Title: There’s no Anal Probing, I promise.

Word count: 570

Joel really, really wouldn’t have chosen this kid if he knew how many fucking anal probing jokes he was going to make.

The abduction process had gone smoothly enough, although, as Ray had told him, not at all how they did in human movies. It consisted less of zapping people off the ground and into disk-shaped UFO’s and more to do with showing up at their house, explaining the subject matter to them, and giving them the option between becoming a test subject, or dying.

Ray picked the former.

Ray, by the way, was referred to as ‘Ray’ because he absolutely insisted on that name, or ‘Experiment 420’, which Joel refused. Technically all test subjects were to be referred to by their given numbers, but Ray was different.

Ray was really different. Ray was interested in everything, including Joel. He was interested in the slightly different skin color and texture, he was interested in the curve of his eyes and the shape of his teeth. He was interested in the designs on his shirts and his culture, and he was interested in everything else in what he called ‘outer space’.

There had been studies done in humans before, of course, but none yielded such results as Ray’s did. He wasn’t just something to be studied and prodded, he talked. A lot. He told of many things about humans; the diversity and the differences between cultures was a big subject. Oh, and he made references and told jokes, too. That was outstandingly new.

The most prominent jokes of course, were the ones about anal probing.

Joel didn’t find them funny.

But he continued on making jokes and simply just talking to Joel, something no other species or human had done.

“Why do you guys need live humans for all this stuff, anyway? Can’t you just google it?” Ray had asked one day, while Joel was attaching monitors to his chest. Joel blinked.

“Google?”

With that, Ray introduced Joel to the internet, which was apparently one of humanities most important creations. His species had something like it, but it was used almost completely for incredibly serious things, as theirs was.

Well.

Not.

After that incredibly important discovery, learning about humanity was a lot easier. And damn, was it fucking weird. Like really weird.

What was even weirder was Ray almost forcing him to get him an Xbox, and play with him at least an hour out of the day. Test subjects did not make demands, test subjects were lucky they got food and were kept alive.

Ray was so surprisingly different. Not to mention incredibly good at these ‘video games’.

Joel excused it as research, but he really enjoyed that time together.

Six months was the time allotted to each test subject, and at the end of that six months, the supervisor of the test subject decided whether it would be okay to release the test subject back into it’s environment, or if it was too dangerous.

Joel let Ray decide. He couldn’t blame him for wanting to go back home.

Ray left him with a kiss, a sign that Joel had learned in his research time represented human love. Joel returned it, with a promise that one day he would come back for him.

He ended his final report with the following:

If test subject 209 is anything to show for it, Humanity is much greater than we could ever be.