Pack Bonding

Humans quietly did not speak of it.

Speak of it and it makes it real, yeah?

One of the leftover prejudices from Pre-Shattering.

In reality, it wasn’t so bad. Young terrans unmeaningly latching on to inappropriate first beings when they were beginning their Adult Growth cycle. Receiving mixed and confused information due to age and species wasn’t so odd, with all the travelling.

You just had to know how to handle it so it went from "No, it’s okay!" and not "What kind of counseling do you need, small Terran???"

The growing little ones may need help, but when you thought of it in terms as them seeing their surroundings as Perfectly Normal, it made much more sense. -- Anon Guest

Before Ships' Human was an occupation, it was an infestation. Stations that had Humans lurking in forgotten or neglected spaces ran the risk of infecting other ships with Humans. There were warnings. There were precautions. Yet there were no fatalities, regardless of the fear of Deathworlders. Many who gained Humans on their ship gained them temporarily, and tended to view them as a wild animal that had decided to declare a truce so it could reach a destination.

After all, the reasoning went, who was going to stop a Deathworlder. Moreover - how did they plan on even trying? They were Deathworlders. Surviving having one on the ship was something of a badge of honour. Some Havenworlders even tried to gain a Human or two for long voyages. Even then, many travellers understood that Humans would protect even a temporary home. On those long voyages, the Humans would start to bond with the non-Human crew.

That was when other secrets about the Ships' Humans were revealed. Many of them were juveniles. Some reached their maturation in the company of relative strangers. It was, owing to unfamiliarity, a rough trip for all concerned. The Infonets shared what they could, but confirmable information was as unreliable as the knowledge from the Humans.

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"Wow, you really did it!"

"I said I would, didn't I?"

"Well, yes..."

"Then why are you so surprised?"

"Oh, I figured something of a higher priority would come along and you'd do that, then you'd be busy and forget about it, so I just assumed it wouldn't happen for, like, three or four months so I wouldn't give you a reason to be mad at me for being frustrated that you didn't do it when you said you would!" -- Anon

What if humans sight was akin to fantasy elves sensitivities to mana, “I may not have electro receptors like you but I'm able to to detect light with my eyes within the general vicinity” and they were so coy and vague describing light. Also if aliens have electro receptors imagine if they detect our nervous system. -- Anon Guest

The semi-amphibious Anatins didn't need to see light as they were evolving. They could sense the electrical discharges of predators and prey alike

Sometimes reality is indeed Stranger than Fiction... As far as finding strange space-faring beings, humans had a knack of seemingly finding those that somehow matched almost exactly the "creatures" of their wide and varied mythologies. From the Thumruth (whom bare an astounding resemblance to Qu-tze Bears) to the Karmorp'se, Humans had learned that pretty much anything was possible! That's when humans came upon a society that developed on the outer regions of their stars habitable zone(thus darker and colder than an