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Weiss in þereminia
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"...It's kinda hard to explain..."

Wait, are they doing language learning or interrogation, here? (She thinks of an old meme: Both? Both. Both is good.)

"I eat," she changes languages to Noten, whose numbers make the most sense in her opinion, and counts off fingers, "One, two, three, four, five, kinds of thing."

From left to right: A blank spot. Ordinary food, bread, meat, fruit, etc. Obvious confectionary- Candy, sweet pastries, donuts, cake. Another blank spot. And then, a crescent moon sending down a visible white moonbeam shining on a mini-Weiss.

"Leaf... Bird... Muffin... Rocks... Hmm..."

...She'll take notes in phonetic Noten floating in air for now.

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... uhhhh.

Okay, this is normal, actually. Of course the alien eats something weird. The scientists were probably already worrying about whether they would have to synthesize right-handed meals in a lab. Would Weiss have ended up with a nutrient deficiency if þereminia didn't have a moon?

Kyaris thinks for a moment, and then nods and erases her whiteboard. She makes another 'wait' gesture, and goes off into the shelves. When she returns, she has an unfolded space blanket, an uncapped gallon glass jug of water, a rolled up self-inflating inflatable air mattress, and a flashlight.

She sets these things on the floor in front of the table, and then walks to the door.

She grasps the door and opens it. "I open the door."

She closes it again. "I close the door. I can close the door."

She mimes biting her knuckle. "I can eat myself. I cannot eat Weiss."

She opens the door again and steps through it to stand on the step. Behind her, the street is deserted, other than a group of people standing off to one side down the block. "Weiss can open the door. Weiss can close the door. I can close the door. I cannot open the door."

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Wait, is "can", can, or may? Does she even have 'eat' right???

She feels her energy ebbing away. Her invisible-self hops up onto the table and joins where her illusion-self is sitting, and then the illusion-self expires without anything seeming to change, reclaiming a bit of energy. They don't seem to have sent in the cops immediately, and she doesn't feel a SWAT team breathing right outside the door with her whiskers, at least...

...She whips up the Noten alphabet in midair and starts pointing to letters and assigning them sounds.

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Okay, sure. Kyaris can repeat sounds (and make sure to stand enough to the side that her colleague with the camera in the backup group can stream it to the linguists at the university).

She is not really a languages person, but it's not actually difficult to learn a phonetic alphabet; everybody knows a handful of ciphers, anyway.

She remains standing on the step, in case Weiss decides to close the door in her face.

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About half-way into the alphabet, another golf cart arrives, and one of Kyaris's colleagues comes to the door with a selection platter of sandwiches and pastries. He sets it just inside the door, and then slides it into the room, before retreating back to the group of people hanging back down the street.

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-Uuuuuuuugh. Frustration!

Illusion: One person talking to her.

Half a dozen rooms with a dozen people each staring at a screen that shows her!

And she herself kind of waves in vague frustration about it. Gods, there was supposed to be a masquerade or something, this is just... It's way too much of a thing, a huge, impersonal system trying to make sense of her and UGH.

Facepalm. Deep breath.

"This is alphabet of Noten. You," vague wave to indicate it's a general you, "have a alphabet?"

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Kyaris winces. She ... probably cannot get the entirety of Smaller Continent Emergency Services and all of the linguists, xenobiologists, biologists, and diplomats they've contacted to stop paying attention to the tushot alien. Let alone the people from the First Contact Rehearsal Festival, who are probably losing their minds and also trying to learn this alphabet right along with her.

As the one person who the alien is talking to, she has plenty of leeway on how to handle this. But probably not that much.

Also — she made a tactical mistake, leaving the whiteboard inside. Oh, well. She steps back inside, moving slowly over to the whiteboard in case Weiss interrupts her, and writes out Smaller Continent Official Language's syllabary on it.

"I have an alphabet," she agrees, because if the alien is fed up with their pronouns, she doesn't even want to try getting into alphabet versus syllabary versus abjad versus abugida.

She thinks for a moment, and then writes in the Noten letters she's learned next to the corresponding syllables. There isn't a perfect overlap in the phonological inventories of the languages, but there is a reasonably typical overlap. She points and makes sounds for the rest.

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Yay. Alphabet... Sort of.

...This will go faster if they learn Noten. And they certainly seem freakin' eager enough. She pulls a few books from her tail.

One: Parables of the Light Gods, compiled by Lineaus chosen of Erius. Cover art is the eight symbols that were on the gold coin she didn't sell earlier, plus a fox head at the top of the 'wheel'.

Two: Cuisines of the World, by 'General Gourmand', an obvious penname. Cover art is line art of a steaming bowl of ramen.

Three: The Essential Field Guide for your Journey. Foraging, Campcraft, Monsters, Navigation, Foreign Manners, and More. No listed author, the Guild comes out with one every five years or so. No cover art, very rugged and worn softcover copy.

The pages of each seem to be woodblock-printed.

 

She offers them when she stands to grab the sandwich tray, along with an illusion of a sunset-sunrise-books return and people taking photos of the pages with a phone.

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Can Weiss just ... produce books using her weird collective-hallucination-inducing magic? That is so cool.

She takes the books with a nod, backs out of the room, and closes the door. Maybe she will get reprimanded for closing it instead of drawing out the conversation, but ... Weiss was clearly pretty done with this whole thing, and now they have actual books to work with.

She walks over to the congregated group of experts, carefully hands the book over to a runner who will take them back to the library to be scanned, and then catches up on what the various scientists noticed during her conversation and what the plan is now.

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The local branch of the Archive has a high-resolution document scanner, for approximately the same reason a church has a baptismal font, even if it's not often called for. The books are carefully scanned and saved to the Archive within two hours. A coalition of cities from across the planet all agree that these books need to be in the public domain, and promise to pay as much money as it takes to make that happen, once they've managed to figure out authorship and copyright information.

Shortly after that, the books go up on the Network. And shortly after that, a noticeable percentage of the population starts trying to learn Noten.

 

The thing is — þereminia is prepared for this. þereminians are already a little weird about language; it's not uncommon for life-partners to invent a naturalistic language from whole cloth that nobody else knows, and speak it to each other exclusively. It's sometimes problematic to go through someone's effects after death, and learn that they have labeled everything in a completely unknown language. It's not even completely out of the Overton window for someone to invent a conlang to speak while cosplaying and stick to it to the exclusion of any existing language.

þereminia is the kind of world where ... well ...

 

Every hexade, þereminia has a First Contact Rehersal Festival. On other planets, a celebration like that might involve something like emergency preparedness drills or simulating a disaster. On þereminia, it goes like this:

Six years in advance, just after the last one wraps up, volunteer linguists, anthropologists, and xenobiologists begin collaborating on designing a new alien species and culture, complete with a dominant language. Four years in advance, they publish all of the materials behind a 'spoiler seal'. Everyone on the planet gets the chance to sign up for the next festival, on either the human side or the alien side — although tickets are usually sufficiently expensive that only a limited number of people will be able to attend physically. The people who sign up for the alien side get access to all the spoilered materials, including official language learning materials — they have a limited amount of time to reach fluency before the festival.

Over the next three and a half years, people produce language learning materials, fiction, poetry, personal diaries, etc. all written in the new language. They're all kept behind spoiler seal, to avoid giving anything away. If someone on the 'human' side accidentally sees any of the alien language, they have to withdraw from the event.

Half a year before the festival, everyone on the alien side has the chance to pass an aptitude test: a combined linguistic fluency and cultural knowledge test, to find who will be able to play the most authentic aliens. The top winners are flown to the festival free of charge. On the first day, they simulate a crash landing, or a transporter failure, or a completely successful radio link — and the festival is begun.

 

All of this to say? Deciphering a completely unknown language from three random books? That's actually a pretty hard challenge, even for the best linguists.

But it's a challenge þereminia is completely prepared for.

By the time the sun rises again in Central River City, a surprising number of people will speak limited Noten. With a stilted vocabulary and a strange accent, for sure, but capable of discussing the basic concrete things mentioned in Weiss's books.

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It probably doesn't hurt that she'll also tell a few parables out loud to the camera, with accompanying illusion shows depicting the described events. Some just random ones she remembers, some ones she likes. And Noten labels for characters and objects.

She relaxes some doing this.

They're parables; The stories are simplistic and flat at best, but...

Two clans have a feud over something from the past; It rarely escalates to violence, but it certainly includes suspicion. There is a crop blight, and one of the villages had unwisely planted mostly the same plant. Nobody wants to share, citing their own needs, citing that the others are obviously evil, asking why should their hard work go to another's mouth, but one young man says they ought to, that it is the right thing to do, and stands stubbornly even when everyone is shouting at him, and over time convinces folks, and both villages have a very lean but not starving-lean year, and next year the second village gives gifts to the first - furniture, and stones for repairs - and people, having met each other and done kindness to each other, are reluctant to go back to the old feud again. All it took to save a village was one brave man calling out for what is right.

A group of masons are all building sections of a wall. Two of them just want to get it done and get paid, and go through as quickly as possible, using cheap materials and not digging enough of a foundation. The third repeatedly warns them that they need to be diligent; This wall ought to stand for a century if it's well-made. One of the two masons is shamed but the third just laughs. The two diligent masons then tear down the lazy one's work and re-do it themselves, leaving the third mason to collect some of the reward for doing nothing. But the people hear this story, and nobody wants to hire the third mason, and he has trouble getting work for years. And when the monsters come, the walls held beautifully. It was because of hard work done properly that all was well in the end, and of course, those who did good work were paid fairly and those who did poor work were paid fairly, and less, in the end.

There once was a sorceress who had magical control over water. She could command the rain to start or stop, if there was any water in the clouds above. She could hold back a river, at least for a short time. She could turn water into a stream so thin and powerful it was like a sharp blade. She lived in a tower on a hill, and would fly out on wings made of mist to help the people. She stopped rains from falling where they were not wanted, and guided them elsewhere instead. She used the might of water to carve canals and irrigation channels. She drowned and cut the monsters of the woods who had hungry, evil designs on the people. She was beloved by most, and utterly miserable. Rarely was she in her tower home, her comfort-place... And one day, when she returned home, a group from a nearby town, angry over imagined slights, and fearful, and jealous, murdered her in her sleep. The fox goddess, Tamamo, laughed at the sorceress's misfortune and lamentations, and offered her the chance to become a fox-spirit instead of returning to the great wheel of reincarnation. The sorceress accepted, and became a fox, and spent a long time healing from her mental wounds, and eventually was happier than before now that she did not have guilt and duty weighing on her.

"...I'm not this person," she makes sure to clarify. "This person might not be a person and is just words. All of these people are just words."

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Well, the fact that the illusion-illustration of the sorceress doesn't look like her makes it pretty clear, probably.

The gathered people follow along with her parables as best they can. For some of them, (including Kyaris, who is currently playing the role of sitting within polite conversation distance and looking attentive) this is not very well. Others do a bit better, and start piecing together enough words to have guesses at what she's saying.

There's a lot of quiet coordination in the background. The linguists providing best-guess translations, the diplomats talking about why she's here, and the Emergency Services personnel — whose job it is to suspect the worst.

"Look, let me just lay the facts out," one of them back at dispatch says. "She comes here and doesn't make contact with us — she sneaks away and tries to go unnoticed. When we insist on tracking her down, she shows a vision only to Emergency Services personnel implying that she doesn't want to deal with crowds but that she will deal with us. Several of her stories mention monsters, but they're not about monsters; the monsters are just sort of a background fact of the stories. And then her last story is about a powerful fox-magic-user who protected a group of people from monsters, even though they didn't know she was protecting them, and even though doing so made her miserable. Then those people interfered, and she went away, and presumably they got eaten by monsters."

They spread their hands to emphasize the implicit point.

"And she says that she isn't the woman from the story, the linguists think, but then why tell that story specifically? I think she's trying to talk around something dangerous. Either a literal monster, or a metaphorical 'monster' that we don't know we need protecting from and that she's here to fix."

There's general nodding around the table.

    "When you put it like that, it does make a certain amount of sense. We should see if we can get Kyaris to confirm — see about having the linguists put a set of questions together."

    "And halt nonessential movement into and out of the city. She appeared here, and we don't have the manpower to establish a perimeter around the whole city — she had to go looking for whatever it was, she didn't encounter it immediately, so it might have gotten out of the immediate area. But we can at least establish a city-level quarantine, just in case."

"I think the Disease Eradication Coalition actually already set up a medical quarantine, but we can add to it, for sure."

    "Okay — so let's think about what to ask specifically ..."

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And when Weiss reaches a stopping point between stories, Kyaris gestures for attention, and phonetically repeats the prompt from her earpiece.

"Do follow a monster you?" she asks. "The people in this village do pay what is fair of finding a monster."

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"...Eh? No, no monsters here. They..."

She stands and leans out the door for a moment, focusing her senses and taking a deep breath, ears pivoting around.

"No monsters," she says confidently. "No monsters in... How fast a person can walk for two hours. The stories about monsters because there's kind of a lot of monsters on Tirra. The gods... Uhh... I hate how ten thousand people are going to over-interpret everything I say but whatever, ugh... Also this is a city, not a village. I am here by accident - accident is: Oops, I dropped that! - I thought it would be fun so I let the accident happen. If I go back to that bank I can try to poke at the rift more and see what it's up to. Eh... Rift is... A tunnel between worlds. They just happen sometimes, kitsunes can go through them the best. Monsters are really bad though, so good idea to worry."

She's using illusions to help with this probably nonsensical string of Noten words; Including two different green-blue-white marbles, and the sun inching across the sky to demonstrate 'hours', and so on.

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... yeah, Kyaris got none of that. She really hopes the linguists are doing better.

She feels kind of useless, honestly. She signed up to be a community mediator, not play first-contact face with an alien. She is using exactly none of her job skills except having nonthreatening body language. Well, at least the actual diplomat is getting here in an hour or so.

There's a brief pause, and then they give her another utterance to relay.

"Is a kitsune you?"

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It really sucks that she's not having fun either. Sheesh...

Nodnod. "Yeah. I'm sorry, none of this is very fun, is it?"

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Weiss is really extraordinarily expressive. She thinks it's the ears. Kyaris has an easier time reading body language than a lot of people do — and an easier time projecting it, for that matter — and she is pretty sure that Weiss doesn't want to be doing this. Which seems like a pretty serious problem, honestly.

She engages in a whispered conversation via her earpiece, and a moment later the linguists have a new utterance constructed for her.

"The third mason: he is reward for now and poor for years. Our language: shortsighted. Village with all the same crops: shortsighted. Miserabling you is shortsighted," she explains.

"You are kitsune. We are human. A human is miserable —"

She flips her social status light to red and mimes cringing away.

"— they tell the humans, the humans return away. The human lives alone."

She flips her social status light to blue and straightens up again.

"The human stops is miserabling, the humans return. You are kitsune. Is stops miserabling you a human stopping? Is stops miserabling you a different stopping?"

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"Yes, no... Don't know how to say."

You know what? Fine. They're using it as a legible symbol, that people switch in and out of, not as some kind of disability marker, so. With a dramatic stamp of her pawfoot, her clothes sprout streamers and highlights of red all over.

She goes and drinks some water and paces the shelves, tail lashing in agitation.

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Kyaris closes the door on her and walks away.

Ten minutes later, she is on the phone with the someone from the central office quietly yelling at them.

"I told you she looked uncomfortable. What is the very first guess about the situation I made? What was the first thing I said? You hear that there's an invisible alien and the idea that they might be tushot doesn't make it into your top three guesses? Yes, I know that she — That doesn't mean — No, don't hand me off!"

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"Mediator Kyaris. I think that you have had a very stressful day, and predict that you will regret speaking like that to Coordinator Varmin when you've had time to reflect. But — you have done a good job. Speaking to someone with no shared cultural context is hard, and you've managed to get our guest to tell us about several of their needs that we would otherwise struggle to accommodate."

Tatenika's voice is simple, elegant, and compelling.

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"Diplomat Tatenika! Ma'am!" Kyaris exclaims. "... yes, you're probably right. You're not going to try intruding on Weiss until she opens the door, right? It's just —"

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"Don't tell your oragami instructor how to fold bedsheets," Tatenika jokes. "No, we'll set up in the area, but I have no intention of damaging the rapport you've been able to build so far. Go report to your local coordinator and see what they want you to be doing. I suspect they'll tell you to go home and rest, but that's not my call to make."

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"Yes, ma'am," Kyaris agrees. "And ma'am ... good luck."

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"Thank you, Kyaris," Tatenika says — and whether it is genuine sincerity or thousands of hours of practice Kyaris can't tell, but she feels reassured. Tatenika hangs up the phone, and then turns back to her assistant with a hastily constructed set of Noten flash cards.

"Okay, Mevet, I think we have time for one more pass before landing —"

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And so they leave her alone with the sandwiches and the shelves full of supplies. If her ears are sensitive enough, they might be able to hear the sound of people going to work outside, but otherwise nothing will disturb her.

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