Chapter Twenty-Six

Determination is a funny thing, it may drive you to seek results, but it does not actually ensure you get them. My first day of in person class came sooner than I expected, and I found myself staring at the steps leading up into the building for a lot longer than I needed to. “You nervous?” Boatswain asked, he’d joined me for today, at least for the outdoor trips, his voice was a very low growl, and he made a point of using our native tongue to ask.

English was the dominant local tongue, and we usually just used that, every dlamisa who visited Earth for work purposes was required to be fluent in the local language. We did have our translating implants, but the reality was that since all language is to some degree a matter of cultural perspective, they were absolute garbage when it came to daily use. Their primary function was as an assistant to us to help us learn quicker than we otherwise would. That way we could pick up on human idioms and cultural references. Boatswain’s was better than mine, dlamisan’ military budgets were something to behold. His included an augmented reality option that let him pull reference materials up in front of his eyeballs.

The University student budget? Not that great. But this just made his use of Dlamisar that much stranger. He hadn’t spoken our language even once in my presence. Not till now.

“If you are, don’t be.” He said and looked around, his arms hung loose at his sides and he looked around at the various human students zipping by on their scooters or walking into buildings, there were a lot of them.

“Easy for you to say. You have suppressant drugs and conditioning.” I retorted, and he let out a heavy grunt.

“Even so. You got up after being sideswiped by a dlamisan space marine, and from what I hear, you threw a human who was nearly as tall as me. You’re at least a little tougher than you think.” Boatswain said, “Besides, I won’t be far. Any trouble, call me.”

This was yet another indication that humans and dlamisa could take a great deal from each other, his words were reassuring, but… everything is an experiment, and I made a mental note of it later. Military dlamisa are notoriously thick skinned, literally and figuratively, they say little and are used to speaking to no one for long periods of time. Some ships even put them into cryosleep, only waking them up to fight when the time comes. Part of that is because our soldiers are so exceptionally dangerous… and many other species have a hard time being around them. We were the humans of the known galaxy before the humans, you might say.

So to hear him express compassion toward me, offer praise, encouragement? There was only one obvious source for that, and that was his association with Byron.

“Thank you.” I said, and just before I could head for the stairs, I heard a familiar voice.

“Hey! Waiting here for me?” I turned to the voice to see Lisa’s smiling face, she wore a pair of jeans and a cropped shirt that exposed her midriff, along with some perfectly ordinary sneakers that were a vibrant blue shade.

“I guess I am even if I wasn’t.” I perked up when I found myself with a companion to go in with.

“Hey Boatswain, have a good one, don’t worry about this guy, I’ll watch his tail!” She said and we both looked at her in surprise. It was the first time we’d heard an expression of our home world pass a human’s lips.

“What? I pulled down a dlamisan phrasebook. I might as well make you feel at home, right?” She said and kept that big, welcoming smile on her face.

The natural ambassadorial skills of humans never ceased to amaze me. As I followed beside her up the stairs after she traded a few courtesies with Boatswain that I barely noticed, I couldn’t help but think…

‘The human capacity to make friends might make them more dangerous than their capacity for violence.’ It wasn’t hard to imagine weaponized diplomacy, backed by the rapidly growing human military might. Fauve’s concern about species like hers and ours being ‘outnumbered’ being recognized around the world by human leaders was an… intimidating thought.

I was so lost in those thoughts that while Lisa led me to the classroom, I didn’t even notice the directions, I just aimlessly followed after her.

‘You need to stop getting distracted.’ I told myself as we walked through the thick wooden door. It was heavy, shockingly so. So much so that I stopped at the door and swung it several times.

“It’s old.” Lisa said when she saw me fiddling with it.

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“You say that like it’s an explanation.” I retorted and swung the door once more for good measure, I managed to ignore the gaggle of other students who watched with expressions that ranged from bemusement to amusement at what to them must have been a curious alien antic.

“Oh, right, you wouldn’t know.” Lisa snapped her fingers and said, “That just looks like all wood, in fact it’s got a heavy iron core. A few hundred years ago they used to have a problem with ‘school shootings’. A bunch of schools from the ones for very small children to college students like us, they got shot up and a bunch of kids died.”

I couldn’t go pale in the face, but I could drop my jaw, and did.

“Crazy people were allowed to have guns?!” I knew humans could be reckless, everybody knew that, but that took reckless to another level.

“They weren’t supposed to, but it kept happening until they made it so almost nobody had guns, then there weren’t guns for crazy people to get. That was a few hundred years ago, but one of the solutions early on was to make bullet proof doors to keep crazy gun wielding maniacs out.” Lisa explained, and I closed the door behind me with the utmost gentleness.

“We don’t have the problem anymore, but nobody ever took out the doors. So? Big, heavy doors in a lot of the old buildings that were around in the early 21st century.” Lisa said it reassuringly and I admit, my sigh of relief was visible.

“There is an unpleasant thought, education is stressful enough without getting shot at while getting it.” I said and the other students nodded along with the sage understanding that can only come from students of higher learning.

The class was laid out with a number of simple square topped desks and chairs made of wood that could have stood to be a bit more comfortable if I’m being honest. Interestingly, the alignment of desks was a curve that created a wide open central space, or would have, but that central space was taken up with a long flat desk on which nothing sat.

I wanted to ask questions, but before I could, a middle aged woman with short brown hair walked into the room and strode up to the far end of the room. She was somewhat obese as humans went, though not to the extent that [Wolfbeard] was. Unlike him however, she wore a bright and sunny smile, and she seemed to crackle with energy in very gesture.

“Welcome to Creative Writing. I’m Professor Edwards.” She said and then for seemingly no reason at all, she slapped the wall behind her with an open hand creating a massive ‘crack’ sound that stiffened my tail and everybody else’s backs all at once.

“Didn’t see that coming, did you?” She asked. “And that’s part of what makes creativity what it is,” she hadn’t waited for anyone to answer, “the unexpected, the unlooked for, taking two ordinary things… an older woman’s hand and a boring old wall, and combining them to make something unexpected. Take a chainsaw and a person, you get ‘Chainsaw man’. Take a corpse and a living person, you get a vampire or a zombie. Take a human and a dog, maybe you get a dlamisa.” She winked in my direction, and I can only say I was glad to know I was acknowledged in such a friendly manner.

“You can make anything in fiction, and during this class, that is exactly what you’re going to do. Now turn to page thirty-five and let’s get started.” No sooner than we heard her command, than we all began flipping through our datapads to follow along.

We read through quite a bit in a very short period of time. I learned about how unreliable narrators created realism and confusion. I learned about the three arc structure. I learned a lot in a very little time.

And when the class began to wind down, I got my first creativity exercise. I suppose I should point out that creativity is not widely encouraged among dlamisa, we’re ‘able’ to do it. We have our arts, our music, but our society is so focused upon its efficiency and advancement that we do nothing to fund or promote the arts, as a result? It should come as no surprise that few of my race are ever really exposed to them.

My first real exposure to ‘concentrated quantities of creativity’ was in studying human media forms, their old movies, books, and the materials I would need or thought I would need in order to understand them.

But I had never created anything myself before, unless you count ‘Ballyball’.

The exercise we were given was simple, “Spend the last ten minutes of class writing a story about being somebody else in this class, anyone. Take a good look at them, and try to imagine their life, don’t say who, just write a short fictional story about what it’s like being them.”

I was coping well enough with it being only a small number, about twenty-five people, but I felt every eyeball in the room turned toward me. I didn’t need to be a genius to know that ‘everybody picked the alien’.

“Oh boy.” I said out loud and cocked my head, I let my ears flop down and looked at them all in that curious expression that seemed to make the primates happy. “Trust me, I’m not that exciting.” I cautioned them, but with enormous and absurd grins on their faces, they immediately began writing.

For my part, what could I say? The more I learned the more I realized I didn’t know, and trying to imagine all these different lives just based on appearance alone?

Then it hit me. ‘I don’t have to go just by faces and bodies!’ I shut my eyes and focused all my attention on my sense of smell, and I inhaled deeply. One stood out in particular, our instructor. There was so much there. The smell of fresh baked bread, a soft lavender shampoo, and thanks to my exposure to Michael, I knew the smells that toddlers accumulated. I knew the scent of stress, and there was plenty of that.

I had enough, I hastened my fingers to the surface of the datapad, and began to write.