Aliens Have Landed!

Cramp entry: aliens have landed.

Aliens Have Landed!

It was all over the news, on several channels, in the papers, and catching the internet on fire. I sighed, paging through for whatever else was in the news.

I wanted to care. I really did, but the fact is humans are completely witless wonders. I've been here, long before Roswell, long before Nessie was a legend, and long before humans had figured out they had asses to wipe. Maybe I had been here too long.

My shell at the moment was human, being the best way to camouflage with the natives. I walked down Main Street, and even in my medium-sized city there were people reacting with all sorts of reactions. It's like they both wanted to be alone in the universe and didn't want to at the same time. I'd seen many only children herald the new baby's arrival that way, and each time it was not the disaster they thought it could be.

Well, almost each time. There's always a story of the one that breaks out of the norm. Humans love these stories and parrot them wildly to anyone who will listen. Their penchant for drama is unseemly. They've created so many forms of media to make the drama more and bigger - so intense that many of them need breaks before their brains are mush and they don't take them.

I've studied the humans for these long centuries. There are a few of my kind here, and we're not the ones who just landed. Nobody who knows what they're doing just lands where the humans can see them. They're more excitable than a new star's electrons. We're not the only ones here, either, so I have called a council for the watchers, the researchers, and the fugitives.

Even in an emergency, we're a lot calmer than the humans. I've been a meditation teacher here for some time, and a meditation retreat is the only calmer place I've seen than our gatherings. The burning question is to figure out who officially landed, and whether the rest of us should stay or go.

Mixed feelings abound in all of us. The fugitives felt they should stay. The watchers felt it was time to go. That left my faction, the researchers. That meant it was my say, because I had led them well for so long.

I cleared my weirdly human throat, nervous for the first time. Did wearing a skin make us vulnerable to emotions, or was this something that affected me more than I thought it did? "I think we should all make that call for ourselves. Some of us need to be here to document what the humans do, and some of us need to take the records home, because we have done our faithful duty. I will stay. Who will go?"

In that short minute, everyone decided. There would be enough time to do what was needful. My life in this realm had become meaningful. It couldn't be that I liked these humans, could it? I shrugged that off for another day's discoveries, and I wished my departing fellows a good trip.