Field Notes on a Failed Kidnapping

Elyra had prepared for this extensively. She stood in the corner of her burrow halfway behind a tall shelf that she had dragged there two nights before for exactly this purpose. The human was sitting on the other side of the room, tied to the chair that Elyra had placed in the center.

That is where chairs belonged, in the center, where everything was happening.

She observed them, and then they began to wake up.

This had happened much sooner than expected.

She did not move; she waited.

This was the part that she had been waiting for, the reaction.

There were several expected outcomes that she had written down in her notes.

Screaming was the most common among the humans. Running, if they weren't tied up at the time. Sometimes they cried, and sometimes they were just angry.

This human did absolutely none of the things in her notes. They just stared at her. Elyra waited a bit just in case the reaction was just delayed.

"Hello," she said, smiling with all three rows of teeth.

She closed her eyes tightly. That was out of order. The greeting should have come earlier, before the relocation. She had written that down, but why didn't she pay attention to her notes?

The human's expression had no change. They shifted slightly in their chairs, testing the movement against the binds that they were tied up in. Elyra took a note in the notebook.

"Yes," she added as she approached them. "You are tied up. This was on purpose."

There was another pause. The human looked down at the bindings, then back up at her.

"Okay." The human said.

Elyra froze. Okay? She tried to think of the appropriate response, frantically going through her notepad, but there was nothing.

"This is not..." She paused and then started talking again. "You are meant to show signs of fear or distress."

"Ya, I know," the human said, still looking back at their bindings.

They sounded weirdly calm, not pretending to be calm but actually calm. Elyra stepped closer to them. She moved slowly; her notes indicated that if she moved too fast, it might scare the human. She stopped a few paces away, not too close but not too far. She had marked where she was going to stand earlier, but the marks had sort of blown away in the wind.

"You are not in distress," she said with her pen poised to write down the observations.

"No."

"Um," She stuttered. "Why?"

The human thought about it for a moment, actually thought about it. Elyra leaned forward, pen still poised in hand, waiting for any kind of response.

"I just don't think it will really help," they said.

E'yra stared blankly at them. What was she supposed to write down for that response?

"That is incorrect," she told them with her chin up in false confidence. "Distress is the normal human response to any threat."

"Um, yeah, but it doesn't mean that it actually does anything."

Elyra was dumbfounded, closing and opening her mouth again and again, but she could not figure out how to respond. This was not in her notes, and if it wasn't in her notes, then it could not happen! She took a moment to get herself together. She stood in the stance she believed was the most casual for humans, according to her observations. It didn't feel right. She nearly lost her balance, and the human noticed.

"I made an error," she said.

"Yeah, probably, but it's okay. Take your time," the human attempted a smile.

Elyra was trying to figure out what error they were referring to because there had been quite a few. She looked back through her notebook, trying to find a phrase or a diagram that would fix this.

"Introduction," she read off the notepad. "Step one: establish non-threatening presence." She stopped for a moment to look at the human bound to the chair and then looked back down at her notes. "I have completed this incorrectly."

"Little bit, maybe," the human said.

"I understand."

She closed the notebook and set it back down on her desk. Then she took a big deep breath in.

"Hello," she said, stretching her three rows of teeth from ear to ear. "I am Elyra."

There was a pause, a moment where they just stared at each other for a moment.

The human stared at her, taking her in a little at a time rather than all at once.

"Hi," they said.

Elyra waited for more; there was supposed to be more. The diagram showed more.

"You may tell me your name now," she prompted the human.

"Or I don't," the human replied, now obviously trying to wiggle out of the binds.

Elyra didn't understand. Again, this was not in the notes.

"Why won't you tell me your name?" she said.

"You kidnapped me, I feel like keeping a few things to myself is fair game."

Elyra just stared. That made sense, not the right kind of sense, but it was like a pattern, and patterns made sense.

"I can loosen one of your binds in exchange for your name."

The human raised an eyebrow. Elyra noted the expression in her mind; she had seen it before, though it never really made much sense to her.

"Are you negotiating with me?"

"Yes..."

"You're bad at it."

Elyra stared and paused, thinking. "Explain, please."

The human leaned back in their chair as much as they could with the binds still on and seemed to study her.

"You don't even know if I would give you my real name; you would never know."

"Are you saying that you could provide false data to skew my notes?"

"Yep."

Elyra stared at the human. She hadn't taken this idea into account.

"You're not behaving correctly," she said at last.

"Neither are you."

Elyra considered that and grabbed her notepad to take more notes.

"I am attempting to learn."

"Yeah, I can tell."

Elyra felt like that response was an insult to her, that this entire thing was insulting. It didn't match her notes at all. She wrote some more notes down in her notebook. She was going to have to take a different approach.

"Would you like some water?" She smiled. She knew that this was a perfectly normal thing to say to someone in your home.

"Um, ya actually. Sure."

Elyra nodded very sharply.

"I have prepared some water."

She went over to the table to get the cup she had labeled "water" earlier.

She brought it over, untied the binds, and handed the water to the human.

"Drink," she said, and then tried to find the right words. "And then you will teach me to be like you."