When their mutual storm of laughter finally settled down, and the children lay upon the grass, happy and quiet, Sarah sat up and looked around. It really was a beautiful place, this simulated planet. Much of the flora and fauna was a little bit (and sometimes a large bit) alien, but the sky was the same shade of robin’s egg blue, the sunshine was the same yellow warmth, and the grass was the same soft green of chlorophyll. For just a moment, it felt like home, and then she looked down at the alien kids at her side and the illusion shattered. She sighed.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I still can’t pronounce your names, you know,” she said, marveling at the ease with which she could now construct sentences in the alien tongue. Sure, those sentences were still littered with English words she didn’t know how to translate, but at least she was plugging them into things in the proper order, grammatically speaking.

The boy sat up and his nose crinkled slightly as he parsed her bilingual sentence.

“Names are different,” he finally said. “They are (…)” and he used a word that Sarah couldn’t even begin to guess at.

Seeing her squint of incomprehension, he furrowed his brow in thought, turning to his sister and repeating the incomprehensible word. The little girl sat up and she and her brother traded several low-voiced sentences before turning back to Sarah.

“Names are special,” the boy said with a shrug. The lifting and dropping of the shoulders was a gesture the kids had picked up from Sarah, but they performed it as naturally as if they had been born doing it.

“I see,” Sarah said. “Well, I have to call you something. It feels really rude to keep referring to you with generic phrases, especially now that I speak your language better. Do you have nicknames?”

She had to use the English word for that since she didn’t know the “bird people” equivalent.

The kids looked at each other in matching confusion before turning back to Sarah.

“What are nicknames?” the girl asked, slowly sounding out the English word.

“Aren’t ‘names’ the same thing as ‘names’?” her brother added. He used the English word first and then his own people’s word, clearly thinking something must have been lost in translation.

“Yes,” Sarah assured him, “‘name’ and ‘name’ mean the same thing. A ‘nickname’ is something else that people call you, sometimes as a form of endearment, sometimes for the sake of convenience or clarity.”

She could see the kids were still struggling with the concept.

“Okay, here’s an example. When I was in kindergarten – that’s uh, a kind of school for really young kids – I had two classmates who both had the same personal name, 'Elisabeth'. The two names were spelled differently but that only helped when they were written down because they were pronounced the same way...so you can see how it would get confusing for everyone in the classroom, right?”

The children nodded, their jade-green eyes big and their faces attentive. Sarah reached out and tucked an errant poof of downy hair behind the little girl’s ear and her heart clenched. It was becoming harder and harder to believe that these precious children were nothing more than computer programs. Was it possible for artificial intelligence to have a soul?

Hiding her turmoil behind a smile and a playful tweak of the little girl’s nose – which earned her a happy giggle – Sarah returned to her story.

“Two kids in the same class with the same name was something that happened every now and then so the school had a policy…a, uh, plan in place…for what to do when it happened, but that policy, that plan, didn’t work this time.”

Sarah paused and grinned at the rapt attention of the children. She hadn’t planned to draw the story out but the kids were such attentive listeners that she found she couldn’t help herself.

The little girl’s patience finally broke with a wiggle. “Well? What did they do, Miss Sarah?”

Before Sarah could respond, the boy turned swiftly to chastise his sister for her lack of patience. The girl immediately wilted and Sarah stopped the boy’s tirade with an outstretched hand.

“It’s alright, young one, I’m not offended,” she said, mentally smacking herself as she remembered how much these people seemed to value showing patience while listening to another speak. She reminded herself yet again that theirs was a different culture, with differing values, and she needed to pay more attention to that.

She cleared her throat and straightened her back to indicate a return to the narrative and when both children’s eyes were on her again, she continued to speak.

“When two kids with the same personal name were in the same class, we would use the first sound of their family names to tell them apart. Like, if there had been another Sarah in my class, I would have been known as ‘Sarah O.’ because that’s the first sound of my family name. Does that make sense?”

The children nodded. Sarah had chosen to use the terms ‘personal name’ and ‘family name’ because she wasn’t sure how the “Bird People” (awful name, that) dealt with the order of names. Perhaps they were like some East Asian human cultures who put the family name first and the personal name last. Mixing two languages together was enough confusion on its own, thank you very much.

“The problem,” Sarah continued, “was both of these girls had family names beginning with the same sound, so the teacher asked them instead if they had nicknames. Sure enough, one of them went by ‘Liz’ and the other one went by ‘Beth’ and the problem was solved.”

The children’s faces scrunched once more into confusion.

“So…each girl used a different small part of her name…as if it were her proper name?” the boy ventured.

“Exactly.”

Horror flooded across both children’s faces.

“They cut up their names?” The little girl shivered and grabbed tight to her brother’s arm.

Sarah looked between the children, now in her own state of confusion.

“Uh…no…that’s not…”

The boy pulled his sister close and patted her reassuringly on the head.

“We do not cut up our names,” he solemnly informed Sarah. “Throwing away part of one’s name would be like denying a part of one’s soul.”

“Ah.”

The cadence of the phrase made it clear the boy was quoting something he’d heard many times, but the sincerity with which he said it also made it clear that he wasn’t just parroting someone else’s beliefs.

“So when you said that names are special,” Sarah ventured, “you meant special.”

The children nodded, seeming relieved that Sarah finally understood.

“And that word you used, the one I didn’t understand…does it have something to do with how special and, uh, what kind of special?

A quick nose scrunch of thought was followed by another nod.

“Okay.”

The three lapsed into silence for a moment as Sarah pondered this new glimpse into the depths of an alien culture, until the silence was broken by the wavering voice of a conflicted little girl.

“Do your people really cut up your names, Miss Sarah? Have…” and here the horror in her voice was palpable, “…have you cut up your name?”

Sarah shook her head and tugged the upset child into her lap before offering her other arm to the boy. He hesitated for a moment (probably debating the merits of pretending to be grown up, Sarah thought) before shuffling closer. It was only when he tucked himself tightly against her side, with her arm around his shoulders, that Sarah could tell he was shaking as much as his little sister.

Oh my, Sarah thought. And here I thought nicknames would be such an innocuous topic. What other bomb shells might I trip over in the days to come?

“My full name is Sarah Nadja Overmeyer. The last one is my family name and the first and second are personal names, but both of them are complete on their own, they’re not cut up. ‘Sarah’ means ‘woman of high rank’ or ‘princess’ in one of our world’s languages, called Hebrew. It is also the name of an important woman in one of our religious texts. ‘Nadja’ is a name from a different human language, German, and it means ‘hope.’

“Each part of my name is important, but each part can also be used by itself without diminishing the whole…okay?”

The English word “okay” had quickly become a favourite of both children during their early language lessons and Sarah’s clearly deliberate use of it now brought the faintest hint of a smile to the little girl’s face. Encouraged, Sarah went on to address the children’s other concern.

“Okay, the first thing to understand is that my people don’t think about names the same way as yours do, so even if they were to cut up and throw away parts of their names, it wouldn’t have the same meaning. Humans don’t generally believe that names are connected that closely to souls. Not all humans even believe that souls exist.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Huh.”

“Different human cultures treat names differently. Some give them more importance than others. I’ve even read about people that believe knowing someone’s true name gives you power over him; that you should only tell your true name to people whom you trust, because if you tell it to an evil person, he might steal your soul.”

“That’s silly,” the little girl burst out. “People can’t steal souls!”

Sarah smiled. “Yes, well, I’m not sure if anyone actually believes that or if it’s just a story someone made up. Either way, can you see that humans believe a lot of different things about names?”

The children made affirmative noises and Sarah was grateful to notice that their fearful shivering seemed to have stopped.

“Good. Now, the second thing you need to know is that nicknames aren’t the same thing as proper names. Just because someone uses a nickname doesn’t mean he or she has gotten rid of his or her proper name.”

“That’s confusing.”

Sarah chuckled. “Well, it’s like when I call you ‘little one’ and your brother ‘young one.’”

“That’s different,” the boy finally piped up.

“Oh? How so?” Sarah asked.

Having seemingly regained his mental equilibrium, the boy scooted out from under Sarah’s arm, and then spun around on the grass until he was facing both girls.

“Those are descriptions,” he said confidently.

Sarah cocked a questioning eyebrow at him, a bit of body language that she had discovered – to her delight – translated perfectly between species.

The boy rolled his eyes, which was another mannerism with parity, to which Sarah responded by raising both eyebrows at him. This was, of course, different from either raising or cocking a single eyebrow, both of which had different meanings and which could be differentiated from each other by various contextual clues within the accompanying facial expressions. Even the double eyebrow raise could have different meanings, though this one was quite clearly the authoritative expression that Sarah had most often seen on the faces of parents and teachers (and the opportunity to use it for herself gave her a little spurt of childish glee). Its meaning could generally be summarized as: “Excuse me, young man. You just did/said what now?”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The expression must truly have been universal, or perhaps the children were simply learning Sarah’s mannerisms, for the message was clearly received. The boy blushed and ducked his head as apology for his rudeness. This gesture was one that Sarah had not understood when she first saw it, and she’d had to figure it out from a mix of observation and, once language lessons started, pointed questions. If she were asked to describe the movement to another human, she would have said it was a combination of a child dropping his head in embarrassment or shame, and that quick little head-bob of an abbreviated social bow that she saw people do on K-dramas.

Both children’s eyes had gone to Sarah’s face to see if she accepted the boy’s apology so she gave a small smile and the formal deep, slow nod that seemed to hold many meanings within the “Bird People” culture, one of which was acceptance of an apology.

“Well,” the boy said, reassured that all was forgiven, “we are both young, so when you say ‘young one’ you are describing both of us, but of course that would be confusing if you used it for both of us.”

His sister nodded from her spot in Sarah’s lap and took up the explanation. “That’s why you call me ‘little one.’ We’re both young, and we’re both little, but I’m littler than he is so it makes sense to call me the ‘little one.’”

“And me the ‘young one.’”

“So that’s all it is to you, a description?”

Both of them nodded.

“If you don’t know someone’s name – or can’t pronounce it – then you just use a description, or their job or something,” the boy said.

“We called you ‘Guest’ until you told us your proper name,” his sister informed Sarah.

Sarah frowned. “But what if there had already been a guest in your home when I arrived? Would I have been ‘Guest Number Two’?”

“No, don’t be silly,” the girl giggled. “We would have called you ‘Female Guest’.”

“Or maybe ‘Injured Guest’,” her brother chimed in. “Because you were hurt when Father found you on the road.”

“So, if I were to call your father nothing but ‘Farmer’ all the time, that wouldn’t be considered rude?”

“But he is a farmer. Why would it be rude?”

Sarah shook her head. “I know you must think humans are weird…”

“We do,” the children chorused impishly.

Sarah scrunched her nose at them (managing somehow to stop short of sticking out her tongue) and finished her sentence. “…but from my perspective, your people are the weird ones.”

The children had no compunctions about sticking out their tongues and promptly did so, while attempting to imitate Sarah’s nose scrunching expression at the same time. The resulting faces set all three of them off in another storm of giggles, and as Sarah lay on the soft green grass under the warmth of an alien sun, with a laughing alien child on either side of her, she couldn’t help but remember that feeling she’d had on her first day in this virtual reality world, of being high on life. Yes, her world and her old life were gone, but this new life certainly had its perks, even if this part was only the Tutorial.

Then a niggling little thought in the back of her mind reminded her that the system apocalypse stories she’d read never went this well without something nasty coming along. True, none of the stories she’d read had protagonists who chose Easy Mode, plus (and more importantly) this wasn’t a story she was in, this was real life (virtual reality notwithstanding), but the Builders had explicitly stated that they based their System off human fiction. They might have designed things to be a lot more human-friendly than most fictional System integrations, but that didn’t mean it was going to be all sunshine and roses.

If humanity was going to adapt to new worlds and new species, they would have to grow; and growth is neither painless nor easy. Sooner or later, the other shoe was going to drop on this idyllic little life she’d been playing at. She needed to be ready.

Now that she could reliably communicate…wait a minute…by the end of that conversation she’d been feeling way more fluent in the “Bird People” language than when she first got the Skill, but not once had she seen a single level-up notification.

And come to think of it, she hadn't just earned the [Language] Skill, it had activated...but back in the forest on her first day, the System had told her she’d earned the [Wood Carving: Proficiency] Skill but couldn’t activate it without a class…and she couldn’t get a class without contacting a Town Monument.

Why the double standard? Was the System glitching?

She supposed it was possible there were different requirements for different types of Skills. Maybe [Language] Skills were in some kind of “General Skill” category that anyone could get, but crafting Skills, like [Wood Carving] required an appropriate crafting class.

Did that make sense? Maybe, but what if someone with a warrior-type class wanted to pick up wood carving as a hobby? Would he have to do it without the Skill, and all the associated benefits? It would be one way to ensure people with actual crafting classes remained relevant within the System, she supposed.

But hang on. This isn’t a game. Beasts and monsters aren’t going to appear in nicely regulated, level-appropriate regions and endlessly respawn, right?

She really hoped not. Seeing something like that in real life would be weird, and improbable, and in all likelihood make her question the nature of reality. If anything would scream “virtual reality” that would be it.

If, however, they really were going to be living on those “Sanctuary worlds” the Builders mentioned, and therefore building – or rebuilding – human civilizations and societies, then the System wouldn’t need to tweak things to make non-warrior classes more appealing. Society itself would demand a higher proportion of the crafting-, labouring-, trading-, and facilitating-types than soldier-types. Well, unless they started a bunch of wars with the aliens and each other, which – considering the whole of human history – was sadly not an impossibility.

That was a depressing thought. Still, it didn’t answer the most pertinent question of the moment, and that was: what was up with her [Language] Skill?

Firstly, why hadn’t it shown up when she first started learning the language? All she’d needed to do to earn [Wood Carving: Proficiency] was turn a tree branch into a pointy stick that vaguely resembled a weapon of war. Come to think of it, that had been unexpectedly easy; the Skill descriptions in the System menu she’d been shown had made it sound like Proficiency Skills took a lot more effort to earn. A lot more. Had that been a System glitch? Maybe a “First Day” bonus?

Whatever. Again, not the matter at hand, which was, firstly, that the [Language] Skill hadn’t shown up until after [Polyglot] had already done a lot of the hard work, and secondly, that it hadn’t levelled once since she got it, despite a noticeable increase in fluency within the course of a single conversation. Did the System…

ALERT

Okay, now what?

Skill corrections being implemented. Please stand by.

Huh? Was the System…

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 2.

…reading her mind?

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 3.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 4.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 5.

You know, it might be more efficient to just do it all…

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 6.

…in one big jump.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 7.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 8.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 9.

Umm…how long is this going to take?

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 10.

Congratulations! For raising a Skill to Level 10, you have earned one free Skill Point.

Oh, that’s nice.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 11.

Not done yet, eh?

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 12.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 13.

She really needed to sort out that atrocious name. The asterisk was probably a hint but she’d have to wait for her level-up notices to finish before she could examine it closer.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 14.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 15.

Umm…System, this is getting…

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 16.

…a little ridiculous…

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 17.

…and overwhelming.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 18.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 19.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 20.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 21.

What, no Skill Point?

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to Level 22.

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set to…

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)] now set…

Uh, System?

Correction: [Language: Bird People* (Uncommon)]…

Correction: [Language: Bird People*…

Correction: [Language…

Correction…

System?