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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Betty-Adams on 2024-12-03 00:54:36+00:00.

Humans are Weird – Breaking News

Original Post:

Rollsslowly pushed off the delicious bed of the freshwater river, this time remembering to put extra effort into the motion. He rose up against gravity and nearly instantly lost visual information on the smooth, algae covered rocks in the turbid water. However he managed to get enough momentum to pull his work bag off the riverbed and it followed his lagging end over the protruding rock without catching. Rollsslowly gave a few powerful strokes, not enough to maintain the surface-ward momentum of both him and his tools, but more than enough allow him to drift to the next collection site. As he drifted back down, forward momentum assisted by the current, a stray eddy of water tickled his appendages in a way that indicated a deep, narrow hole in the river bed below him that had not been there the last time there were in this location. Rollsslowly hesitated between just sounding as loudly as he could and getting out his comm unit, but finally decided on the comm, the surface of a smooth pond disrupted sound enough to confuse mammal audio senses, the surface of a rippling river utterly negated sound as far as the humans were concerned. He slid an appendage into his work bag and pulled out the device.

“Human Friend Nate!” He called out, not bothering to alter his tones to match the sound profile it had on land. Human Friend Nate found his unaltered underwater voice endearing ‘like whale speak’ whatever that was, and more importantly, had no trouble understanding it.

“Sup’ Undulate Friend Rollsslowly?” Human Friend Nate called back cheerfully, the comm carrying a clear voice and the water catching the voice that originated nearly two unds above and distorting it as the sound waves crossed the phase barrier.

“Be aware of a deep hole, just large enough to catch your walking appendage,” Rollsslowly said. “It is about in the middle of the distance between the two sample sites, about two and a half unds from either.”

“Roger that bud!” Human Friend Nate called, the approaching sound of his two massive appendages sloshing through the water changing subtly as he began attempting to detect the hole in the turbid water by touch.

Rollsslowly directed himself to the sample site and began the meticulous process of selecting one out of every ten of the most average lengths of the algae strands. It was fairly simple ones you got a feel for the local population, and despite the human member of the expedition protesting that a proper ecologist should have to “at least do some math” to be able to accurately select only those strands which fell within a standard deviation of the perfect mean, every attempt on their part to prove that laser measurement devices and artificially computed lengths would be more accurate, none of their efforts had proved, on post collection inspection to be more accurate than a well trained Undulate ‘feeling their way’. Rollsslowly was about forty percent finished when the water carried a sound to him and he stopped suddenly.

Rollsslowly had never heard that sound before. It was a muffled crack, as of the woody part of a terrestrial plant breaking under pressure, but very different. Something like coral snapping under the force of a wave, but muted. To be perfectly aligned Rollsslowly had never heard any sound like it in his existence. It was, there was no better word than alien to him, and for some reason, something that sounded through his every fiber, he knew that was a bad sound. He slipped out of the harness of his work-bag, remembering to drop its anchor and scrambled against the current back towards the general direction of the sound. He wasn’t sure why he focused on the hole, Human Friend Nate was aware of it and an experience river walker, but just down stream of the hole he found Human Friend Nate on three limbs, facing down into the water with his nose mere appendage breadths from the surface of the water.

Rollsslowly used one of Human Friend Nate’s thick arms to brace himself and thrust several appendages up out of the water to get a good look at the human’s face. The humans skin below the water, which was well below the mammal’s comfort level, was hard to read but above the water it was flush with pain signals and the expressive flesh over his face was taught with strong sensation indicators. Rollsslowly was about to demand explanation when Human Friend Nate took a deep breath and heaved himself up onto his folded legs, freeing his hands to smack at his face. A gesture that both dislodged Rollsslowly, forcing the Undulate to brace himself on the humans ‘knee’, and cleared the vast majority of the pain signals from the human’s face. The human looked up at the blurry distant blue sky with its rippling colors and took another deep breath.

“There was a hole,” Human Friend Nate commented in a tone of forced evenness.

“Yes,” Rollsslowly replied. “The one I warned you about.”

Human Friend Nate’s face contorted in a rueful smile and he adjusted his work bag that he carried strapped to his back.

“Yes you did,” the human agreed, “and I stepped in it.”

“What was that bad sound I heard?” Rollsslowly demanded.

“You heard that?” Human Friend Nate sounded genuinely surprised, “and identified it as a bad sound? Have you ever heard it before?”

“No! What was it?” Rollsslowly demanded.

“Most like to be one of those pesky little bones in my toes breaking,” Nate said with a shrug. “No big deal.”

Rollsslowly scrambled around the human’s mass to the foot where, despite the cold of the water, and the thing anti-laceration/traction covering the human wore he could see was now coloring with pain signals.

“Aren’t those bone things important to you?” he demanded, gently feeling the foot to get a better idea of the damage.

“The real big ones are,” the human agreed. “If it’d been my femur or tib or whatnot, I’d be up the creek literally, but other than running the bone generator over it not much to be done about a broke toe bone. Let’s just finish up this stretch of the river and walk back to the transport. Nothing else to do.”

“We could call for pickup,” Rollsslowly pointed out.

But Human Friend Nate shook his head and with slow, deliberate motions rose to his feet. The pain signals spiked, rippling across his stripes in glowing colors again but decreased as he began gingerly walking towards a flat rock that stuck out of the stream a few unds away.

“I’ll just take a sit there,” he indicated the rock with his hand, “and wrap my foot and set the bandage to walking book hardness. It’ll slow me down a bit but will keep the bones from taking any more damage.”

“Won’t that thing be an issue?” Rollsslowly demanded as he followed the human. “The part where if you damage one of your, I can’t recall the word, but when those organ things are inside and they get damaged they leak fluids into the wrong chambers?”

“Internal bleeding,” the human supplied as he folded his appendages down on the boulder and detached his work bag to get at the contents. “Nah, not for a little old broken foot bone like this. Least it won’t be a problem before we get back to the base and can have the medic take a proper look at it. Come on up here and watch now,” Human Friend Nate said with a grin, patting the boulder beside him. “Sounds like you never saw a foot get field wrapped before. Now pay attention to the direction I wrap the long bandage before I set the bottom to get hard, it’s important because of the way human blood flows.”

Human Friend Nate brought the injured foot up onto his ‘lap’ and began unrolling the long bandage from his work bag and Rollsslowly crawled up the boulder to observe. He had the creeping suspicion that he was being distracted to avoid an argument but he had never seen a field wrap before and it was interesting.

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