I Wanna Try Writing Situations About Humans Are Wierd, Humans Are Space Orcs And Ect

Drew a merman :) Their name is Markus, and they use They/them pronouns :)

Humans are Weird: Burnout

I didn’t know how best to phrase this, and I definitely didn’t write this with the express purpose to romanticize mental health issues; this is just my own experience with the thing

tw: burnout

On Earth, it would be a Friday.

If Nora was back home, it would be 6:22 PM.

She sat back down at her desk, stretching.

-x-

Vullox was conducting their regular End Of Week check-in. They stopped outside Nora’s door.

Inside was silent, but that was regular for this human. She had called herself a “homebody” once, they had remembered. They opened the door.

Now that Vullox was inside, they could hear a faint scratching noise. Human-Nora, they saw, was at the desk. They called to her.

No response.

Vullox made it halfway through the room when they slowed to a confused stop.

Nora was slumped at the desk, her head resting on the wood, her red pen scratching against the journal.

Vullox wondered briefly how Human-Nora could even be writing at all without being able to see the page. They came closer, almost hesitantly.

Nora’s eyes did not so much as move. They were half-open, staring blankly at a point near the door. Her breaths made a few strands of her black hair quiver over her mouth, but she did not notice - or she did not care. Her entire body was completely still—except her hand.

(There was a human word for this they had read somewhere - something relating to felines, Vullox thought.)

A mounting dread growing in them, they looked at the page.

Things that I do just to take stock because I’m so

freAKING

DEAD

grad school full time

WORKING full time

dealt with a nice guy I think??

Idk, I’m just sick of him at this point

blocked him yeah he got annoying I can’t express it

Reeling I guess from it

ESSAYS????!!!! WHY

WORKING

WAKING UP EARLY

LIKE EVERY FREAKING DAY I

DON’T

WANT IT

GOING THRU MY ESSAY OUTL

Here the words stopped, and Vullox looked at the pen.

They stepped back. Tried calling her name again, but the word seemed to die out. Their scales bristled and stuck out on all edges - the feelings of confusion and dread.

Human-Nora didn’t need to look at what she was writing. But it wasn’t muscle memory, as Human-Dalton had explained to them.

No, it was simply the fact that Human-Nora wasn’t writing anything at all.

The red pen moved up and down the page in short, irregular lines—sometimes dragging, sometimes in a quick burst. Occasionally, she would lift up the pen and tap at the page, before resuming. The page seemed to sink in on the most numerous of the red lines, so dense was the ink there. It was some strange, unknown language - or just no language at all.

Very suddenly, Vullox remembered the human word they were searching for as they stared at the pen, as they stared at her unblinking eyes and slumped form.

Catatonic.

Scales rustling, they walked quickly out of the room and to the one on its left.

-x-

Human-Sascha flung open the door in response to Vullox’s frantic calling. “What.”

She sounded so thoroughly annoyed that Vullox briefly reconsidered asking her for help.

“It is Human-Nora,” they responded quickly. “I went to go to her room for her check-in - I think there is—something—something wrong with her.” Vullox’s scales rustled and clicked constantly, a sign of fear on their home planet Vulmien.

“Is she alright?” Sascha asked as she shut the door behind her. Her voice was no longer annoyed - rather, it held a considerable amount of urgency.

She stepped through Nora’s open door and stopped for a few seconds. Nora was still at her desk, eyes glassy and pen scratching lifelessly. Vullox now could absorb the sight in full, and it rooted them to the spot.

Slowly Sascha made her way over to the desk and laid a hand on Nora’s back. She surveyed the writing in the journal and gently began rubbing Nora’s back, murmuring words that Vullox’s translator could just barely pick up:

“What makes you think you can’t do it?”

She murmured this a few times over, each with a pause between the sentence, each with some variation — as if she was having a conversation with Human-Nora’s brain.

The pen scratched on, still in the same irregular rhythm. Nora lay still, breathing through her mouth. The few strands of hair that lay in front of her mouth quivered with a severe regularity that (strangely) unsettled Vollux even though they knew normal human breathing patterns were set to a tempo.

The pen slowed—at least, there seemed to be more pauses between the lines and taps Human-Nora was creating.

Slowly, the pen grinded to a halt, wobbling on its tip. A few more taps.

The pen fell onto the messy page with Nora’s hand covering it. Her eyes closed and opened, and she blinked a few times. She stirred slightly, her back shifting. Her breathing grew deeper, inhales sharper, almost as if it itself was sentient.

Vullox reflected that it was rather like... watching someone coming back to life.

It took even more time for her to push herself up into a normal sitting position. She leaned into Sascha’s arms, sniffled, and a guttural sound escaped her, quite unlike her regular voice.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. Vullox was struck by how much like a child she sounded - a child apologizing to their mother.

“You’re alright,” Sascha murmured into the girl’s hair. “You’re back here now.”

Nora sniffled again. “I don’t wanna… do complex thinking.” She brought a hand up to her face and wiped something on her jeans; she had been crying while in her previous state.

She continued, still in the same child-like tone. “I just wanna… be a cat… and think of cat things… all the time…”

Sascha hid a smile, patting Nora’s arm rhythmically. “Which cat would you like to be?”

“A really fluffy one. Like that Minuet cat, with the fluffy tail.” Nora’s mouth twitched a little. “I’m not even… a cat person. I like dogs. Small dogs.”

“Come.” Sascha wrapped an arm around Nora and led her to the bed. “Come. Rest now. You’ve done a lot for the day.”

Nora curled into herself, beneath the blue blankets, until all that was visible of her were messy tufts of hair sticking up onto the pillow.

Vullox watched Human-Sascha swipe through Human-Nora’s phone and set it down on the little table near the bed just as a man’s voice began to speak from it:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much…”

-x-

Sascha led a highly-confused Vullox out of Nora’s room and gently shut the door behind her.

“She put too much on herself,” she said quietly. “She’s suffering from burnout, so I put her to sleep with some Harry Potter. It’s always been comforting to her whenever she was sick, so I figured this would call for that.”

“But - what is - what about the… red markings in her journal?”

Sascha nodded. “She was initially trying to take stock of everything—trying to see what she had to do so she wouldn’t go on worrying for longer than she needs to. I guess… it turned into a vent, and then it got too much for her. So she just broke down.”

“So… this - this burnout… it does this to her? This strong of a reaction? She seemed quite… catatonic when I first found her.”

Sascha sighed. “This time was particularly strong. But other times she just vents it in her journal, or to someone. She’s not too confident in herself either, so those words that I kept repeating seem to help her.”

There was a pause.

“Thank you. For calling me.” Sascha's eyebrows were drawn with worry, but they cleared quickly.

There were good reasons, Vullox knew, that the two friends had requested to be put next to each other on the ship.

This had to be the strongest one yet.

50 posts!

Nice

Coothin burst into Human Sara's quarters, smacking the light tapper with xis upper left arm as soon as xe entered. "Human Sara! I know you enjoy seeing the new aliens and you are missing this arrival! The other humans are very exci--" "nnnhhggg shhh. Shhh." Human Sara remained in her sleeping-bay, arm pulled over her eyes. "No time for one of your 'naps'!" Xe reached out and tugged gently on Human Sara's arm with two of xis. "The other humans say they look like a cross between 'faeries' and 'jellyfish' and you must see them and also show me photos of those creatures!" Human Sara pulled herself to the edge of the sleeping bay and -- Coothin leapt backward as the human's stomach acid erupted onto the floor. Xe slammed the emergency button on xis communicator. It wasn't xis medical emergency button (unless xe had been splashed and it was even now burning through xis coverings), but xe couldn't reach Human Sara to press hers. The emergency system located xim and started blaring nearby alarms. Human Sara was keening now, an angry, pained moan as she curled into a a ball and clutched her pillow around her head.

Medics arrived equipped for the wrong species, and started to call for other supplies, when another human-who-hadn't-gone-to-the-new-species-docking came out of his room, squinting and covering his mouth like he, too, might eject acid. "Turn it off. Turn it OFF!" he demanded. The medics were already here, and disobeying an angry and insistent human seemed unwise. The alarms were turned off. The human slumped sweatily against his door frame. Those with acute hearing, if they hadn't been deafened by the alarms, could hear groans from elsewhere in the warren of human housing. "A bunch of us have migraines. Please fuck off. quietly. quietly fuck off," he mumbled, having apparently spent himself with his brief shouts. "What caused this? Do we need to quarantine the human sector??" It wouldn't be the first time. New rules had to keep being added about things the humans had to be screened for when returning from planetside.

"mi'en dlar kweshen." Coothin's translator could not parse the human's slurring and transmitted it directly, but the medics had more powerful systems for this sort of scenario. "no kwarteen. debrief la'er. Shhh..." He faded, staggering back into his quarters. ... A handful of medics-of-various-species and a handful of humans who had recovered first sat (or equivalent-ed) around a table. The humans did most of the talking among themselves. "Is there something we all ate?" "I didn't eat breakfast, I woke up too late for [religious seasonal meal, details sent to handheld]," said a woman whose garment extended over the top of her head. A strongly built human rolled his eyes. "Well I didn't eat dinner." He sat up straight, smug. "Intermittent fasting, you know." Several of the other humans rolled their eyes. "Okay, not food. Stress? I know me and Sara are doing some high-stress work, is everyone else's stuff going off the rails?" The alien medics looked at each other. What rails?

But the humans shook their heads. "Hormones? ...Ladies, at least?" More head-shaking. "Any changes to the cleaning chemicals?" They turned to the medics, who were not in charge of the cleaning robots but did have access to which chemicals were being used where. The medics answered in the negative.

"Everyone good on water? Though I dunno why we'd all get dehydrated at once. No atmospheric water emergencies, right?"

Again, something the medics kept track of. Or would find out about quickly as sick crewmates turned up. "No, atmospheric humidity constant. Well, up a little, in some sectors, for the Dre'mls, the new ones? They require higher humidity and less pressure so maintenance spent most of the day running reclaimers on null gasses, the ones that no-one breathes, so needs are still met but the percentages are all --"

"Wait, wait wait wait" -- humans were talking over eachother and the one with the garment banged her palm on the table to shush everyone. "There's been a drop in atmospheric pressure? Over some hours?"

None of the medic species liked the way the humans all had their eyes trained on them. "...yes? The Dre'mls are delicate--"

The humans tossed up their hands, some of them shouting. "Next time just vent it, oh my [human deity]. The sudden drop will make us all miserable for a few minutes, but we handle that going on and off planetside all the time. Don't drop it over HOURS; that means a storm is coming and it'll knock a bunch of us on our ass."

"... oh. That is... unique. It's rare for a species to sense it at all, if it's within survival parameters. If we encounter a species that requires higher pressure, should we --" "I think it matters less, but err on the side of caution and do it fast, yes."

"We will report this to maintenance and add it to the human files. Thank you all for your time; you may go." And it was added to the human files, under "health risks", that causing a fast pressure drop would cause widespread brief pain, but a slow pressure drop would cause concentrated, disabling pain for hours or days. It was also put under the secret "Arguments that species is secretly/unwittingly a hive mind despite denials" file.

Ok so I know that there's this whole thing on Humans are space orcs about aliens being surprised on what we eat, like acidic food,etc.

But I've yet to see a post based on the opposite so what if they eat or drink stuff that we humans can't have and now it's our turn to be shocked.

Alien: Uhh still can't believe that you humans can eat all those things you call oranges,I mean that thing is filled with all sorts of acidic acids

Human: Well it's acidic to you and your species but not to us. I mean you have to have something in your diet that we humans can't eat right?

Alien: Hmmm let me think.I mean,the galactic cuisine menu on aboard is mostly edible to all species as it's meant to cut down on cost of having to order specific meals from all corners of the galaxy.And the drink you have hidden in your room doesn't count as I noticed it gets emptier every 7 cycles.

Human: What drink?I thought you were going to mention something I couldn't eat or drink but if it's in my room then it's most likely edible.Also where did you find this drink?

Alien: Well I found it in the storage areas along with all the cleaning supplies, figured it must be one of those alcoholic drinks you humans enjoy,just thought you hid it away from anyone else.

Human: Wait, you found it next to the cleaning supplies?Dude those are strictly cleaning supplies and plus I don't have any alcoholic beverages in my room!

Alien: Really?Well I had a taste of it and it was very similar to a drink I've had from back home.I had no idea that humans made it as well.Though the name was kinda weird.Why was it called 'Bleach'?

Human:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

EXCUSE BUT WHAT DID YOU SAY YOU DRANK?!

Alien: why is Rehaan vibrating his legs so much? It's been an hour and he's still doing it. Isn't he exhausted?

Alex: nah, he has ADD, but I'm not sure why he moves a lot. He has told me it's fun and it makes him concentrate better, so why not let him

Alien: add? Add WHAT? CHEESE?

First of all I'm just gonna thank @uhm24 for writing about Aliens getting to know people who have different sexualities and genders than other people :)

But i got another request, since I'm not a writer, and english isn't my first language :')

Anyone can volunteer C:

(I feel like I'm asking for too much since i did ask for a request yesterday, but let's not rush, I'll be patient.)

2nd Request:

- Aliens finding out two of the humans in their ship are trans by hearing two other humans talking shit behind their back. They approach them, interested and ask what them being a "trans" is (if you aren't trans, and you think of writing this, please do not write the t slur since the word is offensive to the trans community.)

I wish you good luck if you've thought of writing this!