Challenge #00760 - B029: Hug-a-Bunch

“And here we have- please put the new ambassador down.”

“But (s)he’s so cute and cuddle able!”

Ha’ri still didn’t understand how she became an ambassador to her people. She was just one of the many, many asteroid-chasers trying to make enough money to pay for more than her ship and its fuel. Especially damages.

Then a ship belonging to the strange, balding apes had come out of nowhere and she made the mistake of hailing them.

Now she wore a gold version of her work clothes, and walked among giants.

The humans were all right, really. They were just mind-bogglingly insane. But insane in ways that bordered on genius.

No other species would have thought of tying a ship’s proximity sensors to the grapplers, and then programming the latter to take anything it snagged straight to the on-board processors. And nobody else would have considered calling the resultant, cthuloid monstrosity a harmless-seeming name like “the hungry caterpillar”.

It took Ha’ri all of ten beats, watching it in motion, to want to have that system attached to her ship. It was a nightmare made mechanics, but it was a potentially profitable nightmare.

And now, she was in another nightmare. An immense space station seemingly designed by a warped mind. Her human guide had explained that the station had just happened. Various people throughout the ages had added to it, reconfigured it, and otherwise messed around with how it was put together. Ha’ri was so used to humans by now that she was not surprised at all to learn that there was a cult of humans who considered the station to be a living being.

And then there was the welcome she got upon entering the Ambassadorial Conference Arena. There were already people there. If one greatly expanded one’s definition of ‘people’ to include a group of human-shaped machines playing instruments with a glowing-eyed creature with sharp teeth - while a blue-skin man looked on in resignation.

“Aaaaaawwww…” cooed the black-skinned humanoid with the guitar. Her glowing eyes had somehow turned pinkish. “Aaah ‘is such a cutie…”

“Shayde,” warned the blue man. “No…”

By then, the being known as Shayde was across the room and had literally picked Ha’ri up and was vigorously cuddling her.

“Put the new ambassador down!”

"Aw but she’s so cute an’ huggable…”

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