Dave The Human, a female Tsin, crouched down and gently put a fresh piece of tape onto the floor cleaning unit, making sure the knife taped to it wasn't going to fall off.
Phalanges Mittens, totally normal human, previously also called Dave (But on paper, a seven foot tall purple marsupial lizard, for reasons of advanced interspecies fuckery) watched with interest.
"I heard it was a human tradition." explained Dave.
Phalanghes nodded. "Oh yeah. Since Time Immemorial, or about 2010 on the calendar my culture uses, so same thing." he agreed.
The floor cleaner, now designated as Stabby, rebooted, and started cleaning the floor. Its collision avoidance made the knife mostly safe, but that's hardly relevant to tradition.
The two friends watched it bumble around, until Cat Fantastic climbed on top, and then they took pictures for "Little Guys being weird little guys".
"You guys will really pack bond with anything." said Dave and Phalanges just had to shrug at that.
"I mean yeah. It's not even a species thing. It's an Earth thing." he said, getting comfortable. "Back in the day when we first invented robotics, we even made realistic robot animals to watch wildlife."
"Oh ar?" said Dave, whose grasp of the colloquial was extensive and ever shifting.
"Yeah. And some of the animals would try to hang out with the robots. Make friends. But if they fell over or the batteries ran out, the animals would get really upset and try to take care of their new buddy..."
"Aww!" said Dave appropriately, and pulled out her tablet. She looked it up and laughed with delight at the ancient videos and images.
Cat Fantastic, looked up, and said "Graaak".
Phalanges thought about that. "Huh. It would be awesome if we had a miniature Tokyo." he said while Dave looked that up.
Cat nodded and whispered 'Skreeonk' to Stabby, who equally quietly beeped back, gratified that it's suggestion was well received, while it admired its new knife in a reflection.
Dave The Human, female Tsin muttered something at a high pitch at her tablet and Dave the human, formerly Dave the Atrix, formerly also Dave the Human performed some epic side-eye.
Gondy was filling in for the Atrix member of the group, still slightly scarred from having her helmet smacked hard enough to split during the recent disintegration of the station due to Von Neumann's Space squid.
Raxy, her Little Guy was stuffing his face in a way that you don't normally see on an Atrix that size. This suggested to the Daves that the Little Guy was shortly going to be upskilling, getting certified and getting referred to as female...
Given Atrix really just looked at the whole gender thing and opted out, and the whole male/female thing was labelling for other people's benefit, the Daves formed an unspoken and instant agreement that helping Raxy bulk up was their new hobby.
For two people from radically different biologies and cultures, the Daves were staggeringly similar as though some cosmic author had created them with the same voice.
Tsin Dave waggled the tablet. "Homeworld want to make sure everyone's complying with off-world best practices. They want to ensure that we're... ugh: 'Maintaining tradition in line with oof-world guidance'" she grumped.
"First I'm a heretic and a sky-demon and now they want to make sure I'm the right sort and not making you lot think less of us with my wicked deviant ways."
Gondy paused, as did Rax.
"graaaaak?" Rax said, around one of the mysterious and never explained purple bread rolls.
Meta-note about the purple bread rolls:
They're actually Ube potato bread rolls. They're steamed in the Caffeteria. The food services are very aware that everyone who encounters them assumes they're a food from some other species culture. It's the little things that make the day to day fun.
"You never heard about that?" Dave The human said. "Oh well hum..."
Dave the Human gave his buddy full points on her mastery of colloquialism and settled in.
"So there's this legend that many years ago the People - 's us - had an idyllic land, and the concept of evil was unknown. Then one day, Sky Demons, jealous of our ways and our purity of soul absolutely pounded the knekp out of the place and only those of us in the Great Underground Halls, who were devout enough survived. And since that day, to leave the ground is to attract the attention of the Sky Demons."
Gondy raised a claw.
"Boats are OK. Water is theologically still ground."
Gondy put her claw down.
Dave the human said, "That sounds like..."
Dave The Human answered, "Nope, it was Orbital Bombardment. Nation-on nation. The shelters were built because it was a strong possibility that things would get all... ker-blammy."
"Yeesh!"
"Yeah. And the religious angle kind of got shuffled in as this agreement that when everyone got out, nobody wanted to be dancing around pointing claws at other countries and trying to blame them, while it was everyone's fault. Can't really blame them but for a thousand odd years that was the official line."
Gondy said "Wow! I never knew that!"
Dave The Human nodded. "Yeah yeah, it's been pretty common knowledge for a century or so, but still, when we got back into space after the Wallandernoooks showed up to trade, it was a major, major problem and uh well, leaving the Homeworld means you're a Heretic and in league with the Sky Demons according to the Dogma soooo..."
"Huh. And that means...?"
"Not much. Kind of lightly excommunicated. Not really welcome back home where things are a little more traditional. But y'know. No biggie. We're all colonists out here anyway, and we still get Homeworld support. It's just we also have to get audited that we're not giving Homeworld a bad name." She paused and took a long drink of mekp. "Aaaaand this time they want to know if we have a shrine to show you filthy heathens that we're still the number one proper pious type heretical sky demons. F.M.L."
Gondy, Rax and Dave pondered this.
"Gondy... what do Atrix believe in?" Asked Dave the Human.
"Graaak."
"Yeah, Rax, I guess 'some places are lucky' covers it. You know.... good moss, cool rocks, just got a good vibe. The sort of place you can drop a bunch of... what do you call them? Possums."
Dave the Human choked on his water. "Possums?!"
"Grak." Commented Rax and Gondy pulled her tablet out and poked. "Yeah... human smalls." She said, holding up a picture of a possum mis-labelled as an infant human.
"Huh. You guys are adorable when you're young" cooed Dave The Human, who Dave previously rated as about as maternal as a meat grinder.
Dave let it go for now, suspecting this would yield hilarious dividends at some future time, and turned back to Dave the Tsin.
"Ok, this is shaping up to be another wacky hi-jink. What's the gig?
"Gotta build a shrine."
"Any shrine?"
"Pretty much. It's got to be location appropriate. Y'know. The god of the place. To show we're uh... friendly to the local divinities? On theological good terms?"
"OK but... we're all godless atheists, apart form the ones who aren't. Who are you going to build a shrine to?
"Yeah that's kind of it. I mean I don't want to be the grit under anyone's scales..."
"Ohhhh," said Gondy, "Oh oh! Rax, call Garf! I have an idea..."
Several weeks later, the Tsin named Walks-between-Waves arrived as part of the Tsin welfare and general ambassadorial circuit.
O'Patel and Big Ma performed the proper greetings and paperwork, and Dave presented herself.
Walks-Between-Waves ("Just call me Waves") walked up and declaimed, "Heretic, and blasphemer. You bones will never lie with the ancestors, and your meat will rot. You and the demons you dwell with are denied! Cast out as the foul beasts you are. How are you doing? Well I hope?"
Dave bowed, small hands together, big ones outstretched.
"Oh yeah. They're all very nice here." She said. "Did they change the words of the castigation?"
"Oh, no, but some of it needed translating for human language a little," Waves said and added, "such a fun language! Quite the fad back home. And since you're hmm, officially human, I couldn't resist. Now, I believe you have something to show?"
O'Patel looked bemused and said sotto voce to Big Ma, "I think this is going to go well!"
Dave led Waves to the common area where, true enough, there was a shrine. It was made of old pieces of the station recovered from it's partial disassembly. 3D printed and painted panels along the sides showed Tsin, Atrix and Humans, helping each other climb up the sides, to the top of the shrine where someone had creatively frosted some glass and lit it with shifting lights to suggest something exciting and pleasant waited. The thing dripped with moss and a small water feature played down from the back into a shallow bowl of stones.
"Ah!" Said Waves. "Very impressive. Going for extra credit?"
"No..." said Dave. "It's a group effort. Once we started, everyone wanted to help. Especially after we found a small god for the Station that everyone liked... Their name is Arepo."
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