A new landmass appears, with a thump of displaced air that echoes across the ice.

It's small, about fifteen feet across by about fifteen feet long by about ten or fifteen feet high, with a fairly flat grassy top and rough, curved or sloping sides ending in a sort of blunt point at the bottom. The sides are mostly dirt, held together by a tangle of roots, though their grip is imperfect and a few rocky clumps are shaken loose by the shock of arrival.

It floats in the air, its lower part a few feet off the ground. Sails and fins spread around its edge catch the wind, which begins to drive it slowly north.

On the top, the open doorway of a small round hut faces a dense stand of trellised grapevines across a thin, trickling stream of clear water.

A short humanoid figure standing atop the hut lets out a whooping yell of triumph, then jumps off and scampers inside to throw on some warmer clothes.

A somewhat taller figure emerges, fluffy tail lashing behind her, to observe their surroundings and scribble some notes.

The short one dashes out again, winter-clad and sporting a compact backpack, which unfolds into a pair of artificial wings whose gold-edged red-purple feathers don't quite fully conceal the linkages beneath. She takes off to survey the area, in particular looking for any sign of a warmer climate to aim for.

If the short one goes north, then it should be warmer! The supercontinent is crescent shaped, so if she goes in any other direction, she will encounter ice or seawater.

She may notice a tower about two dozen meters tall. It looks like it's been abandoned for hundreds of years (since it has).

After flapping around for a few more minutes to confirm initial impressions, she reports back and takes the helm to steer the islet north, heading for the tower first since it's interesting and might be a good place to moor in bad weather.

A third figure, eight feet tall with feathered wings folded to her back, ducks out of the hut with a blanket to wrap gently around the trellises, protecting the grapes from the cold.

The tower has windows and a six meter long pole attached on top, where six orange flags have been attached. Or what seem to have been orange flags, since they're tattered and discolored. The flags are attached by ropes and linkages to the chamber at the top of the tower, so that they can be controlled there.

The tower has empty crates and a telescope. Near the entrance, there's a metal plaque saying PAXAREMOI GUSNOIBEJDIHU POIHA ZBASU DEHI LI NY SOXAZE GY CI JY RE DY RE. Some of the stones in the masonry of the tower have fallen out, though it (and the wooden stairs inside) still seems to be stable, if they want to enter without levitation or flight. Mooring the island to it may not be advisable – the architects of the tower did not consider the forces that may be exerted on it by moored flying islands.

Rinka diagnoses it "potentially better than pounding stakes into the ice but not by much", then drags Esri out for a second opinion.

Esri carefully copies out the alien symbols into her notebook, then agrees that a crumbling tower without any purpose-built mooring posts is a poor place to tether to if you have better options.

They continue north, gaining altitude as they go once they're no longer investigating a strange ruin.

More tundra and mountains! There's a small forest.

If they continue to travel north, they'll eventually come upon a large, four dozen meter wide geodesic dome made of glass and steel, and what seem to be three to five story tall buildings. Many of the building windows are lit. There's plants growing inside that do not seem to be adapted to living in a very cold habitat. (photo not fully canon and should be treated as flavor)

Lit windows imply residents. The islet drifts gently downward again as it approaches the dome at a sedate jogging pace.

The drone currently doing gardening sees the islet, but 'watching out for flying islets' isn't in its job description, so it ignores it.

Eventually the islet gets close enough that it can no longer ignore it and runs inside to inform people.

Other humanoids come out to look at the islet!

Wow, the drone wasn't hallucinating. There is, in fact, a flying island flying towards them. Okay.

One of them will dictate an email for a drone to transcribe and send.

Attached is my identification and location. There is a flying island flying towards us. Bond offered: two thirds of my total assets.

Raran Batan Somat.

Raran will have his drone take a picture of the island and attach it to the email. Other people send similar emails.

It seems totally unbelievable, but the other people corroborate the accounts and also put up very large bonds. So at the very least, it can be assured that it's in good faith, even though on priors they think that some sort of carbon monoxide leak type incident occurred and all of them are hallucinating.

The Imperium will scramble four interceptors to the Iskar South Pole Dome Habitat. They can travel supersonically — they should arrive in half an hour.

The islet drifts to a halt as soon as it gets within shouting distance of the dome's visible entrance, and the shortest member of the team stands on top of the hut and cups her hands in front of her mouth to yell a greeting in an unfamiliar language.

Sadly, the dome is made of layered reinforced glass with gaps for insulation, so the shouting will not be heard by the people inside. They'll be able to see their mouths opening and closing though! Only some of them are continuing to pay attention — the rest are busy collecting firearms and whatever they could scrounge up to function as armor.

None of them go outside to meet the islet or the ?people? on the islet.

The entrance is a thick metal door with a keyboard and screen on the side.

They wait around for a few minutes to see if anyone wants to say hello, then steer to the side and continue north, giving the dome a wide berth.

It's moving, it's moving! Oh, it's moving away. That's a relief...well, for them, at least. They will send further emails to the Imperial Emergency Hotline about the fact that the islet is moving away to the north.

Thank you, we've updated the interceptors of this. Their radar ranges go up to one gross kilometers, and they've established radar contact with the islet. They may be able to sense the radar if they have radio sensing capabilities.

They will try hailing it in the standard frequencies. Does it pick up? Is the islet transmitting? They will try a bunch of the other frequencies to be sure.

They adjust their flight and split up, aiming for two of them to approach head on and the other two to fly east and west so as to approach at the sides.

The islet produces no detectable transmissions, and does not react to hails. It continues to be quite slow compared to a modern aircraft, and when the interceptors show up it drifts to a halt again and the short one gets on top of the hut to wait and see if they come close enough to talk to.

Nope! They continue to stay at least a kilometer away from it, circling. They repeat their transmissions over and over and in different frequencies and encoding, and also continue to attempt detecting any transmissions from the islet.

Eventually, one of them is ordered to land a kilometer in front of the islet, in the direction of its travel. A humanoid emerges from the cockpit wearing a heavy hooded coat, and alights. They stand to the side of the interceptor, looking at the islet, standing still.

The other interceptors continue to circle, though they start to fly farther away and higher up.

The islet waits for the humanoid to emerge from the landed interceptor, then starts moving in that direction again, slowly and with frequent adjustments to maintain a predictable course despite shifting winds. When it reaches the same shouting distance as before with the dome, Rinka climbs on top of the hut and tries yelling another hello.

The person is wearing a flight helmet with a visor and breathing tube, but it does have a microphone inside and a speaker attached to the suit! He will turn up the gain on the speaker and try recreating the same sounds Rinka does in her direction.

The next thing she yells is a question.

Ah. The pilot realizes that this is most likely an actual First Contact situation and they should like. Do the procedures for that. He did not anticipate doing linguistics fieldwork today.

There's a delay of several minutes while the pilot receives guidance from Command. Eventually, he goes back into the cockpit and gets the waterproof black and white e-reader. It's about the size of an A4 piece of paper.

He holds it up and tries to make something like a welcoming or approaching gesture, spreading out his arms to the side, then swinging them to front, and then pulling them back in.

The Imperium is now scrambling to get linguists and diplomats that are near the area to immediately be sent there. It will take longer than it took the interceptors to arrive, probably a few hours.

After a brief discussion between the three figures on the islet, Rinka spreads her wings and takes off, gliding in for a landing a polite wingspan-and-a-half away from the stranger and then approaching from there on foot with a friendly greeting at a less distance-carrying volume.

The pilot does not have the requisite impassivity training not to be floored by the wings and the flight, but the flight helmet conceals his reaction. He says the same 'hello' as the first shout.

He currently has the e-reader set to a clock app. The clock displayed is a 24 hour clock — all time is expressed in 24 hour notation in Zmavlimu'e. The time now is 15:32:23. It's updating in real time.

He holds out the e-reader so Rinka can see it. Does she react to it?

(Up close, Rinka is a bit less than one meter tall, with a chunky hourglass build. Her hair, kept in a thick braid that reaches past her knees, is a dark purplish red-gold that matches her feathers.)

She's fascinated by the device, and asks aloud and also by attempted communicative mime whether she can grab it for a closer look.

The pilot is average height for a xepri, so that's two meters tall exactly. The pilot will hold the e-reader closer, but will not let her hold it. Not yet.

Once she's seen it, he will point to the sun. Point to the sun, then to the current hour marker. Then, point to the east, then point to 0400h. Then, point to the west, then point to 0800h. Then, he'll point back to 0400h, then slide his finger around the circumference to land on the 0800h marker, then point to the east, and then move his arm, tracing out the path that the sun would take around the sky in a day.

She nods along, though she seems cautious in her understanding, and tries to confirm her impression of the meaning by sketching a crude sundial on the ground with her foot and standing over it to make a shadow, then gesturing at the shadow's future passage around its arc.

Nodding in Zmavlimu'e means acknowledgement, though the pilot won't assume that. It does seem that she understands what he's trying to convey. 

Next thing: He points to the current time, then draws two humanoid figures. He draws a circle, a box, four lines emanating from the box, then two wings in the snow using his hand. He points to it, then points to her. Then, he draws a similar figure, though this one has ten lines emanating, six short, four long. He points to it, then points to himself.

There's a pause of a minute while he confirms with Command that they're planning on sending two more people. He draws two more ten-lined figures besides the original two, spaced away from the original, then points to 1700h on the clock. Points again to 1700h, then points to the sky, then swinging his arms from that point to a space besides the interceptor.

Rinka nods along to that too, though she's puzzled by a few of the details. Despite the language barrier, she keeps narrating aloud as she does her own gestural rendition of the concept of two tall figures descending from the sky to stand next to this fellow at roughly a-bit-past-noon on her crude sundial.

That's mostly correct, though he'll point again to the clock and point to the sundial as to the approximate location of where he thinks the shadow would fall at 1700h. He's assuming she understands that in the extreme latitudes, the sun varies a lot in rising and setting time. It's not always at 0600 and 1800h. But yes, the part about people descending from the sky after some time is correct.

She draws two different scenes on the ground and explains them by gesture, still speaking aloud as she goes: one scene where the small winged figure returns to the islet to wait for the two taller figures to arrive, and one scene where the small winged figure remains with the one taller figure and continues speaking. Which would he prefer?

Waiting for Command as to what he should pick...he points to the one where the winged figure waits on the islet.

She nods and waves and says goodbye and flaps back to her islet.

Then he will return to his interceptor.

An hour and a half later, a helicopter arrives. There's three entities inside, though only two leave. The two who leave are wearing brightly colored loose rubber suits of a spiraling red and yellow pattern. It looks like diagonal stripes, on the suits. There's a clear polymer faceplate that shows their face. At the top of the faceplate is a camera, microphone, and speaker. One of them is empty handed whereas the other is carrying large packs of stuff.

They approach near where the drawings are and wait.

Rinka re-emerges from the hut very shortly after the helicopter's approach becomes audible, and waits for the strangers to land and disembark before she flies down to greet them. When she does, she's carrying in her hand two replicas of the clay pendant necklace she's wearing: a chunky geometric flower, its petals alternating vibrant blue and shining white, glazed to a glossy sheen.

Rinka will be able to see that the two entities that are facing her aren't wearing a flight helmet with a shaded faceplate, so their faces will be visible. They don't have hair, not even eyebrows and eyelashes, and otherwise look like humans — though their bone structure seems 'pointier', with their brow ridges, jaws, chins and cheekbones more prominent. Their foreheads also seem like they are covered by shell.

The diplomat thinks Rinka's necklaces are absolutely stunning, and he has to make an effort to draw his eyes away from it and back to her. Their faces and body language do not observably change upon her presenting them, and they make no effort to take them. The one who is holding the packs does open them — the packs seem to contain books.

The packs seem to contain two copies of each book, and the diplomat takes out two titled Pixra Vlaste co Manri Balgugbau. The two hardcover books are oxblood red with the title in gold, and the middle of it has a spiral of gold set in a square, so as to achieve a red and yellow spiral effect.

When they don't react to her offering them the pendants, she tries holding up a pendant and miming putting it on the one who had trouble looking away from them, to somewhat comical effect since she would need a stepladder to reach his head from ground level. She does also show an interest in the books, but the necklace question seems to be a higher priority for her at the moment.

Ah. The alien wants them to put on the alien artifact necklace thing. Well. Regardless of the hazmat suits, they're still going to go into quarantine after meeting them, so. And it's less problematic if they don't need to open the suits to put the thing on.

Rather than fully obeying what she seems to be asking them to do, the diplomat will take the pendant and put it on his accompanying drone, rather than himself. They put it on top of the suit, though the necklace is around where the entity's neck would be. Does anything happen?

The alien turns to address the drone and says, "Right, can you understand me now, then?" in the same alien language she's been speaking all this time, which the drone, having just put on a translation artifact, can now comprehend fully and even have a sense of how to respond in the same language if he tries.

The drone understands but does not speak or react in any way since it wasn't and hasn't been authorized to do so!

The diplomat does see that the drone hasn't exploded or anything and will ask it to report, and the drone will say that it has now acquired the ability to understand their language.

This totally does not accord with their understandings of physics and linguistics and psychology, but flying islets weren't in accordance with their understanding of physics anyway. So, the diplomat will proceed to put on the necklace also.

"Hello. Does this artifact grant fluency in your language?" He idly considers if the artifact could read their minds, and if this is how it's able to do translation. Oh well. He was selected for this in part because he has a low security clearance, so it's not possible for him to leak anything nonpublic through his thoughts.

"It grants fluency in any language you hear spoken while you're wearing it, for a little while after you hear some - mine would let me talk to you just fine if you spoke your own language at me, I just wasn't sure how to say so without demonstrating. It doesn't work as well on writing, I might be able to puzzle out your book a bit if I tried but I wouldn't be able to write back unless I learned how the long way."

"Our language has weak audiovisual isomorphism: that is to say, the written language and the spoken language are bijective phonemically. If I read out the text to you, would you understand it?"

He will then offer one of the copies to Rinka, and open his own. It's illustrated. He turns to a page that shows the day sky. The parts are labeled zmasolri, mecysolri, tsani, dilnu, tumsfe, tankoi, meclunra, zmalunra. Mecysolri, Zmalunra and Meclunra are currently not visible in the sky — Zmavliterdi is a circumbinary planet. From the illustration and description, Zmasolri is a Type G star and Mecysolri is Type K.

"You may keep the copy we are offering you. It is offered at no cost and if you accept, it will be your property."

"Thanks." She grabs the offered book and hangs onto it while she studies the opened copy. "Having it read to me helps a lot, yeah. Uh, if knowing where you stand about stuff being passed around is important to you - the necklaces I gave you belong to my crewmates, but we can replace them without too much trouble, so if you want to keep them you can, and if you want to give them back we'd appreciate it in the short term but it wouldn't make a big difference in the long term."

Huh. Her words imply that they don't pay much attention to ownership? Maybe if you live in a world where you have flying islands, it's not so necessary to care about material things.

"We can return them at your request. In treating with you, we will refrain from plans that assume taking ownership of the necklaces. And yes, I can read out the dictionary to you, or any of the works here. Is it more helpful to you to learn grammar or vocabulary?" The diplomat has copies of Gerna le Manri Balgugbau.

"Given that you have translation artifacts, it's also possible that learning language is less important to you. If so, I can show different books." Yes, he's fishing for information! It's informative what they decide to focus on!

"I like the thought of being able to read your language, and I bet my crewmates will like it even more, so language as a place to start is fine by me. Do you want to come up to the islet to talk? We can rig up a shelter to get out of the cold a bit and you can meet the other two. Or we can stay here if you'd rather, I'm pretty cozy in my cold-weather gear."

Should he come up to the islet? Command orders him to do so. Tarban is super apprehensive but he's well trained enough not to show it. Hopefully their cameras and microphones are and will still be usefully transmitting.

"We would also be very pleased to learn your language. And we would be pleased to come to your islet." 

How is the islet boarding process like.

Rinka takes wing to get up onto the islet, lowers it until the lowest roots on the bottom are touching snow, then kicks loose a rope ladder from one of many firmly anchored posts around the islet's rim.

As she's doing this, the other two are setting up a sort of tent enclosing much of the islet's surface, held up by the trellis on one side and the hut on the other and temporary supports in between, with sturdy canvas walls that block the wind and allow some relatively warm air to begin collecting inside.

Tarban is soooooo greedy* that Rinka can just fly.

The two of them will take the rope ladder up, the drone attaching the bags to its shoulder to be able to climb. They will wait patiently for the setting up to happen — does the setting up happen materialistically or is there ✨ magic ✨ involved? Also it's so wild that they have crops growing on the islet, though really the fact that an islet can fly at all is already really wild. Adding a finite number to infinity does not make it bigger.

*Zmavlire'a use the term 'greedy' when you want something that someone has, but you don't begrudge them having it, in contrast to 'envious'.

Setup seems fully materialistic; the only plausibly magical item involved is a great big clay pot that the silver-haired alien with the snow leopard tail lugs out of the hut, which is full of hot coals that only begin tangibly radiating heat once she takes off the lid.

Rinka shrugs off her wingpack after sealing the tent behind the visitors, and loosens her coat once Esri brings out the heater.

"So, I'm Rinka, and that's Faelin," the eight-foot-tall one with homegrown wings, "and Esri," the silver-haired one who's quite short by local standards but comfortably in the middle between Rinka and Faelin. "Haven't got your names yet, but Esri, they gave us this book" (she passes it over) "and seemed willing to teach their language out of it."

Silver-furred snow leopard ears perk up interestedly, distinguishing themselves from the surrounding hair.

"I am Tarban, this is Sint."

Tarban lacks the discernment to know that Faelin's wings are homegrown and not storebought, but is very impressed internally regardless.

"And yes, I would be very pleased to teach you Standard Imperial. It is the language of government in our country and our laws are written in it. It is the most widely spoken language here" because they mandate that everyone learn it.

Sint puts down its bags on the ground.

Esri bounces a little in place and gets out her notebook and pen. "Please do!"

"And let us know if there's anything you need to be more comfortable," Rinka adds, dragging a wooden folding chair out of the hut and offering it to Tarban. "We're not best equipped for hospitality but we do have food, water, and chairs, and might be able to come up with more if there's something you're missing."

"Chairs and a table would be good." What is the lighting situation in the tent? He might request better lighting. "We've already eaten and drunk, though thank you for offering." And also because it's very inadvisable to be eating and drinking the alien food and water before testing it because it might be contaminated. They already have tubes and water reservoirs in their suits if they get thirsty.

Tarban will pull out paper and pen also. He has a ballpoint pen.

Faelin is bringing out a folding table and a second chair.

And Rinka is ducking back into the hut to grab some glowing baubles of glazed white clay which she hands to Faelin to string from the tent roof, providing a soft but decently functional light,

while Esri takes the table and chair and sets them up excitedly for language lessons.

The string lights are So Pretty! He will not make any reactions to it, though. It has not been authorized.

"Are you more interested in grammar or vocabulary?" He did ask this previously but he didn't get an answer, so he's awkwardly asking it again. Not that he is showing the internal awkwardness. That would not be in accordance with his orders.

"I think grammar is a more sensible place to start since it provides a framework for understanding the language more clearly," says Esri.

"I can teach grammar first."

The author presents the language as being like Lojban because he is fluent in it, though it's not diegetically Lojban.

Diegetically, Standard Imperial only has verbs, or predicates, with arguments being variables passed into verbs but which aren't explicitly stated (i.e. there is no syntactic difference between a matrix predicate and a relative clause). Variables are passed as arguments into multiple predicates through adjacency or anaphoric pronouns. Words inflect based on the number and type of their parameters. 

Zmavlimu'ean variables can be of the following syntactic types: entity, event, property, relation, number, quote. Most predicate parameters only accept certain types of variables, and so the parameters that a variable is passed into have to agree with each other. Otherwise it's a type error and is ungrammatical. Variables have static type, but there are helper predicates (helpredicates) that create a new variable with similar meaning and different type. Here are the particles and inflections that let you open clauses to encode events, properties, relations, numbers, and quotes, and here is how you close them.

There are also semantic types that are subclassifications of each syntactic type. For example, the 'entity' type has the subclassifications 'person' and 'nonperson'. There are separate personal pronouns for persons and nonpersons — they're bijective. There's an first person pronoun for nonpersons. The pronoun section doesn't mention that it doesn't have grammatical gender, it merely doesn't talk about it.

There are no exceptions in the grammar and all words of the same class have to work the same way. It's a point of pride, though Tarban won't say that explicitly. It's possible for it to be parsed by machines and there are programs you can run to check for syntax and type correctness. Code for such parsers in several different languages (which are not necessarily meant to all be read by computers) are available as an appendix at the back of the book. The parsers don't natively catch semantic type errors, since semantic type isn't expressed morphologically through inflection, though it's possible to use dictionaries to check for it.

While this initial lesson is ongoing, Rinka brings out another chair for Sint and then keeps passing lights to Faelin until the whole tent is quite pleasantly lit.

Esri, meanwhile, is thoroughly fascinated by the features of the language and then even more thoroughly sidetracked by the introduction of computers as a concept.

"You can teach your language to a machine?? How? What does it mean for a machine to understand a language?"

Sint would not normally sit, but Tarban orders the drone sit because it feels awkward, given that their hosts have deliberately already put out chairs for all of them.

"It's not...understanding. It's just checking whether a piece of text is grammatically valid. Similar to how you can use machines to add and subtract, though here, we've structured our language to be especially amenable to checking by machines. Well, the aspects that make it easy for machines to check also make it easier for people to learn — the latter was the original design intention. It's possible to make a nonsensical or meaningless sentence that is still grammatically valid, and which the machine would say is grammatically valid."

"We don't have machines that add or subtract - at least, I assume you're talking about something more autonomous than an abacus."

Huh. He would have thought the Magical Flying Islet Society would have calculation magic.

He's going to wait a few moments for Command to say something if they think he shouldn't explain. Command says it's fine.

"I can demonstrate." He takes out a similar model e-reader to the one the pilot had. It's also only black and white. Functionally it's actually closer to a smartphone, though the display is e-ink and it's a lot wider and taller than Earth ones. This one is touchscreen.

He puts it to a calculator app and writes with the stylus. It has OCR, so the handwritten numbers are interpreted by the computer. He reads out as he writes.

"One gross five dozen to the power of two divided by eight times three equals... nine great gross four dozen and six."

"I understand the theory of how it works, though I don't know how to create one or how it works in practice, except for the very simplest mechanical models."

"I can begin to think how I might make a machine that adds and subtracts by moving objects around somehow. I cannot begin to think how I might make a machine that recognizes handwriting," she says, staring in fascination at the e-ink display. "—also we use numbers differently, ours go by tens, but I think I can calculate the translations in my head."