Thanda-tu

It’s been four days, and the clan is starting to slow down a little in its manic quest to stash away food.

I will probably regret saying this when I’m desperately starving in a few months or something, but for now I’m grateful that it’s winding down. I’m not sure how many more hours I can spend hunched over without turning into Igor-Tee. Yeeesss, Kohric, what is your bidding? Agh. My poor spine.

The youngsters were the first to take advantage of the lull. Nyarno practically vanished the minute the adults were looking the other way, with Ghee and Oshtik not far behind. Even solemn little Eyani finished his chores in a hurry and practically danced out into the fields to romp. It was cute. Kohric let me go a short while after, and I may have done a teensy bit of dancing too. I found Eyani and we made straight for the beach.

It hadn’t rained yet, which was a miracle, and the sun was actually peeking through the ever-present clouds. The breeze coming off the water was cool, but it was still warm enough out that the air felt refreshing instead of chill. Eyani and I did absolutely nothing productive, and it was wonderful. No learning, no practicing, nothing. We splashed around in the water, chased a funny-looking crab-lizard thing that I didn’t even ask the name of (hah!), and finally ended flopping under a tree and dozing. It was blissful after so many days of nonstop manual labor.

Eyani fell asleep after a time, and I didn’t have the heart to wake him. I wasn’t feeling sleepy. I’ve never been one to nap, really. So I went ambling along the wrack line to look for shiny pebbles to bring to Nandi (he covets shiny things worse than an entire flock of crows). The poor guy hadn’t gotten away from his chores and I thought a sparkly may make up for our abandoning him to play.

I hadn’t been at it too long when I spotted Oshtik sitting in the sand, looking out over the water. I still haven’t gotten their body language down pat, but I thought she looked rather sad. Her ears were drooping, her posture hunched, and her tail was curled tightly around her feet.

I approached her carefully. “Oshtik?”

She dipped her head and flicked one wrist in a half-hearted mockery of the normal greeting gesture. I sat down nearby and fumbled through my Azu-nah lexicon. The normal question here would, of course, be “is something wrong?” But I don’t know the Azu-nah word for “wrong.” Morality isn’t something that comes up in the day to day struggle to keep the clan fed, or in the little lessons Kohric has been giving. So I muddled along as best I could.

“Do you hurt?” I asked, feeling stupid. I knew that wasn’t the way another Azu would ask. I tried again. “Does your spirit hurt?” This language barrier really sucks.

Oshtik was quiet for some time, and I began to think she may not answer at all, but she finally turned to me and spoke. Her yellow eyes were like two pieces of amber in a bed of gray ash.

“Kohric does not teach today, or the next.” She sighed gustily, her sides rippling. “I will not learn new things for many days. Maybe a hand-and-tail of days!” Her muzzle was wrinkling, and her eyes were scrunching shut. I swallowed a laugh; I have apparently been hanging around with the Azu-nah equivalent of a geeky teacher’s pet, and didn’t realize it. I smiled and leaned to bump my forehead against hers. I ruffled her forelock with one hand.

“I can teach you human words,” I offered.

Oshtik made a delighted sound, haaaa, and surged to her feet. “Yes! Tee will teach? Yes!” Yeah, she’s definitely an Azu-nerd.

I grinned and hugged her.

Sick

I have managed to catch a fabulous strain of the head cold my co-workers have been passing around. No entry this week. I can barely see straight.

Gone Fishin'

Those first three days or so of rain were the worst. Thankfully, like all unpleasant things, the rain finally subsided. It still rains nearly every day, and we still have to go out in it to find food, gather supplies, medicines, and all the other things that are necessary for the clan to make ends meet. But it does stop, especially mostly during the afternoons, which makes for a welcome reprieve.

I noticed that with the changing season, the Azu-nah’s habits have begun to change too. The hunting parties have been going out more often, almost every day, and they are bringing back a lot more meat. A lot. More than the clan could ever eat before it spoiled. One of the caves has been converted to a kind of smoke house, and the extra meat was preserved that way, and stored in the back of the cave.

Plant foods are also being gathered, dried, and stored with a lot more intensity than before too. We’ve been spending every day out gathering, and my back is not happy about it. Our lessons with Kohric have been put off until this harvest frenzy has ended; that can’t be soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. I’m beginning to doubt I’ll ever walk upright properly again. Ugh.

I have an idea what all this is about. The season is turning, after all, and it’s supposed to start getting quite cold. I don’t know if “winter’ on Minerva is anything like on Earth, but I imagine foodstuffs become scarcer in the cold, and the clan is stockpiling against starvation. That or maybe they plan going on a monumental food bender at some point down the road.

Another change is that there have been more lookouts posted. This I don’t have any solid explanation for. Nandi said something cryptic about keeping watch for when the clouds dance. I took this to mean they’re watching for storms. A short period of thunder and lightning occurred a day or so ago, and it had the clan pretty spooked. They would keep glancing up at the lookouts all throughout the storm. I was surprised by their reaction, honestly. It wasn’t a bad storm at all by Earth standards. The thunder rumbled more than really thundered, and the lightning was just like any other lightning I’ve seen. Or perhaps they’re concerned about plains fires. That would be pretty frightening.

Today was a day for water, though. And thankfully it wasn’t raining.

Today I got to go fishing. Though, it was unlike any fishing I’ve ever done. More like herding, to be honest. Several of the clan worked together to weave several nets. They’re big, too; nearly five meters long. A handful of hunters gathered up the nets and strung themselves out along the water line on the beach and crouched with the nets down in the water. The Sa-kudayu gathered the rest of the clan and we were all told to wade out into the shallows and be very still.

It was pleasant, actually. The sea water was warmer than I thought, and the sandy bottom was soothing on my feet. We waited and watched while the Sa-kudayu took a basket of entrails and bits of viscera from the clan’s most recent kill, and began scattering it across the water between the net-holders and the rest of the clan. It was a little weird, seeing the solemn hunt-leader gleefully flinging guts around, but I was too busy watching to see what all that chum would attract.

Very soon, I could see creatures gliding past our legs to feed on the little gobbets floating in the water. Everyone was tensed, waiting, and no one so much as twitched a tail. By now I’d figured out the trick, and was eagerly waiting for the signal too.

Finally, after several agonizing minutes, the Sa-kudayu made a chopping motion with his arm. Everyone not holding a net began charging forward toward the shore, shouting, splashing, and making all manner of noise. We formed a kind of arc, trapping the fish with a wall of surging water and forcing them toward the nets. The net-holders surged to their feet and pulled up the nets, revealing a mass of twisting, thrashing creatures.

We did this several times, until all the nets were full and we’d stirred up the water too much for any sane creature to want to come near.



I keep calling our catch “fish” but they’re really not much like Earth fish. There are places where you can clearly see convergent evolution; many of them are streamlined and have fin-like appendages or tails. But they don’t resemble Earth fish much at all. Some have a half dozen compound eyes, for example. Some have hugely long mouths with strange suckers on the ends, one species has what almost looks like baleen in place of teeth; another was some freakish lovechild of a coral and a crab.

The Azu-nah seemed delighted with the day’s work, though, and many clan members were swapping favorites over dinner. I can’t eat them, of course. They’re actually worse than the land creatures in terms of freakish compounds and whatnot. But honestly, I’m glad I have that as an excuse. These things are a little too freaky for me to consider them dinner.

---

There will be no entry next week (the 12th) as I have some other work that needs to be taken care of. The week after though will have some more polished art to make up for it. Have a great week, everyone!

Flood

The rain eventually slowed and. after a few more miserable days, stopped. The days that followed were even more miserable, though.

The day after the rain stopped, one of the scouts became excited and pointed toward the sky. At first I dismissed it as yet another meteorite. Minerva sees a lot of meteorites. But this one made me do a double take; it was shiny, a distinctly metallic shiny.

Odd.

It landed in the ocean, far, far down the shoreline, so no one ended up going to look for it. I was curious, though, and the thought of that metallic glint wouldn’t leave my mind. So I pinged Ground Zero to see if they had lost a piece of equipment, or if one of the satellites’ orbit had decayed prematurely. I didn’t expect them to answer right away. It wasn’t a priority message, after all.

But after 36 hours they still hadn’t responded. A cold knot was growing in my stomach, and I kept trying to tell myself that it was just a system error and not that something bad had happened. I spent most of the morning trying to put it out of my mind, and I actually almost succeeded, until about mid-day.

I didn’t immediately recognize the noises I was hearing as Azu-nah screams. Nandi and I were harvesting sap from a tree for the Kan when we heard whooping, and agitated hisses, and shrieks.

One of the hunters was sprinting through the grass toward the clan dens. He was making wide arm motions and shouting at the top of his lungs. I could barely make out what he was saying, but I kept hearing “run” and “killed”. My pulse quickened.

“Something comes from the water,” I heard him shriek, and he gestured in the direction the meteor had fallen the day before yesterday. “It grabs, it kills. We must run!” His voice was harsh with fear, and his eyes were so wide I could see a thin sliver of white around the edges. The clan mulled around, uncertain, until the hunter looked over his shoulder and shrieked, “They come!” and sprinted away down the beach.

We watched him go in confusion, and then our heads all turned in unison as we heard a kind of squishing, squelching, slithering sound coming through the grass. I barely caught a glimpse of the creatures; a flash of colorful red tendrils, a sickly, maggot-like body, and far, far too many legs. There were hundreds of them pouring out of the grass. A dozen of them fell upon the nearest Azu-nah, a gray female with striking black stripes, and enveloped her in a horrible mass of seething, bubbling, cancerous flesh.

We ran.



Several individuals sprinted out into the water, others ran up trees and hid. Most of us fled along the beach. There were horrible shrieks and screams behind us. I tried not to think about what was happening to everyone who’d run up the trees. Nandi was still next to me, and we ran flat out until we could barely breathe. We began to slow, our sides heaving, and I risked a glance behind us.



Adrenaline surged through my veins, and we ran again. We could hear the little things slithering across the beach sand after us. More were pouring between a pair of rocks ahead. We were surrounded. My sides were aching and my ragged breathing was chapping my throat.

No way out.

Several of the things landed on Nandi and started to turn him into another shambling monster. I heard myself screaming. Then one of the horrible creatures latched onto my leg. Another crawled up my arm. A third leapt onto my chest and waved its tendrils in my face.

The last thing I saw was a ba’oh fleeing down the beach from the creatures.

Then I was nothing, and there was only the Gravemind.

---

And they all died. The end.

Okay, no, not really. Yes, the "scheduling conflict" last week was that April Fool's Day inconveniently didn't fall on a Tuesday. >__> The real next entry will be as usual on the 5th. Happy April Fool's Day, everyone! (Seriously, no one's dead, this was just a joke, so please don't hate spam me. :P)

_{The Flood, the Gravemind, and Halo in general all belong to Bungie/Microsoft. I just borrowed them to bring the funny.}