music’ in my opinion, is one of those ‘unnecessary things’ which is so marvelous that it ‘becomes’ necessary after only a brief exposure. This patterned noise is meant to guide motion and occasionally induce mating behavior in the species, a behavior I will cover at a later time. For now it is enough to know that idioms like this can be cross referenced in the appendix if there is ever contextual confusion in the text that follows.

Now to resume the narrative, the golf cap wearing neckbeard ‘growled’ at me again, he tried to stare at me, and I looked away. I was fairly sure after reflection that neckbeards were not in fact a different species, and that what had been said before was merely tongue in cheek critique, a kind of humor relating to their bizarre behavior. Instead I concluded that they are a kind of ‘failed human’ though whether they do have some kind of hybrid traits with other animals I wasn’t sure at the time.

All I was sure of was that I was a guest on Earth, there were no others of my kind on the whole planet, or even the solar system as far as I knew. All I had was my host family, and who knew what could get me thrown off the world and sent home a failure with nothing to show for years of work?

So I looked away so as not to offend the neckbeard, though I caught sight of his smug face out of the corner of his eye, the way he tilted his head back so that he was looking down at me was a form of dominance display I’d seen before. But when I looked away, I saw something I hadn’t seen until then, William was glaring at the neckbeard. William wasn’t a big man, truth be told the neckbeard was taller by a head, but with his glare unflinching and steady, I looked back at the neckbeard and saw that ‘he’ looked away.

“They’re all like that.” He muttered so that only I could hear him and shuffled us away.

“Like what?” I asked, I barely noticed the noise, because there wasn’t much, other than the sound of flowing water.

“Shallow. Cowards. Aspiring bullies. He knew you were an alien and probably worried about how you look to humans, so you were an easy target. Plus because of your doglike features, he got to pretend you were really intimidated by an ‘alpha werewolf’ or whatever he imagines his true self to be.” His derisive snort was conclusion enough, and by the time he finished speaking we were well away from the rude ticket taker and we put it out of our minds.

Free of the chaos from the other day, I could marvel at the sheer scale of this place, there were arching metal bands with tracks between them that went high into the air by hundreds of feet and curved down toward a pool of water that stretched even farther. This track undulated over a large section of the park, and from where I stood I could just see a series of open double seats each one linked to another behind it, and a group of humans screaming as it began its rapid descent.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Not far from that I saw a wading pool where people just sat and enjoyed the feel of the flowing water. William kept me walking, I suppose giving me the tour, sort of, before we actually went on anything. And I saw something called ‘the lazy river’ which had just tubes of rubber in which humans lay back and drifted. Dlamisa have something of an affinity for water, it borders on the same affection for it that humans have, and the prospect of just laying in there and drifting was a welcome one.

He showed me the ‘bumper boats’ which were little boats with rubber rims that small humans piloted over a big pool and rammed each other over and over again.

I lingered beside William to watch these small humans wage naval warfare against each other in their little boats, and while I watched, I thought about the Zenti and their brief conflict with the human race. Homo sapiens really are predators of the highest order. These small ones were sweet and cute by human standards, but even now at such an early age, they had violent impulses. The Zenti didn’t stand a chance. I thought about what my professor relayed about the way pioneer women eliminated the gaxa and then chased down the last of them to a nest to eliminate them at the source.

I had to wonder, ‘How many prey species evolved intelligence, how many even have the capacity for violence on the human scale? Most predator species don’t have the socialization capacity that humans do, even among those who develop intelligence and civilization. How many can even fathom the depths of the human propensity for violence?’ When I thought about that, I had to really wonder long and hard, ‘How much of a chance does the rest of the galaxy stand when this race ‘really’ starts expanding?’ As of now, there are no true ‘empires’ to speak of, governing multiple worlds is difficult as the social skills required simply don’t exist for most species. Ruling even a handful of planets is unheard of outside of a few outlying species who have a single figure that serves as the center of culture and government.

Besides that, settling new worlds and growing their populations takes considerable time, it will be centuries before any worlds are fully inhabited. But the homo sapien species has sent out colonists or ‘pioneers’ as they dub themselves, to a dozen worlds. Thankfully the galaxy is a very big place and there are endless worlds to settle. But if it came to violence? I watched the glee on these human children’s faces as they rammed full speed into each other’s little boats, and I already knew the outcome.

William was watching my face out of the corner of his eye and seemed to read my thoughts. “It’s surprising that we haven’t destroyed ourselves before now, isn’t it?” He asked me, and I couldn’t disagree, but I didn’t want to be rude either, so I said nothing.

“We managed to make peace with ourselves before it could happen. We’ll find a way to live with the rest of the universe. We’re not just destructive, we’re creative, innovative, and we will find a way.” William said it quietly, had I not eight ears on my head, even I might have missed it. I never could tell him that this nebulous determination to find some ‘way’ in the Universe was exactly what had me worried at that moment. Fifty years later, yes, I love my humans, but I never forgot that moment standing by the giant pool and watching small human children pretend to kill each other, and even now, writing and speaking on my thesis to earn my degree, I tell you this with certainty. No matter how cuddly and loving you find humans to be, never forget that they evolved as apex predators on one of the most dangerous and lethal worlds in the known galaxy.

Do not poke them.

This may seem ironic in retrospect, given what you are about to read of my next actions, but if you are wise, you will understand that this only emphasizes what I have just said.