#but he's had his tongue modified to allow him to speak alien languages easier

[dragonnarrative-writes]

I want you to know that literally only made him their linguist bc he has to make to joke about being good with his tongue.

It’s just such a Soap joke lol

WHEEZE

[codylabs]

The Nomads: Part 1

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

Long ago, a story was recorded. It told how after many months of careful listening, a lone astronaut learned to understand the language of her rescuers. Weeks more of practicing to herself within the privacy of her escape pod, and she had grown accustomed to shaping her tongue and lips around their strange syllables. Then one evening over dinner, when one of the boys made fun of her, the astronaut finally spoke. “Well I do not think my eyes are tiny.” She replied with a smile. “Maybe yours are just enormous.”

It had been a poor comeback to a poor insult, and had been half incomprehensible to them, but it caused quite an uproar nonetheless.

“Missus Fikes!” They all cheered. This was the only phrase she’d managed to teach them of her own language, and just as well, for it was her name. “You understood our language this entire time? Did you learn? When did you learn? Who taught you?” They prodded her with questions, speaking too quickly for her to distinguish. “We’re so proud of you!”

“I have been listening many nights!” Her concentration on her own words made them come out slowly, (and even she could hear the clumsy distortion of her own accent,) but they were coming. “Practicing many nights. Was become weary of sign language. Big thanks to friend Keeleeticktick for speaking so slowly at me.”

They laughed at that, and slapped Keeleeticktick on the back and congratulated him for being a good friend. “Oh.” One of them turned to her after the uproar quieted a bit. “That was good, but the word for ‘night’, you said it wrong. It’s more like…” His beak didn’t move when he made the correct pronunciation, (since they didn’t speak with their beaks,) but the clusters of high-voltage nerves in his tentacles pulsed and chimed with electrical interference, and her helmet radio picked it up and played it into her speaker in the form of sound.

“Nights.” She repeated back to him.

“Still not quite right.” Somebody else chimed in. “It’s like you’re only saying half of it.”

“You sound like a queeteekit with weevakik syndrome!” One of them teased her. She didn’t know a few of those words, but got the gist.

“Don’t be rough on him!” One of them smacked him. “He’s doing his best!”

“Is problem with my voice-maker.” She tapped the radio on her helmet with a helpless laugh. “It cannot do the frequencies so low. Cannot hear some of word.”

“Oh! Oh! I’ve got an idea!” One of them waved a tentacle toward the dish up in the crow’s nest. “Let’s go get the ship’s radio! It can do the whole range!”

“Hey yeah!” Somebody agreed. “We can just wire it right in! And then we’ll just turn the dish back toward us, turn down the volume, and we can all hear each other! Should work well enough until we can modify his radio.”

“Very good!” She followed after with an eager laugh.

They were awake for many long hours that night, laughing and talking and doing their best to help her learn. It seemed they all adored the excitement, and they nursed her for every bit of attention and strange newness she could provide. And they seemed to be growing to like her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So, Missus Fikes, what are these things for anyway?” Keeleeticktick asked, reaching a tentacle forward to poke at her.

They’d been respecting her boundaries for the entirety of her stay so far, but now that she was starting to fit in, it seemed that the taboos were finally breaking down; this was the first question one of them had ever directly asked her about her human biology.

“Those are legs.” She smiled. The word had no direct translation that she knew of. “I guess you could call them hook-limbs? Crawlers? I don’t know… They let me move around.” She wiggled her boots to show that they were living parts of her, not just some kind of stiff horns.

“They don’t look like they help you move.” He seemed skeptical.

“Not way out here, no.” Her eyes wandered over the nomad’s small convoy of ships, and none of them had any habitation rings or rotating sections, or anything at all which could be used to generate artificial gravity. Their engines weren’t even powerful enough to provide thrust gravity. “I… I suppose I don’t have a way to show how they work.”

“Maybe if you took off your armor?” He poked curiously at her space suit. “Maybe you wouldn’t burn yourself?”

“No, they’re not thrusters.” She laughed. “They… If I was stuck to something… If I were being pulled…” She remembered that they didn’t have a word for ‘down’. “If I were being pulled on to something, then they would let me move.”

“…Huh?” He didn’t quite grasp the gist.

She pondered it a moment longer. And she remembered a history lesson from long ago, from before human spacecraft were large enough to mount entire rings. In the very early colonial age, when humans were still exploring their own solar system, their ships were often designed to stay attached to their last discarded booster stage, and reel it out on the end of a long cable. Then, by spinning end-over end, they could approximate enough of a radius and rotation to provide artificial gravity. “Okay, I have a idea.” She snapped her fingers. “Do you have a strong cable, and some mass equal to my pod you would allow me to risk?”

“Ohhhh…” He had access to the first one, but was hesitant on loaning the second; there wasn’t much mass out here they could spare. “We have silk cable that’s near indestructible… But how ‘risky’ are we talking?”

“I want to swing it around quickly. If the silk breaks, it would fly away from the convoy and be hard to get back.”

“I’ve got my dingy!” Keeleeticktick’s son, Thilykto, had been listening, and now spoke up. “I could just tie that to it, and that way if I fly away, I could just fly it back!”

“Oh yeah, that would be safe.” She nodded.

“…Alright.” Keeleeticktick nodded reluctantly. “But if this gets too crazy, Missus Fikes, I’m going to put a stop to it.”

“Of course.” She spread her arms and curled her fingers, a motion which, (as far as she had been able to tell) meant about the same as a courteous bow.

An hour later, they had her escape pod tied securely to the end of a narrow silken thread, and Thilykto was up on his dingy, tied to the other. His father looked on in growing disapproval (though not growing as fast as his curiosity, apparently.) Most or all of the other nomads, both on this ship and surrounding ships, had clustered to watch as well. Beneath the gaze of many eyes, she radioed over to Thilykto. “You ready, man?”

“I was born ready!” He curled one tentacle into the shape of a thumbs-up, a gesture he’d learned from her.

“Great!” She stepped into the airlock of her pod. “I don’t know how much fuel this will use, so if you waste more than quarter, call it off!”

“Okay!” He grabbed the controls of his dingy, and waited for her signal.

As for herself, she sealed the door behind her and cycled the airlock. The pressurized stiffness of her suit lightened as the chamber flooded, and then she drifted through the inner door into what counted as her home. There wasn’t much to it, just a few seats, a control panel, and some frayed wall insulation which she’d folded into a bed; it was little wonder she spent so much time outside.

Now she grasped the control panel, twisted herself around to right-side-up, and began tapping buttons for pre-ignition checks. She wondered for a moment if the escape pod’s thrusters still worked. She had run them completely dry of fuel during the leviathan attack, and nearly overheated them in the process. The Nomads had been kind enough to offer a refuel when they found her, but the quiet drifting ever since had never given her an opportunity to give them a test fire, and she worried whether or not they’d suffered permanent damage from her initial clumsiness. She held her breath as she threw the last switch.

To her relief, the pod’s propulsion roared to life with hardly a second’s hesitation, and the readouts all leveled out to green. She grasped the RCS joysticks to begin the maneuver. “Remember.” She radioed over. “Thrust opposite direction of me.”

“Yeah, I got it!”

The escape pod’s thrusters pushed it one way, the dingy pushed the other way, the silk went taught, and they began to rotate each other. As he watched it begin, Keeleeticktick turned in a nervous circle and curled his tentacles up around his head, while his eyestalks retracted back into a fold beneath his beak. “Oh, be careful!” He cried up at them.

“I’m good, I’m good!” His son called back. “Missus Fikes, how fast do we need to get going?”

“Very fast.” As the dingy and pod spun, the centrifugal force began to weigh on her body. It was light at first, a ghostly hint of drag in an unexpected direction, but it rapidly grew stronger and stronger. Now she was no longer floating, and her boots touched the floor. A wrench hit the wall behind her and bounced to a stop. The picture of her family by her bed began to slide. And now the suit was resting on her shoulders, now she felt the blood begin to drain from her head, and now her knees and back remembered the meaning of ‘down’. And then, they exploded in pain.

She’d been weightless 4 months now. The entire time she’d been drifting with the nomads, she’d never once dedicated herself to the least exercise, and it seems her back and legs had become next to useless by her neglect. “That’s enough!” She gasped, releasing her own controls and falling to her knees. “That’s enough!”

For the next minute or so, silent anticipation hung over the tribe, as they waited for her to make good on her claim of some unique and alien spectacle. Their eyes followed her pod around and around its circular path, and some of them began to rotate themselves to match, so as to make the watching easier. As for her, she clawed with her gloves at her suit’s latches, and managed to detach them. Then she wiggled out of it, like the weak and flaccid motions of a molting insect whose new shell was yet too soft to support it.

Now she was free of her suit, was on her hands and knees, staring at the metal floor with her own two eyes, feeling it with her own bony fingers. And then, with a force of will and a mighty complaint from every one of her joints, she grasped a railing on the wall and drew herself upright.

At this rate of spin and this length of silk, the ‘gravity’ in the pod was almost nothing. A bare 20% of Earth gravity, 20% of what she’d spent her entire life surviving, and which by rights she should be indestructible to. It was surely disheartening to see herself so weak… But perhaps fully developed strength didn’t matter tonight. To merely stand and walk, to give an introduction to human behavior however brief, that was all they needed.

As she opened the shutters of the pod window, and stood before her friends for the first time, she wondered what they would think.

At first they didn’t know what to think. They either didn’t understand what they were looking at, or didn’t understand the enormity of it, or maybe they didn’t even recognize her as herself without her suit, and thought her body was a piece of abstract furniture. It wasn’t until she began to walk, and paced the width of the pod a few times, that they started to understand the design of her, and the immense force she was under, and the strength of her legs, and the coordinated balance that kept her upright. One by one she heard the shocked realizations coming over the radio.

“That’s amazing!”

“How are you doing that?”

“He must have a crane or something built into the wall.”

“You must have a powerful heart!”

“Where else would those ever be useful??”

She hesitated at that last comment, and her smile faded. For she knew that these peoples’ culture relied entirely on thrusters, and fuel, and the delicate equations of propulsion and reaction. Wasted mass, be it clutter, garbage, or any kind of inefficiency or miscalculated baggage, was counted somewhere between a dreadful sin and an embarrassing faux pas; the nomads did not suffer things without use.

It occurred to her now that by their measure, a good portion of her physical body could be counted as waste. She looked down at herself, at her arms which weren’t as strong as they could be, at the layers of fat on her belly which she’d been meaning to shed for years, and at her thick, hard-boned, vestigial legs, for which she had no use at all in the foreseeable future, and which perhaps had become too weak to ever be used again. She also thought of her kidneys, and her liver, and the lengths of intestines, which were largely obsolete thanks to her diet on the pod’s genetically-perfected algae paste. Legs, fat, a complete digestive tract… Nose and hair and breasts and bones, space-bound castaways such as herself had no use for such things. Perhaps the reason she was so foreign to the nomads was that they had never imagined a creature like her. And they had never imagined it because, out here… It really made no sense at all.

“Legs were needed on our world.” She reminisced. “We needed them to move. To walk. Anywhere we went, our legs took us… They were my thrusters.”

“…What kind of world was this?” Keeleeticktick’s voice was quiet.

“A rock planet.” She told them, and let that sink in. “A planet named Earth. It had a great pull, and we lived our lives on its surface… It was full of… Of…” She searched her vocabulary for words of theirs which could properly carry the meaning of hers. “Steam… Ice? Gas. Covered in gas. Masses of gas. We walked on rock. Creatures walked on rock. Food grew on rock. We ate ice, ate food, and ate the gas, ate oxygen, for life…” She took a deep breath in and out to show them. “Mass was all around, all pulled down, all on the same…” She spread her palms like the line of a horizon. “Same surface…”

They were silent for a few seconds.

“Missus Fikes.” Keeleeticktick broke the silence. “I think you are a very, very long way from home.”

She nodded, in solemn and wholehearted agreement.

“Hey, uh, I don’t mean to interrupt, but how long are we gonna be spinning?” His son spoke up. “Feeling a bit sick over here, ha ha.”

With a start, she looked up through the window at the kid, who was swinging around on the other end of the line. Even such a small measure of artificial gravity had mashed him to the floor of his dingy, where his body bore more resemblance to washed-up seaweed than any kind of creature. “Oh, sorry!” She cried. “I’m so sorry! Yeah, we will spin down then. The demonstration is over.”

“Don’t worry about it, I know it looks bad, but it doesn’t really hurt at all.” He laughed. “I feel all limp and squished but uhhh yeah, I think you’re gonna have to spin it down with your thrusters. I can’t reach my controls.”

“Hang on kid, I got it.”

And for the second time in her life, but more sadly this time, she bid farewell to gravity.