This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Psychronia on 2025-10-01 02:16:58+00:00.
Garag exhaled in half a snort, causing a passing Piliv to flinch. It has been…quite a productive week for him, but an exhausting one.
After Ambassador Lewis made contact, he’d been in talks with him and various Terran leaders. It was supposed to be a standard cultural exchange to establish baseline interactions between their species-social faux pas, greetings, dos and don’ts of physical contact…that sort of thing.
But the more he learned about the Terrans, the more their kind fascinated him, and while their eyes didn’t quite sparkle like young Kara who approached him, they showed far more interest in the Uvei than he’d ever encountered before.
As he spoke to them, he came to a rather gratifying realization that they utterly broke the Coalition’s aggression index. According to the index, they had the highest ratings of “conflict-adverse”, “agreeable”, and “peace-loving”, with no score lower than a 97 of 100 compared to the Uvei’s 2-9 of 100.
But a twenty minute conversation with each human representative made it clear that their culture slipped into the scale’s blind spots. Based on how all the other races seemed to treat Ambassador Lewis with younglings’ gauntlets, they slipped into the other species’ blind spots too.
Rather than "conflict-adverse’, Terrans were “solution-seeking” in the same way the Great Chief Lajid and his advisor Vedin from centuries’ past were solution seeking. While the other species abhorred their swift elimination of bad actors when the tale was recounted, the humans immediately understood why they got an honored place in everyone’s history books in managing to navigate the needs of 231 nations for a trade that sustained everyone for 80 cycles.
Rather than “agreeable”, Terrans were “diplomatic” in the same way war chiefs were diplomatic. It just so happens that, since the Uven cradle Nysis was struggling from a severe lack of resources, there was rarely a way for everyone to walk away without both having constituents dying.
Rather than “peace-loving”, Terrans were “war-hating”. And the good Ambassador didn’t say it directly, but it was clear why they…
It was clear why his proposal to the Uven capital back home-to forbid hostile action against human authorities and aid them in military conflicts-was accepted so quickly.
…
Garag huffed again. Of course the Uven people hated war. Each and every one of them has lost someone close to them at some point or another. It’s not like they killed each other for the fun of it. It would be an absolute dream to be able to put all that behind them like that.
Why else would he be here on this citadel of posturing, judgmental little p***kets? Nysis was on its last gasp and the Uvei needed a garden world. Or even two or three non-deathworlds. But how does a “barbarian race” get anything within the Coalition’s explored space without it looking like a stronghold for future invasions?
Ugh. He could use a good gallop to clear his head, so he headed to the S.S. Kevak’s gymnasium.
Naturally, the moment he showed up at the gym, everyone else made themselves scarce or poorly hid around the corners to gawk. Well, except for one familiar figure striking a ball at a wall.
“Oh! Mr. Garag!” Kara chirped as she ran over to greet him, earning slight gasps and murmurs from the gallery.
“That’s quite a disorienting sport there. You humans have excellent dynamic vision and coordination, don’t you?” Garag smiled at her, ignoring the panicked skittering of a fleeing Micket in the background when he did.
“Ahaha, I guess so. We’re more proud of our sustainable stamina though.” She started to follow him as he began with a light jog around the track of artificial grass.
“Mmm. It was more expensive than expected, but I tried that war game your father recommended the other day. I could get the sense that skirmishes and campaigns can be much longer for a human than an Uven.”
“Supposedly, we can jog at functionally forever if our pace is right.”
“That’s…terrifying. Pardon me, little miss, but I’d like to gallop on all fours for a while. You best clear some room.”
“Gallop?”
It was a strange development that almost no members of the Coalition expected, save perhaps the two parties themselves. For reasons nobody could understand, the gentle Terrans and brutal Uvei not only got along, but could without exaggeration be said to have pack-bonded.
Despite many concerned races’ quiet asides warning them of the sort of people they were dealing with, Ambassador Lewis and other leaders of humanity pushed aggressively for acquisitions of lands for the Uven to settle in.
One particularly passionate group even acquired a garden world, purchased under their own name and leveraging their low aggression classification, only to let the Uvei have it in all but name.
If you searched the Terran Extranet, there would be no shortage of footage of “Uven Catharsis”, a term coined for the common response when a Uven refugee had an emotional break a few days after settling into their new home, showing emotions most members of the Coalition hadn’t seen in them before.
When the Terrans first joined the Coalition, a great many of both parties kept their distance from each other by reputation alone. Where, then, did this initial goodwill come from?
While there were the accounts of plenty of humans and Uvei who’d become fast friends after personal contact, many people accredit one key development that opened their eyes to the possibility of friendship.
[“WEE HEE HEE HEE!”
“Hey now. I told you to hold tight! Don’t lift your arms!!!”
“Everyone back home is gonna be so jealous!”]
It was a viral video of one Kara Lewis gleefully riding on one Garag Vedin’s back as he barreled through the track on all fours, baring his fangs in a wide grin.
When questioned on this event, Ambassador Garak usually deflected the inquiry with his usual stony face-though his tail always flailed with embarrassment.
I probably could have put this together as one post, but I felt like it was better to separate them to mark the break in time.
This is all of the story I have planned in my head for now, but I do have ideas for more tidbits and scenes with new perspective characters. If a compilation-style story works, maybe I’ll put those to page too eventually.
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