“How do you know it’s him?” Lika’so asked, confused. The body was so rotted that Lika’so couldn’t even recognize the green flesh on the skull as a face.

“The necklace,” Nijo’tika said pointing to the metal chain inside the chest cavity.

“What do we do now?” asked Lika’so.

“We leave,” responded Nijo’tika.

---------------------------------------------

Alex paced around the house, reciting words and phrases in Kni’il. He had written down pages of notes over the past five days Lika’so had been teaching him. He had gone over them hundreds of times and memorized every line on each page. He had nothing left to learn until Lika’so got back.

Alex waited an hour for her to come back but he was getting restless. He decided to, against Lika’so’s orders, leave the house. He was going to do what he called “exposure learning”.

Alex had done this while trying to learn Chinese dialects. He had moved to Hong Kong for a year and in that time managed to learn to speak passable Mandarin and Cantonese. He exposed himself to the languages and made some friends, too.

Exiting the house, Alex noticed a large crowd of people in a circle about a hundred meters from him. He made his way over to it and as he did, he began to hear a beat and rhythmic speaking that rhymed every once in a while.

“What is this?” he asked one of the members of the crowd.

The crowd member said a few words. Alex didn’t know some of the words the person said but he learned that there was some sort of performance going on inside of the circle. Alex stepped into the crowd of people, trying to see what was going on. He maneuvered his way through, sliding between people and saying “nu’taka”, “sorry”.

When Alex was in view of the center of the circle, he saw and heard something that reminded him of his own world. There were two people, a man and a woman, each holding a foot-long rod that glowed blue, which they held close to their mouths. Between them was a wooden box that also glowed blue. The box was tilted on its side, the opening facing the crowd. The source of the sound came from the people but the box was amplifying it.

“Holy shit,” Alex said to himself, realizing what he was witnessing. The woman was beatboxing and the man was spitting a freestyle rap to it!

The man was rapping about the death of a friend by the hands of a foreign power. Alex couldn’t understand much of it but he still enjoyed listening. He bobbed his head to the beat and a smile began to form on his face.

The performance reminded him of the hip-hop music his co-worker, Mike, listened to. Mike was a writer for Explorers. He often listened to rap and hip-hop music to help him concentrate. He played it on the Bluetooth speakers he brought from home every day. Alex and the rest of the writers bobbed their heads and sang along with the music during lunch breaks. Mike would also take music requests. He had everybody write down their requests on a sheet of paper one at a time so everybody would get a chance to listen to their song of choice. Mike would then create a playlist based off of the list and then play it during lunch.

The man who had been rapping pointed to Alex. “Now you.” he said. “New story”. He walked up to Alex and handed him the glowing rod. The man walked behind Alex and pushed him towards the center of the circle. Alex’s heart beat faster.

Alex stared at the crowd of people. He guessed there were a hundred at least. They stared back at him with anticipation. The beatboxing woman started a new beat and Alex’s mind went into overdrive.

“Waking up in a strange land, and not in his apartment, laying in a field of grass, almost completely naked.” Alex started, “He’s led by the scent, of civilization, he enters the village, after heavy contemplation,”

'Holy shit,' Alex thought, 'I'm actually doing it.'