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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Mclewis_13 on 2025-08-22 13:46:18+00:00.
**All credit to u/SpacePaladin15 for the universe!
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Swiftpair Transcript Date: April 20th*, 2241*
CharlieBuck: You cannot understand how excited I am to see you face-to-face, Kosif.
Kosie2219: I assure you; the feeling is mutual. I’ve only seen glimpses of other species before we paired up for the exchange. You always seem to be upset in the photos you’ve shared, though. Why are you baring your teeth all the time?
CharlieBuck: Uh oh, someone didn’t read her comprehensive pamphlet. That ‘snarl’ is how we humans show contentment and pleasure.
Kosie2219: Your species is weird.
CharlieBuck: Agreed.
CharlieBuck: Oh, I just remembered, I have a surprise ready for you when you land! I’ve been working hard on it, and I hope you like it.
Kosie2219: What did you do?
CharlieBuck: C’mon, don’t be like that! Besides, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.
Kosie2219: Please don’t do anything stupid.
CharlieBuck: It’s not stupid. You’re gonna love it. I’ve gotta go sleep now. What time is it on your side?
Kosie2219: It’s about 3:30 PM SHT according to my holopad. Since you mentioned sleep, I’m guessing it’s late at night over on Earth?
CharlieBuck: It is exactly 10:47 PM here. Hence the need to sleep.
Kosie2219: Okay, don’t let me keep you up any longer. As I believe you humans say, good night.
CharlieBuck: Night, Kosie.
*<<*CharlieBuck has logged off>>
*<<*Kosie2219 has logged off>>
<>
Memory Transcript Subject: Kosif, Arxur-Terran Exchange Participant
Date: (Standardized Human Time) April 23rd*, 2241*
Why is he upset? Am I late? He can’t possibly blame me for that. It finally clicks and I mentally tailwhip myself. Kosie, you dolt! This is the surprise he’s been planning for the past [three days]!
Charlie’s eyes land on me.
“Kosie, is that you?” All the other Arxur look directly at me, and I would be bright red of it weren’t for my scales. He can’t keep the snarl, no—smile, off his face as he approaches, sticking the sign under his arm. He stops about [5 feet] away from me.
“Hello, [female adult of equal status honorific] Kosif. Welcome to Earth!” He lisps on some of the letters, but every single Wrissian jaw drops nonetheless at his grasp of our native language. At this point, even the other human partners are taking quite a lot of interest in Charlie.
He switches back to his own language. “Surprise!”
I’m flabbergasted. “What? How?”
“Easy. There’s a linguistic database with all known speeches and dialects in the galaxy. I had to get special permission to access your language, but I managed to learn enough over the course of a week to pull this off. Did you like it? I can’t really read your face.”
To be honest, I really did like it. It was exactly the kind of thing that Charlie might go and do. Something crazy that he needed special permission to even try, just to surprise me. A lot of the stories that he’s told me over Swiftpair are of him doing something dumb for at least one of three reasons: he thought it would look cool, he did it to make someone else happy, or he just wasn’t thinking at all.
“I did like it. You actually sounded like an Arxur, albeit a child.”
The snar-SMILE that split his face was one of the biggest I’d ever seen on him. The other Arxur that had formed a loose crowd during Charlie’s performance had dissipated during our conversation, going over to their own partners.
“Here, lemme take your stuff. You ready to head to the house?” He holds out his hands for my bag, and it takes me a moment to realize what he wants. I slip the bag from my shoulder and pass it to him, and he carries it around to the rear of the vehicle, where a hatch was sitting popped open. “Go on and get in. I’ll drive. I lowered the passenger seat all the way down, but I don’t know what we’re going to do about your tail.”
He places my bag into the storage hatch and pulls the curved door closed, shutting it with a thud. I pull on the door handle of the passenger seat, and it hinges outward to reveal the interior, a cushioned seat with a workable amount of legroom. Slouching downward a little further than normal, I duck into the automobile, trying to lever myself into place. The car sinks slightly as I step inside, and I lean back into the seat. The cushion is soft and quite comfortable, but I still need to do something about my tail. It’s not flexible enough to go behind my back, so I try putting it under my leg. Alright, that works. I may have what humans call ‘pins and needles’ when I get out, but at least I am inside the vehicle. Closing the door takes a few attempts, but I manage to get it shut.
The driver’s door opens, and Charlie slips inside easily.
“Alrighty, let’s go! Kosie, seatbelt.” He pauses as I don’t move. “The belt over your right shoulder. You put it across your torso and over your waist. Push the metal bit into the little plastic box near your left hip.”
Three failed attempts and some wriggling later, I finally hear the small click as the metal slides home.
“Going home, take two!” Charlie says as he pulls a lever beside him. The vehicle starts forward, and so begins my first trip in a human car. He steers the vehicle down various roads and passes through a gate before the first major highway comes into view. He pulls onto it, speeding up until he matches the velocity of the other automobiles. The vibrations are almost soothing, and what’s most interesting is the seemingly unspoken set of rules that the other drivers adhere to. A light activates on the rear of the car before us, and it changes lanes soon after, crossing the white dashes painted on the road. Later, I notice another driver who does the same thing, but without the flashing light. Charlie noticeably tenses up when they change lanes in front of him.
I have got to learn what their transportation is like. Why is that little flashing light so important?
“Why is that little flashing light so important?” I ask as Charlie flicks a small lever beside the steering wheel. A small arrow pointing right begins to flash and click regularly. “Did you activate yours just now?”
“Well, yes. The white flashing light is a blinker, and they’re standard on all vehicles. You use it to signal a desire to cross the white dashed line.”
“Why did you tense up before when someone didn’t signal?”
Charlie steers gently to the right, clicking the lever back into place.
“Because driving on Earth is about being predictable, and that driver was not being predictable. For humans, you don’t even get to sit in the driver’s seat until you’re nearly an adult and have taken at least one test. Then we can get our license, and we must abide by the rules of the road. If you want, I’ll tell you more when we reach the house.”
The scenery outside the car had changed from the urban landscape near the spaceport to a more rural and residential feel. If it wasn’t for the fact that there were humans everywhere, I might think I was in a part of Wriss I had never seen before. Our two planets really were very similar.
A few turns later, Charlie pulls a left and we enter a gathering of homes. The sign we pass says ‘Cooper’s Meadow’.
“Who is Cooper?” I ask Charlie.
“Who?” he says, sounding confused for some reason.
“Cooper. The guy who owns this meadow?”
“Oh, that’s just a name. The people who made this neighborhood just wanted a good name. Maybe one of them is named Cooper, but it matters exactly this much.” Charlie holds up his right hand, fingers curled into an O.
“How much is that?”
“What? Uh, it means zero. That’s what the number zero looks like. It means it doesn’t matter. Oh look, here’s the house!” He points out the windshield at one of several nearly identical houses.
Charlie stops the car, and I extricate myself from the vehicle. It was almost the same size as one of the shared Wrissian houses, where two would inhabit the same place to conserve credits. Those kinds of houses were almost exclusively used by mated pairs, due to many an Arxur’s unsociability.
“You like the place?” Charlie says as he walks up beside me with my bag. “The exchange program moved me in here since I lived in a 1-man apartment before. C’mon, let’s get you set up.”
The interior was only similar to a Wrissian home due to the essential rooms. It had a kitchen, a main living area, a dining table, all the universal things like that. The main difference was the electricity. Case in point, Charlie starts flicking light switches as soon as we walk in. I wince.
Why is he turning on all the lights? I certainly don’t need them. I think, before realizing that night vision is not something that all predator species have.
“Do you humans even have night vision?” I ask as I wipe my eyes, blinking away the spots in my vision.
“We do, it’s just not amazing and takes a while to fully come in. I think it takes about half an hour, but I’m not sure. How fast does yours go?”
How fast do my eyes adjust? “That… is an excellent question. I don’t know.”
“Meh, doesn’t matter. Let’s get you settled in. Your room is the big one in the back.” Charlie hands me my bag, and I follow where he was pointing. I duck through the doorway, the floor changing from wood paneling to carpet as I cross the thres...
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