Challenge #00752 - B021: Tea Solves Everything

Apparently there was an old prank tv show that faked an alien landing on an English lady’s front lawn. Her immediate reaction was to offer them tea.

Your prompt is the same scenario except it’s a real ship and a couple of extraterrestrials who had to make an emergency landing instead of a prank.

Somewhere east of Cricklewood…

There was no fire. Just a sad hissing of water vapour and the gentle ‘pink pink’ noise of cooling metal from the middle of her prize Begonias. Elsa tutted to herself and murmured, “Oh dear…” It couldn’t be helped, really. She could tell it was an accident. And the lizards inside were alarmed.

Lizard people. They had to be people. They were wearing clothes and shouting at each other in Lizardese. And there were some gestures that, it turned out, were truly universal and generally required most of an upraised fist.

Some of them were hurt.

Elsa scurried back inside for a moment and fetched all the medical supplies she had. And some clean rags. And hot water. And, since the kettle was going anyway, she made tea.

After a bad accident like that, they could probably use a cuppa.

*

The human encountered in our crash site was not the hostile beast we had been lead to believe they were. The creature intuited that we were in need of help and laid before us offerings of a medical nature.

How the creature knew that our battery acid was leaking is a miracle I can’t explain. Yet, after the repairs were finished, and we were puzzling how to restock the battery when the human offered us a cup full of the valuable fluid.

Engineer Zhonn was truly excited and made the human show its teeth. An alarming moment until we realised that the display was friendly. It was smiling.

The only disturbing part in the entire encounter was that the human drank her portion of battery acid in front of us. But, considering that we landed on a Class Four Deathworld and lived to tell the tale, I consider this incident to be minor.

It may be possible to train humans to be amenable to frailer species. It would take a long time and a significant effort, but a few examples show promise.

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