“If when you wake up, you’re heavily sensorily deprived, gagged, bound to an immobile surface, cut off from non-verbal and networked communications, and the first thing you perceive is someone telling you that everything is going to be fine so long as you cooperate… maybe it still won’t end up being the worst day of your life. Maybe you’re just the victim of a prank in very poor taste.”
-Sermon from an unidentified Lorbish priest
“You’ve got no shortage of questions, I’m sure. But let’s cover the important stuff first.”
The envoy had stepped from the circular dish-bowl thing, and had managed to talk for around a hundred heartbeats without anyone getting stabbed or attacked. All around the strange human’s makeshift auditorium, envoys slowly and carefully interwove themselves. The comfortable unambiguity of the alien nature of the visitors, combined with the inoffensiveness of the delivered speech, had calmed things down… for now.
Ktsn saw some envoys who were most certainly not human. Some of them approached a villager in multiples. Several others navigated around specific villagers, leaving distinct gaps. She found herself uncertain as to whether she was getting more confused or less.
“To reiterate what has already been said,” the disk-rider lectured, with one hand pointing skyward, “you are all now residents of the place named Rhaagm. You see, there was a problem which caused your home to suffer a bit of a terrible inconvenience. No; let’s be honest, your home was in dire straits - your village, yes, but also your planet. If things continued down that route, you would have had to contend with awesome, horrible creatures. ‘Beasts,’ we call them.”
The newcomer gestured with a hand. Suddenly, a swarm of geometric textures appeared in midair above the circular vehicle. They fleshed out, carved themselves. In a heartbeat, they left a midnight-colored shape roughly half a body-length in size. It depicted a creature which was composed of a bulbous posterior, legs that weren’t much longer than Ktsn’s hands, and a set of jaws that seemed to rip it in half down to its midpoint.
When it began animating with a lunging snap, the creature’s speed made it less of a fast motion and more of a black stroke through the air.
“These things are extremely dangerous, and able to invade places, like the realm that your planet called home, under the proper conditions. Part of those conditions - something that is called a ‘type nine event’ - had been met recently. With that in mind, prudence dictated that we remove your world from-”
Ktsn was picking up the general vibe of the dissertation even without understanding its specific verbiage. “There was a problem, we fixed it.” She got turned around, though, when she tried to grasp the nature of the solution. The visitors from the sky had… abducted the planet? A huge number of unanswered less-vital questions rattled around her brain.
How did these strangers speak her language?
How long had they been watching her people?
And more important than all of these, why were they being so helpful?
Glancing to where her father stood nervously beside a hulking horned creature, he seemed to have many of the same inquiries.
“Hello. Ktsn Wdondf Daephod?” asked a voice to her side.
She turned in its direction, then looked up. And up.
The human that had come along next to her would have been the tallest upright living creature she’d ever encountered in person, if not for a couple of the others milling about. The one beside her father was such an example.
“Yes,” she said to it. “Him?” She assumed “him” based on several commonalities she observed between the tall person and Thomas.
“Ah! Nice to meet you. I’m your caretaker, for the time being.”
The human’s lanky steps carried him around to her side, standing cleanly in her right field of view. He drew a little bit close for comfort, when others following behind him needed to make their own ways through the crowd. Even so, she kept calm as the figure came near enough for her to get a good scenting of his strange form. His pale flesh looked almost like a grub’s, his smell reminded her of fresh-turned soil after a rain, and his accent sounded just as weirdly hollow as the lecturer still going on and on.
“Call me Eihks,” said the human. “Eihks Richard,” he clarified, and Ktsn nearly toppled over as her legs wheeled around.
“What did you just say!?” she demanded, and the tall human stepped away. His face contorted as though it would fold in on itself. He spoke more slowly, his frame crooking backward, then weaving forward again.
“My name,” he enunciated carefully, “is Eihks Richard. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Ktsn noticed that his biglottal vowels and a fair number of consonants were, in fact, coming from the back of his neck.
“I…”
Wow. She felt dream-grass wobbly in the knees, looking up at the man, as her encounter with Thomas ran back through her mind once more. Tangible proof that she’d not been just having a terribly vivid fabulous sleep-vision. She’d remembered him; now she simply needed to learn what “You’ll be a boon to him in time” actually meant.
“... think I may know you,” she said to… Exw. How did one…
“Escs,” she tried.
The man blinked at her, rapidly, then she found herself leaning back as he crouched closer, eyes narrowing.
“Eihks,” he replied. Soft yet strong; iron wrapped in gauze. “But-”
“Ehxk,” she said.
The human stood, eyes returning to their weird forward frankness.
“Here,” said the man, withdrawing something from the jacket or skin or whatever it was he wore over his torso. “I have a demonstration for precisely this purpose.”
A metallic pin-hinged mechanical joint appeared in the strange one-thumbed hand, along with a little bag.
“Observe, repeat, and learn,” he said in a totally uninflected voice. The metal thing hung out at the end of one arm, with its end flexing loose. He turned the hand over, and the hinge lethargically answered the dictate of gravity.
“EEEEEEEK-”
Simultaneously, he pulled the drawstrings on the bag with the free digits, and a stream of heavy sand began sifting onto his now-level palm.
“HHHhhhsssssssss…”
When the bag was empty, he had one of the thin lines of fur gracing his face above his eyes held aloft, the other pressing down.
“Now, after me: EEEEEEEKHHHhhhsssssssss.”
Somehow, he managed to perfectly mimic the sounds with his vocal apparatus. Ktsn could even swear she heard the rattle of hundreds of little gritty grains in his voice. Then, his lips curled upward, parting just a little.
“Now you try.”
“Eihks,” she answered, without the dramatic over-the-top production.
“Perfect.”
The human stared down at her, and managed to get most of the sand back into its sack by some mystic technique before stowing the props again. His face rippled once more as he looked out at the first newcomer, who had been talking uninterrupted for quite some time.
“The Way preserve us all, please let that woman get to the bottom of this soon,” he said. This time, his voice came out deeper, lower. Menacing. It approached Ktsn’s own register, and his inside-only teeth emerged, before sinking back behind his lips again. “It’s not like this is particularly complicated. Or it’s hard to tell what NEEDS to be said.”
He glanced down at the farmer, and made an idle-looking gesture; humerus straight forward from the shoulder, elbow angled to put the hand down across his chest diagonally and below the shoulder’s straight line.
“Sorry. From our perspective it’s all straightforward. You probably have too many questions to count.”
Surprisingly, Ktsn had only a few pressing and very immediate threads of inquiry stretching out at the moment - this, she suspected, would change very soon.
“It sounds like you do not think all of this is going as it should.”
She gestured vaguely, indicating the… everything that was happening. The sky. The strangers. The interminable dissertation. The temporarily-contained unrest in the other people of Goskec Tktl.
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