Elysium, the city of dreams, golden towers soaring through the skies, street vendors selling their wares and playing their music from on the clouds. A beautiful place, and also not where this story takes place. See, when humanity really crossed the final frontier, when we finally achieved the long-predicted warp drive, when we finally made contact with an intergalactic society of aliens, we quickly realised two things:

First, every single alien bore a strong resemblance to an earth animal. The first alien our test pilot met looked exactly like a man-sized badger standing upright, save for her slightly more dexterous hands. Luckily, the aliens hadn't noticed yet, and didn't seem to mind that Earth wasn't open to the non-human public. Various governments were still quaking in their boots over what to do, but that's also another story.

Second, and more important, the various aliens were mostly lacking. Not even in anything specific, every aspect of their culture seemed a little underdeveloped compared to us, they mostly stuck to one one type of architecture, one type of government, one type of music. Hell, some didn't even have music! It wasn't uncommon for a whole planet to consist of only a single country. Interacting with just a few aliens was usually fine, but after talking to more than a handful of any particular species, most humans quickly started to feel that they were all very similar. Earth, it turned out, had as much variety as most of the galaxy combined.

That's where you came in. Joe Schmoe. John Smith. Anon. Aliens pretty quickly worked out that keeping a few humans around would improve things, in hard-to-measure ways. Almost every sector had seen a quiet revolution, some fields were almost a third human. You could cook, nothing crazy, just a bit above average. Soups, stews, casserole. Maybe some buns. That was all it took to launch (hah) a shockingly high-paying career as a ship's cook.

It almost felt too good to be true, the ship was a sort of interstellar analogue of a nuclear submarine back home, quietly gliding the waters of space for months on end, in case the spooks needed... well, you weren't sure. Probably best not to think about it too much. You didn't even need a clearance, the recruiters told you that the aliens didn't care about you hearing their secrets, since you didn't speak their language. The morale benefits of eating more than three things were apparently so great that they were willing to risk it.

So with no particular ties to your home, empty coffers, and the thickest Betty Crocker you could find, you headed off to the port. It was a week's spaceflight to the nearest non-human planet, so you took the time to read up on as many dishes as you could think of, make a long list of potential ingredients, and familiarise yourself with the various crew-members and species you'd be living with for the indefinite future. The thick binder was full of information, but on closer inspection, it seemed like a simple case of the officials on Earth not wanting to seem lax. There were plenty of words, but only a few pages had actual information.

The captain, who you'd ultimately be answering to, was an "Ong-Rern", a short sort of creature, light tan fur, round black eyes, incredibly huge ears. Oh man. Without counting the ears, he'd only be a little taller than your waist! His name was... Sod-Lensten. Okay. So he's a fox, one of those desert things, from Africa or the Middle East or somewhere. Carnivore, probably.

You expected some sort of existing ship's cook to answer to, but nope, without humans they just have a vending machine and a fancy space microwave. It'd almost be sad if the knowledge that you were already the head of a one-man department hadn't gone to your head. You really didn't have to answer to anyone else, they hadn't even met you, and were already giving you free range (hah) of the ship's newly-installed kitchen.

Six more days until you set foot on alien soil. Wouldn't hurt to read up on some of the other high-ranking crew members, would it?

The head engineer was an antelope-looking thing, the paper said he was a Narybar, named Rawle. Short brown fur, ears that would've been large if you hadn't seen the captain's, long spiralling horns that probably were a nuisance around the delicate warp engine. Probably vegetarian, buy lots of stuff for salad. Do deer eat bread? Probably.

Who else... there were a lot of heads and chiefs of redacted jobs, that'd be fun. Hello, chief of _______. Some kind of scary lizard thing, like Godzilla wearing clothes. He still looked like some earth animal, you were sure, but at least this felt a little bit alien. Let's see, species is "Rhxylxtirln". Uh huh. You gave up at this point, remembering all these names and terms would be hell. You had a fox, a deer, a lizard. Let them take offence.

A fish guy, a lynx with big mutton chops, some kind of little rodent, a cute looking rabbit girl who was definitely vegetarian, was that a beaver? Maybe wood should be on the grocery list. Six days and countless pages of ingredients and recipes later, you arrived.

There was no first step on alien soil, you and the small crowd of humans were all carefully directed to different areas of the alien spaceport, and immediately shepherded to your ships. The captain was waiting for you by the on-ramp, dressed in what you could only assume was some kind of alien formal wear. He spoke to you in an incomprehensible tongue, full of squeaks and noises you certainly couldn't make. After a brief moment of panic on your part, a small box in his hands chirped to life

"Welcome to our ship! We have try to make it as pleasing to you and hope you and us can serve each other well!"

The grammar was questionable, but Star Trek was right again. A translator. He passed it off to you, and you inspected it for a moment. One of the lights on the side lit up, as it translated more alien words.

"We do not know the Earth language well still, but the translator will learn. You are a very complex, and that is why you are here. Oh, you are a big too."

The captain was staring up at you with his blank black eyes. With his head tipped up, his enormous fuzzy ears stuck out horizontally. You suppressed a nervous laugh, glancing back at the translator. There was a matrix of lights on the front, with tiny labels etched into the metal. Three were on, "happy", "excited", and "romatic". That last one wasn't spelled right, and didn't really make sense. Seemed like the translator was a rushed job.

Looking up, you could see that the captain was already up the ramp, standing inside the ship's doorway. You hadn't even noticed him leave. He called out to you, waving a tiny paw, and you didn't need the translator's squeaky "Come!" to understand what he meant. One small suitcase rolled up behind you, and you stepped on board.