skonen_blades

It was that time again. Time for the aliens to mate. I was the first human allowed to watch.

The Kurisk were a unique race. Their minds had raced forth early on while their bodies remained on the bottom rungs of the evolutionary ladder. The Kurisk had become adept at building and smelting and extrapolating when most races were figuring out how to walk upright and club each other.

They enhanced their primitive appendages with wooden and then clay prosthetics, enabling them to make more complex tools, enabling them to make more complex machinery. They built carapaces for themselves out of metal. They built heaters for themselves inside those carapaces to enable exploration of the polar regions. Then they built self-contained breathing apparatus for trips below the water. They built communication arrays inside their increasingly armoured husks.

After that, they added wings and flocked to the sky. After that, gunpowder and kinetic weapons to protect themselves from skyborne predators. After that, they added rockets and escaped their planet’s gravity.

When food became a problem, they managed to make adjustments to themselves to live off of solar and gravitational power while in space and geothermal power while on planets without nutrients. One of them flew near a gas giant and transmitted a blueprint to all his fellow Kurisk about an idea for improvements to survive such an atmosphere. The discovery of lasers was an evolutionary leap.

Every new set of planetary circumstances they came in contact with caused them to race back home and add a new layer to their shells. They were quick learners.

No one knew what their original forms looked like. They were permanently sealed in their massive shells.

Masters of language translators and pleasant to talk to, the Kurisk were curious and inquisitive. A good thing, too. If they’d been warlike, they would have been formidable. They held patents on most of the technology in the universe. They hadn’t yet mastered Faster Than Light or Transport Technology but it was only a matter of time.

In some places, they were referred to simply as The Improvers.

While each Kurisk varied a tiny bit, they tried to remain identical and to keep all of their improvements up to date across their entire race. This made it impossible to tell them apart. Only the Kurisk themselves could do that.

Every six years, they needed to return home to mate. This was the only time they came out of their shells. As a Universal Geographic reporter, they let me visit their world to witness and record what no other race had seen. They saw my own human curiousity mirrored in theirs.

I was about to see a naked Kurisk.

A Kurisk with the designation Arentally, my friend who gotten me this job, was interested in a Kurisk named Mortenoj. Mortenoj was fertile and Arentally was ready. With an agreement passed between their arrays, they started to undress.

It took an entire day. Pressurized suits were collapsed slowly. Eggshell-thin casings were retracted. Reactors were powered down. Connections were waterfall-triggered to regress and bodypit faceplates were folded under and away. Hoses were detached. Complicated suture arrangements and biomechanical virus defenders were temporarily dissolved.

And there, at the center of the enormous, open, bloomed flower of intricate machinery, sat my friend, Arentally. He flopped forward onto the ground with a grunt. Sort of a cross between a vivid green slug and an blue octopus. Utterly disgusting. He couldn’t speak to me or see me without his equipment. He waved a weak tentacle and slithered towards the smell of his mate.

Mortenoj was also out of her shell. The two of them clumsily found each other, sliding across the ground, and entwined. It was very messy and noisy.

I filmed the whole thing with a frown on my face and tried to remain professional.






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Nothing could live in a volcano. That was the assumption of the landing party.

The twenty-meter slab of articulated rocktopus that turned a diamond eye to these squishy walking icicles of meat was puzzled at first, then alarmed. The meat icicles were walking the perimeter around its crater-nest.

A long arm accordioned out and snagged one for a closer look. Clumsy, clumsy, superheated rocktopus. The meat icicle squeaked and vibrated in the tentacle’s grasp before igniting. Ashes joined the hot orange soup of molten rock that the rocktopus lazed in.

Whoops.

The ashes brought a school of lavanhas to the surface. The rocktopus suckered up the crater’s edge while they swarmed to eat the ashes. That was the advantage of being amtemperous. The rocktopus could withstand brief exposure to temperature that would freeze most other forms of lavalife.

It dipped into the magma and snagged a lavanha, quickly exposing it to the air. The lavanha twitched before turning grey with a crackling shriek, atrophying immediately in the extremely low temperature of open air.

The meat icicles on the crater’s edge were watching with great interest as the rocktopus grabbed its snack.

It offered the snack to the meat icicles. They made no motion to accept.

Just then, a rockfish shooter poked its head of the pool. It sucked in molten rock through its slatted gills and shot it out in an arcing stream of hardening glass towards the meat icicles.

It got one. With a yank, the shooter managed to pull the squealing meat icicle into the pool. The meat icicle practically evaporated in a flash before a few ashes hit the bubbling surface.

The shooter dipped under the water, disappointed.

The meat icicles pulled sticks from their backs and pointed them towards the rocktopus.

This was odd. They shot food towards it. Basic irradiated metals in solid form in a steady stream straight at the rocktopus’s head. The rocktopus was happy about that. He bathed in their generosity for a while.

Then they left.

The rocktopus slid back down into the lava. Quite the day.



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