Buck Godot Online Comics

Saturday, August 09, 2008
Buck Godot Online Comics

THE HERODOTUS COMPLEX: NOTES BY P'OILGOF LIVY

Chapter 5; Humanity's Best Friends:

The Pogs are a small, studious race of turtle-like beings that quietly evolved on a rather soupy planet somewhere in the constellation of The Southern Cross. They developed a no-nonsense star drive approximately 10,000 years ago and have been members in good standing of the Gallimaufry for at least 9,500 years.

The vast majority of members of the Gallimaufry, once having made the mighty effort to escape their home planets, seem to fall into a dormant period in their history. Despite the access to new races, technologies, and uncounted wonders, they seem content to drift along, assimilating knowledge and experience, until they feel confident enough to more fully assert themselves in galactic society.

Some races never pull out of this period, and have remained quiet background players for millennia, unlike more dynamic races that burst upon the galactic scene, and attempt to found empires, evolve into higher forms, reveal shattering new religious, philosophical, cosmological or mathematical systems or sell something.

Therefore, unlike most of these dynamic young races, they will probably by around for more than a few millennia before being wiped out or forgotten.

The Pogs are a textbook example.

They travel widely, and are familiar features throughout this sector of space. They frequently work in those low-key, clerical jobs that, while still requiring a sentient’s touch, usually find that touch belonging to quiet, dull unassuming sentients.

Most xenopsychologists rate them as one of the more stable races, although there was a small faction that said that there were definite signs that as a race they were searching for something. Something that would give them purpose. This opinion was not held by many, until Humanity entered the sphere of the Gallimaufry.

The two races hit it off splendidly.

In the past, there have been several examples of bonds being formed between different races, but, like the Dwoo, who packed up their belongings and actually moved into the Fwogga-Quelm, the vast majority of these have been an establishment of a physical symbiotic, parasitic, predator/prey, or socks-and-shoes type of relationship. The Human/Pog relationship was, instead, a true meeting of minds: an astonishing thing between alien races.

The Pogs had discovered that they liked Humanity's quirky way of living and dealing with the Universe, and the Humans discovered that the Pogs were perfect straight men.

It was a match made in Heaven...