Day 3
Koyl give me how make say speak paper. Me make choose do make ship log. Speak paper easy. One mark per sound.
Day 4
Learn more word, like write. Speak paper mean same as write, is write same way but not same. Not know why.
Day 5 Sun Low
Me I help crew with keep boat ship no dirt clean. Captain say not need help, but crew like help. Koyl use time to think of learn lesson. Write not as easy as I think on day three.
Day 6 No Sun Up
Koyl wake up middle of night. Koyl wake up other nights too, but this day today Koyl make more noise than other day. Talk loud, not know word. In English it scream. Yehv Yaavtey in Koyl dream. Yaavtey kill Koyl many time, then Koyl wake. Koyl think Yaavtey in room. Koyl try bite me when I go to make speak quiet.
Koyl make learn teach me more word, but Koyl seem not pay attention. Not know word, in English it distracted. I not want use English, make dead defeat purpose of speak paper book journal.
Day 8 Sun Down
Koyl show me plurals today. Simple structure, just add special mark at end of words. It not letter like in English, instead different mark. Uwrish have many special marks, I not sure what all mean. Maybe ask Koyl. Koyl sleep early today, so I spend time practice write more clearly.
Day 9 Early Sun
Koyl wake up scream again. He strike me in face with wooden arm, but calm when he see light magic. He say Yaavtey throw him back into burning building in dream, then kill me. I tell him I cannot be kill by weak Yaavtey, so if he see me die he know he in dream.
Day 9 Sun Down
Koyl also show me pronouns for others today. Very simple, like plurals. Only four types: man, woman, not want to say or not applicable, and fourth type that he say for special cases only and never speak out loud. Fourth case like special beings, gods or spirits or high leader, and written like first three but more complex. I not really understand point, but Koyl insist they important for some things. Plural pronouns just pronouns with special plural mark, and for mixed group use no pronouns and instead say ‘people’.
Day 11 Evening
Verbs and conjugation. Annoying. Also vocabulary. Some words write strangely.
Day 12 Evening
Koyl finally explained tenses, and they are very easy. Most of the questions about special mark characters I had involved the tense marks. Words are spelled the same for all tenses, but then special tense marks are added to indicate if they are past or future tense. As Koyl explained there can be more than one past or future mark to indicate certain levels of tense, and joining opposite marks means something like a progressive tense. Despite being easy in principle, in practice there are multiple conventions for writing such marks which vary by writer and region, so Koyl gave me some reading material to try out.
Day 13 Morning
Another screaming night from Koyl. Luckily I was not tired and instead was reading, so I stopped him quickly. The crew are growing annoyed with Koyl’s outbursts, so I will have a talk with him about them. Two weeks is more than enough time to resolve trauma, even for a creator human.
Day 13 Evening
I asked Koyl many questions about the spelling of words. The books that the captain had been willing to lend were more complex than Koyl would have liked, but even simple words sometimes looked misspelled. Koyl explained that the spelling was not an error, but that common writing convention groups certain vowel sounds together into special characters. Once it was explained to me that the characters were compound vowels I could read the words more easily, but then Koyl began to explain the rules for which vowels became compound and the discussion veered into technicalities for several hours. Suffice to say, essentially one just has to know the word from seeing it. There were rules originally, but over time the misuse of them lead to a completely unintuitive mess. Thankfully my first language was English, so I was expecting such a mess at some point. Writing without vowel grouping is “childish”, but not illegible, so I will focus on passive memorization.
Day 14 Evening
During the evening after some lessons I joined the crew for a game. I did not intend to join, but instead was pressured into joining by the crew themselves. Said game was essentially a test of strength activity, no magic allowed. Ropes are tied to the limbs and the participants balance on filled barrels, then try to pull each other off. I deliberately won exactly half of my matches to avoid standing out. The games then turned to simple arm-wrestling, lifting heavy blocks of metal, and bare-knuckle boxing. I declined to participate in the boxing for fear of another incident like with Thaajh, but I did arm-wrestle and win two-thirds of my rounds, losing the remaining third deliberately. The crew’s disposition has improved.
Day 15 Afternoon
Koyl became unresponsive multiple times during lessons today, staring into space. This has happened previously but today in particular he spent nearly five minutes in such a state. I attempted to reason with him and have him process his trauma more quickly, but I angered him instead. I had assumed that long trauma only occurred in pseudofemales due to genetic flaws, but it seems that even male creator humans may require a longer process as well. Regardless, Koyl must learn to remain functional, such ‘zoning out’ in battle would be fatal.
Day 16 Noon
Another screaming night last night. Two crew members burst into the room shortly after I managed to quiet Koyl down, shouting about the noise. Koyl, still in a dissociated state, responded by screaming again. I escorted the crew from the room after quieting him, at which point the captain arrived. A long discussion ensued about Koyl’s problem and his body’s condition. I explained the matter in reasonable detail, after which the crew and captain went back to bed.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Day 19 Evening
The crew has not said much about Koyl’s screaming since my explanation. Either the captain ordered them not to speak of it, or they decided his trauma was justified. Koyl seems embarrassed about it, and sometimes the crew glances at him when they think he cannot see them with curious looks.
I finished the books I was reading and requested more. While I do not pretend to have knowledge of Uwrish literature, I found the stories to be quite uninteresting. Still, their value as educational material justified the time spent.
Day 25 Evening
Koyl’s limbs have grown back enough to necessitate adjustments to his prosthetics. The regeneration process is interesting to behold. It seems as though every sub-section of the limb which is damaged first heals, then a bud forms on the end of it which grows back into the next part. Koyl balked at losing some height, but admitted that his balance improved once he was shortened again.
Day 26 Afternoon
Some kind of animal attacked the ship. When the impact first occurred I thought we were under attack, but the captain assured me that it was normal for the ship to take some damage during voyages from animals he called taaleylngehvay. They are incredibly durable shelled mollusks who, apparently, use magic to propel themselves at extreme speeds into foes as a form of attack. Their natural prey are kayvkihv, large creatures that sounded whale-like from the given descriptions and create powerful whirlpools to suck in water for feeding. Incidentally, the captain did not know the whirlpools were for feeding, but I assumed that it was the case from the description of the animal, which has classic filter-feeding teeth. The taaleylngehvay often think boats are breaching kayvkihv and attack them mistakenly.
Day 30 Evening
The crew caught a shark-like animal today, and dissected it for food since reserves are now below half. The animal was called a tuhvdawpt, and apparently is some kind of predatory fish which feeds on schools of smaller fish. Using means unknown to the crew which I heavily suspect to be electrical, it stuns dozens of fish at a time during torpedo-like attack runs, then quickly turns around to snatch them up before they recover. The main question is whether or not the electrical power is magical or biological in nature. The animal’s shark-like shape looked quite ordinary with the only exception being the eyes, which were set on short stalks for a larger field of vision. The crew had killed the animal before I managed to get a good look at it, and my analysis of its internal organs was inconclusive, so I suppose the nature of its powers is an open question.
Day 34 Afternoon
I found Koyl crying in his room. He tried to pretend that he wasn’t crying when I entered, but it was obvious. It occurred to me, after a few seconds of processing, that I had rarely ever seen an adult human cry before. Even pseudofemales rarely cried when suffering mentally, preferring to either rage at those around them or shut themselves away. I confronted Koyl about his unstable emotions, which angered him. He refused to speak with me for the remainder of the day.
I require a plan to deal with Koyl. He is still useful as a local guide, but the level of investment required to keep him functional in his current state is too large of an investment. It would be best to dispose of him upon reaching shore and find another, but I would very much prefer to not throw away invested effort. I am acutely aware that my past simulation of emotions, even my current body’s emotions, may not carry the same qualia as genuine experience and as such cannot be used as a metric for advising him, but I feel I must do something before the damage becomes irreparable.
Day 35 Evening
The crew invited me to engage in a game of chance with them for money. Initially I rejected the notion, but upon further consideration I accepted, especially once the captain explained that the stakes of the game would be kept minimal so as not to damage morale.
The game in question involved wooden pieces with various symbols, some crude eight-sided dice, and many coin flips. The rules were extremely convoluted to the point that I suspected that they only existed to confound the randomness of the results enough to give the humans the illusion of skill mattering to their results. Once the social situation settled down, I managed to bring up the topic of Koyl, to surprising results.
The crew pitied Koyl once they learned of his story, and openly admitted that fact as though it was normal. One member in particular recounted a story of an uncle who went through a similar trauma from being mauled by bears, then kept alive and repeatedly mutilated while being slowly eaten for several days. He stated that, even years later, the uncle could not stand to walk the forest by himself after the incident.
I asked for advice with fixing Koyl, and the only conclusive answer I received was that psychoactives could distract his mind. One crew member offered to provide me with a substance in exchange for my (substantial) winnings, and I agreed.
Day 37 Afternoon
Koyl is responding well to the substance, which he referred to as znahdeyvtih. When inhaled, the dust (which appears to be the powdered fruiting body tissue of some sort of fungus) induces an altered mental state wherein the user is “distanced from themselves”, allegedly. Koyl appears more psychologically normal under the effects of the drug, both relative to his traumatized state as well as relative to the other creator humans of the crew. He shows little emotional affect under ideal dosage, is very logical, has little to no pain response, and is fully alert and articulate.
The crew member who provided the drug to me warned me that overdosing on the drug can induce a state not unlike Koyl’s unresponsive trauma fits, though for a time measured in hours instead of minutes. In such a state the user’s conscious mind experiences extreme hallucinations and disconnection from all sensory input. Some users find such a state enjoyable. Further overdose, usually through accidental ingestion, can be fatal if it lasts more than three or four days.
Day 38 Morning
Koyl awoke screaming again, but quickly caught himself and became angry before taking some znahdeyvtih. When I asked him about what caused the issue, he explained that his recurring nightmares do not end even when he becomes aware that they are nightmares, turning into a sort of mental torture. In his altered state I found speaking to him about his issues to be conducive to fixing his problem, and eventually Koyl informed me that his non-responsive states were being triggered by the sound of footsteps and wood creaking at certain frequencies and in certain directions from him. He himself postulated that it was because they sounded similar to what he would hear in the torture chamber when Yaavtey was approaching the hatch to the basement. Truly, znahdeyvtih is a useful substance, for it to allow him to give accurate mental introspection.
Day 38 Afternoon
I also had to alter Koyl’s prosthetics again. He now has fully formed forearms and legs, lacking only his hands and feet. I offered to carve Koyl some feet, but he insisted that it would be pointless and only accepted the ball for his hand being changed so that he could slip over his forearm.
Koyl’s healing has been slightly slower than I expected. I suspect that his mental state has something to do with it, but I cannot prove anything.
Day 40 Afternoon
I created a pair of ear coverings for Koyl to sleep with using scrap materials from around the ship. As it turns out, there is a flexible resin that is used for patching holes in the vessel which can also be formed into semi-malleable shapes. Koyl was skeptical of my idea, but when I explained to him that I believed his nightmares were being triggered by the same sounds which triggered his non-responsive state being heard while asleep he agreed to try the device.
I have also officially read every book the captain has on board. Most were just poetry or fictional stories, but a few had useful information about the mainland. For example: Klehkah, the region we are headed to, is mostly a type of terrain called pawtaokiyjhvaaljh, which essentially matches the descriptions of the North American “Shield” terrain type. Very rocky, large amounts of trees, height variations to extremes in some places. Most of Klehkah is uninhabitable long-term because of the lack of suitable farmland and aggressive wildlife. Paradoxically, Pehrihnk is also the largest city in Uwriy, and the only major settlement in Klehkah.
Day 43 Afternoon
We can see the shore now, the captain estimates that it will be two days before we reach Pehrihnk. Koyl’s feet have grown enough to allow him to walk, and his hands are fully regenerated, having lost no apparent dexterity. He joined the crew for one of their gambling games and managed to defeat every single member, much to their dismay. He appears more like himself, but I sometimes catch him staring off into space when he thinks that nobody can see him. His use of znahdeyvtih has stabilized at approximately three uses per day, and though the ear coverings did not fully resolve the nightmares they did cause a forty percent reduction in them.
I believe Koyl to be functioning at an acceptable level, and I will retain him for as long as he continues to be useful.