The Human Study.

Heya Everyone,

I've had this story sitting in my to-do list for ages, one of my friends demanding that I take this prompt and make something of it, and I finally managed to do that today. Hope you enjoy it. :)

Prompt: You gotta put your heart into it! No. No, not literally– not your actual– no. How did you even manage to get that? Is it even yours. Put that. Away. Back. Put it back.

Being from a different planet was difficult at best, trying to blend in with the human race was even worse. Technology on your planet meant that you could change your appearance at will, allowing you to look exactly like those you were here to study, as well as giving you the option of changing how you looked in order to gather a full range of data to analyse.

It was strange, how the colour of your skin and place you came from changed how you were treated, something unheard of on your planet and certainly an interesting thesis topic, but it was not the one you choose, it would be far too obvious, and no doubt already a study being undertaken by someone like you. An ‘alien’ as the humans would say.

No, instead you choose one skin to be your own, enrolling in a university and finding yourself a human job. You wanted to fully immerse yourself in humanity if you were to find the perfect topic for your thesis and to finally reach your dream of being an expert on humans and the planet they called home.

It was only natural then, that you decided to study two bachelors, human studies and geology. The workload was nothing compared to what you had already had completed back on your planet, but you pretended to struggle as your human flatmates did, learning from their lives as you pretended to live yours.

It was the language that got to you the most, you’d spent ages getting to grips with the most common and well-known languages on planet earth, learning from those that had already lived amongst the humans. None of that prepared you for how much the language had evolved since then.

You had been in one of your mandatory classes, facing a naked human posed on a pedestal whilst you grasped a flimsy piece of wood between your fingers and tapped the hairy end of it in a various group of colours. A mentor stalking around the room to judge and correct, that was when they reached you. Perfectly recreating what was in front of you, blending colours with a flick of your wrist. This was as easy as it had been in your childhood, perhaps even easier.

“No, No, No, This is all wrong.” The teacher's voice cut through taking you by surprise, your eyes darting between the canvas and the man standing before you as if mere glances could find what she had.

“You gotta put your heart into it!” Your eyes turned to him, glancing back to the canvas before reaching a hand towards your torso. Your kind could still live with their hearts outside of their body, so it made sense that the humans could be much the same.

You realised your mistake when everyone’s jaws dropped, eyes zoomed in on your heart as you pulled it free of the cage your body had grown for it.

“No. No, not literally– not your actual– no. How did you even manage to get that?” Your teacher reached as though to touch your heart, watching each small beat as you kept breathing, unsure what to do now everyone had seen what you had done.

“Is it even yours?” A nod from your head had everyone turning even paler, a few classmates dropping to the floor as the struggled to process what their eyes had seen. “Put that. Away. Back. Put it back.” You did as instructed, wincing as your body healed over the hole you had forced it to make when removing you heart.

You had no idea what to do now, none of your training had covered such a strange situation arising, but lucky your teacher seemed to have everything well in hand.

“This is clearly just some weird dream, or a byproduct of those new meds the doctor has me on.” Came the mutter from under his breath, and your ears picked up something similar from everyone else as they knelt to help their friends.

Normally humanity’s ability to simply ignore that which it could not understand would annoy you to no end, but today, today that ability to make the illogical rationale seemed to have saved your cover, and for that, you would be eternally grateful... and perhaps that would make a great thesis paper.