T’reka is regaled by tales of the Emu War…by smarter-than-expected emus.
[AN: This has to be a descendant of the original T'reka the Inquisitive]
She had found them fascinating on her trip to the famously dangerous Australia of Earth. And they found her fascinating, too.
When she discovered that they had a language… That was the most interesting thing to cause T'reka the Questioner to extend her stay.
Central-Australian Emus were intelligent.
“Ah nah, we’re not worried about the Domesticated ones,” said the leader. A female who called herself Great Auntie. “They were stupid enough to get caught. They’re not Us.”
Which was a very callous attitude unique to the cogniscent species that shared this planet with the humans. Anyone who’s not Us can go hang. And, frankly, many historical humans had a similar attitude about different cliques of their very own species. The only real difference was that the humans were the ones most commonly making war.
And speaking of conflict… “Did the humans give you many troubles, before they discovered your… capabilities?”
“Yeah nah not a lot,” said Great Auntie. “We made sure they got the Thick ones and the slow ones and we grew stronger. Though there was that one bloke.”
“Which… ‘bloke’?”
“Eh one of the whitefellas. Can’t tell 'em apart. It was -oooh- forty-odd summers after the whitefellas barged in? They were trying to grow tasty-seeds and we were hungry, right? Us back then, not Us now. Ever since the treaty, we’re goin’ good.”
“Of course,” said T'reka. “The human wiki says that your ancestors were after -uh- wheat?”
“Yeah, tasty seeds. Loads of them. More than the one or two we ever saw could eat, for sure. So we tried to help ourselves. ’S only natural, right?”
“Of course.”
“Stop interruptin’, Shiela. I’m tellin’ a yarn. You get rhetorical questions in a rhetorical yarn, awright?”
T'reka nodded, still busily taking notes.
“Good-oh. Anyway, we’re hungry, it’s dry, and they’re putting up fences, the mangy bastards. So of course we did what we could to get through. Wire and posts ain’t gonna stop us long, are they? And it was never our fault about the little breeding mammals.”
“Er… rabbits?”
“Yeah them. Whitefellas brought 'em in and then acted surprised that they mucked everything up. Idiots. So you got hungry Us, biggest dry spell in ages, and them swearin’ at us for wanting to eat, right? Then this big, white shitstain comes at us with bloody machine guns. Machine guns, I ask ya. What the flying hell was he thinkin’? The whitefellas tried t’ round us up, but we were having none of that. We’re too bloody smart. Scattered to the four winds.
"Then they tried pickin’ on bigger groups? But their bloody mechanical gun jammed, right? Big loss for them and we were in the wind, mate. And you know the really insulting thing? They didn’t even wanna eat us. We were just rubbish to them. Bastards.
"But of course we were too clever and the whitefellas just had to bloody put up with us, eh? Some of the buggers tried to claim that we were bloody bulletproof. Nongs, th’ lot of 'em. They can’t kill Us that easy.”
“Evidently,” said T'reka. “How long did it take you to communicate the treaty?”
“Aw bloody ages… Humans are Thiiiiiiick…”
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