In the end, Dads grudgingly decided his search for a cure would use something he had near at hand: human food. "At least it won’t kill them," he muttered… which wasn’t half so certain as he pretended. Ooloms were engineered to eat foodstuffs native to Demoth, as well as crops and animal products their people brought from the Divian homeworld; no one expected they could hold down terrestrial food too.

Take a common Earth grape, for example: chocked juicy with dozens of biological compounds. Some of those compounds are nigh-on universal — you find simple sugars in every starry reach of the galaxy, and Ooloms could easily digest them. On the other hand, your average grape contains a whole lab shelf of more specialized enzymes, proteins, vitamins, and other tools of grapehood… grand for humans, because we’ve spent three billion years evolving to eat whatever grapes dish out, but to Oolom metabolisms, each chemical was an alien substance with untold poisonous potential.

Natural result: Ooloms didn’t eat terrestrial foods. They’d be crazy to take the teeniest nibble. No doubt, in the twenty-five years Homo saps had lived on Demoth, some daredevil Oolom must have given it a try; but there’d never been a systematic study. Why would there be? When Ooloms could eat blessed near every leaf and grass on the planet, where’s the sense in stuffing them with human coq au vin to see if it kills them?

That’s how things stood till the plague came… at which point, the scales tipped to the other side of Why not? When Ooloms were all going to die anyway, where was the harm in a little coq au vin, on the off chance some unexpected terrestrial chemical actually did some good?