Dik'Hed rubbed his slimy tentacles with glee as he saw the latest acquisitions scrolling past his bulbous eyes on the screen.

Excellent! He thought to himself as he calculated what the value of the precious trove of stolen data would net his species, minus his usual 10% finder’s fee.

The download bar turned green, and he hurriedly added it to the central marketplace registry at a starting bid of 30,000 drakels.

That done, he ran his net worms through the defragmenter and waited for their memory banks to empty. Once the purge was finished, he programmed them to disperse back out into the galactic data net for more works to steal.

As he waited, he marveled at the insidious niche his species had occupied in the local quadrant.

A dull, unimaginative species, his people were descended from scavengers that survived by feeding on the dead bodies of marine life that drifted down to the depths where they resided.

This went on for millions of years as his species was too stupid and lazy to have an original thought or even attempt to evolve, so they just occupied their niche, content to munch on rotten corpses.

A few thousand years ago, a team of marine biologists from an advanced civilization landed on his planet and went about cataloging the depths of the ocean where his people lived.

Intrigued by how incredible lazy and stupid his species was, they ran experiments and tried to jumpstart their evolution.

The experiments were successful, and his species achieved sapience. The biologists tried to instill original thought and the ability to invent, but they soon tired of dealing with such a lazy, imbecilic species and left for other planets to explore.

Now his people were sapient but still indolent and unwilling to think for themselves. So, they returned to their niche, and instead of waiting for a corpse to fall by them, they went out to look for corpses to steal from other species.

This went on for a few thousand years until they became so successful at stealing they had expanded their habitat to include scavenging along the beaches. Not once did it ever occur to them to learn how to hunt or create anything.

They were just content with stealing from others, and so they continued, a bane upon any who came across them.

In a stroke of luck, another alien species landed on their planet and uplifted them further, allowing them to figure out how to make tools and build things.

They didn’t like that, as it was too much work, and they preferred to steal.

So, they killed the nice aliens that uplifted them, stole their ship, and went into space.

For the next few generations, his people just traveled along the trading routes, scavenging anything they could find as they opportunistically stole whatever they could.

The other races disliked them immensely, as they would try to steal technology, ships, ideas, anything they could get their hands on.

They became the kleptomaniacs of their quadrant, and other species tried to steer clear of their extremely ugly, barely functioning kit-bashed ships.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

As they acquired more technology and continued to seek more things to steal, they eventually settled into their role as a spacefaring scavenger species and started passing off the inventions of other species as their own.

Dik'Hed and his brood brother Aas'Hol were the most successful scavengers of their species and became extremely rich, allowing them to increase the size of their harems.

This was incredibly important since the males of their species were too stupid to even successfully copulate half the time as they kept forgetting where the females’ cloacae were located.

Such was the life of Dik'Hed and Aas'Hol when a new species called humans arrived in their area of space.

The humans were not advanced, nor were they powerful or anything special that warranted trying to steal anything from them.

It wasn’t until they came across a derelict human ship and he decided to go through the data banks that he realized the one treasure the humans had and were hiding from the galaxy.

Stories, tales, poems, Limericks.

Since he was incredibly stupid, he could barely understand the concepts they were trying to convey.

He tried to read a book called See Billy Go Potty, and it hurt his brain, so he stopped reading it and just looked at the nice pictures of the human baby defecating in a bowl while an adult human female clapped happily.

As he scrolled through the database of thousands of such stories, a rare idea struggled mightily to penetrate his doltish thoughts and make itself known in his typically vacuous brain.

He could steal these stories, pass them off as his own, and then sell them to other species for more drakels.

No one really knows who the humans are, and there weren’t enough of them to be concerned about as they were barely spacefaring.

He thought long and hard about this for days and tried in vain to brainstorm with his brood brother Aas'Hol, who just blankly stared at him while he drooled.

So Dik'Hed downloaded the database and started selling the human stories on the central marketplace registry. The response was immediate, and thousands of aliens started a bidding war to purchase these novel stories and own them.

For the next two cycles, Dik'Hed and Aas'Hol slowly released more stolen stories as they were grabbed by his net worms, making sure to create the idea of there being a limited stock of rare human stories to drive up the value.

Suddenly remembering that he had started a bid at 30,000 drakels and forgetting what he was literally just thinking about, he rubbed his tentacles together with unbridled glee as he watched the bid already surpass 100,000 drakels.

As he was thinking about how much this would increase the size of his harem, a shadow darkened the interior of his crappy ship.

His stupid, bulbous eyes took a few seconds to register that a large, menacing warship filled his cockpit window.

The comm alert beeped, and he finally found and pressed it after pushing the wrong buttons repeatedly.

“This is Ralek mercenary ship Kills with a smile. Summary judgment has been passed, and we have found the cause for which we have been hired honorable.”

The Ralek were one of the oldest races and extremely powerful. They were bounty hunters with strong concepts of honor and a legendary work ethic. If they took on your cause, nothing would stop them until they completed the contract.

Dik'Hed started trembling while Aas'Hol looked around in confusion and slung drool all over the consoles. He keyed the communication panel again and responded.

“This is Dik'Hed; may I ask by whom was this contract put on us poor, simple traders?”

The Ralek ship responded, and Dik'Hed trembled in terror as he listened to the snarling words of the felid mercenary.

“We have been contracted by the Guild of Authors of the planet Earth. They have introduced us to the concept of copyright, and we have found honor in such a belief. We have declined payment and agreed to the contract once proof of your dishonorable thefts was presented to us.

This is one contract we gladly fulfill for free.”

Dik'Hed was still trying to understand what they were implying as his moronic brain struggled to catch up. He looked at his brood brother Aas'Hol and watched as he tried to shove a piece of flurt fish in his mouth, missing repeatedly.

What an idiot, he thought to himself as he watched his brood brother miss again. He started laughing before remembering he was just doing something really important.

As his half-witted intellect finally comprehended the danger they were in, he looked back out of the cockpit window. He was just in time to see the plasma torpedo flaring brightly as it passed the minimum safe arming distance and slammed into his piece of crap ship.