When I returned to my room in the basement, I was questioning myself. The funny thing about resolve, certainty that you’re right, is that even while it may be ‘black and white’ at the extremes, it is colored in between by so many shades of gray.

As much as my ‘emotional beaker’ was being filled with affection for what I dubbed ‘my humans’, I was and am and will remain, a dlamisa of science. I wanted to know, to understand humanity. Their drives, motives, creativity…

Their violence. Their jealousy. Their envy.

Their love. Their devotion. Their compassion.

I wanted to know it all, I’d been fascinated back at my University, and my fascination only grew over time, from the stories my professor told to the things I’d seen and even the things I’d done.

And while I could justify my interference with my human as another avenue of study, how humans responded to intervention and how they responded to unlooked for compassion or rescue from danger…

This was different.

I sat at my desk, I was resolved to do what I needed to do in order to alleviate some of the pressure on my humans. But even resolved as I was, this was crossing a line. I would be directly intervening to stop human activity in its tracks. My observation, my study, was going to be altered.

I was going to lose knowledge. How would a mated pair respond when stress increased exponentially from a wealthy and socially significant figure? How would the harassment escalate from what was dubbed by Fauve as ‘flying monkeys’?

Would I be charged? Would Wolfbeard be charged? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the officers must have expected that I would use my own position’s uniqueness to interfere.

And I hadn’t.

At least not immediately.

Human society is filled with games of power, as one of their great thinkers in the ancient past remarked, “Man is a political animal.” A key contributor to their evolutionary path was their high degree of socialization which involved negotiations of many varied factors, everything from who would lead to who would carry out tasks and what direction the group would walk.

Observing just how this played out with individuals in their society, its legal system, and for their lives was important knowledge, and if I acted, I knew I would lose the chance to study that. The chance to study this might not come again for another hundred years with someone else. My thesis would suffer, I might even lose my degree.

So I stared down at the datapad, I was shaking like a human, my tail curled under my seat.

But still I was resolved. With the benefit of hindsight I can look back and say that my own reactions were worth study just by themselves. The impact of sharing human lives and being taken into one of their families? My professor is from a profoundly anti-social species, and yet he embraced the other branch from the Walker family as readily as if he were born human. Dlamisa are more social, but even so, I didn’t think we were capable of what I was now going through. At least not to this degree.

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My finger hovered over the data pad, but before I could touch the screen, a message dinged in. It was on the server system used by Fauve. In my preparation for living with the family, I set up my datapad to mirror their activities, though I hadn’t actually used all of it yet.

This particular software was chiefly used by humans for communications, streaming gameplay, and talking with friends, as well as file exchanges. Fauve was a heavy user of this software.

Until this moment, I hadn’t touched my copy. But now a message was coming in. I moved my finger down to the message and tapped on it, and up popped a string of convoluted written attacks.

I say convoluted because they made no sense to me, it was clearly in the local language, but it was also not.

Human culture is not monolithic, this much is widely known, but it is generally assumed to be limited to preunification ‘national boundaries’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Humans develop subcultures of all kinds that exist within the larger dominant one. They develop subcultures around hobbies, around political parties, and before the advent of energy tokens and the adoption of the galactic standard units, there was even a subculture devoted to the mental mirages of deregulated cryptographic currency. That by itself merits a whole field of study, but it is enough to say that not every subculture was good for its members, that one, at least people only lost money.

Others were downright dangerous, or just as badly, there were some who were self destructive.

As I went on to their WURD, ‘Websters URban Dictionary’ to look up the words used in the communication to me, I realized I had just stumbled upon one such subculture.

Picture if you will, a culture of intelligent beings who hate themselves. But not just themselves. They hate the objects of their desire. They hate anyone who can ‘have’ the objects of their desire. Now imagine that this subculture focuses so heavily on self hatred and blame that they spend every waking hour either wishing they were dead or that someone else was. Suppose this group of people were constantly reinforcing their own sense of futility and failure to the point where failure became their identity and anger at being denied what they feel is rightfully theirs, became their only motivating fuel,

The terms used in this message, ‘Stacey’, ‘Foid’, ‘cuck’, ‘day of retribution’, ‘chad’, could not be understood without examining this subculture’s linguistic conventions. However for the sake of academic dignity, these are the only terms that will be listed here. The vileness and hatred poured out onto my young human for rejecting Wolfbeard was contrasted by another sea of messages containing their twisted ‘philosophy’, and accusations against me personally as being a ‘chad’.

It made no sense to me until I realized… ‘If they ran any story at all, it would have been left off that I’m an alien, or if the word alien was used, they would think it referred to a human from another part of the world.’ It was almost laughable how badly their confusion must have been.

I say almost because it included copious threats of violence. Just how they got my Chaos software ID, I don’t know. But they did, and they were reaching out. My estimation of Fauve’s mental toughness shot up several more levels as this must have been happening for days and she simply brushed it off.

Mental resilience in humans was truly something to behold.

I screencapped some of the messages with more violent threats and ignored their messages otherwise, instead swiping the software out of the way and scrolling through my contacts. There were few, my professor, my classmates that I traveled with, and then found what I wanted.

My people’s embassy.