Oops

Sorry for the last minute notice, but there won't be an update this week. Idiot that I am, I completely forgot today is my wedding anniversary. The Husband Unit is kidnapping me for a much-needed night out together. I won't have time to devote to the entry for this week without making it half-assed. :P Double post next week to make up for it.

If anyone has any questions about the Project or the Azus in general, now is a great time to ask. :)

Also, coming soon--create your own Azu-nah?

Crumbling Resolve.

The blue funk that had been bothering me the night before had largely faded by morning. I still felt a little off, but I was determined to make it a good day. I like to be alone, and I’ve never been a terribly social person. So I shored up my resolve, gave my whiney, needy inner self a little kick in the behind, and got up to find breakfast

Nandi had already gone before I’d even gotten up. The Azu-nah seem to make a habit of moving very, very quietly. It’s a little disconcerting, but it makes for an excellent roommate. I folded my sleeping bag, tided the rest of my things, and headed outside.

My determination to stay positive didn’t last terribly long. All throughout the morning meal, various clan members started asking me questions. This didn’t bother me at first. They were innocuous enough questions. I happily answered them. In retrospect that may not have been the best approach, since my answers only seemed to encourage more questions, and more questioners. Soon I was inundated.

Does it hurt to stand so straight/tall? How can I smell with such a tiny nose? How do I run fast with no claws on my feet? Why don’t I have a tail? What are the bumps on my chest? Can I move my ears? Why not? Why are my eyes “colorless”? Am I cold, since I wear so many coverings all the time? Why haven’t I gotten any tattoos? Do I have an azuku? Why is my skin so soft? Was it true that I made water every day, but I was not sick? Why don't I hunt?

I eventually excused myself and fled down to the beach to get away from all the questions. Nandi followed me. He seemed to understand that I was feeling a bit out of my depth.

“The Azu-nah are of Sukil,” he said matter-of-factly, as if that explained everything. At my blank expression he continued. “We are filled with curiosity.” He went on to say that the Azu-nah had always been curious about me, but I had so little command of the language they did not know how to ask. And my learning with Kohric, and then the physical and mental demands of the move had kept me more isolated.

“You shape breath well, now. Kohric will still teach, but now you are more of D’Keda,” Nandi explained. “Curiosity grows, and so many D'Keda ask questions.” He said it in an odd, laughing way, as if it was so obvious he found it funny I hadn’t already anticipated something like this.

I swallowed my irritation and tried to go about the rest of my day. The questions kept coming, though. Not as may as at breakfast, but when I joined a foraging party to help gather food, they pestered me about my clothes again, and asked why I could not eat the same foods as they could. At dinner they asked why I was only one color all over, and if my siblings were spotted or striped. And in the evening, when I was trying to sketch a little sand creature on the beach, there were more questions as to what all of my equipment was, why did I need it, whether they could eat it or make something of it, and many others.

I went to bed early, and woke up in the morning with a headache, still off-balance.

The barrage continued at breakfast. It was like being under siege. I didn’t know how to get away, and I felt badly that I wanted to escape at all. But all the whys and hows were making it very difficult to squelch the whiney, needy inner Tee that kept moaning about how alone and alien I am on Minerva. All the things that felt alien about the planet seemed to press down on me and interrupt my thoughts. They weren’t like Earth. They were different. Everything here is different. I kept having moments where I started longing for home, and even had a flicker of, “why did I come here?”

That pissed me off. I mean, come on! I spent a month without even seeing another human in Tanzania. I trained in a super-isloated Antarctic base with only me and one other person amidst a hundred miles of ice and nothing. Not to mention the last year training for Minerva at the lunar outpost. This should be no different. I should be prepared for the isolation, even relish it. It suits me, after all.

But, the whiny little inner-Tee wheedled, there’s a difference between being alone and being the alien under a microscope. I’m used to observing and being somewhat removed from the subject I observe. I don’t think I was really prepared for my subject to jump up and start taking notes on me back. Sharing knowledge was to be expected, but somehow this feels different. Lonely.

I fled breakfast and found an isolated patch of beach to sit and think for a while. It was Eyani who eventually found me. I don’t know if it was his withdrawn nature, or some kind of empathy for me, but when he came and sat next to me, he didn’t utter a word.

We stared down at the blue-green water together, and I tried to decide what to do next.

Song and Dance

I set my plots for revenge aside for the rest of the day, since the trio had taken themselves off out of reach. For now....

The rest of the afternoon was deliciously lazy. Nandi and I had a splash fight. I’m really starting to resent my lack of a tail. Not only does it give you an extra boost swimming, but it works as an excellent wave-maker. Nandi claimed a decided victory after half-drowning me in a home made tsunami.

I dragged my water-logged carcass to the shore where Nandi and I lounged in the fragrant plants that bordered the beach. It was a huge relief, after so many days of constant walking, to just sit and relax and feel the sun on my skin. I was just finally feeling completely dry (and thankfully I’d gotten past that weird sticky skin feeling you get after swimming in sea water), when Nandi announced that he was hungry. I wanted to applaud this announcement.

We ended up spending the rest of the afternoon and into the evening wandering the fields and foraging. Nandi introduced me to a fruit called koh. God DAMN is it good. It tastes a bit like strawberries, but it’s tart and a little sour, like a pineapple or something citrus. Nandi says the trees are relatively rare at the old clan site but that they are fairly plentiful here. I don’t know if that’s good or not. It’s like a dieter hearing Choco-topia has just set up on the nearest street corner, and they give away freebees every Tuesday. Nandi and I devoured an entire fruit on our own. I didn’t even stop to draw a halfway decent diagram. They’re pretty big, too; watermelon-sized.

I can quit any time, I swear!

When we were pleasantly full (and honestly starting to feel a little sick from ODing on koh) it was getting on toward full dark. So we headed back to the caves where the rest of the clan was gathering.

There were no normal cook fires built tonight. Instead there was only one very large bonfire that stood at the center of the little open common area near the cliff face. The entire clan had gathered and was talking excitedly. Apparently I was wrong about the whole no fanfare/greeting of the new clan site.

The Kan walked up to the fire and held his hand over it, holding a packet of something that dangled from a leather thong. I still have enough difficulty with the language that I couldn’t understand 100% of what he said. But I got the gist. He asked the land (their word includes a sense of consciousness, as if the land is a person) was generous in letting us live here, and that we were happy to see an old friend again. Then he said we would dance our gratitude until it was visible to both the land and the stars.

He threw the packet into the fire and it blazed blue-green for a moment. Then he began to dance. The clan began to sing in time to his steps, thumping tails on the ground, or stamping feet in a primal beat. The Kan’s dance seemed to be a series of poses that flowed into each other. He would slide into one pose, hold it for half a heartbeat, and then slip to the next one, all the while circling the fire.

Once he completed two cycles of the dance, the rest of the clan filed in behind to join him. Nandi dragged me along, even though I couldn’t do the dance properly. I can’t really do the quadruped steps, and I still don’t have a damn tail. But no one seemed to mind, and Nandi seemed to get a huge kick out of my attempts.



The celebration went on for a couple hours. There were more dances, singing, and lots more flaring colored fire. Eventually, though, the fire burnt down and we slowly made our way to our caves to go to sleep. I barely got my sleeping bag out of the pack before flopping into it.

But tired as I was, I couldn’t quite fall asleep. As comfortable as I feel with the Azu-nah, and as welcoming as they’ve been, tonight’s dancing really brought it home again how alien I am here. I simply will never be able to truly fit in with these people. Not that I’m ever going to go crazy and pull a Dances With Wolves. But the barrier between me and the Azu-nah made me feel like I would never be anything but an outsider, an alien.

It took me a while before I was able to quiet my thoughts enough to fall asleep.

Alien Waters

I had expected to greet the clan’s new home with some sort of fanfare or at least some special words; a moment of silence? Something. But nothing of the sort actually happened. It was mid morning when we reached the beach. I know I’ve been using vague terms for time. It’s probably annoying. But you and every school kid knows the Minervan day is only 21.73 Earth hours long, and it really doesn’t give as good a frame of reference if I say it was 0800 on the Minervan clock. Mostly, though, I’ve started to fall out of the habit of thinking of time as a number, and more of a state of the day. It sounds stupid, but it fits my current situation a lot better than 0800’s.

The shore was surprisingly quiet. There weren’t much in the way of waves, and the usual watery beach noises were mostly absent. There were no mewing, squawking gulls or pelicans, or any other sea birds. Instead, there were other calls that were disturbingly alien. One was a series of odd, low, mournful sounds. Have you ever played “music” on a wine glass? That thing where you wet your finger and run it around the lip of the glass? You get these lovely pure notes, with a faint echoing quality. This was a bit like those sounds, only lower, much deeper, and with an organic sound to them that vaguely reminded me of a whale call. It was a haunting sound to begin with, and the fact that I couldn’t figure out what was making it creeped me out even more.

The other noises weren’t really creepy, but they messed with my head a bit. For example, the clicking chirps that immediately made me think “songbird,” were actually coming from pack of little six-legged ground creatures that were prowling the wrack line several hundred meters away. And a series of mechanical clacks and snaps that registered in my hindbrain as belonging to an insect of some sort, actually belong to this ocean’s “sea birds.” There seem to be several kinds of them. They’re really hard to see, since they go shooting by really fast, but all the species I could see seem to have two sets of wings. They aren’t actually birds, of course. But I can’t help seeing a flying thing and immediately thinking “bird.” I’m hoping to get a better look at them as we spend time here, so I can tell you what they actually are.

The Azu-nah were fairly leisurely with setting up camp. Everyone chose somewhere to live. There were a few coveted caves that caused a few disputes, but they were settled surprisingly quickly. There weren’t enough caves for everyone to have their own. I ended up sharing with Nandi. Kohric’s cave is only a dozen meters away, and Oreeaht is our next door neighbor. I’m pretty happy with the setup.

After we’d set our things down and had a short rest, most of the clan, myself included, headed down to the water for a wash up. It took all my willpower to test the water’s composition first. The ever present chlorine is there, but it’s more or less entirely been bound up by the other minerals in the water. So it means the water is really, really salty, and a little gritty. It had my eyes burning at first.

The Azu-nah are very picky about keeping their belongings clean, but absolutely no one went into the water wearing a bag or clothing of any kind. But while the Azu-nah run around more or less in the buff to begin with, I was feeling a bit more …shy. I’d stripped to my underoos and was about ankle deep when Kohric and Nandi both came splashing up to me.

They didn’t exactly forbid me to wear anything in the water. But they said that the salt and other assorted particulates would make me sorry I did (well, they said “sand”, but I got the message. Chafing sucks, no matter what species you are). Also, it’s apparently a bit of a social faux pas, and would make me look like a total idiot; the Minervan equivalent of a noob.

It took me a good twenty minutes, but I did manage to get up the courage to strip down. I practically sprinted to the water and submerged to my shoulders. But other than a few innocently curious questions about what the funny things on my torso were, they didn’t give me a second glance.

And, really, by the time I was in the water, I was so grateful to finally get clean that I wouldn’t have cared if the global counsel president had walked by at the moment. There wasn’t any soap, of course, but the salty water got most of the grime off by itself, and a good scrub with a handful of sand took care of the anything more stubborn. It was heaven.

The only downside to my bath was at the end, when the Terrible Trio decided to pay me a visit. Or, rather, an ambush. Now, I’m still not sure what’s IN the water here, right? And when three splashy, roaring somethings descend on me and give me a good dunking, I kinda, sorta, maybe freaked a bit.

The trio found this utterly hilarious. I chased them around a bit, attempting a revenge dunking, but they were too fast for me. Damn tails. I need better propulsion. They found my failed attempts even funnier. I contented myself to splash them ruthlessly for a few minutes, and they eventually took themselves off to harass some other victim.

But it’s not over. Vengeance will be mine!