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An idea for an awkward Star Trek species: the Osstercutorii

Imperator-Zor

Lieutenant Junior Grade
Red Shirt
A well known principle in Star Trek (as well as Trekoid media like The Orville and so forth) is that of Rubber Headed aliens, sapient beings which look nearly identical to humans externally, even if they may have internal differences (haemoglobin with copper instead of Iron, multiple hearts, etc). Well here's a variant of this.

Imagine an episode of Star Trek in which our heroes make first contact with an Alien Species that looks mostly human, which we'll call the Osstercutorii. The party beams over and there is a friendly reception. They're polite and they great the crew in a spirit of friendship and mutual discovery and they're generally quite nice. They do tend to chew gum a lot, but they don't have any hostile intent beyond the joy of discovery. An Osstercator and an Osstercatrix end up chatting up some of the Starfleet crew members in a moderately suggestive way that Kirk would be familiar with who's aim is simply exploring the possibility of a consensual good time.

But eventually for one of the Starfleet Guys, nature calls. One of our crew members asks where the facilities. There they find things they find an Osstercutrix re-applying her lipstick in a mirror, and that are a bit different from how a Human or a Vulcan or a Ferengi would build them. Basically there are a set of shallow bowls set into the walls with handles to each side about 1.5 meters above the ground with what looks like napkin dispensers. Not something you could sit on. This confounds the starfleet guy until a Osstercutor comes in who proceeds to make use of the facilities and leans in to one of the stalls.

In short the biggest way physiologically that Osstercutorii differ from humans is that descend from an animal that 600 million years ago was similar to Hydra...
Green-hydra-Hydra-viridissima-02.jpg

A creature with a simple digestive system consisting of a mouth and a stomach. Over the better part of a billion years since then, their evolutionary history had evolved a lot and developed a fair deal more complexity. An extensive cladistic rundown of the intermediaries would not be necessary, though many phases of their development have rough analogs with the course that led from Urbilateria to us. There is one critical difference, while their digestive system was refined considerably over the eons it never evolved a secondary orifice.

Or in other words, the Osstercutorii are a species of Mouth-Poopers.

Zor
 
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It's actually so obvious that I'm surprised it's never been done.

"Tastes just as good coming back up as it did going down."

Too bad that by broadcasting it on TrekBBS, in a section other than FanFic, you've pretty much guaranteed that it never will be done (for reasons explained in a pinned thread at the top of the TrekLit section).

Out of morbid curiosity, whence came the name of this species of mouth-defecating sentients? (In a science fiction milieu I created some years ago, in a Short Story Workshop class, I created a species called the Lozadians, tentacled beings who resemble both Diane Duane's Sulamids, and the natural form of the Kelvans. I named them after a classmate.)
 
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And I suppose the compulsive gum-chewing is because those sentients who don't have a single-ended digestive systems find that otherwise, Osstercutorii breath would (as George Carlin once put it) "knock a buzzard off a shit-wagon."
 
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