Title tentative. All I know is, I sat down and wrote 2K words on this story today without trying very hard.
The human child screamed, and leapt.
George Smith did not recoil in horror. After all, the girl was only playing on a toy called a ‘Slip-n-Slide.’ She and her friends were taking turns diving on the water-drenched plastic sheet, to slide down it until they zoomed past the edge and onto the midsummer grass. There was nothing objectively or subjectively terrifying about the playing. If his own species had thought up this item themselves, he would have probably done the same thing as a child.
He thought about his childhood, and then made a mental note.
Aside from the shrieking, the neighborhood was peacefully quiet. This part of the Observational Area was devoted to satellite communities serving a hub city (the humans would say they lived in Joisey, south of Gotham), and it was the weekend. The kids’ parents would be busy on their lawns, or doing ‘cook-outs’ of various meats and vegetables, or tinkering with their personal vehicles. It was, in other words, a veritable snapshot of the old United States of America, during its Late Middle First Republic period.
Which was the entire point.