Section 1 All businesses employing human workers must provide on sight psychological services

Section 2 The intentional psychological abuse of a human will be considered a class A intergalactic felony.

Despite the outcome of this story, recent ill-will towards humans from "Previous Rioting" was remarkably lessened. Galactic leaders are in discussions about reopening talks with LFIL representatives as intergalactic opinion towards humans has markedly improved.

We weren't expecting this....

The planet was stable 7 billion years, and not a tremor, not.... Not a shiver, and yet here we were, brought to our knees.

It is relatively unknown for planets to have an unstable crust. As far as we know the human homeworld is the only habitable planet were they routinely deal with a shifting exterior. Over thousands of years they have developed technologies to mitigate those effects until nothing but the greatest disaster can even so much as level a city block.

Of course we were not so prepared, for thousands of years the pressure had been building up upon a weakening fault line, until one day, the ground could take no more. We weren't aware of the signs, and we didn't have the instruments necessary to detect the slowly weakening rock below us.

The cataclysm happened in the late evening, one moment there was nothing but the early morning buzz of commerce, and the next it seemed the world was ripping itself in half. There was the first massive jolt sending thousands to their knees, cracking support structures, ripping through roads, derailing transportation, and sending screams upwards to paint the sky with its terror. Thousands died in that initial tremor, but then it only built, the ground began to rattle and shake as if the world was determined to rattle itself to pieces; those that had managed to survive the first moment were brained by their own household appliances, thrown to the ground, buried under rubble. I couldn't hear them crying so much as feel it in my soul as I stuck frozen to the street below.

I watched as the buildings above me, thousands of feet high came crashing to the ground as if in slow motion. Windows shattered outwards sending glass into the sky shattering the light into a prism of color. Metal bent and snapped, the noise was horrific and rending. The entire world was screaming. Bodies fell from buildings silhouetted against the sky in their last moments of panic. Shrapnel roared up from the crashing buildings, I watched as a wave of running bodies were pulverized under a mass of falling stone, just engulfed by steel and stone and glass. Debris roared around me in spirals and explosions, it cut into my skin and shredded my clothing, my fur, my ears.

I was blinded by my own blood, I couldn't even scream as the dust set in. It rolled upwards from the collapsing buildings in a column of jet black smoke and dust that blotted out the sky and plunged the world around me into perpetual darkness. I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything, but I could feel the pain feel the class as it cut into my belly, my hands and knees. I cried out for help but was choked by the dust.

....

I couldn't have known it at the time, but there were those coming for us. The Galactic Assembly sent sixteen ships to our aid. Three ships made it in the first hour while I crawled through the shattered glass choking on the air as I stumbled. Humans have a long history of disaster on their planet, they have people especially there to deal with this. Their name speaks for itself "The First Responder." They can be deployed for anything, fire, crime, natural disaster. Generally they are fearlessly brave, aggressively reckless and mentally steely.

I was beginning to lose hope stumbling through the darkness trodding on broken glass. I could see nothing hear nothing, and then there it was a light cutting through the mist, particles of dust split through the beaming luminance, and I was blinded eyes burning. That's when I saw it appear from the smoke, a single eye illuminated in the darkness behind goggles, a sturdy helmet and a gas mask. Its creamy white efface was already coated in a layer of ash and dust, but the white of its eyes was the single brightest thing in my vision.

It reach out grabbing me in a tight grip so painfully strong, but so.... Comforting. I didn't hear its words of encouragement as it lifted me off my feet pressing a mask over my face and urging me to breathe. And then it carried me, it carried me through the smoke and the ash and the debris as my blood soaked into its clothing. I was carried for what felt like miles through the devastation unable to see as the human had covered my eyes to protect them. We broke from the smoke slowly to the burning glow of overhead floodlights all in slow motion for me as thousands of bodies passed by us.

Hundreds of humans pressed through the smoke dragging, and carrying bodies lifeless through the ash to place them in neat sheet-covered rows. Large sheets..... Small sheets.

The human that carried me ran towards the center of the square where a large white tent had been erected. A small figure worked at the center of this carnage many limbs working at double speed back to back with a dark haired human hair flying and swaying about its creamy ash-covered face. Other inhuman figures worked around us emerging from the smoke carrying up to five bodies against their massive bulk. I was placed on my back upon one of those ominous white sheets, and then the human turned with a wave to the tent workers, and plunged back into the smoke.

There were more bodies under the sheets than there were under the tent.

In my state of half consciousness, I watched them for hours. I watched them as the dust slowly dissipated into a thick fog. I watched as they plunged into the darkness, and I watched as some of them never returned. They staggered as they came in from the smoke sometimes without the burden of bodies. When that was no longer an option I watched as they brought strange creatures with them, with large ears, big eyes and sharp teeth. I watched the cameras on the front of their suits, on the monitors from where I lay, as they shuffled their way through the fog with inexplicable movement of a creature who had senses beyond our own.

I watched them find body after body, the bent, the lifeless, and the disassembled. I watched them stop to congratulate the four legged creatures.... Despite finding nothing but death. They hid in the rubble when the congratulations no longer worked, tricking the creatures into thinking their work wasn't for naught, and yet they kept going back with frantic urgency every time. When members of the GA came they urged the search to cease, but the humans rejected the idea, sometimes violently, plunging back into the chaos.

The first thing I heard when my hearing returned, was the weeping.

I had never heard a human cry.

As far as I know they are the only species that represent the emotion of sorrow so openly.

It was a horrible, heart wrenching sound pulsing and gasping like the call of a dying animal... and they were doing it for us.....for those they didn't even know, and for their own who never returned from the smoke. Their calls rose up into the sky in a haunting chorus painting the sky's canvas with sorrow where cries of terror had once painted it with fear.

I watched them through fading eyes as they heard signs of life, noises form inside a devastated building at the heart of the carnage, watched as for hours they fought against rock and stone timing themselves against the reaper. I watched the masked humans run from the smoke carrying small bodies, one lifeless the other barely breathing coated in black ash like a death shroud. They did not immediately turn to the fog his time, they had worked too hard on this one..... a child, not even their own species.

They stood in a wide circle crying out as the tent team worked rapidly, aggressively against the clock.....

It wasn't enough....

The relinquished its heat to the air as the sky was just beginning to lighten. The dark haired human stepped back sitting itself on the ground with a thousand yard stare. The rescuers rent the sky with their screams. Some dropped to the ground, pounding the earth with their knees, others stood still against the lightening sky.

One turned in a wide circle marching back towards the smoke before being intercepted. I couldn't make out the strange roaring noises, but watched as the human lunged at the two figures aggressively pushing at them before turning in a sharp circle sinking down until it sat back on its heels amidst the rubble. The figures watched on in silence as the human tore the mask from its face nearly blackened with ash. Trails of diamonds rolled down its face cutting paths through the dust over its chin and down its neck. Despite having only one eye, it still wept from both. Teeth peered gritted through the whites of ash as that same cutting noise broke from its throat. It tore a glove from its hand pressing the now freed hand over its mouth.

It rocked forward hunched under the weight of...... our pain.... Brought to its knees weakened every time we gave in to the darkness as if pieces of itself were being torn away.

How interesting.... I always used to think humanity could not be broken, was indestructible. How funny that I would find their weakness here. How you can't hurt them with your chains, your blades or your weapons, but you can stagger them to their knees by the weight of your own pain.

We aren't humans, we aren't indestructible, and I think that took them off guard.

Somewhere, in the darkness, a fading voice pleaded, begged with a last breath to hear the humans sing, and despite the cracking and the fading and the sobs, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, a sadness for us, for me.

It was the last thing I ever heard as I faded away, not alone but accompanied by the scraps of themselves the humans sent with me.

It may be easier to break a bone but when you break a heart, you take a piece with you.