A Propinquine, from an earth where the amniote egg never evolved. It is four-legged creature, with a head like an alligator, rough skin, and quills over its hindquarters. The feet are hooved, but the first three fingers of the forelimbs are used for grasping. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/460f78cb37eb53871c0fd1003a0104f6/a0cde4869e2155d7-cc/s640x960/fdb244cecf5819e76bb5e79a7e04fbb95462078e.pnj]
Picture by Timothy Morris
Squished up against a pillar, eyes squeezed shut, Mark waited outside the auditorium. Red checkerboard patterns swirled and warped behind his eyelids.
Mark had assumed that the building—no, it wasn't a "building." The "tree house"? The "shipping container"? Call it a "space." He'd assumed that the space they'd reserved for him in this fashionable river-side patch of the city would be rectangular. Wasn't the UN embassy composed of rectangles?
This space, though, the space where Mark was to hold his first ever nonhuman team-building exercise, wasn't rectangular. It was, in fact, composed of stacked rhombic dodecahedra, but Mark didn't know that. All he knew was that the "auditorium" had a "floor" composed of four diamond-shaped panels, whose acute-angled corners all met at a point.
It was clear why the Quotidians had built the space this way. They were climbers. Their origami limbs scissored and whipped them around the guy-wires and ooze-coated pillars that stretched from wall to wall. Every time Mark looked around, he had to fight off a wave of nausea.
He did not throw up. He waited outside the door to the auditorium, which slanted like a skylight in the diamond-shaped wall-pane above him. He held onto his pillar with the special gloves that somehow stuck to the hygienic mucus. Go in. He screamed silently at himself, as if driving an exhausted horse. Go in go in go in!
The high-pitched whistle nearly made Mark loose his grip.
"Excuse me," said his translator bug.
Mark's head jerked up. Someone had seen him. Of course people could see him having a nervous breakdown here, out in the open. Coward! Idiot! He was sabotaging himself. At least no humans were here to watch him. Laura was already down in the auditorium pit. Answer him!
"Excuse me," said the voice again. "Is this the way to the Salp Larva's Clown Dance?"
Mark bit the inside of his lip and turned to address…something. It had three legs and a pair of tentacles that curled like mustaches under a pair of what might be eye-stalks.1
"This is the UN Human Team-building Demonstration."
"That's what I said. I was curious after I met you and your conspecific on the bus. You were very rude to me. And you still stink."
Mark had no idea what this thing was talking about, or where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing. He smiled while he scrambled for appropriate replies.
The creature rotated on its perch, swishing the skirts it wore around its barrel-shaped abdomen. "I am disgusted by the teeth in your mouth. Thank you." Its mustache-tentacles reached past Mark and seized his pillar. Before Mark could do more than begin recoiling in terror, the nonhuman swung itself through the door.
Mark looked after it and experienced another wave of vertigo. The bottom of the auditorium was a very long way down. Guests collected there like melted ice cream at the bottom of a cone.
Go in go in go in!
Mark forced himself to climb into the room and begin the team-building.
***
Deep in the vertical tangle of the auditorium, Laura waited for Mark and tried not to think about or notice anything.
There was no level floor to stand on. Wrapped in boots, galoshes, and a pair of hooded raincoats, Laura had to hold onto a fifteen-centimeter pipe to stop herself from tumbling onto other guests. Although the tube was absolutely coated in slime, Laura had no trouble gripping it, even in her elbow-length dishwashing gloves. But she didn't notice that. Laura was too busy not allowing herself to wish that she were anywhere else. Especially not with Koen. She would not think about what he might be doing even now.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Was this the best use of her time? Was this the right place for Laura to be? Don't allow those thoughts, either.
Nor the fear. She would not be afraid. This fear, and the will that countered it, were so familiar by now that Laura hardly noticed them. Yes, she was surrounded by shuffling monsters, but she had a job to do. That was all. She functioned.
The burning in the muscles of her right arm became impossible to ignore. Laura shifted position.
Laura's colleagues and counterparts from other embassies scanned her back with eyes and other, more cryptic organs. They were all from junior members of the Convention of Sophonts, unused to talking to beings from other timelines. That was exactly the problem team-building exercise was supposed to remedy.
There, pressed up against each other, they could look up and see the perfectly flat and level diamond-shaped pane that formed the "ceiling." Mark was climbing there, through the skylight door.
Sty mix Sty, the Quotidian who had arranged all this, produced a high-pitched rasp with her teeth.
"Here he is! Everyone, look! It's the amusing wriggler!"
***
Mark waited for the hoots and shrieks to die down. "All right, everyone! Thank you all for coming to the UN Team-Building Exercise. Hopefully the first of many. Aha. Um. Okay." He cleared his throat.
"Are you ill?" asked Sty mix Sty.
"No?"
"Then why don't you spit that mucus out?"
More rasps, shrieks, and hoots. Down among them, Laura stopped herself from wishing that Koen was with her.
"It's time for the icebreaker exercise," said Mark. "Please form groups with your closest evolutionary relatives."
She took a deep breath and forced her eyes to focus on a being shaped like a red igloo. It stood on a pair of round, spiny organs that might be mouth-parts, wheels, or domesticated pets.
Laura looked down at one of the cards Koen had prepared for her. "Excuse me, are you a … deuterostome?"
"Zzz!" said the creature, which translated as "Of course not!"
Laura nodded, already weary. "Thank you." She flipped through her cards. Most of them were incomprehensibly technical, but one said to look for fur and milk glands.
She looked. She didn't find any, but there was something that looked like a bridge made of blue lemons. Laura had seen that species before. She slid over to it.
"Pardon me, Honored Sophont. Would you by any chance be a deu...deuterosome?"
"Why, yes I am." Little mouths opened and closed on the lemons nearest her.
Laura didn't know what she was doing or why, and yet the tiny twinkle of validation still warmed her. She was doing something right.
"And," Laura flipped cards. "Are you a chordate?"
"Yes!" The lemons gasped. "You're a chordate too? Your anatomy does indeed resemble some free-swimming aquatic larvae of my lineage."
"Yes, I've been told that."
"Why, you've turned the notochord into columnar support structure! Fascinating!"
That exhausted Laura's store of polite response to gibberish, so she flipped to the next card. "And are you a vertebrate?"
The lemon-bridge's translator clicked. "Clarify? The notochord is encased in a hard shell? I can't help you there. I'm a colony of salps, you see."
Laura looked up from her cards. So that was what a salp looked like!
The lemon-bridge shuffled one of its ends around to point behind Laura. "That fellow might be more…vertebral, however. Look at those rigid limbs."
Rigid, indeed. From its spiny, armored body rose an organ less like a head than the claw of a praying mantis, except that on the claw's bulging elbow, a pair of eyes stared at Laura with damp hope.
"Vertebrates?" said the claw-head, its voice a wheeze through three pairs of slats on its body. "Dare I say, fishes? Don't say your lineage went the way of internal skeletons! Hilarious!"
"Did someone say internal skeletons?" The voice was a growling hiss from below.
It stood at the nadir of the auditorium, its long legs braced against the diamond-shaped walls. Each leg ended in a dainty hoof, each hoof extending from a clutch of fingers. The skin was covered in a cracked, waxy coating like lacquer, and its broad, neckless head was twice the width of Laura's. Quills rattled on a thick tail. Nictitating membranes flicked across eyes like mud-colored tangerines. It opened a toilet-seat mouth, and light gleamed off a ceramic-colored tongue.
"Long-lost cousin!"
"I am?" Laura asked the maw yawning right under her feet.
"Welcome," the giant amphibian hissed. "Welcome, fellow tetrapod!"
1 Actually, they were nostrils.