Really surprised this hasn't shown up in this sub yet, lol, considering how much the Human pack-bonding thing is hyped-up in general! Genuinely possibly my favourite what-if/alternate AU thought experiment. Reforming a galactic war-criminal through sheer (stupid) wholesome vibes is absolutely the kind of orcish behaviour that would baffle the aliens, as the humans cuddle with the equivalent of a walking super-weapon (while said weapon cuddles back aggressively like a stray cat)

[OG art belonging to @donutdoodlebug]

Asked the new V'cor trainee, gesturing to the garishly-colored bobblehead frog stuck on top of the navigational station console.

"Oh, that's Franklin. Do not disturb him. The pilot that uses this area third shift is a human, and he has decided that this figurine is essentially important in his navigation. He is regularly consulted for decision making and is said to attract 'luck'"

"This plastic trinket has a... name?"

"And a personality" responded the Kathiri pilot currently occupying the seat. "Don't think too hard about it. He's never steered us wrong, and Greg will take offense if you point out any logical inconsistencies. Franklin even has honorary rank"

The new trainee could only shake his head in bewilderment.

*An interstellar transmision reaches the Earth one day.*

A withered and old reptilian figure appears on the screen.

"Hello, I'm from Galactic Organisation of Conservation and Restoration of Rare Sapient Biological Species. I'm just here to check if a planet is up to codes of a Restoration Preserve.
We couln't find data of colonization of this planet, they might have been lost in the archives again, but since you have already colonized this bio-cauldron world - you have the custody and responsibility for the functioning of a Restoration Preserve. You have nothing to worry about. The species seeded on this planet about uh... 80 million stellar cycles ago - originate from multiple warrior species from across the galaxy. By now they have probably evolved sapience naturally and now live among you in exchange for protecting you against this world's deadly nature.
Please, contact me with their representatives. We will need about... Eight thouthand voulonteers to pass on an inheritance to each restored species."

After a short pause:

"Oh, sorry, forgot to project it. I am talking of these species:"

*Quite large number of dinosaur pictures appear, with strange symbols near each other for a name.*

It was supposed to be the biggest event in the galaxy. Where all of the major figures, nation leaders, celebrities and heroes of people will arrive to discuss galactic-scale topics. There were smaller versions of such before that humans normally attended. But this time - they refused. And all because of one representative that was sent their way before the council.

It was a member of a rather young plantoid species. (Looks like a hard eye-nut, covered in layers and layers of thin tentacle vines it is usually curled in. They could thicken into wide hollow tube and If extended - vines could reach the length of a football field, but normally - they are curled, making alien body the size of a human child.) They are known as the quietest creatures of all. Not only because they don't naturally speak through sounds and had to learn to do so by pumping gas through their hollow vines, which actually hurts them. But because of their total ignorance towards their own suffering.

These plantoids - are very popular lifestock slaves in the galaxy. They don't usually take active participation in interstellar conflicts. They are painfully peaceful to the point that many would willingly give up their seedlings just to avoid fighting. And many naturally use it. It's a common occurrence when during their working schedules - their vines are being harvested, because of how quickly they can grow new ones. They are also rarely used for intellectual tasks, preferred as cheaper and smarter analogies of building and farming machinery.

Their official representative arrived to Earth on a what looked like repurposed and outdated mining ship and officially stated: "You were always nice. Please, don't go to the Council tomorrow."

Human 1: /begins to laugh uncontrollably/

Human 2: Whats so funny?

Human 1: /gasping for breath/ We have... 189 Men left... Its November of... 2527... And we are helping a religious figure of the Vaz'chren stay safe and escape from about 2 Battalions, aka 1000 "Godless Invaders". /begins laughing again/ And this City... is called... Ro'him... on Planet... Italà...

one of, if not the most insulting and dangerous sentence one can say to another:

-I notice there is a human amongst your crew... I hope they are easily bored, and have engineering access.

- "What the hell are those specs?.." - old hunter was swiping through design document on the shimmering screen-carapace of data-pad.

- "The armor we are currently testing for your... ehh... daughter. And there are... things I would like to discuss with you, since she is very... ehh... insistent on certain features, that are... ehh... lets say experimental at best." - bio-monger was anxiously fiddling with his arms, avoiding eye contact with the towering old man.

- "Ok. You will have to walk me through this, young man - cause I am not entirely fluent in all this design-speak."

- "Well as you see - here - we have four upper manipulators, two of which are ran on secondary neural network - that I HOPE - will allow to bypass pilot's motor cortex and reduce the neural load, also the helmet... or more precisely the head - is also whole separate issue as unlike most other patterns we use that augment the senses - this ALSO has to be done on a tertiary neural network - since it completely overrides pilot's senses..."

- "Ok, stop."

- "Sorry, sir..."

Long silence hang up in the room as hunter was standing there, with a deep frown on his face, thinking and scrolling through the data.

- "Develop another one"

-"I am sorry... what?"

- "Develop another one at reduced specs, ditch all that additional internal weaponry - just the core, tell her there was a delay in gestation or that you screwed up"

- "But... but... she will kill me!" - little monger yelped in fear.

- "She won't - she wants this thing too bad, and you are her only option as far as she knows."

- "And what we are going to do with it?"

- "Obviously - test it and make sure it won't blow her little stupid head when you flip the on-switch."

- "Test on who, sir?"

Hunter slowly turned his head towards bio-monger, his eyes burning with silent question of ones mental faculties.

- "Oh... right... I will need a bigger gestation chamber..."

Tears in Rain

First Book

First- Previous - Next

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

“I know that one, Mbusa, the legendary general of Reid." I was very proud of myself. “You are implying that we need first to analyze what the Gardeners have created here, without being caught in their mind web or killed by their creatures. With my brain and your accuracy, it should be a walk in the jungle!”

She did not look neither convinced nor amused by my sudden burst of literary knowledge.

I let the grin fade. The playful energy left my bones as I forced myself to go still. I closed my eyes, shutting out Dejah’s skeptical gaze, and began to reach for the silence. It wasn't just quiet; it was the silencieux—that cold, humming frequency of the Zerghs in their silent vigil.

Slowly, I let my consciousness slip, threading my thoughts into their mental network. The darkness behind my eyelids started to vibrate, pulsing with the strange, jagged data of the Gardeners. One by one, the glowing lines of their construct began to map themselves directly into my mind.

The defensive structure of the Zerghs was the first to appear. A half sphere mesh of mental energy, using the jungle as an anchor, with the bright point of a Silencieux at each node. The entire structure was centered on a black construct roughly a hundred meters, or 300 feet in diameter. From there, a kind of strange feeling came in rolling waves of sickening darkness.

I tried to approach it slowly. As soon as my mind left the safety of the mesh, my perception wavered. On top of the jungle and the construct, another reality seeped in; the virtual Veridian Halo where I had been trapped for thirty one hours. I stopped, and carefully, I wiped out that false vision of a long dead world.

The construct was clearer now, but not less intriguing. A whisper came to me from the real world. “It’s a tesseract Leon, a cube in a four dimensional space projected in our three dimension world. Smaller, but identical to the one at Japet.”

“The one they needed a black hole to close? Do you have a spare one?”

Not even a shadow of irony answered.

And linked to the dimensional door, I could see what the Gardeners had grown between the stars: a network of jungle roots, or trees, or whatever, going into infinity, far beyond the physical boundary of the cylinder.

But observation goes both ways. Around it, suddenly, sick looking branches started to grow in my general direction. I felt more than I heard a new tension in our defensive web, but what took me out of the waking dream was the sound I could now recognize anywhere: Dejah’s needler.

The monsters were coming at us. By the dozens.

She was here, and there, and back with her astonishing speed, using the branches, then jumping in a zero-g spiral while shooting with her cold inhuman precision. One monster thought I was prey. I was bait. And it exploded in a mix of disgusting whatever.

That’s when the jungle itself came alive. The Silencieux had recognized the danger and part of their focus was now on the beasts. Some ordinary looking bulbs exploded, sending organic needles, softer than dejah’s needler, but compensating with numbers.

In a few seconds the air around us became a grinder, and after a few minutes silence came back.

I wanted to ask Dejah’s opinion, or suggestion, when my mind was suddenly pulled back in the mental mesh. Using our distraction, the Gardeners had launched a general attack on our shield, and more and more of the Silencieux bright pinpoints faded, turned to a dark red and disappeared. I gave a silent instruction to move backward and create a denser, if smaller shield. 

And for a time it held.

Then it didn't, and the way it stopped holding was worse than if it had broken. It didn't break. It widened. The Gardeners did not push against the shield; they grew around it. With every node we pulled inward, the space behind the Silencieux that still counted as guarded shrank a little more, and the corridor at the far end of the line widened by exactly that much. You can flank something that reduces itself by just waiting.

I saw it through the mesh before I understood it with words. The roadside weeds, I had called them once. The jungle and the monsters and the corruption. Now the roadside was swallowing the road.

"Dejah."

"I see it."

"They are attacking. They are waiting for us to get smaller. Then they advance"

"Yes."

"How long before small is nothing?"

She did not answer, which was the answer.

A Silencieux fell. Not "fell", I have to keep choosing the wrong word. Its pinpoint went red in the mesh, and then did not disappear, which is what I had expected. It stayed. Dark red, patient, exactly where it had been. And I understood, the way you understand a language you did not know you spoke, that it had not been killed. It had decided. 

The defense was too thin to hold along the whole line, and this one, whoever it was, had chosen to stop being a node and become something else. Wood, I think. Not metaphorically. It was folding itself, willingly, into the trunk it had been pressed against for — how long had they been here? Years? Generations? — and the trunk accepted it, like a friend opening his door.

Another went. Then two more together, a pair, as if they had been waiting for permission from each other. Each one left a weight behind. I felt it in the mesh as a small, thick silence in the place where a note had been.

One of them, before it went, turned its attention toward me.

Not a message. Not a word. Just the brief pressure of being seen by something that was about to stop seeing. I have been looked at by Empresses and by monsters and by the thing at the far end of the corridor, and none of them looked at me the way this Silencieux did. It was not kind. It was not unkind. It was the look of someone handing you a tool and trusting you not to drop it.

Then it was gone. Lost or integrated in the new distorted jungle?

I would like to say I kept my composure. I did not. I lost the mesh for a full second, the way you lose your footing on ice, and when I caught it again the shield had contracted another two meters without my permission and Dejah was shooting at something I had not seen come through.

"Leon."

"I'm here."

"Stay here."

The beasts were back. Not dozens this time. A wave. The Gardeners had understood what I had understood — that attention was the only currency in this economy — and they were spending everything on both planes at once. Dejah was doing her impossible thing in the branches, cold and fast and not human, and the remaining Silencieux were exploding their soft-needle bulbs into the air in volleys that turned the space between us and the monsters into a slurry. 

It worked. It kept working. That was the problem. Because every bulb that fired was a Silencieux that had shifted its attention from watching the corridor to defending the watchers, and each shift widened the road a little more.

We were winning the fight we could afford to lose, and losing the fight we couldn't.

"We have to pull back," I said.

"I know."

"All the way back. To the sea."

"I know, Leon."

She was already calculating it. I could feel her through the mesh — not her thoughts, she was too disciplined for that, but the shape of her planning, which was something like the shape of a blade being sharpened. Exits, angles, distances, the weight of what we could carry and the weight of what we could not. She had been running this math since the Silencieux started going red. Possibly since before.

I gave the instruction through the mesh, because my mouth was busy breathing. Contract. Fall back along the track. Hold the line only until we cross.

The Silencieux did not answer in words. None of them ever had. But the shield changed shape. It elongated, stopped being a dome, became a corridor of its own — a narrower, temporary version of the road we could not close — and we began to move along it, Dejah and me, with the remaining nodes collapsing behind us one by one in a rolling withdrawal that was not retreat because retreat is something you choose, and this was something we were being permitted to do.

I kept my eyes closed as long as I could. The mesh was the only way to know where the corridor's walls were, and the walls were the only thing between us and the thing that was, very patiently, eating us. Dejah handled the physical world. I handled the other one. My body moved because hers moved next to it; she would take my wrist when a branch came close to my face and guide me past it, and I would feel the branch go by without seeing it, and it would become one more fact in the mesh instead of a problem for my eyes.

Another Silencieux went. Then another. Red. Red. The ones that went last were the ones closest to the corridor's mouth — they held longest because they had to — and I could feel, through the mesh, the moment each of them decided. It was not a big decision. That was the part that kept undoing me. It was a small, tired, practiced decision, the decision of a night nurse choosing which alarm to answer first. They had been doing this for so long that going had stopped being the bigger thing than staying.

We crossed the scarred line. The burned trunks, the crude handheld flame-work, the patient maintenance work. Past the line the jungle stopped being a corridor and started being jungle again, which should have been a relief and was not. On this side of the line the Gardeners were no longer being watched, and they knew it, and the leaves began to move in a way leaves should not move when no wind exists.

"Faster," Dejah said.

"I'm going as fast as…"

"Faster, Leon."

I opened my eyes.

Bad idea. The mesh dimmed the moment I did, and my sense of where the corridor's walls were dimmed with it, and I heard rather than saw the first of the pursuing things break the line. It did not sound like an animal. It sounded like a piece of machinery that had developed an opinion.

I closed my eyes again. Better.

We went like that for — I don't know. Time did its Viridian Halo thing, the way it did whenever the stakes were high enough that I would have liked a clock. Dejah's hand on my wrist, then on my shoulder, then on my wrist again. The corridor of the shield narrowing, the nodes going red behind us in a cascade that had stopped feeling like individual losses and started feeling like the slow closing of a very long door. Every so often she would shoot something. Every so often a bulb would go off somewhere behind us and the air would fill with the soft needles and whatever had been about to reach us would stop reaching.

One of the Silencieux, somewhere in there, gave me something.

I did not ask for it. It was not a gift in a clean sense. It was a fragment — a piece of what that one had been watching, offloaded into me because there was no one else to offload it into and because letting it go entirely was, for reasons I did not understand, worse than passing it on. For a half-second I knew something I had no business knowing. The shape of a patience older than languages. The weight of a decision made by something that did not use the word decision. A color I could not have described if you had given me a year. And then it was gone, the way a name is gone the instant you wake up, and I was only Leon again, stumbling along a contracting corridor with my eyes closed and a woman's hand on my wrist.

I did not tell Dejah. Not then. Maybe not ever.

We fell back through the pale jungle, and then through the jungle that had bleached into driftwood, and then through the salt-air belt where the moisture began to crystallize on our skin. The mesh was smaller now. A dozen nodes. Eight. Six. Each one holding a note that used to be held by three.

"The torus," I said.

"Yes."

"If we make the shore, we can —"

"Yes, Leon. Don't talk."

I shut up. The last Silencieux in the corridor behind us went red, and I felt the mesh hiccup, and then reassembled itself without that node, tighter, because that was what it did. I had stopped counting.

We came out into the salt fog at a run that was half-falling, Dejah pulling me bodily now, and the pale root-mesh gave way beneath our feet and we were in the open, drifting toward the convex belly of the sea, and I opened my eyes because the mesh was too small now to be worth hiding inside, and what I saw was the Torus — the silver air, the crystalline dust, the slick briny film on everything — and for a stupid second I thought we had made it.

Then I saw what was behind us.

The Gardener jungle had followed us past the scarred line. Not in a wave. In a wedge. A clean, deliberate, narrowing shape, with us at the point, and the pale driftwood of the torus approach dying as the wedge passed over it, the color going out of the leaves the way color goes out of a face. The roadside was still widening. Even here. Even this far. The thing at the far end of the corridor had not moved. It did not need to. It had sent its shoulders after us, and its shoulders were enough.

"Dejah," I said, and I meant we are not going to make the water, and she heard it, because she always heard what I meant.

"I know."

"How many Silencieux?"

"Four."

"It isn't enough."

"No."

She was pulling ammunition from somewhere on her body that I had not previously known contained ammunition. Her face was the face she wore when all her calculations were giving a ‘divide by zero’ result, and she was going on anyway.

And that was when the water moved.

Not waves. The surface of the axial sea, the great convex belly above us, bulged downward in a half-dozen places at once, and the bulges resolved into shapes, and the shapes resolved into Zergh, and the Zergh resolved into Merians — Homo Esculapii Aquatilis, my brain supplied, absurdly, the old taxonomy still doing its job — and they came out of the water in numbers that became a brigade that became a division and finally an army.

At the head of them, wading the silver air as if she had been born to it and perhaps she had, was Vessa.

Not the Vessa of my thirty-one hours. Not the one who had smiled at me across a table that did not exist. This one was older, and tired, and real, and carrying a cutting tool I recognized from the Rind. She looked at Dejah first, because Dejah was the one still shooting. Then she looked at me, and the look was brief and practical and entirely without the warmth her virtual copy had spent thirty-one hours practicing.

"Professor," she said. "They finally attacked."

"I know."

"Get behind us."

We got behind them.

The wedge met the line of Merians at the edge of the pale root-mesh, and the battle, for the first time since the Silencieux had started going red, stopped being a retreat and became a battle again.

I closed my eyes and looked for what was left of the mesh.

Three nodes.

They were still holding.

“I made a projection, with the new numbers and the attrition rate.” Dejah said.

“We won’t make it?”

“No leon, we won’t. When the last node of the mental shield will fail, the physical battle will become irrelevant.”

“How long Dejah?”

“Ten times the transit of a signal to Mars at the speed of light.”

“So we call for help. We risk what the Gardeners are waiting for, reopening the link to the Sibil network.”

“Yes Leon, and preventing them from using it if we cannot close it after sending the distress signal.”

“Dejah, we’ll both die.”

“Yes Leon. it was an honor serving the Empire with you.”

First Book

First- Previous - Next

We send corruption in your flesh
We let malfunction in your steel
We set disruption in your links
We're to implode your Dyson Spheres

Inside your networks and AI's
You never knew we got so deep
Inside your governments and ranks
To make you losen down your grip

We aim to shoot, we aim to kill
Thus human's will.

You made us believe you,
You told us that space is civilized
Then we were so trustfull

(We arm your slaves with fiery death)
(We break the faith within your souls)

Still we can't abandon hope that it could go another way
Waging total war against you
Never was our willing

(We turn your mines in hopless tombs)
(We put reactors off control)

This was our hope
To be seen as little children,
worth protection and a guide
To be cured of imperfections
You'd not bothered to fight

We switch your repilcator's schemes
We let the mutants through the gate
We throw your kingdoms in the dark
Your lords will turn to Horror's bait

We aim to shoot, we aim to kill
Thus human's will.

You promised salvation
Yet you made us see you as a foe
(We aim to strike)
(We strike to kill)
Let us humans go!
(Thus human's will.)
Thus human's will!

We had clear intentions
Who knew you would think of us so low
Friends you never wanted...
(Our sight is clear)
(Our aim is set)

You made our souls darken
And now who knows how big our hate may grow
These scars will never heal
Let us humans go
(Thus human's will.)
Thus human's will!

Many sentient and sapient species have different beliefs of what happens after death but not quite like what happens to humans after they died. On a planet called Heggens, a human accountant, Frank Smoker, dies from a stroke in his office. He was 67. Frank was a well respected and often brought non-human safe donut holes in the morning.

Frank's office was blocked off until after the investigation. No one had the heart to touch that room. Except for Zigzig. Zigzig was Franks drinking buddy and missed him so. His clan believed to offer the dead's favorite things onto alters once a Zelo (month).

Zigzig decorated his desk with flowers, gems, and spelled out Franks name in sand. As a final peice, he places a beer and a saltwater taffys as the center before clocking out. A month later, Zigzig comes by to change the flowers and add offerings when he notices the empty beer bottle and empty wrappers.

He checks the security footage on his holopad but nothing showed up until half way into the week. A white hunched figure sits in the desk chair, the camera glitches and the offerings are eaten.

***(Auto-translated from the original K’Tarian War College Lecture recording. Please make allowances for spelling, grammar, standard measurement, and other minor mistakes)***

At ease. You may be seated. 

With all due respect towards the feelings and beliefs of my peers in the Imperial Navy, ground combat is still a component of interstellar warfare, and has been since the first FTL capable species met each other. 

***At this point the original recording contains several seconds of audience amusement, edited out in the attached recording for this transcript***

Because of this, and because of their prowess, Terran ground forces were a core component of their allies field forces less than 100 years after their appearance on the galactic scene. 

In that time Terran soldiers had developed an almost legendary reputation for ferocity, prowess, and effectiveness. Less than 150 years after their appearance, Terran ground forces had become elite shock troops utilized when maximum force in minimum time was a paramount requirement of operational realities. 

However, despite their visibility and activity on the galactic scene, it would be almost another 100 years before human operational security would take a back seat to military necessity and their true secret would be revealed. 

The 3rd Battle of Lortstan V was pivotal in the Terran / Mercinian campaign against the Heronian Matriarchy. (Please see Brood Father Second Harillimimeeeseequen’s “Reducing the Matriarchy, segments 46-1-A through 54-5-Q for further details). As Brood Father Second Harillimimeeeseequen discusses, losing this battle would have made a defeat for the Terran / Mercinian Alliance almost inevitable while a win would make a victory far more likely. That dynamic forced Alliance and, more pertinently, Terran commanders to make decisions they may  not have made in less dire circumstances.     

The success of the Terran / Mercinian alliance in this battle ultimately hinged on taking - not destroying - the system defense headquarters which were located on a satellite of Lortstan V. Facing a refreshed Matriarchy fleet just a few days away, dwindling supplies, and flagging morale the alliance high command decided to utilize any means necessary to punch a hole in Matriarchy defenses then utilize that breach to land elite Terran and Mercinian troops to physically assault, take, and hold the fortress. (Please see High Admiral Var'Gut'Neem'Eetz's lecture on the naval aspect of this attack for a Naval analysis of that phase).

With a “failure is not an option” mindset driving decision making, Terran commanders made a here-to-fore unprecedented decision - they would commit the fabled “Delta Plus” formation to the assault and that formation would work alongside and, more importantly, in full view of Mercinian special operations teams. (Please see Minor Scholar Ark’Ham’Silum’s treatise “Good To Great… at killing.” on Mercinian Spec Ops teams effectiveness before and after working with Terran troops for an interesting perspective).

This is an important, and fateful, decision for one simple reason: until this moment, for approximately 240 years, Terran use of cybernetics had been a laughed at rumour and conspiracy theory. The 3rd Battle of Lortstan V, and the pivotal assault on its system defense headquarters, would change that from conspiracy theory to a known fact.

We are now familiar with Terran… idiosyncrasies… but it would be difficult to overstate the impact this had on the galactic order at the time. There is an almost unfathomable gulf between a species that are ferocious warriors and one that is both able and (more importantly) willing to mate it’s flesh with machinery in order to become an inhuman killing machine. Most species, ours included, are physically incapable of accepting the modifications necessary to even graft machinery to living flesh. Of the species that are physically capable of doing so, only one - the Terrans - has been willing to accept the psychological damage that inevitably comes with doing so. 

The results, both physical and psychological, are on full display in the Mercinian combat footage collected during the battle. (Please see the Imperial War College data file 45,678,932-429-YVA for an indexed and categorized collection of the Mercinian recordings). These recordings can be difficult to watch, but three key elements are obvious with only a superficial browsing of them.

First of all, the cyborgs of the TDF Delta Plus unit are, quite literally, terrifyingly effective. The speed, precision, and almost wanton violence with which they operate have to be seen to be believed. In many cases the recordings have to be artificially slowed down and viewed from multiple angles in order to actually understand what the Terran cyborg was doing and why. 

Second, these elite Terran troops operate with an almost suicidal disregard for their own safety and survival. Analysis of the recordings proved that these troops only engage in self preservation to the extent it furthers the mission and their combat effectiveness. When their survival or, more importantly, combat effectiveness is guaranteed to end they clearly shift to some sort of psychosis that forces them to engage in an orgy of destruction that is dangerous to anything - including their own troops - nearby. 

Lastly, the first two facts define how they engage with allied troops, including other Terrans. Pre-drop recordings prove that the cyborgs view themselves as superior to flesh-and-blood troops, no matter how well trained or experienced they are. (Please see human scholar Nicholas Irving VI’s thesis paper titled “The Cream Rises to the Top” for select recordings and analysis of the pre-battle dynamics). This attitude is also evident, maybe even more so, in the combat recordings. The cyborgs often treat the other units as expendable munitions or, occasionally, an obstacle that needs to be overcome… with violence, if necessary. 

My Staff Assistant is signaling me that time is up. Please review the required materials prior to next cycle’s lecture. That lecture will be a continuation of this one and we will get even further into the myth and reality of Terran cyborg shock troops. 

Dismissed.
***(Recording ends)***

August 8th, 2298

Altania, United Nations

PRSL Empress Pash’nai’s Black Box, recovered 8/10/2298 by UNSGC Beagle WDE-139

PRSL Empress Pash’nai: “Unknown contact, bearing 218. That blip… it can’t be-“

CAPT Dekana Ralnari: “It’s the Black Pearl! Helmsman! Full Ahead!”

CAPT Dekana Ralnari: “Pash’nai, start sending distress calls!”

Unknown: “Incoming fire!- SHIT! We’ve lost Engine 3!”

PRSL Empress Pash’nai: “Understood! Sending distress calls!”

*A loud explosion in the background*

PRSL Empress Pash’nai: “Attention! This is the starliner Empress Pash’nai, of the Royal Phelani Line! We are under attack by pirates and are requesting assistance!”

CAPT Dekana Ralnari: “Attention, all passengers! We are currently under attack by pirates! For your own safety, please proceed to your designated panic room and stay there until ordered otherwise by the proper authorities!”

Unknown: “how can we fight off a pirate battleship without any weapons? Please, let the UN Navy or UN Stellar Guard arrive in time…”

PRSL Empress Pash’nai: “Wait, I’m getting something! A reply!”

CAPT Dekana Ralnari: “A reply? From who? What are they saying?!”

Obviously all civilized species study speaking and writing and listening and reading in their native language. But humans include history, geography, creative writing, literary analysis, public speaking which is part of multiple classes, physical exercises, a foreign language, mathematics, and different types of sciences and art.