---Signatures---
---Viig’s perspective---
“Representative…!” calls the deep, guttural, translated voice of a woman I’ve heard rumbling up the road behind me for a few minutes now… a woman I once murdered without a second thought before… or a hint of guilt after.
I turn to her and curtly acknowledge “Representative.”
We may be at peace now (or at least we’ve negotiated a peace) but that does not mean I have to like her… This woman who led the band that took Pod from me… [sister] of the one that the foot dagger I wear on the hip came from.
I will continue to wear it on the hip until I get the [durasteel] replacement, promised by the Terrans, as a solution to that sticking point; what to do about all the bloodmetal we’ve ‘[stolen]’.
“A fine day, isn’t it!” she says, seeming completely oblivious to the seethe I’m directing at her.
“It’s a little hot, I feel… Perhaps you would find the weather more agreeable in the Southern desert you Vrakhand invaded these lands from…”
Enthusiastically, she agrees “Yes! I certainly hope to see it some day, after it’s been restored to its former glory by the [terraforming]!”
I give a mirthless puff.
I don’t know whether she’s genuinely too stupid to realise how much I despise her… or if she’s simply very good at playing dumb.
The edge of Gob Hollow comes into view, lined with an animal repelling fence.
As me and the Monster woman step through the open gates, attention snaps right to a new structure… or series of structures…
One of them is a building nearly as tall as the [embassy], longer but narrower.
It has plants inside, that I can see through the clear roof, but they’re strange in their colour… most being green at least but a brighter green than almost any plant I know.
The rest are many, smooth, rounded and metallic, each one is about six Twiggs tall and about the same width.
“What the hell are those?!” I mutter to myself.
“You don’t know? I thought the Twigg delegation were living here at the embassy?” asks the large woman behind me.
“I don’t, do I!” I chuff, irritated “I’d hope you’d recognise me as local… or do we all look the same to you(?)”
“I apologise.” she says, her tone neutral “I’ve heard that, because their ship is filled with space right now and can’t be lived in, most of the crew have been frozen in time in the [escape pods] to prevent overcrowding… I’m assuming these are they.” gesturing at the weird balls.
“Frozen in time?” I ask, incredulously.
“Yes… they can freeze time the way that cold freezes water, it seems!… But [Weaver] help us if we suggest it to be ‘magic’(!)”
Before I can stop myself, I let out a breathy chuckle.
It seems like incredulity at all of the magics these magicians insist aren’t magic is at least something Twigg and Vrakhand have in common!
Hoping to leave her behind, I turn and begin walking to the [escape pods] to get a closer look.
Annoyingly, I hear the heavy thuds of knifefeet, stabbing into the ground behind me as I walk.
Just as she said, every one of the pods is filled with Stranger creatures… all standing stiller than death…
“Creepy…” I say, looking through the clear wall at one of those winged people with the four eyes and the strange shiny rainbow stuff on the body, that’s light like fur, but arranged more like scales… He holds a child of the same kind but she’s covered in fluff, much more like fur, only having the long scaley kind on her wings.
I look to see if I can see them breathing, twitching or any other sign that they’re alive in there… I see none.
I suppose I wouldn’t…
Then a thought occurs to me…
“How can we see them?”
“What?” asks the large woman behind me.
“If time is frozen in there… how is the light getting in and out to let us see them?” I ask, unsure exactly why I’m asking her when I know she won’t know any better than me.
“What are you talking about? What does light have to do with time?” she asks, stupidly.
“If light didn’t have anything to do with time, it would be as bright at night as it is in the day, right…? If light didn’t have anything to do with time, things would only ever need to be lit once to be visible forever…”
“Very astute!” comes a friendly, translated Terran voice from behind us.
I turn to look and see Miyazaki walking towards us, wearing a smile.
“You’re right, Viig… Light has a speed and, thus, isn’t able to move through a stasis field where time doesn’t exist. In fact, if it were, it would be very dangerous to spend more than a few hours of sunlight in there with plexiglass doors like these… when time restarted you would subjectively experience all the sunlight that would have hit you at once and it would likely blind you, if it didn’t cook your flesh!”
“Then… how can we see them?” I ask, quizzically.
Another smile “I’m not a physicist or a temporal engineer so I won’t be able to give you very much detail but, the short answer; you can’t… What you can see is just a three dimensional after image of what they looked like when they were frozen.”
I shake the head in a Terran ‘no’ and say “I don’t get it…”
She nods a considerate ‘yes’ and says “How about a demonstration? If you put your head there…” she points to the left side of the clear bowl “…and look that way…” she indicates right “…you feel like you can see through the stasis field to the other side through the plexiglass, right?”
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I have a look at the slice of the compound I’m able to see.
“Yuh-huh…” I confirm, hesitantly.
“But… see what happens when I put my hand on the other side…” she extends a right arm to the other side of the plexiglass… and it vanishes!
Wide eyed, I ask “Where’d it go?!”
She pulls it back, revealing it to still be attached to her, wiggling the fingers to demonstrate no harm done “Still right here… you just can’t see it on the other side because it wasn’t there when the field was activated… The field can’t show you what is (because, from its perspective, nothing is! Time does not exist!), it can only show you what was!”
“Hmmm… I still don’t really understand how that works…” I admit.
She shrugs “Neither do I, really… Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey… stuff…”
“Fair enough…” I shrug back before turning to walk towards the [embassy], the other two following me.
As we pass by the new building with the plants inside it, the door opens and I freeze…
The door is more than five Twigg tall but the thing coming out is so enormous it’s having to crawl!
A woody hand (larger than I am!) reaches out and plants itself into the dirt.
The petrifyingly massive being pulls itself fully outside and slowly draws up to standing.
It’s… a Tree… a moving Tree with arms and legs but a Tree!
TEN of me tall, it towers over the building it just emerged from, the embassy building and the three of us stood watching it.
A clack of wood sounds from the foot of Miyazaki as she steps forward and says “Mr Ro’oo’u’ouu… It’s good to see you… Are you comfortable in the hydroponicum?… Do you need anything?…” leaving long gaps between her sentences for some reason.
The Tree man turns a woody face down on us, causing both me and the Monster woman to flinch.
He studies Miyazaki for some moments before groaning “Nooooooo… complaaaaaaaaints……… Juuuuuuuust… waaaaaaaanted… theeeeeeee… freeeeeeeeesh… aaaaaaaaair… aaaaaaaaaaand… suuuuuuuuuuuun… ooooooon… myyyyyyyyyy… leeeeeeeaves…”
“Alright, Sir… That’s fine… Just don’t leave the compound… and don’t stay in the sun too long… Your leaves might bleach… It would be dangerous…” answers Miyazaki, the clear comfort with the Colossus putting me at ease slightly.
“IIIIIIIIII… understaaaaaaaaaaand… Thaaaaaaaaank… yooooooooou… fooooooor… yoooooour… conceeeeeeeeern… Miyazaaaaaaaaaaaki…” creaks the Tree man.
He raises a leg and strides away slowly.
I breathe a sigh of relief once he’s gone.
Miyazaki smirks down at me, amused, and says “Sorry for your scare there, girls! Grauntians may look frightening on account of there imposing stature and bulk but they’re very mellow, very gentle and very fragile… nothing for you to be afraid of… Well… just so long as you make sure he doesn’t accidentally step on you, Viig…(!)”
“I don’t think I want to be accidentally stepped on by him either!… Why did you only address that to her…?” interjects the Monster woman.
Miyazaki turns the amused smirk on the Vrakhand and answers “Because for you, Khr’kowan, while it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience, it would be an easily survivable one!… For all his volume, he’s actually lighter than you are! If his foot and your carapace try to occupy the same space, his foot looses, even with the weight of his body on top of it!”
“He’s so light?” I ask, looking at where the massive man stands in the sun on the far side of the compound.
“Yes… He’s a paradiseworlder… gravity on his home planet is a eighth what it is here… There, he doesn’t need density to support his weight… Here, he needs artificially light gravity to keep from being crushed…”
“What… is his role?” asks the Monster woman.
“He’s here to study your plant life, along with Drs Zunberi and Mink.” answers Miyazaki, shrugging her shoulders nonchalantly.
“You brought him here… to study plants?!”
Another shrug “Yes, well, we wanted the best and, when it comes to plants, that’s him… Shall we go inside now?”
Miyazaki leads the way through the large entrance chamber and down a hall to an [office].
Inside are the two [ambassadors], the tall, blue skinned one with thumbs on the wrong sides of the hand and one too many fingers on each (who, after the Tree man, I can’t think of as a Giant anymore(!)) and, beside him, the [wife] who he manages to make look small, despite her still being twice the height of me!
“Representatives!” greets the woman, warmly, standing up “Thank you so much for being here! I must apologise again for the interruption to the other day’s peace talks and for leading such a dangerous individual to your planet, even unintentionally.”
“You don’t need to apologise for the actions of a male [killing] [criminal], Ambassador!…” says the Monster woman, seating herself on a mat on the floor.
“I still don’t understand why you think it’s so much worse to kill a man than a woman, Representative…” I observe, coolly.
She turns to me and I see anger flash in her eyes for the first time in a while.
“It is a woman’s place to die for her family and her realm if that is what is required of her!” she spits back “While not desirable, a woman’s death is understandable! To kill a man is simply wanton! To kill a leader is to deprive his people of his wisdom! To kill a father is to deprive his children of their upbringing! I know it doesn’t work the same way for Terrans but, nevertheless, when this Stetter criminal murdered our late fellow Representative from the Terran Coalition (and in cold blood no less), he became irredeemable in my view!”
“Hmmm… Would have been nice if you’d let her know you felt that way before she murdered Pod [in cold blood](!)” I sneer, tapping the foot dagger at the hip.
“That’s…!” starts the Monster woman.
“Ladies! Please don’t fight! You’ll have plenty of time to learn to tolerate eachother once the ship is repaired and we’re on the way to Citadel!… Right now, we have business to attend to as a matter of some urgency…” chides Miyazaki, sounding genuinely stern for the first time I’ve ever heard.
“Alright… Tell us your business then?” I ask, secretly a little grateful she intervened there…
“Well, for a start…” says Ong in a deep, nasal voice, lifting a stack of paper onto the table “…we’ve made some wanted posters for Stetter… we would like you two to hand them out to your respective communities so that everyone knows what he looks like, knows how incredibly dangerous he is and to stay away from him if at all possible! These…” he separates part of the stack, handing me the smaller part of it. The picture on the top is of a horrific looking man with what looks like a black, metal, Human skull for a head (I don’t really think anyone needs to be warned not to go near someone who looks like the Spirit of death(!)) “…are for Rep. Viig to pass around the Southern villages with an oral explanation of who this man is, how dangerous he is and that on NO account should anyone approach him! This…” he pushes the much larger stack towards the much larger woman from the much larger village “…is a stack of his photos with all the relevant information written in Vrakhandic script, though it may need to be read out to those of your realm who aren’t literate… Mr Stetter’s whereabouts are currently unknown but we estimate it could take him as little as 10 more local days to reach here from where he crashed, so we ask that you distribute these as widely as you can as soon as possible. Any objections?”
The Monster woman and I look at eachother before, in unison, saying “Not from me.”
“Good!” smiles Yeshe “Now… for our next order of business…”
She pulls out three more stacks of paper, these ones I recognise.
She takes out a cylinder of charcoal and a hand sized pad of wet dye.
“…we would like to film you signing these… In a perfect world, you would have signed them up on the ship immediately after they were drafted and in front of your delegations but, in lieu of that, this will have to do… Are there any objections?”
I look at the Monster woman to the right of me and think about objecting… but I can’t think on what grounds I could!
Much as I might hate this woman and her kind, this treaty is what we agreed… I don’t consider a handprint on a piece of paper to be the difference between an agreement I have to keep and one I don’t, so it shouldn’t matter to me…
I already dyed the hand once to give the [signature]…
This time shouldn’t be different.
“No objection.” I answer, finally.
“No objection.” answers the Monster woman (who better not think this makes us friends!)
I pull the pad towards me and press the palm into it.
The hand comes away wet and Yeshe opens the first of the contracts to the page, where you can still see a droplet of green and a small scratch of charcoal from a few days ago.
“Three…” says the Monster woman, approaching the page with the charcoal.
What’s she doing?
“Two…”
She’s counting down! She’s not giving herself or me a chance to hesitate!
“One!”
In the same instant, the charcoal and the palm swoop down to the page, binding a peace with the press of a palm and a few scratches of a nib…