"Of course I understand why you don't want more than one human on the ship. Back home we kept a guardian goose with the chickens." -- Anon Guest
Humans and their metaphors, am I right? Half of them are domestic animal excrement, but which half? The really scary part about these balding Deathworlder apes is that the half with a grounding in reality has the high potential to be truly terrifying.
Look this stuff up at your own risk, is what I'm saying. I made that mistake when I heard about guardian geese. You think waterfowl are harmless and safely edible. They're not. Geese are super Deathworlders. Comparatively fragile[1], yet also willing to put up more than a sufficient fight. How much? Enough to frighten the Humans that keep them. This is a bird that has serrated teeth on its tongue, and have been advertised as "better than guard dogs" by many.
Having seen just the teeth, I'm prone to believing anything those apes have to say about their geese. How they can connect that bird to a figure benevolent to their infants is beyond me. Deathworlders are confusing.
Anyway, my trouble began when the avian Havenworlders on board thought that a guardian goose sounded like a good idea. Trying to discourage them without exposing them to hazardous content was... a problem. Allowing one on board was -thankfully- forbidden because a goose was hazardous content.
Which lead, inexorably, to the Inquisitive Peek's policy of One Deathworlder Only. An animal Deathworlder was harder to handle, and a cogniscent one was therefore preferred. So now geese had come up again and I was obliged to state, "Please don't mention geese to the Havenworlders. They believe that all birds are like them. They might want to replace you with one."
"Yeah I heard you were a weird mob. Level - what - three point five Havenworlders, right?"
"That is correct," I said.
"Aaaw, the babies," cooed the Human. They were going to fit right in.
[1] That is, compared to the other Deathworlders sharing the planet with them.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / fotostok_pdv]
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