---Signs---
---Kenver’s perspective---
---2664 Terran Calendar/49 years BF---
I step off the capsule and into the driving rain of Nowydh Kernow.
My home island is Nova Britannia’s 38th largest… which is to say, it’s the middle of bumfuck nowhere(!)
Above me are oppressive storm clouds that completely block out Belenus’ light, making it seem like nighttime, even though it’s actually early evening and sunset isn’t for another few hours.
To my right are sheer cliffs, looming above me and covered in dark grey, Britannian vegetation.
To my left is a 30 metre drop, being battered so hard by waves that salty spray is hitting my face.
Ahead of me is Blustri’s Coast Guard Station… my workplace.
I step through the doors and out of the torrent.
“Evening, Morwen…” I say to my colleague, sat at the front desk, as I approach “…anything happen I should know about?”
“Actually, Chief, yes… Some fish farmers came in with a boy, about 7 or 8. They say they pulled him out of the water about 20km off shore.”
“Alive?” I question, instantly dropping the casual tone.
She nods and I allow a tiny sigh of relief to escape from me.
“Do we know how long he was out there? If there’s anyone else we need to be searching for?”
Her lips purse and she shakes her head “We don’t know anything except what the ones who brought him told us… He hasn’t said a word since he came in! We tried speaking to him in Cornish, English, Welsh and a dozen other languages, but he won’t say a thing to any of us! He just shivers and stims with his hands…”
“Hmmm… You’ve checked him against missing persons?”
“Of course. No match… Checked to see if any companies had reported an unreturned boat rental too… Nothing that looked likely.”
“That could mean a few different things.”
“I know. Not much help.” says the girl, dejectedly.
“Where is he now?” I ask.
“Room 5.”
I nod “Would you come with me and witness, Morwen?”
“Of course, Chief, if you’re happy for me to leave the desk unmanned?” she asks, gesturing to her station.
“If someone comes in, I’m sure they’ll have little problem attracting attention.” I state, walking off and indicating her to follow.
She falls in behind me as I walk through the station halls.
We reach the door to Interview Room 5 and step through.
This isn’t a police station.
This isn’t an interrogation room.
This room isn’t an austere, stark, bare, featureless space designed to make suspects uncomfortable.
There is no observation mirror.
This is a room meant for talking to survivors of accidents at sea. It’s designed to be as cozy and comfortable as possible.
Wood panelling lines the walls and, by a window (facing the cliffs, not the sea, for obvious reasons), is a plush couch with a table in front of it and two armchairs on the other side.
On the table is an empty soup bowl which I make a note to take with me when I leave.
On the couch is a small child, his skin pale, his eyes and hair both an unusually vibrant shade of brown, his hair still slightly damp.
His dry clothes still have the creases of ones that have only just been put on, after spending a long time folded, and fit him poorly enough to make obvious that they weren’t tailored for him.
He must have been given these to change into when he got here.
He has a blanket draped over him and, in his hands, clutches a mug of hot chocolate which he puts down as I enter.
“Hello again…” smiles Morwen, sympathetically, switching from Cornish to English despite not knowing if he actually knows it “…this is Chief Angove… He’d like to speak to you if that’s alright?”
The boy looks straight at her face as she talks but I can tell he isn’t making eyecontact.
I’d guess he must have some kind of neurological condition if that, the muteness and the stimming are anything to go by?
He gives the tiniest of nods.
Maybe that means he can understand English?
Could also just mean he could tell he was being asked a question and didn’t know what else to do?
“Hi there, son… It’s nice to meet you, even if I wish it could be under better circumstances…” I say to the boy, who fixes his eyes firmly below mine as soon as I start speaking “…you can call me Ken if you like.”
No answer but a little stim of his trembling hands.
I take the far armchair by the window and Morwen takes the other.
“Do you need anything, son?… Are you comfortable?”
The mute boy doesn’t answer except with a pained expression and another little stim.
I sigh.
I’ve seen that look before… it’s the look you see on everyone who’s recently learned a traumatic, first hand lesson on just how dangerous and hostile the sea is when you’re not clad in several layers of 27th Century technology…
Looking at those faces is definitely one of the hardest parts of the job.
By comparison, search and rescue isn’t so bad!
At least I’m doing things then… Don’t have time to second guess myself!
“I… know it’s hard, son… I’m really sorry to have to push you but… the thing is… we don’t know who you are… We don’t know who to get in touch with to come and get you… We need to know if there’s anyone else out there we have to be looking for… If you won’t talk to us, we can’t know these things.”
He bares his teeth in a dismal grimace.
His hands begin to stim again, much more protractedly than before.
I frown as I watch them move.
Then it hits me.
“He’s signing…” I realise.
“What?” asks Morwen.
“Look at his hands… He’s using sign language! He’s reading our lips and signing responses!”
The boy’s eyebrows fly up his forehead as he nods vigorously.
“Oh my god! You’re right!… How did I not notice that!?”
“Don’t beat yourself up. He must have been trembling so badly before that it would’ve been difficult to distinguish from a stim… Go and see if anyone in the building knows it. If there’s no one, look up an interpreter we can call!”
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---Miraala’s perspective---
---[2714 Terran Calendar/1 year AF]---
“No.” says the brown eyed Terran, sat in the Commonroom of Portside Dorm, Deck 2 (yet to receive a Terran designation, like the other three ODR occupied dorms have).
“Never?” smiles the female ambassador.
“I don’t believe I have ever been personally thanked for my service in the War… And why would I have been? I was pulled out of Initial Training after less than 2 months and never fought in a single glorious battle… I was only a logistics executive. I was only in charge of making sure soldiers had armour on their bodies, guns in their hands, munitions in those guns, food in their bellies, fuel in their vehicles and medicine when they fell ill or injured, wherever they happened to be fighting, across the front… just silly things like that(!)”
“Not that you’d want to let anyone think you were at all bitter about it(!)” quips the genderless Terran with the golden hair from beside the Vk’unhz woman, whose many legged tail is draped over the back of the sofa she sits on.
“Shush, Thaïs!” smiles the ambassador, the quality of her speech translated as kind and motherly, despite how much older the one she addresses is than her.
She turns back to the handsome, brown eyed man.
“Albert ‘Theseus’ Hardwick… as a friend, I would like to personally thank you for your invaluable Wartime service. You and people like you brought the War to its end every bit as much as the soldiers on battlefields, the medics in hospitals and the diplomats in meeting rooms.”
A smile breaks over the man’s face without touching his eyes, as he responds “Thank you, Lhamo… I appreciate it…”
“Very touching…” grins Thaïs, standing up from their seat on the couch “…but, I am also very tired. I’ll have to bid all of you ‘bonne nuit’, for tonight…”
“I think that goes for me as well…” smiles Lhamo “…I think Ngo will be asleep already if I leave it much longer and it’s so difficult not to wake him up!” says Lhamo.
“I’m… uh… I’m sleepy too…” rattles Sknz’h, the Vk’unhz, whose clash of terrifyingly monstrous appearance and cute, nervous personality I’m still not used to, after [5 weeks] of sharing a dorm.
I look to the handsome, brown eyed man to see if he’ll follow suit but he simply raises his, still half full, glass with one hand and swivels his other downward, palm open and facing his chest, saying “Good night.”
The gesture isn’t flagged as having any meaning.
I suppose it could be a gesture meaning ‘good night’ but I’ve not seen any of the other Terrans on the ship using it for that purpose…
The other three depart, leaving me with the man with the sad brown eyes.
I think this might be the first time we’ve been alone together.
He puts down his drink and turns to me, his expression flagged as querying.
“You’re not tired?” comes a translated question.
I didn’t hear any sound, nor see his mouth move.
Confused, I ask “I’m sorry, what?”
“You’re not tired?” comes the same noiseless question.
I realise that he’s speaking to me with his hands!… Like an Osiyul!
“I… erm… I don’t really… sleep like that… I’m sorry, what is that?” I sign, gesturing to his hands held in front of his chest.
“It’s Terran sign language… Do you mind me using it?” he signs.
“I… err… don’t mind at all but… I can’t understand it any better than your sound language.”
Terran sign language is nothing like Osiyul!
Where my language is flowing, fluid and involves very little contact between the hands and any other part of the body, his signs are jerky, angular and seem to involve a lot of his hands impacting eachother, his arms, his shoulders and his chest.
He smiles in a way that almost touches his eyes “Haven’t really had many opportunities to use it for a long time… I know it doesn’t negate the need for translators but… it’s just nice to be able to talk this way, again.”
Honestly, the incomprehensible signs are a nice change of pace from the constant bombardment of sound I must endure to have a conversation with most airbreathers!
“Why… why do Terrans have a sign language?… Does one of your subspecies lack vocal chords or…?”
His chest bounces, conveying a mirthful quality to his words as he answers “Almost all of us have vocal chords… Some of us are not able to hear, though… TSL is for us.”
“You couldn’t hear?” I query.
He shakes his head “Not until I was about 10 or so and could have gene therapy to repair it, no… Took me a long time and a lot of speech therapy afterward to learn how to speak properly but, now, I believe I speak well enough that most people wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“Why can some Terrans not hear?” hearing is a sense I would be horrified at the prospect of being deprived of… and my language isn’t a sound based one!
He wobbles his head, puffs his lips and looks up and to the side, layering a considering tone to his signs “There are a few different potential causes… In my case, I was just born that way…”
I don’t respond for a few moments.
He laughs, audibly, as he says “You look like you’re watching me drown a basket of kittens, right now!”
I frown and answer “Sorry! I just… the thought of enough of you ‘just being born that way’ that you needed to come up with an entire language that doesn’t rely on hearing is quite horrible to me!”
He raises an eyebrow and answers “Your pity, though I appreciate that it comes from an empathetic place, is quite unnecessary…”
“Sorry.”
He shakes his head “You’ve done nothing to apologise for.”
I study his face for a few moments before completely changing the subject “Albert… may I ask you a question?”
“Certainly you may.” he signs back.
“Why is it that you always look so unhappy when you talk about economics?… You’re supposedly the best economist the ODR could get, right? I know that being good at something doesn’t necessarily mean you like it but… how did you get so good when it makes you so unhappy?”
His mouth twists, his brow furrows and he shakes his head before he answers “Economics doesn’t make me unhappy… quite the opposite… Ever since I was a child, I’ve thought it was simply the most fantastic and beautiful way of understanding our reality that there is!… Everything, from the interactions between subatomic particles, through the workings of cells, organisms, societies, right up to things on the scale of entire universes… all of them, in my view, can be understood as different kinds of economies… To understand economics is, to me, to understand reality itself…”
The way he just spoke and the look on his face leave me with no doubt that he means every word… but “Why do you always make this face every time it comes up, then?” I ask, imitating the bored, irritated expression he’s had every other time I’ve seen him talk about it.
Another chuckle escapes him, I don’t think I’d heard him laugh before this conversation…
“That would be because I, long ago, came to terms with the fact that I am likely the only person, in all of existence, who sees things that way. Everyone else hears ‘economics’ and immediately thinks of all the worst outcomes that ever came of bad economic systems… feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, capitalism, social Darwinism, class segregation, kleptocratic consumerist corporatocracy… Horrifically bad and harmful practices, borne of shoddy misunderstandings of the underlying principles and individuals’ own motivated reasoning as to why economics excuses them of any moral responsibility for their actions… People who, when it’s pointed out to them how much their lies and corruption have actively damaged their planet’s ecology, their fellow sapients’ quality of life and the structural integrity of their society, throw up their hands and abdicate accountability with the phrase ‘It’s just business’… i.e. ‘It made me money and that’s all that matters.’… I guess that’s why I look sad or irritated whenever I talk about it; I’m bracing myself for someone getting in my face and accusing me of wanting to revoke protections against homelessness, wanting to privatise medicine, water, public transport, wanting to make people hungry even when there’s food to go around, wanting to send poor people off to die in rich peoples’ wars, wanting to enrich myself and my friends at everyone else’s expense… It’s exhausting… having everyone think that you’re some kind of Machiavellian schemer… having everyone hear one word about you and assume they know everything about who you are and what you want… I suppose?”
I’m still running over the translated explanations of all the untranslated words and expressions he signed for a while after his hands stop moving.
Eventually, I answer “Wow… err… I can see how that would be frustrating to deal with… I’m not sure I would react to it the way you do, though…”
He frowns, curiously “What do you mean?”
“I mean… I’ve never seen you be accused of any of those things… not that I’m doubting it’s happened but… it sort of feels like you’re letting your anticipation of it disproportionately reduce your enjoyment of the field you’re clearly very passionate about!… I think I’d try to enjoy the times I’m not being accused of wanting to steal people’s money, food, home or water more and deal with those people when they challenge you…”
He places his hand at his chin in a gesture with no explicit verbal translation but which is flagged as generally thoughtful.
“I… I mean you definitely have a point there… I’ll have to give it some thought…” he answers “… but that’s quite enough about me and my discipline for now… Tell me about oceanography… what got you into that? Aside from the obvious I mean(!)” he says, gesturing up and down my aquatic form, including my tail currently concealed in my hoverchair.
“Well… I had… an experience on a reef on my homeworld as a child… it’s a… it would be a bit difficult to put into words…”
He nods, attentively and sincerely.
“I… could show you the reef… if you wanted to get a respirator and come to my room, I could project it on the…”
Every aspect of his body recoils before I’ve even finished making the offer as he frantically signs in the negative “No, no, no!… That’s really alright!… I trust you that it was lifechanging!”
“Oh…” I sign, crestfallen “…OK then…”
“I’m sorry…” he reassures “…it’s… not you!… I just… had a bad experience with water… a long time ago… I’d be quite likely to have a panic attack in the airlock.”
“You had a bad experience… with water?” don’t Terrans need water to live?!
“I’m sure that sounds strange to you… the same way you telling me you’d had a bad experience with air would sound to me… but I’d really prefer not to go into it, if possible.”
“That’s fine… of course.” I state, studying the man, curiously.
He smiles “It’s actually why I look like this…” he gestures to his face, older looking than most Terrans allow themselves to get “…about fifteen years ago I had my first and, to date, only regen session… The doctor firmly told me that I was to get in touch with her and request that she write me a recommendation to be sedated during my next session!… I damn near cracked the tube for how much I was panicking(!)… Eventually, I know, I’ll have to have another one… but I’m putting it off for as long as possible!”
“That’s really funny!” I smile “Oh, sorry… do you mind me saying that? Am I being insensitive?”
He shakes his head, waves his hand and signs “Not at all… it is quite funny. I can appreciate that…”
I smile “OK, well… I won’t [hold my breath] but… let me know if you change your mind about seeing that reef…”