Alder's Grove

The worst thing you can say about an enemy is “Aw, how cute.”

Not because you risk offending them - we’re talking someone who is already an enemy, for one, and in this particular case, we’re talking about things that would have to go through a whole translation process to sort that out, beca

read on…

The Invasion of the Kaa-Tah

The Kaa-tah arrived in early Spring, as the snow was melting. They came down in unsettled areas, their small landing craft hiding easily in forests, in deep grass, in rolling hills. They were picked up on radar, but even so, falling a few a day, all over the globe, it took the world’s authorities too long to recognize the invasion for what it was.

The Kaa-tah did not immediately engage local populations; instead, they put the robots and tools they had brought to good use, building structures, setting up small, isolated settlements and beginning to manufacture more tools, more advanced robots.

The first humans to discover Kaa-tah-ah settlements were gently rebuffed, sent away with a light smattering of weapons fire...

read on...

To rix_scaedu's prompt.

When the space ship hovered over Earth, everyone feared the worst.

We'd all seen the movies, so many movies about alien invasion. War of the Worlds. Independence Day. Signs. The list went on. They were doing to alien-a-form our planet. They were going to enslave all of us and kill the ones that couldn't work. They were going to eat us.

When the ship just - stayed there, people started to wonder. The best linguists and the small-stipend-retrainer xeno-specialists started working on communication. Planes circled the ship, trying to find an entrance. The subject of bombing was debated endlessly. Meanwhile, the ship - stayed there, doing nothing.

The scientists went over it with every instrument they could come up with. There was some exhaust, mostly water vapor, but the ship wasn't sending out radio waves, x-rays, infared - anything. It was just sitting there.

We'd almost started to get used to it. We'd gone back to farming - those of us who farmed - to office crunching - those who worked in offices - to vacations and TV watching and whatever our lives had been like BS, Before Ship. We just didn't look up, if we lived in the northern hemisphere, or, if we did, we didn't look too far up.

And then, five months to the day after the ship had appeared, we all heard the noise. It was something like a squeak of a gate, but much louder, and something like the squeal of tires, but lower-pitched. And in the bottom of the ship, ten circles opened up and beams of - oh, I don't know. Not sure anyone knows, to this day. But we called it steam and it felt like fog, like very thick fog.

Beams of this stuff began sweeping the hemisphere, one three-foot-wide swath at a time. And when they passed by, things had... changed.

My goats were walking on two feet (but only some of them) and I'd found myself with hooves. Cattle farmer down the road had the same problem, and the horse farmer across the street doesn't really talk right anymore.

Anywhere there were animals, some of them turned out to be a bit anthropomorphised. And anywhere there was humans - everywhere - some of them turned out a bit more animal.

The way I figure it, the aliens had been spending all this time trying to figure out what we wanted - and they'd been doing it by watching anime.

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One year ago today.... well, I wasn't writing, or at least not posting anything, so I went back a few more days.

Captain Fuze has appeared in a couple stories, including this one and one on an Alder by Post.


http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/402721.html

Captain Fuze had seen any number of things on any number of planets.

It was, after all, her job to shepherd the scientists, both to get them across the reaches of space and to keep them alive on the planets. So she went where the science was; she went where the interest was; she went where the anomalies were. And she - as well as seven others who could control the crews required for the so-called bounce ships - had been doing so for subjective decades.

She never ceased to be surprised. She never ceased to be startled and a little irritated at the scientists' naivete and helplessness; she never ceased to be amazed at their brilliance, at the leaps they made that she could not, in 1000 years, have made; she never ceased to be awed and a bit worried at the way they made contact with other races, especially the linguists.

Today, this-subjective-day on her personal time line and the day labelled landfall-plus-seven [], the Captain was once again startled.

They knew there were-or-had-been natives; there were buildings, vehicles, and things that they thought were probably weapons, although they could have been scientific instruments (the line was often very thin). But in all of their scans and six days of hands-on research, they were missing two things: a written language, considered vital to the development of culture; and any natives. They hadn't even found a single native-remain.

The scientists were doing their best, but they were notably distressed and depressed. Talking to natives was not only the most accurate way to gain certain information, it was the most fun, or so the lead linguist had told Captain Fuze.

They're going to be thrilled by this, Fuze thought, when in front of her eyes one of the buildings unfolded and blinked sleepy window-eyes at them.

Continuing flash series! I'm going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today's icon:

Shooting Star

Icon by later_tuesday

Yeah, the first one of the Asteroid-hits took us by surprise. I mean, shooting stars didn't hit the earth that hard very frequently, and when they did - crater, some rock, that was it.

Nobody expected there to be sentient life, not in that first one. And, because the government did a quick and thorough job of covering it up (I know, I was there), the rest of the world wasn't expecting the second one, either, or the third.
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Originally posted here in response to the prompt "slurry."

A slurry is, in general, a thick suspension of solids in a liquid. So sayeth the great online wikipedia, at least.

I'd seen slurries. In my line of work, they came up now and then, which is to say, all the fucking time. Concrete. Explosives. The gook they used to process ceramics. The stuff they fed us and called meat. Solids suspended in liquid.

And then there was this. Solids, more or less, as much as humans are solid (if meat slurry has solids, then humans count, too), suspended in the water, or at least, we were going to call it water for the moment. Liquid, at least, and people jammed so close together that they really couldn't drown; there was no room to move downwards, any more than in any other direction.
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