My call was quick, thankfully embassy staff are always available and as such, explaining myself was easy. Making it even easier, the incident made the local news and the embassy was not far from the transit point where my professor and I arrived.

Middle of the night or not, a car was promised to me that would pick me up from the residence within the hour, but I was to bring my datapad with me.

I had no trouble slipping out, the basement in which I lived had its own door, so I left and shut the door as quietly as I could. Human hearing is far from the best, truth be told their hearing is rather weak compared to most species. It is easily damaged and isn’t that great in the first place. But humans have unparalleled instincts.

In preparation for my visit, I studied what I could so I wouldn’t offend their senses, and I learned of something called the ‘evil eye’. Somehow, humans know when they are being watched. They may not see, hear, or even smell the one watching. The one watching might be even a kilometer or more away and using special watching tools that let them see without being seen. But still they will know they’re being observed.

A father will almost intuitively know to check the thermostat of his house, a mother will know when her child is hiding something even when the child isn’t in the same room. They don’t always know what they know, or know why or how they know it. But human senses are far deeper than the mere surface level data input.

To this day I think the only reason I snuck out successfully is because, other than Fauve, they were asleep and exhausted.

True to their word a car was out front within minutes and I found myself at my embassy while I was still scrolling through these vile messages and threats to myself and my humans.

Even while I did what I was doing, I knew I was violating the terms of my study. Involving my world’s government in their world’s legal matters could have gotten me deported for my own safety whether I wanted to stay or not.

I still wonder what data I gave up over this, but as I watched various cartoon avatars scroll past on the Chaos software messaging program and neckbeard after neckbeard say things that no one should ever say, I was sure I was doing the proper thing.

I didn’t really think of it in ethical terms, which is something humans had a hard time grasping when I explained all this later. They were my humans, so I acted. The humans have an expression, ‘Man is a moral animal’. They don’t say this to claim themselves to be good, the expression predates the discovery that other forms of animal life also abide by social moral codes within their own protocultures, and it far predates the meeting of intelligent alien life.

But where most species in the galaxy, including those on the human world, have only very broad, generalized ethics for large scale social interactions, humans are unique in that just as they do with socialization and politics, they can make anything into a moral question. They have a far reaching series of various philosophies that detail down to the treatment of each other at the individual level. This has done nothing to make all of them ‘good’. I could tell that by the vile things I was reading.

But it has set their framework in such a way that any action somebody took was almost always framed as an ethical question first. Thus, ‘protecting my human’ was something that was approved of from start to finish… except by these. This particular subculture of humans was a blending of both neckbeard and incel.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

To discern the difference, while the car drove me to my embassy, I continued to search terms, interestingly while they share some overlap, such as bitter failure over their inability to mate successfully, they do have some differences. An incel who is outside of the neckbeard subculture will have nothing else of interest but their own failure. But a neckbeard inside or outside of the incel subculture may have a broad diversity of interests that create their own subgroups. Ironically both groups react poorly to the opposite sex taking an interest in either them or their interests, thus causing further isolation.

Truly, they are the authors of their own misfortune, turning their venom inward, until they could turn it outward, as was happening now.

My own reaction to this was an ever growing anger, similar to when I brought my teeth down on Wolfbeard’s arm and tore into his flesh despite the poor taste. It speaks to the power of human’s ability to connect with others in that not only had they connected with me, but that the bond now ran both ways.

The car reached the embassy, a gated building with two large black furred dlamisa guards. The gate slid open and my car rolled in, the building had no stairs, rather it had a low ramp that extended far out from the building and out to the circle my transport rounded. I went up the ramp and the doors slid open, while there was a guard, he never gave one of his own species a second glance.

Our hall was smooth, polished wood that, while shiny and reflective, gave a warped reflection instead of a true one. My species doesn’t enjoy its own reflection, and looking back I can’t help but conclude that the building was likely provided to us rather than built for us, and we simply modified it to make it acceptable.

I reached the back room swiftly enough and my people’s ambassador displayed a distinct difference between us and humanity by getting right to the point before I even reached the chair on the far side of his desk. “What do you need?” He asked, and at once I felt a pang of longing for the human socialized method that included ‘small talk’. A chance to get to know each other suddenly meant more than I realized.

But I plowed ahead as a good dlamisa should, detailing the events that led up to the present. The ambassador cocked his head before the story was halfway through and said, “You are getting yourself far more involved than I would expect.” It had the tone of a rebuke, but I cocked my head at him and retorted…

“How else am I to learn everything I need to?”

He accepted my defensive response in silence, then let me finish the story up to the hour of my contact. He extended his dark hand for my data pad and I slid it across the table.

The ambassador began reading over the messages that were still coming in, his teeth were bared several times, but as I could see the pad’s screen reflected in the window behind him, I could tell it was only happening when he read threats against me specifically.

Finally he set the datapad down and said only, “I will make a phone call to the human embassy.”

It was a dismissal, polite by our standards, but I pointed at my data pad which he placed out of my obvious reach. “I have a lot of research data on there, when can I get it back?”

His head stayed cocked, “Morning, of course.”

I was fairly sure that our ambassador to humans, spent little time with humans, given that his expression said to me, ‘You’re spending too much time with them, forgetting how we do things.’

So I stood up, nodded, and then added one final thing that had his tongue lolling out, “Ambassador, thank you for your help. Let me offer a suggestion to you, go spend more time with humans. Leave the grounds, or take on a few human employees here. You might be surprised by what you find.”

There was no answer for me in turn when I made my departure, and predictably the car was still waiting for me outside when I left the building. The whole thing had taken less than an hour, including drive time. Quick, efficient, to the point, with no fuss no muss in between. Very dlamisa of them, admittedly it wasn’t completely displeasing. They would do their work, that was all I wanted.

But it made me miss my humans and their slower, busier, and slightly crazier ways too.

I snuck back into the house as easily as I left it and flopped onto the bed as soon as it was within flopping range. I then passed out from the sheer stress, utterly unaware of the nest of angry hornets I’d just kicked over.