Space Bunny (EASTER SGU)
It had become a holiday tradition on Destiny for Eli Wallace to gather all the children and distract them with a story while their parents were busy preparing the 'big holiday meal' (extra helpings of the grey stuff for everyone! try it it's delicious!) or hiding presents which in this case were small 'chocolate' eggs for Easter. The fact that they were all born on Destiny and had no idea what chocolate should really taste like helped given their still somewhat meager and rather alien food stores and Eli didn't mind at all. Telling stories about the olden days was his favorite pastime and these days he actually preferred the oral storytelling tradition above all others, though he was still working on his ever expanding kino documentary at regular intervals.
Today's story was a popular one especially at Easter time and he began his story as he always did…
"Doctor Rush just didn't appreciate me" he began, "Every day I worked longer hours than anybody else on the ship and most of that time was spent in fixing his mistakes" Eli claimed, "and does he ever thank me for it?" he asked his hushed audience who responded as always with a resounding chorus of "NO!" "That's right", Eli continues, "he never thanked me, not even once" at this his well-trained audience began to boo and shake their little fists, "Although" he continued after a suitably dramatic pause, "He did once, just the once mind you," he emphasized ONCE very loudly, "...pay me just the one compliment…"
[ ]
"Well done Eli you have truly wholly and completely cocked up this whole project on a level that I would've thought impossible for anyone with a mental capacity above a highland collie's." Rush said with a grimace as he surveyed the damage.
"I didn't mean to break it!" Eli stated between tightly clenched teeth, "and I hardly think it's fair to compare me to a dog."
"Don't be so defensive Mr. Wallace. As it happens highland collies are very intelligent animals indeed, they just have an annoying habit of yipping in your ear when you're trying to work. And breaking things of course."
"So that was supposed to be what, a compliment?"
"My apologies Eli, from now on I shall endeavor to employ a clearer form of diction when in your company."
"Are you making fun of me?"
"Well I'm certainly not having any fun and clearly neither are you so I think that would be a NO."
Eli paused, "uh, good, just checking. What were we doing again?"
"I " Rush said irritably, "was attempting to do my job which at this precise moment involves calculating how long we have to stay in this system before it's safe to jump again. You were bothering me."
"I thought Destiny's computer did that."
"Did what, bother me?"
"Funny", Eli said, "No I meant the calculating thing."
"Well sometimes it's best to look for ways around long stops in the middle of nowhere" Rush replied, "Especially when you're dealing with a commanding officer who doesn't like to wait."
"Young's in a hurry to get out of here, huh."
"It seems he's more interested in finding fresh food to supplement our dwindling stores than in exploring the local uninhabitable gas giants."
"Makes perfect sense to me" Eli said.
"It would."
Unfortunately Eli had to bite back his clever retort as readings went crazy all over the console.
"Mr. Wallace" Rush said, dropping the sarcasm with disturbing rapidity, "Were we expecting company?"
(O)
"Chaos reigned supreme in the gateroom" Eli continued, using his best Kirk impression (which should have been a wasted effort on a group of children who had never seen a single episode of Star Trek but strangely they adored it when he did this), "as the crew members (the important ones anyway) rushed in from all the currently habitable portions of Destiny to see who or what was going to pop out of this particular rabbit hole."
The children leaned forward always eager to hear one of Uncle Eli's stories.
"The weirdest part was" Eli continued to the assembled children, "What popped out of this particular rabbit hole was in fact... a rabbit. Well a sort of rabbit anyway…"
[ ]
The crew stared at the giant rabbit and the rabbit stared right back at them.
It was hard not to stare at a six foot female covered in downy white fur and little else with long ears that flopped over from the top of her furry head which, despite its obvious alien nature, made her resemble nothing more or less than a giant bunny rabbit.
Not knowing exactly how to talk to a rabbit, Colonel Young decided, having suddenly remembered it was nearly Easter, to do the only thing he could think of and invite the rabbit girl to dinner…"
Later at dinner
…"So you're not from one of the gas giants?" Eli asked the bunny girl as they sat in the mess hall enjoying Airman Becker's latest culinary effort.
"No" the rabbit girl (who Eli had secretly nicknamed 'Jessica') said, shaking her lovely long ears in a delightfully un-human manner, "My people come from a temperate planet on the other side of this galaxy. At least ...I think it's this galaxy." she finished sadly.
"You mean you don't know?" Young said, glad to have an excuse to stop eating a meal that definitely couldn't be counted as one of Becker's best.
"I'm afraid I've gotten myself lost!" the bunny unexpectedly wailed, snatching at her ears in distress. "I was playing near the travel ring and I wasn't even supposed to be anywhere near it, when I found this device buried nearby."
The space bunny pointed to the dialing device which Greer had confiscated earlier.
"I was having fun playing with the different symbols when all of a suddenly the ring started to shake! And then this great stream of water flowed out and… I just had to touch it!" she cried, "I knew the ring was meant for star travel and I shouldn't go in, but I just couldn't help myself, we are a very curious species you know and oh my! ...my mother and father must be so worried about me! And all my siblings too!"
"How many siblings do you have?" TJ asked as she tried her best to comfort the girl.
"There are sixty-one of us now" the bunny said with a sniff.
"Sixty-one?!" TJ nearly shouted, followed by a much calmer, "My, um, what a large family you have."
"Not really" the bunny replied, "My aunt has over a hundred and she's actually a term younger than my own mother."
"Incredible" Wray said.
"Why incredible?" the curious bunny asked, "how many children does your mother have?"
"Just me actually" Wray told her, "My parents often talked about having another child, but they could never agree on the timing."
"Incredible!" the bunny echoed Wray's earlier sentiment, "and how many children do you have yourself?" she asked Wray.
"Well, none" Wray replied, "I'm 'er, I'm not married."
"Neither am I" the bunny said, "But I'm hoping to find the right man soon and together we'll have dozens and dozens of beautiful litters!" she exclaimed her eyes gleaming.
"Better keep her away from Lt. Scott then" Lt. James muttered, which drew fits of giggles from everyone at the table (aside from Scott of course).
(O)
With nearly a third of the assembled children bearing the surname Scott there was also a lot of giggling in Eli's story corner.
"Scott turned beet red" Eli told the children with a grin, "in fact his face got so red and he was so embarrassed that TJ had to give him a sedative!"
"Then what happened Uncle Eli?" one of the young Greer's asked.
"Well nothing much really" Eli said with a shrug, "After dinner the lady bunny said she should be getting back soon before her parents missed her, so she got up to leave and everybody shook her fuzzy little paw, which seemed to stun her for some reason and then she just kind of hopped off. Rush somehow figured out where she'd gated from and sent her back there."
"But what about the baby bunnies?!" Colonel Young's grandson Riley demanded.
Eli laughed, "Oh yes, I nearly forgot the best part" he teased, as he motioned for the restless children to be lean in for the best bit.
[ ]
"As I said the space bunny hopped off and we didn't think we'd ever see her or anyone like her again, but in this case we were wrong, because not two months later we were refueling our water tanks on some ice moon when Destiny's stargate started up. Nobody was too alarmed since we were expecting the team back with their next load of ice, but it certainly wasn't ice the people who came through the gate were carrying! Do you know what they were carrying?" he asked.
"Baby bunnies!" the children chorused gleefully.
"That's right. Baby bunnies, at least five of them in a basket, and carrying that basket was one angry mother bunny…" Eli said putting on a mock look of anger complete with an attempt at making his nose twitch like a bunny's, "…who was also towing her daughter, who happened to be the very bunny we had entertained two months before, only now she looked very embarrassed indeed and her mother as I said looked very angry indeed, and it took a great deal of time and energy for Colonel Young, well mostly it was TJ, to calm her down enough to get a coherent story out of her."
(0)
"What does 'coherent' mean?" one of the children asked.
"Uh, it means you know, understandable: Eli faltered, "You kind of like the opposite of what happens when Rush tries to teach science class."
"Oooooh" they chorused.
"Anyway," Eli returned to his narrative, "Eventually we were able to figure out what happened and it all came from those handshakes after the dinner party, you see as it turned out space bunnies don't make babies the way humans do…"
"How do humans make babies?" one of the little ones asked.
"Um, I …I think you'd better ask TJ about that tomorrow" Eli said as the red crept up his cheeks. "Back to the bunnies… the whole crew got a good lesson in alien life that day, despite all the places we'd travelled and all the strange things we'd seen, it had never really occurred to us that a species might breed via handshakes!"
"Did you ever find out who the father was?" Ronald Scott asked.
"No, I mean, it was kind of hard to tell" Eli stammered, "the baby bunnies had several different shades of fur and one of them seemed to be almost bald, but other than that they far more resembled the bunnies then any of us."
"Are you sure they had any human DNA at all" a frighteningly articulate five year old girl with the ridiculous name of Yellowlees Tamara Young-Rush asked, "after all the normal human gestation rate is nine months and these bunnies were apparently produced in less than two, perhaps the elder bunny was mistaken."
"Well, the uh, bunny 'grandma' seemed pretty sure our people were responsible for her daughter's, 'er… misfortune" Eli said, making a mental note to talk to Yellowlees grandfathers about letting her skip another couple of grades, "Something about the eyes looked very human indeed and I guess the gestation time is just shorter for a space bunny then for a human."
"What did you do about the babies?" little Riley asked.
"Well we adopted them of course" Eli said, "You know that, Riley, you've seen the pictures."
"But what I meant was, what happened to them" Riley said, "Why aren't they still here?"
"Well it turns out the hybrid bunnies didn't much care for life on a spaceship so once they were fully grown a year or so later they started petitioning the colonel for permission to set up a hutch on the first suitable planet we came across, so eventually that's what happened, they found a planet they liked, we helped them set up as best as we could ...and then we bid them a tearful goodbye and left them behind."
"Do you miss them Uncle Eli?" Riley asked.
"Yeah, I guess I do sometimes", he said, "but I like to think they're happy where they are, growing vegetables and raising more little bunnies..."
"But… wouldn't they all be brothers and sisters?" Ronald Scott asked, "And my father says brothers and sisters should never…"
"OK ...I think we're done here" Eli said, as he rose hastily from his seat, "Your parents should be ready for us now, so line up and we'll all go find them together... and kids…" he said, raising his arms affectionately, "Happy Easter!"
"Happy Easter Uncle Eli!" they chorused.
THE END
Updated 2019