Bridgebuilder

Self-Discovery

Alex sucked a breath in through his teeth.

Not really the time to mince words, he laid it out as succinctly as possible. "It's the term for a baby dog."

Carbon stared up at him with those bright blue eyes that seemed to match her jacket today and hummed an affirmative note in reply.

"As far as offense..." He really had to think about that. Jason clearly hadn't meant anything negative - he had been unreasonably excited about it. Most Arcology dwellers didn't own pets, not large pets anyway, but everybody knew what a dog was. People love dogs. There was a dog cafe on Deck 3, you had to get reservations to go there. "Okay, so like... An adult wouldn't do that, right? They'd see you sitting there, antennas, wearing a sharp jacket, and go, 'that's not a dog, that's... Uh..."

When was the first time he had heard of the Tsla'o? Alex's gaze drifted towards the ceiling, getting to be the one rifling through his memories for once. They hadn't really been mentioned until third grade, so he would have been eight. There had been a picture of a very severe looking captain, a couple of paragraphs about them and first contact stuffed in between a couple of wars... then that was the last of it until high school. Even then it wasn't enough to cover an entire chapter of any textbook he had used.

They had almost never come up. It's not like you were going to run into a Tsla'o at the grocery store or something, so a quick mention was all that was needed. Had he even heard any negative talk about them until he'd joined the CPP, where they were often viewed as competition? No, not really.

His mind raced back to the primer, the list of names of the envoys that had been to Shoen. A dozen, maybe fourteen. Aside from the crew of the Hōkūleʻa, that's the number of people who had actually met Tsla'o before the disaster. He sat down on the back of the couch. The number had to have increased during the relief operation, of course, and during the runup to the Kshlav'o expedition.

How many times had they actually sat down and talked? From his early experiences with Carbon, it couldn't have been many.

He'd met some Trailblazer crews. The work they did was instrumental in keeping the edges of Human space functioning, so they had that long-haul skillset that would have been needed to ship cargo to the Empire. They were a very insular group, even giving a cold shoulder to their fellow Human pilots who hadn't joined up. The Tsla'o would probably view Human military personnel with suspicion-

"Are you all right?" Carbon asked, setting a hand on his knee.

"Yeah, I'm just... I don't know." He shrugged and waved a hand, partway through a little existential crisis as his understanding of how few Humans had ever interacted on a personal level with the Tsla'o, and how large a diplomatic role he was now playing for both races crystalized in his mind. "I can't tell you. Most people have probably forgotten what you all look like. An adult would know that puppies, despite also being cute, are not bipedal and certainly don't talk. They'd have to be doing it to be offensive or because they think they're funny."

"So it would be situational?" She asked, gesturing with the novelty 'I broke the ice on Europa!' mug he had brought back from a trip for his parents.

"Afraid so. Always a dick move, but the latter group will shape up if you tell them to cool it." Probably. If they didn't they were part of the former group and could go to hell.

"The differences between our kind grow fewer every day." She sighed, the sound shifting into a soft laugh as she shook her head. Carbon looked up at him as a sly smile crossed her short muzzle, lifting the mug to her lips to hide it. "You think we are cute?"

He gave her a sidelong glance. "I think you're cute." He actually thought Neya was kind of adorable too, but he was not about to say something like that about his now-wife's secretary aloud, or to any other living soul for that matter.