Max attempted to talk with Yrn more in the hopes of learning the local language, but despite having learned a multitude of human languages over the last few centuries, this one was infinitely more difficult. He tried the basics of pointing to things to learn their names, but every time Yrn seemed insistent that he was saying the wrong word.
“Ppleb,” she said while holding another of the fruits they had eaten before.
“Ppleb.”
“Oo. Ppleb. Ppl - eb,” she said slower.
“Ppl - eb!” he said, getting frustrated.
“Oo! Oto plebq, ppleb!”
Shaking his head, Max pointed to the stone beast pulling the carriage. “What about that?”
“Olemh.”
“Olemh.”
Yrn said nothing, resting her head in her palm as she questioned whether the small creature before her was actually sentient. She could come to no other conclusion as to how he could keep behaving so stupidly.
Max continued asking for names, and after a while, the absurdity of the situation led the two to treat it more like a game than anything else, laughing at their inability to establish even a single word to start communicating with.
The rest of the day passed rather quickly, and as the sun began to set Yrn pulled the carriage to the side of the road to set up camp for the night.
The stone beast was freed from its harness and directed by Yrn to flatten out a section of grass. Max stood awkwardly to the side, wanting to help but unsure of how to set up camp in a world of metal and stone. After a moment Yrn noticed his hesitation and pointed at a tree before gesturing to the rest of the area.
“And oux atherh omet akp org ou urnc?”
He still didn’t understand her words, but it seemed like she was telling him to gather firewood. The idea confused Max even further. It wasn’t as if stone could burn, right?
“Although, I guess crystal shouldn’t be edible either…” Max shrugged and started looking for fallen bits of stone. He managed to find a few decently sized branches hidden within the grass, which to someone of Yrn’s size was probably more like a handful of sticks. He also noticed that the tree stones, while looking and feeling like some kind of sedimentary rocks, had a wood-like hardness to them, giving ever so slightly under his grip.
He was able to lift them easily, which he didn’t think much of until he lifted a branch that, to him, was the size of a whole tree!
Max knew that his body was magically enhanced and that his training had pushed him past what normal humans were capable of, but he never realized just how much his strength had grown. The branch he was holding would probably weigh 200 pounds back on Earth, and with it being made out of stone it was probably closer to 500 pounds, yet he was able to balance it on one hand as if it were a wooden spoon!
This went well beyond the point of any training he did in the oasis. It made him wonder where all this strength was coming from, and if there was a limit to it.
Eventually, a large section of metal grass had been flattened out, and Max had a pile of stone as high as his hip which was about the size of a campfire for someone like Yrn.
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“Owx, ouz atheredh llb hisu?” Yrn asked as she tied the stone beast to a tree using a metal chain. “Org omeonet ot mallt ou’rez trongt.” Walking over to him, she scooped up part the pile of stones, with loud groan before dropping it in the center of the clearing.
Once all the stones were moved to the center of the clearing, Yrn gestured for him to sit down in the cleared area as she started digging through some supplies in the carriage, but Max was hesitant. He already knew that the grass could cut him and just flattening the area didn’t seem like it would stop that, but he knew he would have to lie down eventually, and while he could try sleeping in the carriage he already knew it wasn’t that comfortable. So he gently laid himself on the flattened metal, and when he wasn’t immediately cut he started to relax.
Once again, the strange properties of this metal world revealed themselves. If the grass had been ordinary metal, he knew that his skin and clothes could still get caught and pinched between the flattened blades as they shifted under his weight, but because it also had some of the softness of normal grass it was effectively harmless. The blades still had some rigidity to them, but it seemed like the metal grass wasn’t as dangerous as he thought it would be.
When Yrn returned from the carriage, she was holding a small gemstone box that Max could see had some strange lights within. Opening the lid, Yrn’s face was lit up with a dull orange color as she pulled out a small marble, maybe an inch across.
The marble was shining with an internal light. Though the light wasn’t that bright, Max felt his eyes starting to hurt.
Noticing his stares, Yrn hands him the marble before putting the box back in the carriage. The marble was extremely warm, just a few degrees shy of burning. He could now see that it was made out of a clear crystal with many internal facets, each one reflecting orange light from an unknown source.
“Hrowu tj nj,” Yrn said, making a throwing motion and pointing at the pile of tree stones.
Deciding he was done questioning the strange happenings of this world, Max threw the marble at the pile of stones, shattering the marble with a loud crack. The shards of crystal disintegrated as they flew through the air, releasing the light trapped within. The light spread to the tree stones and caused them to glow with the same light as the crystal had, giving off more and more heat as the light consumed them.
By the time the whole stones were glowing with the warm light, the heat it gave off reminded Max of his year in the desert, an intense heat tempered only by the fact that rest of the area was significantly cooler. The stones were not on fire, and they didn’t exactly burn. In fact, Max watched as a thinner piece of stone fell off and splattered against the ground.
The stones were melting. It was as if an intense heat had been stored within the marble and had been transferred to the stones.
Max sat mesmerized as the heat caused the brown stones to shift and sag, colors appearing as the different sediments mixed and congealed.
It was a strange, otherworldly sight, and yet all he could think about was that he was just sitting and staring at a campfire, just like he would on camping trips with his family centuries ago. It was alien and impossibly familiar all the same. Max sighed, and felt a release of tension that he hadn’t noticed for who knows how long.
“I’m guessing they don’t have pyrite wherever you’re from?”
Max blinked and turned to Yrn. “...What did you say?”
“I asked-” she stopped as she realized the same thing he had. “Did you-”
“I’m still speaking the same as before.”
“...”
“...”
Max rested his face in his hands as Yrn continued to stare at him.
“Why can’t my life just make sense,” he groaned.
“So, uh, I guess weird things are normal for you then?”
“I guess so.” Resting his chin on his knees, Max looked over to Yrn. “So now that we can actually communicate… Hi, I’m Max.” He held out his hand.
She stared at him for a moment before shaking her head with a chuckle. “Okay then, I’m Myr.” She looked at his extended hand. “Am I supposed to be doing something here or…?”
Max retracted his hand with a slight blush. “Okay, handshakes are not a form of greeting here, good to know.”
The two shared a quick laugh at Max’s fumbled greeting before getting into the real meat of the conversation, and he spent the next hour telling her about how he came to be in this stone world.