---Ghost---
---Victor’s perspective---
A tall man, his frame buried under furry, dinosaur pelt clothes (to the point that I can’t accurately assess his build but guess that it’s slim), steps from the bushes and walks to the body of the animal whose life he just took.
His long, black hair is tied into a simple ponytail, his face is covered in a thick, black beard, both are streaked with silver.
He glances at me, briefly, but doesn’t acknowledge me apart from that.
His wizened face reminds me of that of Twila’s cowboy character from last night. I was a child the last time I saw a Human with a face that wrinkled!
His eyes are a vivid gold colour that speak to recent Longi ancestry, though I can’t quite remember which sublineage it is where yellow eyes are most common. Was it Harbin or Xiahe?
At his shin trots a bright green, little, four winged dromaeosauroid, happily warbling and chirruping. As it passes me, it stops to look at me for much longer than he did.
It cocks its head, curiously, before looking to the man, covered in blue leather and mauve fur.
The dromaeosaur seems to decide that, since the man’s not worrying about me, it doesn’t need to either and trots off to sit, expectantly, beside the man and the carcass.
I would have thought that a man who hasn’t seen another Human in years wouldn’t be able to contain himself when he finally saw someone!
This guy’s acting like I’m not even here!
He plants his foot into the side of the dead hadrosaur and yanks out the spear, which causes a gout of blood, making me pretty sure he got it’s heart.
That would explain why it went down so quickly!
The head looks like it’s made of a fragment of Wartime armour, carved to shape with a plasmablade.
“Sir…?” I say, loudly but uncertainly, to the man who’s now kneeling beside his kill and laying out a large sheet of leather. I see his head twitch but he doesn’t answer me.
He draws a knife (that I’d guess to be the product of the same method as the spearhead) and begins deftly butchering the meat, placing the cuts on the leather sheet and occasionally tossing some to his pet as he does.
The adorable little creature snatches the meat that it’s tossed out of the air with its snout, seeming to be delighted by the game as well as the food it happily chews.
It’s able to get surprisingly high by flapping those four wings, even if I’m pretty certain it can’t fly with them.
“Are you Maj Artemas Leandros?” I ask, more forcefully now, a little pissed off that he’s, clearly, intentionally ignoring me.
“Κάνε ησυχία, φάντασμα… Είμαι απασχολημένος… Στοίχειωσε με τον Χειμώνα…” he answers, without turning from his task, in a voice that’s croaky from lack of use.
Well fuck!
He’s answering me, at least, but he clearly doesn’t speak English! I was really banking on him either knowing English or being able to pull the same trick I pulled with the kid on Neonesia and just having Twila translate… Can’t do that without a holo!
Remembering my childhood lessons in translatorless etiquette, I try the next language I think he’s most likely to speak.
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“Perdonami, Maggiore. Non parlo Greco. Sa parlare Italiano?”
The man freezes and his whole body stiffens.
He turns around with a deeply confused expression on his face, his bright golden eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“You not… first… speak me not Greek, fantasma. You first who not knows when I speaked Greek!” he says, in heavily accented English.
“I’m… not sure I understand… What do you mean?” I ask.
Rather than answering, he asks instead “Where did we know?… Not remember you!”
“We’ve… we’ve never met, Major…” I say, mildly alarmed “…My name’s Victor.”
“If we never met, ‘Victor’, why you here?”
Deeply concerned now, I answer “I’m… I’m here for you… Did you not hear the announcement saying to come to the lifeboat?”
He waves his hand, dismissively “I give my time run for fantasma, then cold come and I am no food.”
“When you say that word; ‘fantasma’… do you mean… ghost?”
“Not do that!” he snarls, angrily, causing his dromaeosaur to start back from him in surprise.
“Don’t do what?” I answer, extremely confused at what upset him.
“Stop teach me!” he shouts “I never learn this word you use; ‘ghost’, I not know this word!”
“I mean…” I say, confused at why he’s so upset by learning a new word “…it just means ‘dead person without a body’… I think it’s the translation of the Greek word you’re using… why are you upset by that?”
“Because… in all time on Melinoë… no ‘ghost’ ever teached me word I not know!…” he says, heaping scorn on the word I just taught him.
“The thing is, Major… I’m not a ghost… I’m alive, I’m real and I’m here for you… to rescue you…”
He rolls his eyes “They say that before… I follow for days… go hungry, tired, lost… Not do that!”
“You don’t trust that I’m real?”
“Because you not! I go you, you run away!” he growls.
“How can I prove that I am real?” I ask, doing my best to ape the tone that Alchyinad uses when asking me a question.
Slightly taken aback, he thinks for a few moments before pointing to his pet “Call Horme…”
---Artemas’s perspective---
The ghost with the weird clothes, pale skin, fiery moustache, fiery hair and emerald eyes looks to Horme, back to me then back to her before extending his hand, averting his eyes and calling “Horme… Come here, Horme!” with the same sing songy tone that I remember using on the dog my family owned as a child.
She looks to me, uncertainly.
I give a gesture of ‘go on’ and, tentatively, she approaches him.
Horme, being sane, has never seen any of the apparitions that I see.
Sure, she’ll yip in the direction I’m screaming at, when there’s a particularly bad one, but that’s only because she knows it helps me feel better that she’s there ready to defend me. Not that she’d be able to do anything against them if what I was seeing were actually there!
As she treads toward him, the ghost looks to me and asks “Horme a girl or a boy?”
“She girl…” I respond, my eyes fixed on her.
Any moment now she’s going to get to where he is… and then walk right past him because he isn’t there!
Any moment…
Any moment…
She’s looking at him…
She’s looking straight at the space that I know must be empty!
Her head meets his hand and my eyes bulge out of my skull as the two of them, unmistakeably… touch!
She nuzzles into his hand as he smiles “Good giiiiirl, Horme! Good giiiiirl!”
Breathlessly, I say “You real!”
He smirks back “Told you.”
I gesture him towards me and say “Come!”
If he runs away at this point… much as it pains me, I need to just forget about him! I’ve wasted far too many days, chasing people who weren’t there! They always do just enough to convince me there’s a chance they’re real… that, if I follow them for just a little longer, then…
Then, before I know it, I’m hungry, tired and lost, days from territory I know!
If he runs away now, then he was never there and I just imagined Horme being stroked!
He stands and Horme runs back to my left shin.
He walks toward me.
As he draws close, I’m able to see he’s a few centimetres taller than I am.
I raise my hand and notice it’s still slick with green blood.
I briefly think about quickly washing it in the river but I’m far too terrified that, when I turn around, he’ll be gone!
He doesn’t object as my hand draws closer to his face.
I touch his cheek, my fingers painting his skin with stripes of green.
I gasp as I set my fingers on the first Human flesh I’ve touched in a third of a lifetime!
It’s warm, like the bed of a firepit that was allowed to burn itself out, overnight.
“You real!” I quiver.
“I’m real!” he confirms.
“Real real!?” I demand, tears welling up in my eyes.
“Really real!” he smiles.
I throw my arms around him and break down sobbing.
He wraps his arms around me, letting me feel Human warmth for the first time in decades, as he squeezes me to his chest and pats my back, speaking soothingly to me while I blubber into his shoulder like a child.
This man gives good cuddles!