Before Thulg could tell him to stop, Quarg jammed his three-quarter length tentacle down onto a rectangular device, sending off flutters so violent that both Squartblaats covered their sensing whiskers with their tentacles.

“Kill the gooflinking thing right now you bloat headed kwuffmin!” snapped Thulg.

In a moment of sheer panic, Quarg flailed his segmented limbs in an attempt to stop the vibrations. He managed to beat the thing against the wall, but in doing so severed his already shortened tentacle at the fourth knuckle. “Duugit!”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to flutter that nasty word?” Thulg frowned. “Why the duugit did you do that?!”

Quarg raised his shoulder segments. “I dunno. I found it near where I saw that human. By the gootkap. What is, Thulg?”

“Granted, I’m no expert. But from my short mind meld with the Weekipeeedeeeahhh, I think it may be what humans call an Optical Receptor Pod. They use it to recreate religious flutters.”

Quarg’s deformed head bag inflated with wonder.

“Indeed. Turn the wheel on the front to the left then play it again. That’s an order.”

Quarg raised his stumped tentacle, pulled his body away, then jabbed it down. The flutters resumed at a more bearable level.

“Tell me more, Thulg!”

“Again, no expert,” Thulg’s breathing hole closed as he began a meld, then twisted it into an upright crescent. “Quarg, the deity that produced this hymn is called All Time Low. They are a sub-god of an earlier religious movement called pop punk and was conjured into being by another deity named New Found Glory.”
​
“Cool!”

“I know, Quarg. I know. And while this particular hymn is about what we would call self-destructive behavior, there is a rather clever reference to a sacrificial building game known as…”

Quarg shrugged. “It was, uh, magical.”
​
“What?!” snapped Thulg, his six and a five-eights tentacles flapping in the current like catatonic sea snakes.

Quarg sucked in a quantity of liquid-ethane through his breathing hole and puffed out his head bag. “You heard me, you buffkin!”

Thulg hated getting stuck on surface patrol with Quarg. He was, for all intents and purposes, a kwuffmin. And when he puffed his deformed headbag out like that, he looked every bit of a kwuffmin. “I’m sorry, Quarg. That wasn’t very fair of me. Everything has just been so… different. Ever since the… ”

“Humans?”

“Yes, ever since the humans landed. Learning their flutters from that Weekipeeedeeeahhh our elders were able to mindmeld with has been hard enough. I just don’t want to mess it up. You know?”

“Yeah,” Quarq nodded slowly. “It is almost boofk time.”

“Saturn almighty!” snapped Thulg. “Our species is on the verge of making contact with another intelligent race, and all you can think about is filling your gutsack! For all we know, we could be those very Squartblaats!”

Quarg tensed his five and two-thirds tentacles, and spoke in a tense flutter that was very much out of character for the Squartblaat. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Thulg! I already saw one!”

Thulg went limp with fear. “Saw what, exactly?”

“A human! I popped through the surface to grab a quick slice of gootkap, and there she was, standing there with a giant magical on her head!”

“A magical on her head?”

​“Yeah, granted I ain’t the best at the language yet, but that’s what it was. A magical. The same thing that guy that started all their interfamilial wars has over one of his weekwuffs.”

“You really are a gooflinking kwuffmin, Quarg. That’s a monocle!”

For the past year or so I've been weaving in and out of a re-listen to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. It's been about five years since my last re-listen, and I'm on the thirteenth book now--aptly named The Thirteen-Gun Salute. I just came across this passage, which caught me off guard:

"Jack," he said, as they walked around the rim of the crater to a point where they could hail the ship. "Do you reflect upon Ganymede at all?"

Now I was inspired by many, many wonderful works from a multitude of genres when I challenged myself to turn my goofy space sport idea into something resembling a readable story. But the fact that this passage--from a fictional tale told during the age of sail with it's references to rims, craters, ships, and Ganymede--reads as if it could have come straight from a page of my attempt at sci-fi has me wondering if it was the subconscious seed that led to the idea in the first place.