A Guide to Humans

Chapter 1: Nostalgia and Homesickness

It had been 3 months since I had to watch Marx, captain Druka, and the pilots of the shuttle I hitchhiked on plead their case and be found not guilty of kidnapping a human or tinkering with the species evolution. Intergalactic law for preservation of the natural evolution of sentient beings is a boring ass subject matter.
That took 4 earth years, and Marx and I were glad to be joining captain Druka on the Mavorint again.
When we first docked at Phorax 3, we all had to be moved into housing sectors since the ship had to be examined through all of it's findings so that they could not only see how I got there and wasn't caught, and to try and avoid that happening again, Druka and Marx were left in the same suite as each other and we did bond waiting for the deliberation to end. Wasn't so bad, they didn't break the law, I didn't know the law, I was okay with leaving humanity to learn, so really, it wasn't such a bad thing.
But now I am on the Mavorint, my first home off earth. Marx and I started up our own lab in the ship, Druka got his chair back, and the two shuttle pilots, Quakxi and Dromb, they retired. I would guess to say they weren't okay after fearing they would go to jail over my little stowaway mission.
But most of the crew did return.
And I was looking forward to getting to meet each one of them.
Marx walked in on me while I was writing in my personal log, making me set it down.
"Hey, Fabel, got your specimen set up?"
"Been set up for about an hour now, what took you so long?"
"There was a long line in the cafeteria, and you wanted the items at the end of the counter, so it took me a while."
"Shut up and give me my lunch, Nerd."
"You were in engineering school." Marx said, laughing as he held my lunch away from me.
"Yeah, but I dropped out." I scoffed, trying to grab the tray.
"To write a wildlife blog with in-depth explanations of what to find and why it does that written into every article."
"You mean talking about the forest animal drama?"
"You documented the growing process of baby birds."
"I gave them photo shoots. Like how humans have with babies as they grow."
"You can recontextualize the situation as much as you want, but you are a nerd." He said, giving me the tray. "And one with the weirdest taste in food I have ever seen." He said, frowning at my food.
"What? Galvix tastes similar to roast beef, genirk spread is like horseradish, meyrich is just mozzarella cheese from a different animal's milk, and you all make bread too. This is the alien version of my go to sandwich on earth."
"Yeah, but most of us can't eat genirk. It will literally kill us." He said, setting his food down beside mine.
"Why? To spicy?"
"To corrosive actually. The inside of my mouth is made of a tissue that is easily effected by corrosive acids."
"Aren't all acids corrosive?"
"Nope, amino acids, remember?"
"Right." I bit into my sandwich and sighed, chewing quietly.
Seriously, nothing could beat getting this sandwich daily and also trying new things when ever I wanted.
But Glix in the cafeteria couldn't replicate my favorite crab poppers.
Something about the Vexcron and the Tr'coche civilizations.
The intercom dinged above my head.
"Crew mate Fabel, please report to the human species research lab. We have a few items from storage we would like for you to identify."
"Can I bring my lunch?!" I asked, picking my stuff up.
"Probably, unless it is drugs again."
"I eat one pill."
"Yeah, and that was one to many."

As I walked into the HSR lab, I was shocked into stopping dead in my tracks. The lab was more of an office than a lab. Large desks covered in diagnostic tools, wall to wall monitors that had lists of items they were researching, and lots of normally benign items from earth.
Malud, a Fitxcure with a short and wide body with multiple tentacle-like legs and a strangely giraffe like neck skuttled up to me, chittering happily as he came.
"Fabel, thank you for coming. We have some questions about certain items we have collected. We aren't 100% sure on what they are, despite all the information we can obtain during the monthly influx of the internet scan information. Perhaps you could start with this." He said, pulling a large, silicon, bright pink dildo out from his underbody.
"This is a fertility idol or something, right?"
"No."
"Told you." A black furred kraxon said, crossing his upper set of arms. "It's a prosthetic, isn't it."
"It's a sex toy." I said, looking at them in discomfort.
"What is a sex toy?"
"I don't feel comfortable with this." I said, grabbing the dildo from Malud. "I am confiscating this from all of you. If you have a problem with it, tell Marx, he is the one in charge of me. Moving on, what else?"
"Well, there is this weird puppet suspended in a tube of liquid on a platform with two buttons."
"It's a toy, it will dance if you get the right combo."
"There is this-"
"It's a mp3, when did you get all this? This all looks like it is from the early 2000s."
"This is when we did pick most of this up. What about this? We think it might be imperishable food." Malud said as he held a cylindrical yellow spotted with mold cake wrapped in a plastic wrapper.
"Well, yeah, but it is a dessert. We call them Twinkies. They are divine, but I don't trust that that one is still safe to eat."
"What is flavored lube?" The kraxon asked, staring at a label on bottle of lube.
"A yeast infection waiting to happen." I said, snatching the bottle and putting it in my bag with the dildo. "Just tell me what you want me to look into and I will start categorizing what each pile I make is, okay?"
"Right, that works, but what is the deal with the silicon penis statue and the lube."
"Not every human will want to have a conversation about our sex lives with random aliens. I am one of them. That is my boundary. Respect. It." I said, glaring at him, making him raise all 4 of his hands in defeat.
It took me several hours, and by the end, I was deep in the nostalgia. I just sat admist a series of piles filled with trash, toys, outdated electronics, medical equipment, beauty products, and my bag was filled with a surprisingly large amount of sex toys that I refused to let them keep out of principle.
Also, I wanted to see if one of the suction cups would stick to Marx's head like a dart.