The Sandbox I

Posted on 19 Feb 2013 @ 3:37am by Raifi Zaren & Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Crewman Athlen
Edited on on 19 Feb 2013 @ 3:43am

2,236 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 2, Mess Hall
Timeline: MD03: 1900 hrs
Tags: trill language, symbiont

MOUSE OVER Trill language for translations!

[ON]

Frankly, Lilou found the whole menu rather off-putting. It wasn't that she had anything in particular against Orion culture - she knew nothing about it, really - but the word 'slug' wouldn't have whetted her appetite even if she hadn't find the idea of eating something living entirely repulsive. So when the bowl of still squirming, marinated slugs landed on her previously unoccupied table in the mess hall, Lilou's head snapped up.

"Zhial'xek." Zaren dropped into the seat opposite her with a tray full of brownies, potato pancakes, and grakizh. "Ja'tor Raifi Zaren da. Izena skouz da'xi."

Lilou watched the Joined Trill across from her warily. "Zhial," she answered quietly. The greeting was more than a simple salutation. An offer of peace should be met with peace always; that was a lesson she'd learned well from her father. "Ja Lilou da. Sko chizhakekan'deku da, ka behar'xi."

"Tadalizo, kuttun. Ja'tor sozhiozika sterviz behar." Zaren held up his hands, "Ja'tor i'zhial izhinzo da."

"Ado," Lilou relented slightly, still wary, and lifted her fork, spearing her grakizh. " Daz ja gar ez'zikar."

"Eziku'xi."

"Zulorzika'be da." Fortunately for Lilou, she spotted Athlen as he passed them. "Hi!" she practically grabbed his arm and pulled him to the table. "Have you met the reporter?"

Athlen plopped himself down into the chair with a heavy thud, a precaution against outright tripping over his own large feet and slamming face first into the ground. Graceful, he was not. The tray he saved from landing hard and upsetting his collection of dishes, holding it out awkwardly over the table. He set it down and smiled sheepishly. It quite frankly looked as though he'd ordered the whole shebang. Wing-slugs, potato and green onion pancakes, zurek, a small sample container of zupa-thing he didn't know, and no dessert. At least, no real dessert. His own was some replicated confection. Which, Athlen lamented at. In fact, he was frowning at Zaren's brownies. Athlen loved real dessert and the Orion stuff sounded amazing. Frown, frown, frown. Turned upside down.

"Zaren, oh, here," Athlen held up a hand and reached back into his pocket to pull out a few isolinear data rods. "Those are the comm frequencies for everybody who got back to me. There's only a few, but one of them is a doctor, a specialist in what we discussed." He paused, and then asked, "What language were you two speaking?" leaning forward and sipping through a straw from a gigantic plastic container filled with bened cold froth tea. "Trill? From what I recognize," he guessed with a smile. He'd gotten a feel for how the language sounded because of his time in the lab with Kiskath and Liyar, but regrettably hadn't learned much beyond what was required for the translator to feed it through. It really was a very nice language, all happy and upbeat. Athlen started on his own replicated dessert, a nice helping of Rigelian syala, a fluffy tower of layered sour pastries, fruit and sweet kayak oil. And icing. Lots and lots of icing. Topped with Terran whipped cream. Okay, so he was overcompensating. So what? Hmph. He glanced at Lilou's plate. "No slugs?" he grinned.

The engineer made a disgruntled sound in her throat.

"Thank you," Zaren said, accepting the data rods and pocketing them as he lifted his brows. "She's a vegetarian." It was utterly senseless to ignore an entire spectrum of foods, in his opinion, but taste was a subjective thing. "Yes," he answered, belatedly with a nod to Athlen. "Trill." He shoved a spiked blade through one of the twitching, marinated wing-slugs and nibbled it. "Although this one has an odd accent."

Lilou's brows drew together. "My accent is not 'odd'."

"Your cadence is simply very Terran. It's not a judgement." Zaren smiled at her. "You probably don't get many opportunities to speak the native tongue amidst all the Standard in Starfleet. Neither do I, really, except with my family. How long have you been away from the homeland?"

Lilou straightened her shoulders as he tripped right onto her sore spot. "Aldi'detik."

"Ado," Zaren murmured. He wasn't an empath, but he wasn't blind either. The admission hurt her. "Damubi."

Lilou shook her head, small and slight, and turned to Athlen. "What you discussed?" she inquired, hearkening back to the data rod distribution.

"You remember Liyar's work on Romulus?" Athlen asked Lilou, spearing one of the wing-slugs with the miniature spiked blade forcefully and unceremoniously sticking it into his mouth. He had to admit, live food really brought back memories of home. He chewed for a while and closed his eyes. Not bad at all. He waited until he was done before speaking again. "Zaren is covering the story of the whole thing, about the Romulans, the star, and a colony named MS1, where most of them were relocated. Liyar is doing research into the whole thing. He thinks there's some kind of global issue. So, they're working on it. I told him I'd help see if anyone on Rigel V of my clan could be of use to them," he explained. "Da, that's be, right? Damubi. Your language is truly magnificent." Be-something. Athlen swished it around in his brain, replaying conversations. Kiskath had also used the word, but the translator had translated it with the sentence. Regret, I can't help you... "Apologies? Be apologies. No, that's not right..."

"Just apologies," Lilou corrected him quietly. "Da is 'to be' in other contexts. But in this context it's part of 'damu'."

"Which means 'sorrow', in a direct translation," Zaren offered.

"Ahh," Athlen nodded sagely. That made sense. Then... "-Bi, must be a suffix?" he deduced, pulling out his PADD and flicking to a page with TRILL written on it, where he had apparently been collecting tidbits of information here and there. He turned to the glyphic representation panel and started sounding out the phonemes before drawing a triangle with a squiggle through it and labeling it damu on the Standard side, sorrow. He blinked up earnestly, stylus poised and ready.

"Heart." Lilou set her fork down and cupped her glass of water to her. "It means 'heart'."

"It's a modifier," Zaren added. "From the full word 'bihoz', which refers to the muscle and also to love."

"Heart," Athlen mumbled and wrote it down, -bi... bihoz... djjj.. jjjhh... shhhhh... there it was. He picked out the right phoneme and drew another, adding the words to his column. "Do you think you could look over this and see if it's right?" he asked, holding out the PADD with a sheepish grin. "I like learning about new species, new cultures. It's my job, but I like doing it, too. Especially since there's a lot of different ones here on the ship." He flicked the pages through the PADD to demonstrate. Vulcan I & II, Bolian, Terran, Trill, Orion, Betazoid, Capellan, El-Aurian, Andorian... the list went on. He turned it back to the translations page and passed it over.

Zaren accepted the PADD as he chewed another slug. "Here," he pushed some of the unchewed slug into his cheek and pointed. "You're missing three variations on the self-referential." He tapped the screen. "You've got ja, which is I, yes, but there's also ja koj't'tor, ja ma't'tor, and ja'tor," he added them as he spoke. "You have the singular, but there is also, the I of host, the I of symbiont, and the I of the Joined."

"So, if I wanted to say, I apologize, I would say, ja damubi? Or, no, you just said, damubi so eliminate the extraneous information..." Athlen blinked to himself. "So, because others aren't hosts, like myself, if I were to refer to myself it would just be ja? Or is there a signifier for an outworlder?" he asked excitedly, eyes wide.

"You'd..." Zaren trailed off with a furrowing brow. "Can't say that I've ever actually spoken to a non-Trill in our native tongue."

Lilou raised her hand.

"Born elsewhere or not, you're still one of us."

"Not according to the senate-government," Lilou muttered. "I'm only half-Trill, and my father is Hanor-tor of the Peers symbiont." She looked at Athlen, "So I would guess that you would say simply 'ja', like me."

Athlen rose his eyebrows. "I'm detecting some negative kelanwa," he joked, speaking in his own language. He rose his hands palms-up before taking back the PADD and stylus. He chewed on his lip while he added the additional words. "You're not comfortable with this conversation, are you?" he asked Peers bluntly, wincing a little.

"I'm not comfortable with Trill ostracizing individuals based on their lineage," Lilou said quietly.

Zaren shook his head, "I don't know anything about that."

"It doesn't matter."

"Clearly," the Joined Trill considered her, "it does. I can look into it, if you want-"

"Why?"

"I'm naturally curious." Zaren folded his arms on the table. "It's a bad habit."

Lilou frowned into her water glass.

"I'll let you know what I learn. I don't have any contacts in the senate, but my brothers are in Leran Manev."

Who was he? Lilou wondered. Why would he just come up to her and offer to help her with something that no one had been able to deal with her entire life? "You're a stranger to me."

"We're kin, you and I, both built from the same cloth. Trill cannot be strangers to each other."

"But you are," Lilou insisted. "I don't know you. I don't know who you are or what you want or-"

"You know my name and what I do. I'll tell you anything else you like."

"Words mean nothing."

"They mean something," Zaren looked at her quizzically. "Otherwise we couldn't use them to communicate."

She scowled, "I don't understand why you should want to help me."

"Because you're one of us," the Joined Trill studied her. "I don't need any other reason."

Athlen shrugged. "Makes sense to me," he chimed in. He let them talk back and forth, and turned to study his PADD, this time loading one of the conversational language programs. He talked to himself while they talked to eachother. "Zhial'xek. Izena skouz da'xi? Is that right?" Athlen asked, awkwardly sounding out the pronunciations. "Da-zee? Dat-chi... Zyal-check?" he shook his head. That didn't sound right.

"'Djel-chek,'" Lilou answered absently, still studying the man opposite her. "And 'da-chee'."

"If it's any consolation, he usually feels very sincere," Athlen said, staring at them both. "Would either of you be willing to teach me? Trill, that is. Or both, if you're both, you know," he trailed off. "Done hating eachother."

Lilou flushed, looking down at her water again.

"Happy to," Zaren offered.

"Aren't you just so helpful," the engineer murmured.

"This... is a problem?" the other Trill asked.

"Maybe I wonder what you think you're going to get in return."

"Maybe I'll tell you if you ask."

The woman's eyes narrowed. "What, then?"

"Friendship," Zaren answered directly. "Mutual benefits. Curiosity satisfied. Kin restored to the homeland-"

"What mutual benefits?"

"I enjoy speaking my native tongue. If Athlen learns it, there's another opportunity to do so. And I get to teach again, which is something... something I think I would enjoy, based on Selik's experience with it. So. We all thrive."

"And me?"

"You stop staring at me like I'm going to eat someone's child," he answered with a smile. "And then maybe other people will be more willing to talk to me about this mission I'm supposed to be covering."

"You've got an eye. On your throat. Do you know that?"

"I'm very aware."

Lilou sipped her water and set the glass down. "All right, Athlen. You've got two teachers."

[OFF]

Lilou Peers
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Crewman Athlen
Sociologist, SSC
USS Galileo
(PNPC Liyar)

Raifi Zaren
FNN Journalist
USS Galileo
(pNPC Lilou Peers)

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