The elf looked quite pleased to find something they theoretically both spoke, but he startled rattling off what sounded like even worse German than Alan’s rusty skills. No wait… it was both terrible and like something out of the Erl Konig poem he’d had to read in that one class. Some old form of German, spoken badly. Then again, Alan was speaking some new form of German, aka Germanglish, and doing it badly too. It was… interesting.
The elf wanted to know where they came from, but California and all of the cities he could think of, not even anything in the entire North American continent, rang a bell for the elf. The elf came from ‘the Talor’ and ‘nearby’. Beyond that he either wasn’t saying more or they couldn’t manage to communicate. It barely took twenty minutes for them to devolve into grunts and hand-signs most of the time. Alan didn’t reveal that he had any companions with him, but the elf, rather ‘Purleo’, asked about ‘four people’.
Still, despite the thrill of communicating with an elf, the frustration of the struggle to actually communicate anything meaningfully and accurately while trying to also keep his friends hidden from this potentially hostile alien person and learn as much as he could from them all at once was becoming a big run-on headache that was TURNING INTO A GIANT SCREAMING MIGRAINE AND-
“Halt! Mein… uh… Gehirn? Es tut mir… uh… ein moment, bitte.” The elf called a temporary stop to what was turning out to be more like a ‘friendly’ interrogation of Alan than a conversation. The elf, or Talor like tah-lore, as he kept insisting ‘nicht Elf!’ with some pre-existing irritation clearly attached to the term ‘elf’, leaned against a tree and rubbed their temples, closing their eyes and grimacing. Ah, so Alan really wasn’t the only one getting a headache here. He took the opportunity to lean against his own tree, realized the folly since his grass outfit didn’t cover his shoulder very well and he’d leaned against a nub of a broken branch, then instead leaned his back against a smooth section.
Alan didn’t bother rubbing his temples. Part of him wanted to since it probably would help, but he was enjoying the fact that his conversational counterpart was more visibly suffering than he was. The fact that the Talor wouldn’t reveal hardly any details about themselves or what they wanted, how they knew about Alan or the ‘four people’ they kept bringing up all made them seem like a potential enemy. Granted, it was normally in his nature to not be terribly suspicious of people. It was also normally in his nature not to be suddenly teleported by anime magic to some strange place with shitty building materials and monster beavers.
If you were going to get anime-magicked somewhere, where were the cat-girls? Hell, he’d be happy with a cat-guy too! The Talor had fuzzy ears but even the suggestion that Alan might want to touch them made them visibly disgusted. Alan had even offered to let the Talor touch his ears. Were human ears common enough here that they weren’t curious? That debacle took almost ten minutes to work past before it was clear Alan was just curious and not some kind of weird Talor-ear pervert. Insisting that the Talor’s ears weren’t particularly as far as animal-ears on a person went didn’t really smooth things over much, but maybe it helped fight off the pervert thing. Maybe. Probably not.
“Uh… Purleo?” One green eye cracked open as the Talor looked at him in askance, still trying to rub away their headache. “Ich habe dirst, ich werde zum Wasser gehen. Kommen Sie mit?” Heh, that was not too shabby. Clearly his German was starting to shake off the rust. He was pretty confident he hadn’t used an incorrect word there. Maybe less confident on the grammar. The Talor shook their head and pulled something from a pack they had been carrying and set on the ground during the conversation. The skin pouch was tossed to Alan, who nearly fumbled the catch. It had a sort of clay plug in the end that would otherwise be open, with the soft and thin leathery material tied tightly to the plug with a piece of string. Sinew? Yeah, probably sinew. It was definitely not plant fiber.
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The leather boots should have been confirmation enough, but this was another thing showing that at the least the Talor were not exclusively plant consumers.
“Maybe they don’t eat the meat… or maybe they’ve hunted everything out there on the prairie and that’s why there aren’t any large animals. Maybe the monster beavers are scared of them?” Purleo listened curiously, not speaking. Alan was pretty confident the Talor definitely could not understand English. Occasionally a word came up that sounded similar to one from French or German or Spanish that they knew and they got excited, only to realize that it was a lone word in a bunch of otherwise gibberish.
Alan figured out how to unknot the sinew tie and unwound the stopper, pulling it out and smelling the contents. It seemed to just be water. Cautiously he took a swig, then another shortly thereafter. It was very clean tasting water! Plus it didn’t come from a river! Actually, he didn’t know that at all, it could totally be from the river. Anyways he was downright thirsty… and if the Talor had water, maybe he had…
“Essen?” After a brief exchange, Alan was munching on a little greasy biscuit with a side of some kind of smoked jerky. It was heavenly to someone who’d had nothing to eat the day before except for some bites of raw, scraggly roots and raw fish. Thank goodness he hadn’t started puking or worse, so far. He badly wanted to eat all of it, but he wasn’t sure that the Talor had enough to share three other portions, so he did his best to hide most of it… maybe closer to half… though it clearly didn’t go unnoticed by the Talor. They didn’t say anything, but they raised an eyebrow as if saying ‘a-ha!’.
Alan grumbled. This was only going to end up with him either trying to wait the Talor out and hoping he wasn’t somehow tracked back to his friends, or by introducing the Talor to them intentionally. He did what anyone in his situation would do. Rather, he did was he would do in his situation and since he was himself in this situation it was naturally… whatever, anyways, he paced.
Paced and paced, muttering to himself under his breath. Purleo just watched from their leaning-tree, patient and amused. After a time it really came down to whether or not the Talor was hostile. Alan didn’t want to end up fighting against a healthy looking, taller, elf-person who had journeyed casually and well prepared from somewhere across the prairie with a spear of all things… but he also didn’t want to just lead them to his friends. The Talor had not demonstrated any hostility beyond having he spear. It had never been pointed at Alan, though notably Purleo never let it go and when he’d given Alan the water and food it had been thrown, not handed.
Wouldn’t he be similarly cautious in their soft leather boots? Encountering a somewhat fat, barely clothed in tied grasses man, who wasn’t the same species and clearly in an area he was at least reasonably familiar with and said man wasn’t… yeah. Yeah he would probably be a lot more agitated and cautious than Purleo had been.
Alan squared himself up towards the Talor and asked a question he’d asked again and again.
“Was wollen Sie mit mir? Mit ‘vier Personen’?” What did he want with him? With the ‘four people’? The Talor responded the same as always.
“Sprechen. Sehen. Verstanden.”
“Warum?”
“Ich will.”
“Warum? Was machen Sie… uh… von… vom? Was machen Sie zu dieser Persona?”
“Sprechen, Sehen, Verstanden.”
“Töten? Hilfen?” Kill? Help? To this, the Talor would only shrug. “Argh, we’re getting nowhere with this!” He took an angry step towards the Talor and pointed at them. “I won’t give my friends up just for you to kill th… what the…!” The Talor had responded swiftly, but not by lowering the spear or by stepping back. Rather their eye’s took on a distant look for a brief moment, then they made a dismissive gesture with their hand. Wind suddenly whipped up and bowled Alan over onto his ass, sending him tumbling.
Purleo hadn’t touched him. There had been no rustling of the grasses before that moment like some big wind had been building up, nor had the trees made any sounds, their leaves undisturbed. Now, with the sudden gust, chaff showered against him and the leaves whipped about for a few moments in the unexpected and localized storm. It was over in a second though, only the tremulous swaying that remained in the tips of the longer branches and the kicked up mixture of dry, fresh, and rotted leaf material that lightly coated him where he lay on the ground.
“Fuck. He can fucking do magic.”