Empyrean Iris Story Collection

It Honestly Depends

"Alright everyone, Quiet down...... I SAID QUIET! Down...." That's better.

The large semicircular auditorium grew quiet as the assembled students finally ceased their chatter and took their seats, hundreds of legs clattered against the floor, carapace shifted, and mandibles tapped as the students leaned forward in anticipation.

There were hundreds of them with thousands of eyes all staring forward expectantly in anticipation of what was to come. The, small Tesraki professor stood at the front of the room and adjusted his translating device with a thin hand, "Were you all able to purchase the required packet for this moths lessons."

The room shifted around them with a murmur.

They had, this was a book they actually wanted to read, information they were interested in learning.

"Good." The professor said, looking around at the assembled students with a critical eye. Most of these students had been previously trained in universities and programs across the cosmos. Some of them had been educated in the old ways of their planets, but as the Galactic Assembly grew larger, and more accessible, more and more students were turning their attention to knowledge gained off world. However, settings like the current one they were in right now, was designed specifically for a high turnover of information. It was up to the students to do with it as they could.

Generally speaking, they would need to be diligent and quick in their studies to complete this course and go into the ensuing fields. Many of them wished to be diplomats, politicians, and cultural scientists, studying other races across the cosmos. This meant learning as much as they could about all existing races and their culture before being allowed into the field.

This week, they were learning about the humans.... Everyone wanted to learn about humans. And, of course, with this species, it wasn't enough to learn just about their culture. Without the context of the human homeworld, there was no freezable way to understand the human's culture. Unlike other unites, this unit included, biology, geography, chemistry, and neuroscience, all in order to explain human behavior and cultural customs.

The packet they had been ordered to purchase was an extension of the current texts, and was supposed to contain all the primary research and information currently possessed about humans. Despite more than a few years of involvement with the Galactic Assembly, primary resources on humans and their cultural customs were few and far between. That meant, in short, that the field was open to whoever was willing to take advantage of it. This generation would have an entirely new species open to them, they were to become the primary experts on these strange creatures, the newest diplomats, and some of the greatest historians. Of course, as peace talks with the Drev continued, there would be discussion about them in the future, but with even less information the future was less than certain.

The reading had been more than interesting, but the person who wrote it was clearly not a social scientist or a historian. He was simply a bystander, and most of his observations held clear bias, misunderstanding, and great amounts of confusion. He was a surgeon after all, and not a social scientist. He was also a Vrul, and they weren't known for their great ability to understand others and their motivation.

Trauma Surgeon Krill of the Vrul had been a member aboard a human ship for more than a year at this point, and his papers were making waves in the scientific community. There was no group of scientists, no discipline that wasn't interested in what he had to say, even if the information was inaccurate.

Furthermore, the Captain aboard his ship represented the primary source of what they understood about humans. His biological map was the standard for textbooks, academia, diagrams and medical biology. Most of the images they had for their medical information came from that same human, though Krill had included some more images in with his primary sources, and these included estimations on possible human color pallets which was honestly more fascinating than it should have been.