From that original post that started the whole Amity thing: “What if every alien race has nothing but docile, harmless animals on their planets and they look at us with our sharks and bears and wolves and wasps and venomous snakes and just think “Holy shit! How do you guys survive?!””
T’reka’s people found and seeded the planet with their own wildlife and plants, presumably all fairly docile and harmless. What was the reaction on first discovering, not the humans themselves, but the results of humans also seeding the planet/just the island with Earth flora and fauna?
Scientists, according to the greater culture of Hu'lu'a, were idiots. They alone would wander out into a new world just after landing and poke at things that may be dangerous just to see what they’d do.
T'reka missed out on being in the first wave of explorers on this new planet of Ru'ku'la despite her bunk-mates’ insistence she sign as soon as possible. Discovering new things was why science existed. And exploring their future home before it all became civilised.
Even the second wave got their chance.
But T'reka was too slow. Or too unknown to make it that high up the list of expendable souls. She got to be amongst the fourth wave, with harvesting tools and protective gear, taking soil samples and examining the microflora and microfauna and, if she was lucky, the mycota.
And yet, she was the one who discovered the bloodsucking insect, by the ill fortune of being bitten by it.
The first sample was smashed, of course, but she had the fortitude to withstand the bite of a second one and caught it life. The hideous rash it caused would, physicians assured, heal and fade.
Which was how she wound up in isolation, being the subject for other scientists in full hazmat protection as they analysed every last micrometer of the rash on her lower-right leg.
By the time it healed, and the DNA of the flying bloodsucker ran its paces through the analysis computers, she’d missed everything good. Which left her in the windowless cubicles of Data Analysis. Student work. She couldn’t decide whether it was good fortune or bad that that insect had found her delectable.
But then the analysis started showing… anomalies.
The nucleotides were showing traces of… polluting DNA. It was almost as if another planet had seeded this one. With a far more hostile biota. Native forms of food plants on this planet had traces of… poison.
Not enough to do significant harm, but caution was generally advised when picking wild herbs.
And more ominously, some combinations usually relied upon turned out to be increasingly or exponentially toxic.
The new settlement of Kal'rike changed at the news. No longer a relaxed and huddled sprawl where every citizen had five cubic Flights of their own. It huddled inwards and grew upwards.
There was hazardous life, out there.
And those in charge devoted the scientists full attention to identifying, isolating, and if possible, eliminating it all.
To that end, they sent out probes to at least photograph most of the offending life forms.
Which was how they discovered Toxic Island in the first place. A land mass absolutely brimming with a tropical jungle’s worth of hazardous, toxic life.
T'reka found it enrapturing.
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