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An old fashioned doctor’s leech jar

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my vet just diagnosed me with basically the opposite of anemia apparently i have too much blood does machete need any blood i have spares

It's just what he has always wanted.

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what if it GETS her though 😥

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A comic I made for Lost the Plot’s magazine ;)

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Not A Pest

I kept a hand on the pallet of boxes on the hoversled, making sure it didn't wobble while Blip and Blop pushed it up the ramp. It was all held in place solidly enough by high-tech netting much fancier than the kind we used, and I didn't need to worry much. So when we reached the cargo bay and Zhee called for my assistance back on the ground, I didn't feel bad about leaving the Frillians to finish loading it. They were strong enough to muscle anything into place if needed anyway. 

“What's up?” I asked as I trotted back down the ramp.

“Thought you might weigh in on their pest problem before we go,” Zhee said with a twitch of his antennae towards the clients whose stuff we were delivering. More Frillians today: not as beefy as Blip and Blop, but with waving frills everywhere that just made Zhee look like a praying mantis among flowers. He also looked smug, but that was nothing new. “I mentioned an animal expert, and they mentioned payment,” he told me.

I came to a stop beside him. “You know I don't know everything, right? Just putting that out there. My vet training was on Earth.” 

“Yes yes, I gave them the disclaimers,” Zhee said. 

The client in front, a tall female with colors like a Siamese Fighting Fish, said, “That’s better than anyone on our ship has. Something's getting into boxes in our cargo hold, and we can't find it. Tore into some food and made a mess of the animal fibers.” 

The shorter male behind her in salmon-peach tones held out a lumpy handful of what looked like brown wool. "My guess is it's making a nest somewhere, but it's being wasteful with the stuff too. Tangled it up something fierce."

My response died on my lips as I got a good look at it. Among the stray fibers was the exact shape of a teddy bear. 

“Can I see that?” I asked. 

He handed it over. I plucked off the extra bits and yes, it was definitely meant to be a teddy bear, made by hand from the wool in the cargo hold. There were even little twists for eyes.

I looked up at them. “You don’t have a pest. You have a stowaway.”

They blustered and pooh-poohed the idea: nonsense, how could there possibly be an intelligent creature onboard without their knowledge?

“We’ve been in space a long time,” said the tall one. “Only stopping at uninhabited locations for resources.”

“And at the—” put in the pink one, then stopped at a sharp look from his teammate.

I wasn’t about to let that go. “The what?” I asked.

The tall one sighed. “We salvaged some fuel from a wreck,” she admitted. “But there was no one on it. We checked. And with the tow ship we saw in the distance, it seemed likely enough that the owner had jetted away in a life preserver rather than sticking around. It was a single-person ship.”

Somebody else piped up from between the many crates in their cargo hold. “It couldn’t be a person! There’s nowhere big enough to hide!”

I held up the teddy bear. “This is a child’s toy from my planet.” I looked up at the maze of pipes on the ceiling. “And my people like to climb.”

Zhee was being smug behind me while I made a quick circuit of the room, looking for likely spots. One corner was particularly dark, and it had a series of crates below the pipes, stacked into a perfect ramp. I flashed back to the time a litter of kittens had found a similar hidey-hole on my own ship. This spaceship was made by a different group of aliens altogether, but they never seemed to expect anyone to pay attention to nooks and crannies in the ceiling.

“Hello?” I called, climbing onto the first crate with the wool bear in hand. “Anybody up there?” I continued in every language I knew greetings in, which included the galaxy’s favorite trade language (which I knew well), several minor trade languages (which I did not), and a smattering of languages from Earth (which I knew not at all), plus English. Despite my efforts, I didn’t hear a thing until I got all the way to the top.

“Jambo?” I tried, peering into the dark crevice. “Uh, sprechen sie deutsch?” I held out the wool bear. “Is this yours?”

A quiet gasp echoed off the pipes, then two small arms reached out to grab the bear. With further coaxing, the girl clambered forward to where I could see her: dark skin, wide eyes, artfully braided hair, and clothes that looked fancy, if very dusty. I’m not great at kid ages, but she was young. Old enough to push buttons on her parents’ spaceship maybe, not old enough to steer.

I still didn’t know what language she spoke, but it was hard to go wrong with body language. I held out my arms for a hug. “Want to go home?”

She sniffled and climbed forward into the embrace, clinging tight. That made it a bit of a challenge to get back down to floor level, but I managed. A crowd of Frillians and one smug Mesmer waited there.

“See?” Zhee said to the tall Frillian. “Exactly the animal expert you needed.”

I shook my head in amusement. “For all the wrong reasons, you’re exactly right.” The girl didn’t want to be put down, so I hoisted her onto one hip and stood carefully. “How far away was that crash site? Can you send a message to the planet or station the tow ship came from?”

“Yeah, we’re on it,” the tall Frillian said, her frills flattened in what might have been shame. She directed a couple of the others to do that, and also to gather the fuel they’d scavenged.

Zhee cheered her up with talk of a probable finder’s fee. “Humans get very attached to their offspring,” he said. “There is a strong chance this one’s parents are already advertising a reward.”

While they talked money (and Zhee got our ship that promised fee for pest control), someone with sense arrived with a bottle of water and questions about what food would be suitable.

The girl drank the water eagerly, not letting go of her bear, and didn’t answer any of my questions about food allergies. She accepted some protein cubes and chewed them with determination.

By then, a reply had already come from the nearest space station, and a ship was on the way. Full of authority figures and very anxious parents, by the sounds of it.

While the Frillians discussed that and the little kid quietly refused to be put down, Zhee held up his communicator so I could talk to Captain Sunlight back on our ship. Zhee had already explained the situation.

The captain asked me, “How long do they expect until arrival?”

“I think they said about half an hour,” I said. “Hopefully that won’t put us behind schedule.”

“No, we’ll be fine,” she said. “Given that the young one is so taken with you, we might as well stay to make sure everything gets resolved. Does she need to visit the medical bay?”

“I don’t think so. She hasn’t said anything yet, but she doesn’t look injured. Couldn’t hurt to give her a once-over with the hand scanner just in case. We’ve got time.” I looked down at her thoughtfully, then had a bright idea. “And I bet she’d love to meet Telly. After we check her for allergies, of course.”

The captain agreed that was a fine idea. Zhee took over the conversation while I asked the girl, in a mix of Earth languages and pantomime, if she wanted to see my cat.

Her eyes lit up and she started talking in a spill of words that I didn’t catch in the slightest. Spanish, maybe French? Portuguese? Ah, it didn’t matter. The language of kitty ears and “meow meow” is almost as universally recognized as hugs. We walked from one ship to another, and waited for her parents in the company of a medical scanner, human food, and a very friendly cat.

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

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Humans could have never guessed that, in the far future, they would need to cover their faces with fancy masks in order to not scare other species.

It’s so strange, isn’t it? To think that fragiles humans could give so much fear to others that they have to cover their most human features. There’s species that look so much scarier than you - things that float, things with sharp razor teeth -, but you are the only ones that need to cover yourselves.

Everyone, however, seems to be terrified of humans. Their small teeth, single pair of eyes, weird-shaped nose… Separated, those things don’t scare anyone. But together, and combined with the bipedal shape and weird claws humans refer to as “nails”?

No one can look at all of this combined without wanting to run away.

Humans have found this to be strange, but they quickly got used to it. They made fancy masks, experimented with cloths, made new fashion trends to they could adapt to their new alien friends.There were laws regarding what humans should hide from others, too. They all varied from planet to planet, but were always there.

The earthlings wanted an explanation. Why were they the only ones who had to do it? Why just them? Why not others? Why?

They researched for a long time. Libraries, databases, rumours all across the Universe. Some even tried to contact spirits via an Ouija board in order to get some answers! It obviously didn’t work, and that story should be left for another day, but, eventually, an answer was… Almost found.

It was apparent that every single alien culture had a myth about the death of the Galaxy. A war so big and outrageous that it killed almost everything - and what was left either died, or was locked away for someone to find. And you know what one of the things that was left looked like?

Descriptions always referred to it as “bipedal, furless and scaleless, with two things that could see, two to smell, and another to consume”. The world’s first universal boogeyman! A little thing to scare children off.

Humans, however, didn’t know what to do with that information. Sure, they matched the description, but so many species also matched each other’s descriptions of monsters! Why would they be any different?

…

…

…

But you don’t care, do you?

You are a human from the 21st century. You are almost ashamed of how soft you are. How your insides break so easily, how all it takes is a single conflict for you to go to the hospital. You go to your little friends and talk about how fragile you are. “Look at me!”, you say, and you just don’t care. “Look at this scar I got!”

Stupid human. You are one of the few that can survive so many scars. Stupid, foolish human, who forgot that your parameters of survival were made inside a death world.

But you don’t care, do you? You will finish reading this. You will think of this as fun. You will forget.

Stupid. Foolish. Naive. Little. Human.

Born inside a death world, raised to hate, made to protect.

Earth was the prison someone made to contain you. And you grew to love it. You grew to care for it. You grew to become a part of it. And then you tried to get away from it, to distance yourselves from the nature that you broke your bodies to become a part of, because suddenly you felt all too good for it. And then you killed it.

But you were scared, weren’t you? You were soooo scared of killing your own little prison. You were so terrified for it. You replaced your claws with nails and your canines with fragile teeth and your eyes with souls to become a part of it. The prison made trees and changed its shape so it could be a part of you. And you were so scared of that sudden acceptance, weren’t you? Earth loved you, but all you wanted was to be alone.

So. You killed it.

And then you felt even worse. Because your species was made to be social, and the planet became a part of your stupid little pack, and now that there wasn’t anyone else to worry for, you began to worry about yourselves, and realized that your destiny was to die on this miserable wasteland all alone because you were too afraid to lose something you loved.

There’s acid on your stomachs, electricity on your bodies and blood on your veins. Things that kill. You were made to kill. Not care. Kill.

And you just had to kill the only part of you that didn’t feel remorse. You just had to do it, didn’t you? You killed it and ate it raw because you were starving, and then your little minds crumbled down in shame because now you could think clearly.

You rebuilt Earth. Made it love you again. Centuries of trying to do better, that’s what you did. Centuries of going to other planets and making them love you just like your home does, but you were small and stupid and did not realize that your parameters of living were based on a deathworld that hated you first before realizing you were a monster that was thrown away to die.

Everyone knows what you did. Everyone knows what you were. A monster, a weapon that killed the galaxy before being found and thrown away to the most lonely deathworld this Universe has ever seen.

And you just had to kill the part of you that made you hate the world, didn’t you?

Just like you simply had to kill the part of Earth that despised you.

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Humans have finally managed to land on Mars, only to find a locked safe buried in the Martian soil. The key is apparently on Earth, but no one knows where.

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I can’t make pasta any more without mumbling to myself, “wet the drys… then dry the wets…”

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stop romanticizing your self imposed suffering! leave it in the closest recycling bin!

heather havrilesky // disco elysium // richard silken // Mary Oliver // Jumo Avilés // Jen Mazza // Joan Didion

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dinosaur in a lab coat - would you trust her with operating the centrifuge

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masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

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Boop Boop special Halloween Content to combat the evil spirits. DR. Y. P catched unmasked O.o