How to Be Human

“Just this one thanks”. Collie smiled expansively and widely as she handed the book to the man behind the counter. She saw him recoil a little from her expression, then stifle a giggle, and she realised that she had already made a mistake.

Damn it.

Quickly casting her eyes over his aura she felt a momentary flush of satisfaction.

Brown.

Good. Served him right.

Although given she was the only one in the bookshop on this rainy morning, having him collected by the Seekers or having a nervous breakdown would be awfully inconvenient, now she came to think of it.

Hopefully whatever was going to happen to him could just hold off for a few minutes.

Turning the book over, the man pushed his black glasses up his nose as he read the title. “This is a good one”, he said, tapping the red embossed words. “Yes, it’s quite good, but did you see the others in the section? This isn’t really a beginner’s book, you see”.

Collie bristled and then clapped her hands sharply together. “I don’t need a beginner’s edition”

“Oh you do” he said, stepping out from behind the solid wooden desk that served as the front counter. “You really do. Come on”.

His footsteps fell silently on the plush green carpet as he walked towards the aisle from which she had selected the book moments earlier.

“Come on” he called to her again, his voice sharp among the thickly lined shelves. The shop was quiet, dimly lit. Her eyes had taken too long to adjust to the light when she had walked into the shop for the first time, and she wondered at the overall décor of the place.

But not understanding the décor was part of the overall issue, she realised.

The man was standing in front of the laden shelf, a label reading ‘Self Help’ attached to the wood. The shelf rose tall above his head and was piled with a miscellany of books of every shape and size. He ran his fingers along the row, and drew out three, handing them to Collie.

“Try these ones” he said, raising one long finger as she started to protest. “Yes, I know, I know, you don’t need a beginner book apparently, but literally everything about the ‘you’ that I’m looking at right now tells me that you do”.

He stepped back and surveyed her, frowning as he ran his eyes from the top of her head to her feet.

“Don’t you have someone who can help you with all…this” he waved his hand at her body, his furrowed brow making it clear that he was deeply, deeply unhappy with what he was seeing.

Ignoring his judgement, Collie turned her attention to the books that he had laid out in front of her. People 101, How to be Human, and So You Want to Blend In.

She crossed her arms. “I don’t need these ones” she said testily. “I am quite happy with the one I chose”. She gestured back to the book that lay on the front desk, quietly glowing and thrumming with electricity.

He bit back another laugh. “The Intricacies of the Human Condition is not what you need my love. You need basic human skills. You don’t need nuance. You need basic expression work and masking lessons”

Collie felt her face flush red.

“Do you have any human friends?”

Tears pricked behind her eyes and she bit her lip. “No”

“See, I can tell”. He stood back and surveyed her again. “And if I can tell, then you have a problem”. He glanced at the heavy wooden door that formed the barrier between the interior of the shop and the street outside. No noise could be heard, despite the fact that one of Sydney’s busiest streets lay just metres outside the door.

“Did you walk in here like that?”

She looked down at her body. She had a used masking spell to make her body look just like everyone else that she saw on the streets and she nodded, waiting for his critique.

“Well you’re very lucky no one clocked you” he said, making a tching noise with his tongue behind his teeth. “You didn’t stabilise your legs properly, your face is the wrong colour and I think…” he reached his hand out and parted the hair that she had arranged on top of her head just like she had seen in the magazines, “yes, I can still see scales”.

She brushed off his hand and shook the hair self-consciously back into place.

“I’m doing my best” she spat out bitterly.

“I’m sure you are”, he said, more kindly this time. “Honestly, I’m sure that you are. But you need these books”, he said, tapping his selection, “rather than that one. Seeking out self-help books is an excellent sign of growth, but you need to start in the right place. Reading about appropriate human workplace etiquette and viable fifth level conversational techniques is no use to you when you don’t even know how to walk down the street without attracting attention”. He picked up the selected books and led Collie back over to the front desk.

She picked up one them, So You want to Blend In, and flicked through idly. Chapters titled “Covering your tail”, “Scales; to shave or not to shave” and “You have to live in a house now, not a cave, so get used to it” drew her attention, but she eventually turned to a chapter called “What to do with your face”

Facial expressions, it read are one thing that many cryptomorphs get dreadfully wrong. Given that the human animals utilise such a wealth and breadth of expressions, it is often though that anything goes. This is, in fact, a common misconception, and many a recent convert has been eventually discovered by the Seekers due to their aberrant and unhuman like facial movements. It must be noted that no cryptomorph on the earthly plane has been liquidated purely because of this, but it is often seen as a ‘red flag’ that alerts the Seekers and causes them to delve more deeply into individual lifestyles.

Collie slammed the book shut, the breath catching in her throat. This was too hard. Too hard. There was no way that she was going to be able to do this. What had she been thinking? She should have just stayed in her own dimensional vortex and not even considered that she could…

The man placed his hand on hers gently. “It’s alright”, he smiled gently at her. “We all feel like this at the beginning. Look at me”. He placed his hands on his hips and turned a little pirouette to display his form to its best advantage. “You would never know, would you? I look utterly human”.

She nodded. He did.

“But you need to go back to basics. You need to go right back to the start and move on from there”. He stacked the books he had selected into a neat pile. “Where are you staying?”

“At the Meeting House”

He sighed. “That’s all well and good, it’s safe, I admit, but you won’t learn anything there. You’re all as clueless as each other in that place. You need somewhere where you can safely interact with humans without being discovered”

She glanced at the covered window that ran along the wall behind him. “Could I stay in here?”

“In here’s no good. No humans ever come in here. It’s just cryptomorphs. Humans don’t even know that this place exists”

“I could look out the window and watch people” she suggested.

He raised his eyebrows and nodded appreciably. “Alright’ he consented. “It can’t hurt I suppose. But just for today”

Dragging a bench over to the window, Collie perched her body on the red velvet and carefully drew back the lace curtain. The utter mass of humanity outside made her shudder. She was never, never going to be able to do this. How did her kind make this happen? She tried to hold back tears but they began to trickle down her green cheeks.

Her eyes were drawn to a dark glow heading down the street, a dark glow that was attached to two women, tall and severe, who were walking slowly, casting their eyes around as they moved as if floating, rather than the jerking movements that the humans employed as they walked.

Shit.

Seekers

She leaped back from the window, turning to look for the man, but in the dim of the shop she could not make out his form. In fact, the entire shop seemed to have changed, moved, elongated. The shelves of books had disappeared, to be replaced by huge steel lockers and the roof had lifted and now towered high above her head where fluorescent lights could be seen bursting into life. She shielded her eyes from the blaze, the delicate membranes of her eyes retracting and shrinking, and she heard, faintly, the gentle jingling of the shop door as it was pushed open. As she collapsed to the floor, too defeated to even try to escape, she heard the man’s voice speaking to those who had entered. “Yes, she’s here. She walked right in, I didn’t even have to try” and she realised, as light turned to black, that it was much, much easier this way.