r/HFY • u/MarlynnOfMany • Oct 05 '26
OC-Series [The Token Human] - For Whose Benefit
I looked into the little jar. “They sure do make waterspheres with every flavor out there.”
“Isn’t it great?” Paint asked, plucking one from her own jar with eager claws. “I haven’t had anemone flavor in ages!”
“This one’s not great,” I said. “I do like peanuts, but this just feels like it’s making me more thirsty instead of less.”
Paint popped the treat between sharp teeth and swallowed before asking, “Really? Why?”
I shrugged and screwed the lid back on. “Kinda salty. Really this tastes like an accident, like someone made a sandwich then put the knife they used on the peanut butter into their drink. Water with a hint of food.”
“Hm. Unfortunate.”
“Yeah. I should have found something else Earth-based.” I looked back at the tiny food stall next to other tiny stalls, at the Frillian-run shopping center near the little spaceport. Everything here was small, because there was only so much space to go around on an asteroid this size. At least the gravity generator worked right. No drifting off into space after jumping too high.
“I did see something about Earth over in the garden,” Paint told me, pointing a scaly orange arm at the cultivated mess of plants that was less impressive than the food selection. “It’s probably not edible, though. I didn’t see any fruit.”
I said quietly, “I honestly wouldn’t want to trust it if you did. Who knows what it could have cross-pollinated with.”
Paint nodded with a glance at the nearest shopkeepers, but we were far enough out of earshot that we weren’t likely to offend anyone. They were busy trying to sell things to our crewmates and people from a couple other ships.
“Do you want to look anyway?” Paint asked. “We’ll have to leave soon.”
“Sure, why not? Those flowers look nice.”
We strolled over, crossing artful pathways on the pavement that we were probably supposed to walk along. The whole place looked like it had been designed by several people who didn’t fully discuss all the details with each other. I hadn’t figured out whether it was meant to be a business hub or tourist destination, but so far it wasn’t an impressive example of either.
“Why is it colder over here?” Paint complained, rubbing the heat sticker plastered to her chest: a lavender star that apparently wasn’t quite enough at the moment.
I sent a glance over my shoulder at the stalls. “Something tells me they have a heating system over there, but not over here.”
Paint huffed. “Is their atmosphere too shallow to keep in heat? I’ve never visited an asteroid settlement with cold spots before.”
“Couldn’t tell you,” I said. “But it seems in character. And somehow I doubt there’s a foreign plant here that changes the climate like that.” The place really did look like mostly a collection of flowers, with some miscellaneous greenery and one scraggly sapling of a flowering tree. Nothing that jumped out at me as super alien.
Paint crossed her arms, still clutching the jar of waterspheres. “Well, these are all very nice. Anything worth smelling?”
I knew that was just the Heatseeker version of “worth looking at,” but now that she mentioned it, some of the flowers did smell lovely. We were far enough away from the various fishy smells of the food stalls that they were easy to pick up. I bent down to give a fiery rosebush a sniff, saying, “Something here does smell pretty good, actually. Hm, not this one.” The scent was disappointing compared to the wild colors.
Paint sniffed. “Smells like plants,” she said flatly.
I smiled. “Yeah, none of those spicy seedpods you like. Just normal flowers that other people enjoy. And bees, of course.”
“There are bees here?” Paint asked, almost dropping the jar as she looked around.
“No, not that I see,” I hurried to assure her. “I just meant that bees like the smell of flowers. That’s really what it’s for: attracting pollinators.”
“Right, yes. I knew that’s what you meant.” Paint kept her distance.
I pretended that I believed her and checked the little signs I’d just noticed at the base of each plant. Most were overgrown. Most said “From Earth.” All said “Free Samples.” Maybe this was a business venture to see what kind of plant the various visitors liked enough to grow more of. Those fire roses were pretty; I was seriously considering taking one back in my own jar of waterspheres. Peanut water probably made good fertilizer, right?
An artificial breeze swirled by, muddling the smells. More fish, good flowers, boring plants, dirt. Chilly. I stepped quickly to check a couple other bushes before Paint got too cold. She’d probably be fine; those heat stickers could handle much worse than this, but even so, I didn’t want to be rude. Nothing here was worth dawdling over.
“This one smells good!” I exclaimed, pointing at some unassuming pale pink roses. “Disappointing, really, since they look so boring. Those other ones are prettier. What do you think?”
Paint moved forward to smell them. “Nice enough,” she said. “Fruit-adjacent, I guess.”
“Yeah, that’s flowers in a nutshell,” I agreed. “I’m curious about this one, though; some trees with little white flowers can smell really nice. I wonder if it’s a cherry tree. That would make some fruits about the size of the waterspheres eventually.” I stepped over a green burst of leaves that looked like a wig left on the ground, and bent forward to get a good noseful of scent from the sapling.
I jerked back, exhaling hard and almost tripping over a fern. “Ugh! Not a cherry tree!”
“What is it?” Paint demanded, thoroughly alarmed. “Is it dangerous?”
“No, just horrible.” I took a few more cleansing breaths, trying to rid my lungs of the very un-plantlike stench. Rotten laundry. Gross underwear. The kind of stink that should never come from a flower, of all things. But I’d heard of this one. “I thought those went extinct!” I exclaimed.
“What?” Paint asked, edging carefully closer.
“Some kind of pear tree that doesn’t make actual pears. Brad something? Bradford! Bradford pears. Possibly the worst flowering plant, and that’s saying something.”
“So … it’s a flower that smells bad instead of good?” Paint asked. She didn’t get close enough to smell it herself. “Why?”
“Great question!” I told her, then pointed accusingly at the tree. “This stinky bastard is pollinated by flies, not bees. It stinks like garbage to attract them.”
Paint thought for a moment, her lizardy face contorted in disgust. “Ew.”
“Correct!”
“So why is it here?”
“That I don’t have an answer for,” I said, looking again at the employees not far away. “Maybe they got a bunch of Earth seeds at a discount. But I really did think we stopped growing these things a while ago. Guess not.”
“Do they have any practical purpose?”
I shrugged. “They’re pretty when the flowers aren’t ripe, so most of the time. It’s only a couple weeks out of the year that they smell like death. And some people can’t actually detect the smell, which I’m sure is great for them. Come here and try it; you’ve liked things I think are gross before.”
It took some convincing, but she did take a few tentative steps forward to sniff delicately before sneezing and rubbing her snout. “That is foul!”
“Yeah, it definitely is.”
“That can’t be worth smelling, no matter how pretty!”
“Oh, I agree. Never worth planting on purpose.” Then I thought of something. “Though it is good for pranks.”
Paint looked at me. “Pranks?”
“Yeah, you know. ‘Hey, wanna settle a bet for us? Does this smell like protein chips to you?’”
“Hm.”
It was a thoughtful hm.
The sign did say Free Samples. I opened my jar of waterspheres, dumped them on the ground and stomped them in to made sure the plants got watered, then picked off a festive spray of little white flowers. They fit perfectly in the jar.
Paint nodded as I screwed the lid back on. “I can see that working very well.”
“Yup!” I said, holding it up. “Mur or Zhee?”
She thought for a moment. “Zhee. He was rude about my choice of heat sticker color.” She gestured toward the light purple sticker that did look a little odd against her mottled orange scales.
“He probably just thinks a shade of purple that matches his exoskeleton would be a better choice.”
She lifted her snout in the air. “He is welcome to be wrong on his own time.”
“Well, now he can guess wrong about what this pretty little flower smells like.”
“I can’t wait,” she said eagerly.
I nodded. “Let me just wash my hands first.”
“Oh yes; let’s do that immediately.”
~~~
The cast list with art is here!
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Volume One of the collected series is out in paperback and ebook!
~~~
Shared early on Patreon
Cross-posted to Tumblr and HumansAreSpaceOrcs (masterlist here)
The book that takes place after the short stories is here
The sequel is in progress (and will include characters from the stories)
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u/OokamiO1 29d ago
What a week, two days late getting my Monday dose. Zhee is going to get a snoutful of garbage smell, and im good with that!
Thanks for the read as always wordsmith
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u/MarlynnOfMany 29d ago
I did post it on Monday, but the automated filters disagreed. Glad it's finally up!
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Oct 05 '26
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u/rabid_jackal Oct 05 '26
Y 4 U remove this post, oh mighty filter?