Curious Family



Glarn soon managed to convince P.T. to visit his house and see how an earth family lived. His mother Zo was a bit confused when “Petey” turned out to be greener than expected, but she was just as excited as her son. Actually, Glarn had to throw several hints in his father’s direction until Notzo finally got her to stop. She limited herself to taking notes on P.T.’s diet, analytical skills and physical constitution, as observed through dinner, a game of chess and some football.



Zo and Notzo Curious had moved to Strangetown with several other young couples to create a new city. The clear skies had appealed to both of them and Zo had soon begun to build her very own observatory. It was just a simple construction of wood and stairs right now, but she was confident that the Curious Observatory would one day become the most famous building in Strangetown.



“Here, that’s mom’s telescope! Don’t touch it, she’ll have a fit. But maybe she can help you see your homeplanet.”

“I actually don’t know where that is.” P.T. admitted. “I could ask the Drone, but he was born here as well and we lost contact with our homeplanet even before that.”

“Really? What happened?”

“I don’t know. Nobody’s telling.”

The green boy looked really sad for a moment, so Glarn decided to leave the observatory and distract him with some games. The poor kid didn’t even have comics or videogames, because they didn’t “prepare him for his future task”. Being an alien really didn’t sound fun, even without the whole homesickness thing.



Returning home from Glarn’s loving family was always a harsh change. Certainly Pollination Tech #9 knew that his culture did not have families like that. Drone had taught him enough to know the difference. A Queen gave birth to children from different Drones, each selected for breeding because of some extraordinary accomplishment. She raised them until they were old enough to be given to a mentor. That was perfectly reasonable and within certain limits had been accomplished with Pollination Tech #9’s education. While the Drone was by no means a suitable mentor for a Pollination Technician, he was able to fulfill this role well enough.

It just would have been nice if the both of them didn’t fight all the time. Pollination Tech #9 did not ask for a loving couple like Zo and Notzo, who kissed “like all the time, yuck!” according to Glarn, but he was pretty sure they were supposed to coexist in a friendly way. When he’d asked the Drone about it, he had been given the answer that this was true, but the situation was also complicated, which wasn’t much of an answer at all.



The problem, as far as a child of Pollination Tech #9’s age could tell by listening in on arguments after he’d been sent to bed, was that the Queen insisted that she was not meant to have a single partner for her whole life. To which the Drone agreed, naturally, but there was only one alien for her to mate with, which left her with very few options. The Queen, on her side, agreed that her breeding options were limited, but not her mating options.



Which is how things came to a crisis when the Drone, on returning from work, caught her in bed with the mailman.



The Drone was furious. The Queen was angry. He accused her of polluting the gene pool and got a lecture on birth control. She accused him of being jealous and got a lecture on rationality. Around that time, the argument turned towards the colony’s general situation and became progressively irrational.



Pollination Tech #9 tried to shut out all the fighting and spent most of his time at Glarn’s house. He never mentioned any of this to Glarn, but he was sure his friend could tell when he was being unhappy. Glarn would always cheer him up. There was something to be said for irrational friendships.



Glarn introduced him to other children and he knew all the games you could play. And if he ran out, he’d make some up. Like “Watch the Flamingo”. Later, Pollination Tech #9 could never really put together the rules, all he remembered was that it had been the most exciting thing in his life.

The great advantage of having Glarn around was that none of the other children seemed to care about Pollination Tech #9’s skin colour after they got introduced. There was something about “Hey, this is my friend P.T., he’s an alien and that’s why he’s so green.” that seemed to answer all questions and make his greenness completely normal.



At home things had… settled… in a way. His parents were not on speaking terms, but at least the yelling had stopped. Something else that had stopped were the Drone’s culture lessons. When Pollination Tech #9 had asked him about it, the Drone had just said that there wasn’t much of a point. He’d looked sad when he said it. The Drone never looked sad.

Pollination Tech #9 had however found a great amount of old reports on the Queen’s computer. Glarn had explained to him what to look for and he managed to sneak in and copy them one day when the Queen had passed out in the living room. There were a lot of them and he could only read them when the Drone wasn’t around, but he wanted to find more information about his homeplanet. Maybe he’d be able to find it one day.


The flamingo caught on fire when Glarn was visiting and Arty Loste's (Kristen's father) older sister walked by. It was too adorable not to include.

Coming up next: How To Make A Friend During Summer Holidays