Challenge #00441 - A066: Going With What Works

They shouldn’t’ve been surprised that there were neurodivergent Uplifted on Nufurria.  

(Can we please see an Uplifted sentient on the autistic spectrum? Because neurodiversity occurs in nonhuman species as well (ie, not trying for unfortunate implications here, but rather, any animal with the underpinnings of sentience is capable of the diversity of neural wiring experienced by humans))  

O'Ranges wasn’t much for words. He seemed to piece together what was happening from the world around him and worked on a set of pre-written instructions like there was a manual in his head.

And whenever he was upset - which was a lot - repetitive games like Tetris helped him to calm down.

O'Ranges was sensitive to noise. Huggy to the extreme point of having a ludicrously huge stuffed bear in nauseous purple to keep him company whenever Aelki needed to do anything at all.

He had separation anxiety, obviously. Security issues in general. A love of patterns and regularity in day-to-day life that extended right down to what sort of meals he had on which days. When he spoke, his inflections were very hard to hear.

And, for a creature bound for the arena, he was literally the biggest softie in the known universe. He wouldn’t harm a fly. He certainly cried for his fleas as Aelki combed special formulas through his thick fur to get rid of them.

“They drink your blood,” she explained again and again and again. With each treatment. “And you need your blood for you. Doesn’t it feel better to have them out and not itch any more?”

“Poor fleas,” O'Ranges whined. “Smells.”

“Do you want itches, or smells?”

And O'Ranges would pout about that for the rest of the day.

On one hand, the Cogniscent Rights Committee would get a fire under their collective asses about maltreatment of the neurodiverse. On the other hand, it was going to make the next Ambassadorial meet extremely interesting, to say the least. And she’d be his assistant/helper, for her sins.

Hitchhikers always found one form of rest or another. She’d hoped for the kind with a nice plot under an alien sky… but her kind heart had found the more rewarding form of permanence.

Maybe if she treated O'Ranges with a scent-nullifyer, afterwards. And then let him pick how he wanted to smell. Out of a range of relatively inoffensive scents, of course. Aelki was fairly certain that nobody would want to sit near the Ambassador who smelled of old meat and fresh dung.

She’d clothed him properly in comfortable pants (with egress for his tail) and whatever variety of top she could find to fit his bulk. Yet he insisted on wearing the Big Towel like a superhero’s cape. And in his play-mutterings, he styled himself as HitcherWolf. The hitch-hiking hero and rescuer of the downtrodden and forgotten. Just like his new human.

Aelki had traded an outlandish story for weighted cape fasteners, just to preserve what there was of his tops. And she dreaded the day that she’d convince him that Ambassador O'Ranges was HitcherWolf’s secret identity. It would either get out of hand or get upsetting for her poor, big, little pup.

And it would be happening, soon.

She almost had enough to get them the hell off Nufurria.

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