Microstory 739: Credos, Convention Ten: Congeniality, Chapter Two

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What the town did not know was that their dealings were being watched by a visiting alien from another planet. This alien was intelligent, and powerful, and his morals were fundamentally unfathomable to the people in the town, or the rest of their planet. He felt that it was his obligation to teach this world how he believed they should behave. They needed to be punished for how they had treated the doctor. With a great sense of irony, he set upon the town, and its neighbors, an epidemic. Nearly everyone in the region was infected with the pathogen, for which there was no apparent cure. It discolored their blood, and saturated it with harmful fluids. They had not encountered anything like it before, and none of their home remedies was working. Fortunately, no one was dying from this, but they were still in such incredible pain. It was after two days when someone broke through their delirium to remember that the rude doctor actually specialized in infectiology, which meant if anyone could have figured out the cure, it would have been him. “O,” they cried, “how foolish we have been. This must be the fury of The Dying Light, here to end our world.” But this was not so, it was only a person, flesh and blood, who had done this to them. Feeling more resentful about some other entity receiving credit for his doings that he thought he would, the alien who had infected them stepped forward and made himself known. He removed his modifications that allowed him to look like them, and spoke to the crowd. “This is what you have done. You have brought this upon yourselves. Are you better than the man you shunned, and indirectly killed? Your hearts were filled with as much hate as his, and now you must accept the consequences. Now it is your hearts that will kill you.” He raised a device about the size of a pen. “With this, I will exact my final solution. For now, the pathogen causes painful symptoms, but not death. With the push of this button, that shall change.” Then what appeared to be a female counterpart to the alien stepped up onto the stage. She had been visiting another town during this whole ordeal, completely unbeknownst to the male alien. With one look, she caused him to doubt himself, and he dropped the death device. And she spoke to the crowd, and him, “what these people need is example. They cannot learn to be better if they’re dead, can they? What you people lack...is congeniality, and to understand this, I will show you what it looks like.” And they believed she would simply provide for them the cure for the alien disease, and she did, but that was not all. She also invited them to her ship, where she transported them to her homeworld. There they lived in peace in a society that had moved completely beyond negative traits, such as jealousy and discordancy. Everyone was loved.