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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/2weekoldpickle on 2026-04-17 18:43:49+00:00.
Howdy all, how have you all been? I have spent a lot of my time recently ... not writing, as you probably noticed, my bad! Almost graduated from college in a little under a month, so there will be even more chaos in my life. Chapter 21 is here finally, had the rough draft mostly finished for a while, and I just got caught up with everything. Thank you all for being so patient, and hopefully I will have this finished before I am eighty!
I hope that you have a good day.
Chapter 21: “I bet he will love to hear it.”
NOTE: All metrics of time and distance have been translated into human equivalents.
Jarekk – Grieving Brother, Husband, Father – Age: 39
Roughly 9 days, 21 hours, and 15 minutes after impact.
“You . . . you know Clyde?”
Ajilly asked, trying to hide some of her shock. The green, insectoid alien had clearly shown just seconds ago that they were incredibly taken aback by the name drop of Clyde. I paused for the external translator to relay the message to Ms. Munply, who had at this point, seemed just as sure as I that Ajilly was with the humans. For me, this news was the best news of the day, but for Munply, it could be assumed the opposite. I can empathize; trying to comprehend the news that humans aren’t that bad is quite a tough pill to swallow. Worst of all, now she has to accept that this creature she houses is allied with her worst nightmare. I replied to Ajilly’s question with a smile,
“Yes, I’m currently taking care of him.”
She also gained a soft smile, paused, and let out a warm chuckle. Her laugh had a slight rattle to it, which caught me a little off guard. Her laugh was still pleasant, if a touch foreign. It felt as though some of the tension in both of us had been chiseled away. Ajilly said,
“I didn’t know if anyone else had landed here. How is he doing?”
Pondering that question for a few seconds, I assumed the answer to be, “Alright, all things considered. We keep him fed, we have a hiding spot, and he hasn’t died of boredom.”
Ajilly asked, “Hiding spot? How? Humans are massive!”
I shrugged, “We keep him in our tractor shed, close by to our home. He is just too big to fit in our house . . . or in your case, a garage.”
As I explained the issue with his size, Ajilly’s smile seemed to fade. We all sat for a few seconds, and I glanced towards Munply, who seemed very out of it still. She had only said one reply since sitting on that bench. Once she heard about Ajilly’s past, she was entranced by the floor. All brain power seemed to be routed from the eyes towards an invisible point where calculations are done, and logic makes sense of facts. I spoke to her, and as I did, Ajilly looked to her as well,
“How are you holding up, Ms. Munply?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
Her stare lingered for a few seconds after I said that, then she snapped out of her gaze and looked at me. She looked confused. Munply’s forehead creases told me nothing of her emotions, and the rest of her face gave very few hints. Dazed eyes might have shown pain that could have originated from many different sources. I looked at Ajilly, who quickly noticed that I had changed my gaze. Ajilly changed the subject,
“Sooooo, how did you meet Clyde?”
I glanced at Munply to see if she had reacted, but she was still staring at me with the same face. I paused, then returned my gaze to Ajilly. The apparent outer shell of her body rested on the blue plastic tote, towering a foot taller than me. The thinness of her washed-out green legs was still odd; it seemed strange how they could hold the rest of her body. Scanning up, the extra pair of arms was still bizarre, with the top arms moving much more than the bottom ones. Still, sometimes they would both be performing small actions simultaneously, and my brain struggled to keep up. The top two arms were once again caressing her right antenna, and her fuzzy pupils looked at me with only the occasional glance to Munply. I replied to her question,
“Well, my son met him before I did, and the first thing Clyde did was save his life.”
She seemed reasonably shocked, “. . . Saved his life?”
I nodded, “He was hiding in our shed when my son found him. When the door opened, a gryneer attacked him, but Clyde fought it off and bandaged him till I found him in the morning.”
She paused slightly, but quickly recovered, “Oh my God, is your son doing ok?”
My mind flashed a memory of Drekan covered in blood, asking me if I trusted him, “Much better, yes, he can walk and should make a full recovery.”
We were all silent again; they both had looked away. Ajilly spoke up with a slight chuckle of disbelief,
“I mean, I knew Clyde was a good guy, but . . . that’s incredible.” She paused, and before I could think of another conversation, she asked the following question, “So that’s when you decided you could trust him?”
I laughed a little before explaining the entire first day that I met Clyde. I explained the mental whiplash of opening the door to my shed and seeing a human for the first time in person. I laughed with Ajilly about how Clyde had to grab me to prevent me from running out of the shed. While I chuckled about such an affair in hindsight, Munply looked at me like I was psychotic. We discussed how terrified I was, my wife was, and how quickly Drekan grew to trust him. Over the course of my conversation, it seemed like Munply was starting to warm up to the concept of Clyde, seemingly having a relapse when I mentioned that Clyde was six feet tall.
All summarized in the manner of half an hour, eventually, I segued into asking,
“How did you two end up finding each other?”
Ajilly seemed to pause in thought, then looked to Munply. It seemed like Ajilly was going to give the story, but Munply immediately cut her off,
“Wait wait wait. If you explain it, I’m going to look like a psychopath! I think I should give some context-”
Ajilly said in a joking way, “Understandable for me to think you were a psychopath at the time. I went from thinking you were dying to thinking you were crazy. Even now, I have my doubts that you are normal for a glorbian.”
With the pause for her external translator to catch up, I was able to anticipate and see the joke land on her face in real time. She smiled for the first time since entering this garage, her rebuttal,
“Don’t lie, you think I’m normal adjacent.”
To which Ajilly laughed and said, “You wish. Explain away, crazy lady!”
To think that my meddling almost ruined this. Something in the air had completely changed. After explaining myself and how Clyde had become my ally, it allowed Ajilly and Munply to trust one another again, to trust me. I also noticed that Ajilly would stop fidgeting with her antenna when the jokes would start flying. Munply said,
“For the last few years, whenever I got very angry or sad, I found that screaming as loud as possible can be quite therapeutic.”
By the Gods, her poor neighbors.
Ajilly looked at me and gave me a look that said, ‘yup, isn’t this crazy?’ Munply continued, “Obviously, I don’t want to do it in the city, as that would be a very quick noise complaint. Instead, if I haven’t melted too badly, I drive out of town, find a quiet country road, and then I yell as loud as possible.”
We sat in silence for a few seconds while I took that information in, and Munply finished with, “That is the context you need, Ajilly. You can tell your side now.”
Ajilly said, “You can probably guess how this ended up going.” I nodded, and she continued, “Once I landed on Glorby, I thought that some people would have seen my escape pod land in a forest. I made sure to try to get as far away as possible from it.”
She paused to glance between us, “I just kept moving, getting a nap or two by sleeping on my cape. It wasn’t very great, but I figured that until I was close to dying of exposure, my odds would be better at avoiding detection. The first night here was pretty cold, but I found a little twig structure that someone had built sometime ago; it seemed like no one was around. I camped there most of the next day, as it seemed to do a good job keeping the wind at bay. I had to stay alert, though, knowing that if I heard anyone approach, I would need an escape plan.”
Munply and I watched Ajilly talk about her first experiences on Glorby. It was fascinating to hear how these aliens first interact with our planet, and how little they seem to know. Having grown up here, I would never dream of being out in the woods without a firearm of some kind. She continued,
“I had heard what sounded like faraway cars a few times, but I didn’t realize just how close to a dirt road I was, in retrospect the twig shelter should have been a clue.” Ajilly paused and looked at me with wide eyes,
“Then, my second night here, I heard a scream, pretty close by.” She then looked at Munply, who gained an awkward smile and looked down towards the floor, to which Ajilly and I laughed a little. Ajilly said,
“I knew that you glorbians probably wouldn’t be stoked with me being on your planet, and I wasn’t certain how an ally of humans would be treated. I thought, though, tha...
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