LF Friends, Will Travel

Kobe!

Date: 72 PST (Post Stasis Time)

Sam awkwardly stood around, the strange alien music filling the air with a weird sound, as if a bop-it machine had invented techno. He stared down at the collection of cups and bottles of various makes and lethalities stacked on the table in front of him, as other strange bodies crowded around him, each person taking their own choice of refreshments.

The universe is a large place, and even though the galaxy is a smaller place than that, that still makes the Milky Way a very very large place. There are over 200 billion stars, most with some form of planet orbiting it. As of the current date, there were 32081 known sapient FTL-capable species registered in the Federation database, and this was not an accurate count: It was practically a weekly event of some species finally making their way to the stars and discovering that there's a lot of life out there in the galaxy.

This meant that even though the Terran Alliance's 426 species was one of the largest official diplomatic groupings, in terms of overall context they were very very small. The war that the Terran Alliance was fighting against the Estorian Empire was, for most of the galaxy, "something happening far far away" in a location nobody cared about. The Galaxy was filled with hundreds of such conflicts, hundreds of alliances, religious crusades and genocides. All desperately important to the people involved in them, and all desperately unimportant against the general background noise of the universe.

This is why Sam Derral was surrounded by aliens who were... most alien. Extraterrestrial life was hardly a new concept for humans, or Terrans as they preferred to call themselves, the species having entered the galactic community a mere 72 years ago. However, the planet of Greater Zarrus, which Sam found himself on, was a solid three weeks' worth of travel from the nearest Terran outpost, not including refuelling, meaning he didn't recognize any of the strange beings that filled this house.

There were no humans, no Ritilians, no Scythen, no Hatil. A good proportion of the figures at this party were the native Taadhi, amphibious amorphous 5ft tall bright blue blobs, each with a giant unblinking eye in its centre; their slimy slurping appendages provided a fantastic grip as they walked along the floors walls and ceilings of this abode. However of the 70% of the population who weren't native to the planet, none of them were anything that Sam could recognize: Reptilians and canines, small scurrying rodents and avians. A giant sentient cube of light communicated with a talking tree, only to be later joined by what looked like a jar of sapient purple liquid.

Technically this was everything Sam Derral had signed up for, an experience no other Terran in the history of his species had ever experienced. It was supposed to be a fresh start, a chance to break out of his shell, to be an explorer in the galaxy, the first Terran student on the planet of Greater Zarrus. Instead, Sam felt as if he was having a constant panic attack at the unfamiliar sights.

He was not an outgoing person, preferring the comfort of a good book and a quiet night in, to the more chaotic dealings of other people. But it was this introverted preference, a fear of missing out on life, which had driven him in almost a moment of impulse, to choose this location to get his degree. Sam was not stupid, he could have gotten into a good university on Earth or even a lesser-known Scythen establishment, but in a fit of desperation had chosen somewhere that nobody else had gone before; something to force him out of his comfort zone, to sink or swim.

The Terran took a few moments to continue rifling through the potluck of various drinks and substances laid out on the table in front of him, testing a few to find something that wouldn't be lethal. The first had been some kind of neurotoxin, the second containing enough arsenic to quickly send him to his maker, eventually settling on a cup of thick green liquid which his testing device told him should have a nice non-lethal numbing effect. Sure, he could have just drank the Whiskey he had brought along, but the entire point of this endeavour was to do something new. Having successfully navigated the drinks table, Sam turned his attention to a more terrifying prospect: Socially interacting with people he didn't know.