What is this, the second time you've woken up without sopor? Sleeping dry is turning into a bad habit. You've managed to avoid the worst dayterrors so far, but you really need to stop pushing your luck. Waking up with a warm body wrapped around you, and tucked up all perfect, and close is nice though. That can totally become a habit. You don't even make it past that thought before a soft purr starts bubbling into chest. It's safe, and warm here, in your moirail's (squee!) hive, and with her cuddling you in a not-quite-a-proper pile. Your eyes start drifting closed again as your contented rumble deepens. A few more minutes sleep couldn't hurt. You reach over and paw for Ur-Gar, trying to pull them back into the pile too, only to find they aren't there. Oh. Wellllll fuck. Your eyelids are still trying to convince you that getting up in the most terrible idea ever, but you can't leave them to run around without some kind of supervision. They're definitely smarter than you initially gave them credit for, but in an unfamiliar hive, in unfamiliar territory, that's even more of a risk. They are definitely smart enough to cause trouble. Plus, whoever had it in for Iridie might still be lurking around. That finally puts a kick to your fins, and you slowly, reluctantly untangle yourself from Iridie. And then you promptly trip over Ur-Gar in your half asleep state because they've made a nest of pillows right next to the couch on the floor. Ow. Gravity can bite you, seriously. Groaning, you push up on your elbows- then you have to groan again, and flop back down because you just spotted the perfect little square of mud stuck to the wall of Iridie's hive with certain unmistakable scribbles belonging to your floorlump cut into it. "Ur-Gar. Bro," you prod at their nose, "We gotta talk."
You wake up a bit. "Hello Lawfee," you mumble, and pull them into your arms. They smell weird, as usual, but you give their hair a barely-conscious nuzzle.
You are slowmotion pounced and powerless to stop it. Partly because you still can't convince yourself that you wan tot stop it, or do anything else than go back to sleep. Ur-Gar is even Warmer than Iridie. You're feeling overheated, and fuzzy, like someone scooped out your thinkpan and replaced it with a selfheating snuggleplane. "Nnndon't you. Don't you get all cutesy cozy with me, mister, you're in big trouble. Massive. So much." They snuffle and nuzzle the crown of your head, and you choke on your resurging purr.
You're drifting in the drowsy area between being properly awake and actually asleep when a rumbling sound starts from somewhere in front of you. You blink to try and clear your eyes as you rub the back of your neck, and look for the source of the sound. And then you notice Lophii getting what is apparently some very enjoyable petting from Ur-Gar. You aren't sure what time it is yet but it's almost definitely too early to be dealing with this. "...Lophii, do you want me to stop them or...?" You stand up, trying to figure out if you can get away with making coffee before dealing with this.
"Mgknh," you reply to Iridie's question. Fuck, that is also the second time you have been caught in a compromising position by your moirail. You are just full of great life choices today, aren't you? "I'm not awake enough for this. Fair warning, Ur-Gar was redecorating while we were asleep."
You wake up a bit more, because talking. "What's going on now?" you mumble, and direct one of Lawfee's hands into your hair. You want scritches too.
You need coffee to deal with this. Much coffee. You might also need some cold water to throw at those two (actually, cold water might be needed anyways - you're not sure how uncomfortable Lophii gets after being out of saltwater for a while.) You wander kitchenward and - huh. Right by the doorframe there is a neat rectangle of clay, with a trio of symbols carefully etched in. Mushroom in basket-troll with box-troll in a basket. So that's what Lophii meant by redecorating. Hopefully Ur-Gar doesn't expect you to get a bunch more baskets in a hurry. You walk into your kitchen, and discover more signs. Next to the microwave is 'six point star-fire-mushroom in box', while the door of the fridge has 'six point star-dark teardrop-mushroom in box.' When you go to collect water for coffee you see a teardrop drawn above an arrow. Why in the world would they take the time to make these - they're far too tidy to just be random doodles. And why the focus on mushrooms - sure, they're good, simple food, but - You turn off the faucet and walk into the hallway, looking hard at the sign before going to look closer at the ones in the kitchen. Mushroom=food, then, so mushroom in box means food container? Or food IN a container? The microwave has a spark of some kind, then fire, then mushroom... And now that you aren't distracted by immediate amputations, Ur-Gar definitely knew what infections were on some level, and how to fix it... You pour the water into the coffeemaker and walk back to a larger closet. They're around here somewhere... There we go. You dig out a slightly battered (just on the outer casing, mother grub knows these things are built to last) husktablet equipped for a fresh-from-the-caverns pupa, complete with rounded-off corner, padding, and a protective cover durable enough to survive anything a curious and energetic troll could come up with. You turn it on, flick through the downloaded modules - god, you haven't used this since you were old enough to get them on a real husktop - and find Standard Alternian Fundamentals with Pupa Percii and Wallie the Evisceration Wasp. Thus equipped, you walk back to the living room and present the husktop to Ur-Gar. "Here. You can probably figure this out, I think, and it'll be more useful long-term than petting Lophii's brains out."
You wake up all the way when the blueblood— you have got to learn how to pronounce her name— tries to give you something. Yawning, you sit up, stretch, and lean back against the couch, shifting Lophii to stay comfortably in your lap. They're so cute like this, so helpless and sweet, you don't want to let them go anywhere. It's sort of like your tablet, though it has two hinged parts— a door? a tablet with a door?— no, it's a sort of protective flap to cover the work surface. That's really clever, actually. You could probably rig up a leather flap for your tablet, you hate when you press out some writing by knocking it against your elbow or a table or whatever... anyway. This wizard tablet. ...this wizard tablet has writing on it. You're suddenly wide awake, with an involuntary scree! of delight. "Oh! You are literate! Is this what you use for magic or for regular illuminaton— no, you don't have any illumination in your hive, is this work lore? Did you give me work lore? I can't even understand a word either of you say, how am I supposed to learn wizardry? Well, never mind, I'll learn whatever I can, just you watch. Were you reading my signs? I hope you don't expect me to do all the learning, this is— this is really complex. Really complex." It's less like your clay tablet and more like their portable windows, except instead of looking into anywhere real, it looks into—down onto?— a drawing. But the drawing is in fantastic colors, as brilliant as all their fine cloth, and it moves. There's a nub-horned little pupa slowly crawling around the work surface, wearing some kind of white thing on their bottom instead of just being regularly naked like normal creche-age pupas. That had better not be a ceremonial garment. A big, sharp, bright insect flies around the screen much more quickly and menaces the pupa, who just barely dodges each time. You watch the beautiful magic drawing for awhile, but nothing really happens. The two characters just keep doing the same things, crawling and attacking and dodging. You look to the blueblood expectantly. "What do I do with it?" you ask. "How does it work? Can it give me instruction?"
Do they not know how to use a tablet? Ugh you haven't done these modules in a while, you just do them, right? Well, maybe if you just do a few of them... You take the tablet and show them how to drag the letters to fill in a word. After you collect all the letters for STOP, Pupa Percii says STOP! in a tinny voice and Wallie freezes for a few seconds, before starting to move again. You do the same thing a few more times and hand the tablet back. "It's for wigglers, see?"
You pour over the tablet, touching and moving things with increasing confidence. This is absolutely fascinating. The wizard's inscriptions don't seem to be conceptual illuminations, like your own hive's writing (like you'd expected): instead, the shapes are sound components of a spoken command. When you touch a radical the pupa squeaks out a sound. If you drag the radicals into the character as instructed, the pupa squeaks out a full word. Still, though, that seems inefficient. Everyone knows what the character is for food, and can recognize it whether they call it snack, meal, mushroom, munchies, sustenance. If you were to compose a sign by putting in order every sound to make one single specific word, then you'd have to also list all the other words, and even the most basic signs would be as long as your arm! But, every hive's got their own priorities, and hence their own literary system. If you were a wizard and you wanted to write down your spells, it would make sense to want to record incantations down to the shortest squeak. This sort of writing would definitely preserve pronunciation... "Stop," you tell Iridie, who's doing something with food at the counter. You're fairly sure the word should make her pause. If not, you've missed something. It might only be for threats, or insects, or be part of a game, or who even knows what.
You've dug up some more pre-cleaned fish to toss into the microwave, but when you hear Ur-Gar you stop on reflex. You look back over to them - wow, they picked that up fast. You're going to need to show them how to get to the other modules at some point. And now Ur-Gar's watching you with a triumphant look on their face. You nod and try to make an encouraging expression, whatever that would be, and then go back to your foodmaking.
After you learn stop, you figure out the part of the tablet to tap to learn another word. You learn you (or possibly insect), me (or possibly pupa), then give and take and bring once a colorful cube appears for the pupa and insect to fight over. that seems be how to refer to an object, and means either any item or specifically a command's subject, it's hard to tell. Still, this is a really brilliant way to teach noviates, you think. It's a shame your hive's magicians mostly concentrate on hive defense and astrology. Maybe you can bring the tablet back home, if you ever get home. You learn six colors, confirmed by the blueblood when you start bringing her things and repeating the sounds. She moves her chin up and then down to indicate yes rather than tilting her horns to the right for agreement and left for disagreement. You learn yes, which means tilting your horns to the right, or up and down. You get dissatisfied when the tablet moves from colors to shapes. This has stopped being useful: you've mostly memorized which radicals make which sounds, and understand how to arrange them, but you want more words for interpersonal communication, since it's also teaching you to speak the language rather than just write inscriptions. You have your own language for descriptive things, you don't need to know how to say green square. You need to say who are you? and why am i here? and what do you want? and please help me. You put the tablet down and go raid the cold food box for meat. Neither troll has cared to study your language while you're learning theirs, you are grumpy to note.
"Got bored that fast huh?" Ur-Gar put you down when they set Iridie's old wiggler husktop down too. Head feels kind of woozy still, and you're bereft without either of your cuddle buddies (holy shit why did you just think of either of them like that, what the hell is wrong with you). You don't blame them for losing interest, it's kids' stuff. If you had to endure Pupa Percii's slightly blank stare while he condescended to you about basic shapes and colors for any amount of time at your age, you'd end up tearing your hair out. Hell, you barely tolerated it when you were in the target age group. You don't... quite recall Percii being that much of a dick about certain colors either, and it makes you a little uncomfortable, though you really can't figure out why. You did end up skipping through some modules, and fucking around with app downloads pretty quick. Maybe that's why you missed it the first time. You snag the beaten old thing off the ground, close out of the current app, and take sort of weird satisfaction in making Percii's dumb, pudgy face disappear, then start browsing through the menu. There's gotta be something more interesting than that on here. There was one you remember liking; it was more freeform, but you can't seem to find it in here. "Hey, Iridie, do you remember that app with the camera?"
You finally remember that you put coffee on, and ready two cups, floating yours with psionics as you walk over and hand Lophii theirs. "The photo glossary-lookup one? Yeah, one sec. You flick through the apps before finding it in the reference folder. You walk over to Ur-Gar and demonstrate how to take a picture on it, though you stumble a little when you try to both hold the husktop and press the photobutton at once before settling on just floating it with psi. Well, at least it's practice, though you'll be happier once you get your hand on an actual prosthetic.
That is incredibly useful. You go around the kitchen, taking pictures of things and studying the character combinations and sounds. Inspiration strikes, and you get out your stylus, check the dryness of your signage— not even leather hard, yet, excellent— and carefully copy the radicals s i n k above the glyphs for moving water for work. Then you gently push the blueblood over to the sink and point. "That," you say with profound satisfaction.
You accept Iridie's offer of caffeine for the evening. The first sip is god awful, it's not sweet enough. Or maybe not salty enough. You can tell, it's more than just the horrible bitterness that's getting to you, but you slurp it down anyway because your head is swimming (heh), and now that you're awake you need something to counter act it. Ur-Gar acts supremely pleased with the app. Hah, yeah, they're sharp. Weird, yeah, but a lot smarter than you gave them credit for initially. It brings up the question of how exactly they somehow skipped basic school feeds (or rather, learned entirely different ones altogether), abut that's just kind of tacked on to the ever-growing list of questions you already have about them. "Hey, unless you want permanent clay plaques on everything, you might want to consider introducing them to a pen and paper."
"Ah, yeah, good idea." You set down your mug and wander off, returning a few minutes later with some sharpened pencils, a pad of paper, some notecards, and stickytack. You walk over to Scribe to get their attention, then redraw the symbols on the plaque near the refrigerator as precisely as you can. Hopefully they won't mind if you pull off the clay blocks after this.
You watch the blueblood wave white rectangles and colorful sticks around, then make dark marks on them. it looks like wizard signage isn't done with clay at all, which is close to the most bizarre thing you've seen so far. the white rectangles are... supremely strange. perhaps they're slices of dried fungus? you crumble one up— it wads sort of like leather, rather than a sheet of clay— then take the other over to the sink and run water over it, and watch interestedly as it soaks up the water, becomes gray and droopy, and comes apart. then you soak the wadded stuff, too, and watch it turn into a lump. "This stuff is so weird," you say conversationally. "You know that, right? It's weird. You're on the edge of a lake with more clay than anyone could process, and you make signs on magic white stuff instead. You're all ridiculous." The white stuff doesn't even stick to surfaces on its own! it needs some other substance to stick it on to things. the other substance is a bit like clay and a bit like snot, and you don't like it. Still. You get the message: literally, even! No clay plaques in the hive, white stuff signs only. You examine the astonishingly bad rendition of FOOD BOX THAT'S COLD and give them a deeply pitying look. They are illiterate! This white stuff probably isn't even for signage, it's just whatever they think is better than clay for making marks on. You guess maybe they put spells on it? Well. White stuff signs it is. You take the blueblood's horrendous card off the fridge, redraw it the sign on another card with the dark-tipped stick, and attach it to the fridge by the regular plaque. Now you've got all this clay you're not even going to use! Great! Should you even bother to recondition it? Well, you can't really not. You already fixed it up, it'd be a waste to throw it all out after everything. You give a deep, tired, exasperated sigh, chip the plaque off, and drop it into the sink. Then you take the white stuff wads out of the sink and give them to the blueblood. "Have fun with this," you tell her, somewhat bitterly. Then you take the white cards and go around the food area, replacing all your signs. Every now and then you pause to look at the blueblood reproachfully, just so she really knows how stupid this is.
