Avians are typically considered adults at 10 years old. That's in Terran years. The Dominion of Tiiliit does not have mandatory or government sponsored educational programs, and childhood education is considered the responsibility of the dunparent and their "house," a social housing block funded by a bright "alimony" tax. As adults, Tiilitian citizens are often narrowly educated in the field of employment they enter unless they pay for a wider education at a university. Brights will often sponsor the education of children they believe to be good candidates for employees or financial successors, with first pick going to the children of their dunsiblings. A bright sponsoring their direct children is a Tiiliitian taboo, except for the highest echelon of royalty. The taboo is fueled by bright anxieties about the duns they mate with discarding their eggs, mating again, and then lying about the child's parentage to secure their sponsorship. Your siblings' kids are considered a better guarantee of kinship.
Avians are way too big to be on the menu for omnivorous simiformes from their homeplanet like Eswii, but those animals use hunting strategies similar to this to capture smaller flying prey. Since humans are massive, it's an easy place for an avian mind to wander... helped by the fact that videos of humans restraining avians in a similar way frequently circulate through avian social media. Sometimes the context is positive (rude avian starting fights gets OWNED by giant security guard!!!) and sometimes it's negative (human ruthlessly attacks innocent avian!!!!) but either way, most avians find humans physically intimidating.
Transcript
Angoryt asked: Ohwitiil and Cheevwut, where did you two grow up? Are you from Nexus Jovia. What are your educations?Cheevwut: Ha haw! I've never been to Nexus Jovia! I grew up on the homeplanet! I was born at Oowouiib Ayiizty, a huge dun-house in the east of the Wia archipelago. Specifically in the Viiolech principality. Right next to all the rich fucks in Tiiliit's Throne. Not that they gave anything to us! My house had some community education for kids, but I hated it, and my dunparent never forced me to go. I left the house to work when I was 10. I was always interested in human media and wanted to work somewhere less lame than Viiolech, so I did some administration work training, took English classes, started doing remote work for Jovian companies, and eventually landed here!
Wia Archipelago:
- Viiolech
- Tiiliit's Throne
Ohwitiil: I was born in a small dun-house in Uunraashi City, which has many humans from the China republic. But, my dunparent traveled often to Callisto as part of their work researching the compositions of icy moons and exoplanets for resource extraction. I received early education from my dun-parent, and they instructed me on their field of study as well. I was selected by a bright-sponsor at 11 and went into a formal science tutorship. I grew up speaking Mandarin more than English, but I currently work with English speaking humans. Hmph. I still find it more difficult.
Uunraashi City:
- icy crust
- vertical shaft
- horizontal shafts
Anonymous asked: Hi Ohwitiil, hi Cheev!!!!! Do you find humans uncanny?
Ohwitiil: They look strange because they're aliens. Finding strange things frightening is childish.
Cheevwut: Aw c'mon, don't you find them a liiiiittle spooky? Don't they look like something that would hide in tall grass, watching you with their gross veiny eyes?
Image: A monstrous human stalks an oblivious avian.
Cheevwut: Like something that'd pounce on you with their long limbs, pin your wings, break your bones, wring your neck...
Image: The monstrous human grasps a struggling, screaming avian by the torso and neck, bending down with their mouth open as if to bite it.
Cheevwut: And devour you?
Ohwitiil: Do you want me to tell your coworkers you imagine them as monsters!?
Cheevwut: What? I think that makes them cooler!
61 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 21”
Gar G
Thinking about it, humans with their very long and slender limbs and bodies look like they’d be perfect for stalking through forests and tall grass, snatching up smaller animals and crushing them before eating them…
Like some sort of nightmarish cryptid from urban legends
Gar G
Omg I laughed so much at that last one, it is adorable xDD
Fun to imagine how other species might view humans as predatory monsters 😉 (and I love that some think it’s cool XD)
tyrone
He´s not entirely wrong though : Forward looking eyes, organized in groups, Probably the best and most enduring Persistence hunters (and gatherers) on all of Terra. Got it for a reason. Going vegan came in last after all the dust had settled.
Its believed we switched to predator behavior in our evolution to avoid being the prey, a simple survival strategy but we also needed the protein to feed our “gigantic” brain.
Reminds me a little of “The nature of Predators” fiction.
un_pogaz
Hold Avian gently, like burger.
Clemmy
Artificial landmasses look so silly from above lol. Viiolech reminds me of a normal coastline. Tiiliit’s Throne reminds me of a pizza slicer.
tyrone
Mmmmm , Fried Chicken…finger-licking gooooood!
jattt
Imagine an avian watching humans fill the roasted remains of a being that vaguely resembles them with yummy filling and ripping its limbs off to consume them.
Man, I really want some turkey now.
Arcstone
Man, I remember feeling really awkward about eating chicken in front of my pet budgie back in the day. 😅
I can only imagine if he was fully human level sapient.
At some point there must have been an avian that was like “uuugh, can we not go down this street?”
“What? Why?”
“Theres a kfc down there.”
Rubicon Art
eeh idk budgies enjoy a bit of chicken just the same…
Jay Eaton
Birds eat birds, fish eat fish, and there’s a notable history of humans eating primates in areas that have historically contained both of those animals. The squeamishness about eating something “too close” to you categorically is just as much of construct as those categories. Chickens and budgies are about as closely related as we are to cows, we just tend to draw finer lines in the “mammal” category than birds, because we are mammals and the differences feel “bigger” to us.
Jay Eaton
Avians keep and eat livestock in the same order as them, which to us, looks like more weird six-eyed birds with ears. I don’t think they would care that much about humans eating chickens, in fact many of them probably wish they could try it without it poisoning them.
JoB
Coming soon, to a cinema nearer than you’d like, the next installation of the most successful horror movie franchise since The Speciation:
Chef Eswii’s Kitchen 3:
TURDUCKEN
Book your places on the theatre’s highest branches now!
Trees
Considering how sticky the floor of every single movie theatre is, in a vertically oriented cinema you better believe I’m buying tickets for the ‘highest branches’ every time.
Jackie
Second thought: this does make me wonder how they see our eyes since theirs arent very expressive/obvious by comparison. We must be like how bulgy eyed little dogs look to us times 10
Marcie
What would really throw them is our lack of expressive ears. Bug Ferrets would probably feel the same to some extent
Septemberdale
Classes in human languages for aliens likely also tend to cover human body language briefly too (like how language classes for humans tend to cover cultural differences briefly) which probably usually has a bit on “watch the eyebrows, not the ears”.
mossrabbit
i imagine avians probably miss out on human eye cues a lot tbh. given avians have their eyes on the sides of their head (with an enormous 270 degree viewfield, but still) and humans on the front, and avians having significantly less expressive, all-black eyes, its pretty probable eye contact isnt a big thing in most avian cultures (and in fact prolonged eye contact could be seen as threatening!)
septemberdale is right though that human-language classes oriented towards avians probably do include human body language signals, including our weird hypermobile forward-facing eyes (i wonder if any other sophont can roll their eyes around like a human can…)
Jackie
Lmao I love Cheevs last point 😂
Also I had not thought about my ability to restrain an Avian before but now considering I have restrained geese before I bet I could do it 🤔 just gotta grab the bitey bit and hold down the flappy bits!
Uh
*looks at you with my Big Wet human eyes*
Eux
god i love Cheev. this is such fun backstory on both of them!!
creetur
I’m flattered you find us spooky, gangly, grippy things, Cheev. Really does make me see us as less boring
Archie
Aw thanks Cheevwut! It sometimes feels like humans are so boring compared to most other life forms, but your perspective really makes me appreciate the quirks that we have <3
Sen
Cheevwut is quickly becoming my favourite. I hope we get to see more of him.
JoB
[imagines bottom left Ohwitiil bouncing all over the BL-TR diagonal of this]
·
Never missing an opportunity to push Ohwitiil’s buttons, eh, Cheevwut … ?
Greebus
I love hearing from these guys. YAY ALIENS!!!
Quinn
Cheev is very quickly becoming my favorite side character. I also agree that imagining ur coworkers as scary monsters makes them cooler and I would be SO flattered and honored if one of my coworkers told me they did that with me
Hunter
Is Uunraashi City on the avian homeworld? Or is it a Jovian settlement? I’d imagine having enough humans that, they grow up speaking Mandarin would be enough indication that it’s Jovian but I’m not sure.
JoB
“Icy crust” would fit neither the avian homeworld nor Nexus Jovia (a space station), I’d say. Frequent trips to Callisto (and the minimal population on Europa, the third notable icy moon of Jupiter) suggest Ganymede, though.
Hubert
Finding aliens scary is so passé.
Whachamacallit
Cheev is right, it does make us look cooler!
JoB
As in, “chilling to the bone”. 😛
Spencer
So…humans actually are space orcs? I love this idea
Jay Eaton
This is the perspective of a single species and it’s not necessarily reflective of anything except humans being several times larger and thus stronger than skimmer avians. Nobody is space orcs, everyone is cultural animals.
ryttyr
Now I’m wondering what Ohwitiil thinks of centaurs.
JoB
“Oh well, when you comparatively are the size of a child …”
·
(… nah, no way.)
blythe
never thought id find myself agreeing with ohwitiil 😭
Lilac
A caption on an earlier page was something like “in this story, humans are the biohorror aliens”…. I feel that is especially relevant again here….. jfjfjfhfjs
I love this page i love other species’ perspectives on is kinda stuff in media aaaugh. I wonder how the other species in this universe think of us………
Lilac
*on US kinda stuff in media. So Sorry fhfjcjsj
JoB
> I wonder how the other species in this universe think of us………
·
Well, I guess that “we’re faster than you” still holds, even in case it’d happen to refer to the opposite direction of travel. 😛
HAL9000
hold avian gentle like hamburger
jaggedjottings
But do not eat like hamburger, naughty human.
JoB
… well, there are options …
Teod
What’s the scale of the map? Those look like pretty big artificial islands, but it’s hard to tell how big exactly. Are they small like those UAE palms, larger like Qatar and Cyprus, or huge like British islands and Madagascar?
Jay Eaton
They are ridiculously massive. Tiiliit’s Throne is made with off-world rock and is like the size of Ireland.
Teod
How the hell did they land it without wiping half the planet with a giant tsunami? This universe doesn’t seem to have antigrav tech.
Green Heron
Perhaps it was made gradually?
Jay Eaton
These artificial islands are made from a mixture of regolith fill and concrete pylons. It wasn’t plopped down as a single solid piece of rock, it was built from smaller materials. Some of the raw material came from the ocean floor and the Hotsuuv continent, but most of it came from asteroid mining.
Kaamos
Presumably the material was brought to the planet and the island then built there, not the whole island being constructed at once and only then landing it… Trying to navigate something the size of Ireland sounds like a nightmare in every aspect.
40
This, and the fact that the gang can just so casually have a massive starship, makes me wonder how fucking gigantic their freighters are.
zaratustra
Oh. OH those are not just symbols on the map.
Paroxysmall
le unsuspecting naked bright on phone
40
Is Tiiliit’s Throne a massive artificial island? That’s so sick.
Trees
Wow, thanks, Cheevwut for making us even more self conscious about our gross, veiny eyes.
JoB
[thinks of more novelty “bestial” contact lens designs]
TotallySomebody
I like how the human has a “crest” of hair
Trees
I like that too!
I thought it looked sort of like a military buzz-cut which reflexively caused my mind to manufacture a backstory for this avian monster movie hoo-man: a desperate soldier stranded in the alien wilds for years, never finding out the war is over, hunting his avian prey in the only way he knows how: WITH HIS TERRIBLE HUMAN GRABBY HANDS!!!!!
Only in theatres across the Dominion of Tiliit this summer! I assume.
Apollo235
I love that Avians find Humans terrifying the same way Humans find Centaurs terrifying. Are Avians also frightened by Centaurs? I feel like I remember Jay saying something about how there aren’t any predators on the Avian homeplanet that look like Centaurs so they don’t really register as one to an Avian
malmo
I’d reckon that since an avian can just fly away, they would have less instinctive fear of terrestrial pursuit predators
AnormalADN
Love the avian-visionned human. That’s us. Big round front-facing eyes and grippy appendages to Fuckin Get You. Humans are also so much bigger and stronger than avians, no wonder they’d be unnerved. But also from Cheev’s prespective it’s like being buddies with tigers -kinda sick, you know
Zidane
every time ohwitiil shows up they do or say something that makes me love them even more
Zidane
wait i mean cheev *facepalm* ( i like you too ohwitiil)