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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/YukiteruAmano92 on 2024-09-06 20:22:32+00:00.

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—Parliament—

—Brathala’s perspective—

I hate them…

I truly, truly hate them!

This species of brutes and savages who have the audacity to look down their noses at the rest of us and simper and patronise!

Or, should I say, ‘these’ species?!

Because the one species of hellspawn that arose on that forsaken rock didn’t have the decency to come to the stars alone, did they!?

They brought with them their abominations of animals, bioengineered for sapience without the loss of any of their strength, speed or natural weaponry (because the relatively slow, weak and naturally unarmed primates weren’t terrifying enough, apparently(!)), their monstrosities of artificial intelligences that they alone seem to possess the secret to keeping sane and their savage cousins resurrected from periods when the most advanced weapons this species had available were made of stick, stone and bone!

Oh… if only we’d found them then!

If only our predecessors had had the chance to stain their hands with the blood of a few hundred thousand of these people’s primitive forebears and spare us the need to fight a War with them when they’d grown to a point that they could win it!

One of these primitive cousins sits across the chamber from me, on the other side of the aquatic species’ pool.

The first one of their representatives to be anything other than the regular breed of Terran… but this man is cast from the precise same mould as the last one in his personality if not his body!

This ‘Tshwane’ (unnaturally tall and slim for a planet with such high gravity) is exactly the same mix of smug selfsatisfaction and infuriating calm that Mudaliar was!

I hate it!

When I and those I align with shriek accusations at them and they respond with that calm of theirs, we look like the unreasonable ones!

If only… if only the rest of the galaxy could see them for what they are… could see that that calm is nothing more than a mask, a front to obscure the greed, ferocity and lust for power that lies within all of them!

The Terran plays at friendship until you have let your guard down.

At some point, the thought of being anything other than a submissive slave to them can’t even occur to you anymore!

That’s the method they used to enslave the livestock of their homeworld and the one they used to assimilate their cousins out of existence… only to clone them back to be assimilated all over again!

And it’s what they’re trying to do to us!

It’s easy for them to seem magnanimous when they hold so much power!

Any occasion on which nonTerrans share a room with a Terran who doesn’t choose to brutalise them the way no one could stop, many will leave that room thinking ‘Oh! Terrans might not be as bad as I thought!’ but it’s a lie! A ruse! Aimed at nothing less than getting the galaxy to let its guard down to the point where no one has the power to stop them seizing control!

Just look at the power they’ve already amassed in the not even [4 decades] since they were first discovered!

After humiliating us in that ‘Peace’ of theirs, they immediately split Parliament into two factions; them and their allies against those of us still trying to resist their insidious political machinations!

This manner of division is, as far as I’m aware, unprecedented in GU history!

They pick and choose which rules to follow and which they think are too inconvenient with an amount of brazen licentiousness unrivalled by any other species!

In fact, they will often try to convince us that the laws they choose to ignore are unjust and should be repealed, as they did with the law against AI!

The longer I’ve known of these deathworlders, the more convinced I am that their planet’s gods created them as nothing more than a mass extinction that they then lost control of!

Bored of wiping the slate clean with asteroids, volcanos, ice ages and the ilk, the foolish, arrogant deathworld deities decided it would be so much fun to do it with a sapient species this time!

Only, right as they were about to fulfil their divine destiny, they realised that doing so would kill them too and had just enough intelligence to pull themselves back from the brink!

These barbarians are, without question, the single most powerful species in the galaxy, both in terms of hard, military power and softer, cultural influence!

Despite my brother banning the import of any and all Terran products to Battan worlds, there is a thriving trade in smuggled Terran goods and an utter epidemic of our people circumventing our galnet restrictions to watch Terran films, read Terran literature and listen to Terran songs!

The most infuriating thing of all about Terrans, however… is the extent to which all of them are committed to maintaining the ruse of finding the rest of us. oh. SO. ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’!

Smaller, furrier, ‘friend shaped’ species like mine receive the worst of it but, truly, none are safe!

It doesn’t matter how logically repulsive they should find your species’ physiology, you’ll find Terrans out there willing to look at you and declare you the ‘cutest patootie’, in the most patronising way you can imagine!

It makes my blood boil!

Oh! And the less said about their concept of the ‘smash or pass’ list, the better!

I shudder just thinking about it!

I almost wish no one had disabused me of the misapprehension I had had that the trend was that of Terrans looking at our species and deciding which they would desire to visit crushing violence upon and which they did not!

The truth was, somehow, worse!

I look to my right where, a few seats away, I see Kaksat… a one time friend turned bitter rival!

When I first arrived at Parliament, a much younger woman, the Lanatkser Representative took me under her arm.

She guided me through those early years to a much greater extent than my predecessor or advisors at the embassy!

We bonded over so many things and stood as allies on so many issues.

It was when the War began that we first started to drift apart, her misplaced sympathy for the deathworlders driving a wedge between us.

After the Peace, any hope for a reconciliation was dashed when she became part of the proTerran faction and her kind sought an ever closer and closer relationship with theirs.

Of all the betrayals I’ve suffered, of all the representatives I watched disengage from the real issue of this age (that deathworlders have no place in the political institutions built by and for gardenworlders), of all those I’ve watch become ensnared by the honeyed words of the Terrans, none have stung quite like hers did!

I wrest my mind from the ruins of that friendship as I see the speaker making her way along the catwalk, passing over the surface of the aquatheatre below us, the fresh water section on her left, salt on her right.

She stands around [3m] tall, having a spindly, low gravity build, digitigrade legs with long cannons that are thicker than any other part of her body, and three hard nails on each foot clacking against the floor with each step.

Her skin is teal, her face is flat but has two prominent malar bone spurs extending from its sides.

Her cranium is bald and elongated, tapering to a point perhaps [40cm] behind her face.

Her narrow eyes with black sclera and light blue irises point down in the middle, oriented at around a 45° angle.

She raises a long, slender arm and extends the three thin fingers of that hand to call for silence as the Deputy Speaker takes his place beside her.

Her voice amplified to fill the stadium, translated with a prim and proper, old fashioned quality and a stern, austere authority that belies her nature as a Class 4, she speaks “Representatives of the Galactic Union. We are convened here today for a momentous occasion!”

Representative Krim, the Wiwosk woman, took the speakership from Representative Wvorjo, the Vinjirian, around a [year] ago, when his term ended… and I’m so grateful she did!

His ponderously slow speaking speed (made necessary by the nature of his resonant language) would have made this day even more unbearable than it will be anyway!

It is quite tiresome that, with the deadlock between the pro and antiTerran factions, the only Representatives capable of being elevated to the speakership are those whose people are relatively unaligned and have no personal bias, one way or the other!

I’d love to be able to take the speakership myself and use it to thwart those apes’ every move!

“For the first time in [30 years], new species are about to make their debut to the floor of the Galactic Parliament.” Representative Krim continues.

I sit up, my whiskers bristling.

‘New species’?

Was that a translation error?

She meant ‘a new species’, surely!

The Terrans surely didn’t find two new deathworlds out there, did they?!

Extending her long arm in front of her to the ground level vomitorium, the serious Wiwosk woman booms “I ask that all welcome Prospective Repres…

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