Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Less than a year ago, Dora would’ve never pictured herself in an Outskirts bar. Or, for that matter, on a pirate crew.

Then she’d quit her job dramatically and ended up with Piper Faraday.

She didn’t regret it at all, but it sure was an unusual turn of events. Sipping her drink (some kind of coffee-based thing that Valentine had brought her, telling her she had to try it), she pondered some more on the events that had led to her joining up with a pirate crew.

Then her pondering was abruptly interrupted by Fen yelling “DOT! RUSTY!” at a painfully loud volume and charging delightedly over to two tired-looking short people with scarves and what was either a lot of stage makeup and one metal hand, or five metal extremities between them who’d been trying to order.

Well. That was not what she had expected this ‘Dot’ they mentioned to look like. She’d been expecting someone taller.

Fen scooped Dot up in one arm and Rusty up in the other – Dora couldn’t tell which person was which – and clung to them, purring in that trilling way sprites did loudly.

One of the two people – a dark-skinned woman with her slightly-greying but otherwise intensely red hair in pigtails, a fancy souped-up-diesel-aesthetic backpack that she absolutely refused to take off, and goggles that looked to be themed after a coronation wreath – wriggled around in Fen’s grip; the other one just patted them on the shoulder. They looked equal parts delighted and confused.

“Fen?! What- when did – what have you been DOING, flying with diving weights?! When did you even get so tall –“

Fen interrupted her. “I don’t remember when I got taller! But I like being tall now. And yes, I have been flying with diving weights! And a ten kilogram prosthetic with an included gun.”

The other person – almost average height, short scraggly beard, a faint scar circling his flesh wrist, eyes the same desert-sky blue as Fen’s, wearing a particularly long and colourful poncho and a battered cowboy hat – mumbled something that Dora didn’t catch. The woman threw an arm around Fen’s broad wingshoulder, hand gripping Fen’s own red poncho with a definitely-metal hand that moved as fluidly as Dora’s own hands.

It looked like it had to have been very expensive.

Fen – opened one arm and let the man drop to the floor. He stuck the landing and didn’t seem remotely surprised, like this happened all the time, but he did rest one hand on Fen’s side.

“Scrappers. The answer to what happened with my arm is Scrappers. I blew them up already, you can’t do it for me. And I don’t remember when I got taller. I forgot a lot of things. But I remembered you. I missed you.”

The man was getting a little sniffly. The woman had her face buried in Fen’s chest, so Dora couldn’t tell if she was getting sniffly too.

“Missed you too, Fen. We looked and looked and – “ she was definitely crying now – “just couldn’t find you – “

The man reached up to pat at the woman’s shoulder too.

Dora felt like she was watching something private. It was like the three of them had entirely forgotten where they were: the main room of a bar.

“Fen? Dot? Rusty?”

The three of them startled slightly, looked around, and seemed to abruptly remember that they were in the middle of a bar.

They stood there awkwardly for a few more moments, before one of them started to laugh.

“Of course our tearful reunion happens in the middle of a bar.”

They’d ended up going onto Piper’s ship, and had undocked their own small, beat-up ship from the bar and docked it to the side airlock of the Déjà vu. Dora got the impression that they were eager to not be on their own ship anymore.

The woman’s name turned out to be Dorothy (“but my friends and family call me Dot”), and the man was Rusty. They were not, despite Sally’s guessing, married – at least, not by the current human-and-dieselbot definition of marriage.

Apparently they ‘posed as siblings’ half the time, which raised more questions than it answered.

Rusty barely spoke, leaving the talking to everyone else; he understood sign language, like the rest of the crew, but seemed content to just not say anything in any language.

Dora had noticed that the trio were clearly family. She’d miss Fen if they decided to leave Piper’s crew to go with Dorothy and Rusty, but they’d keep in touch, just like they’d kept in touch with the other former crew members.

Both Dorothy and Rusty were evasive about just about all questions, until Fen pointed out that they trusted the crew of the Déjà vu “almost as much as you two”.

“In that case,” Rusty said, something challenging in his tone, “how about I show you what Fen looked like as a teenager.”

Fen was over four hundred years old. Dora was interested to know how Rusty had gotten those pictures.

Rusty reached into his bag, staring at Piper’s face the entire time, and pulled out some sort of flat screen object and a cable. Clearly Vectron technology, which raised even more questions – although there was a possibility that he’d grabbed it from Vectron when he first met Fen, or perhaps it was some form of data-storage device that he’d stolen to get Fen’s pictures.

One end of the cable went into the flat screen. Staring, challengingly, at Piper, Rusty pulled up his sleeve, dug his fingers into his flesh arm, and – oh.

Human arms were not supposed to open down the middle at a touch like that.

Dora had seen similar mechanisms in a few sprites, and managed to shove aside her initial what in the scrap no no human arms are NOT supposed to do that reaction in favour of a that is fascinating reaction; Sally flinched and swore; Valentine glared at Fen as though they’d ever repeat the Hallucinogenic Alien Berry Tarts fiasco; and Piper appeared to have no reaction at all.

Knowing Piper this meant that she was probably suppressing a horrified initial reaction out of sheer force of will.

Still tense like a coiled spring, Rusty plugged the other end of the cable into something inside his arm, and the screen lit up. So did his eyes. Which implied that at a bare minimum his eyeballs, his arm, and parts of his nervous system had been replaced – that obviously metal arm might be Vectron-tech too, but it wasn’t a guarantee – Dora hadn’t known it was possible to get this Vectron technology to work inside a human body, the way it did with sprites.

Fascinating.

Dora didn’t manage to resist the urge to lean over a little to see more of the inside of Rusty’s arm. Fen sighed dramatically.

“She does this. You might have made her day with the opportunity to look inside someone like that without hurting them.”

There was an array of ports on the inside of Rusty’s arm, and barely any actual flesh. The bone had been mostly replaced with what looked like the same greyish organic-and-metallic compound of a sprite’s skeleton; she could see where the blood vessels went inside it. The blood vessels had been rearranged (she could still clearly tell which were arteries and which were veins; only the former had a visible pulse, and some of the veins were visibly darker), but the skin, subcutaneous fat, and the muscles for the arm hairs were unchanged. A film of semi-transparent, flexible, presumably tough material separated the flesh from the air space inside the arm, and prevented leakage of fluids.

Where the muscles of the arm usually were, there was instead some compact machinery, with lines of some shiny, dark fluid going to it. Lines that had a slight but just barely visible pulse to them – Dora mentally recategorized them as being more like blood vessels, which implied that this man’s circulatory system had been altered, too. Two pumps, at least; a pump - hopefully his original heart, but possibly something else - for the blood, and a pump for this metallic-looking dark fluid.

Piper was trying to avoid looking at it too closely. Dora understood, but after she’d forced down the initial shock she was mostly just curious. This raised so many questions! Turning her attention from Rusty’s arm to the rest of the room, Dora saw that Dorothy was relaxing a little, clearly unbothered and unsurprised by Rusty being able to do this and more nervous about everyone else’s reactions.

The screen had lit up, and was flickering through pictures without Rusty appearing to interact with it at all. Dora decided to ask one of the probably least intrusive questions on her mind.

“Can that screen be operated with your hands, or do you need one of these interfaces?”

The screen stopped flickering through pictures and stopped on a portrait of Rusty, Dorothy, and a shorter, dark-blue Fen.

“This one? You’d need an interface. And some form of data storage hardware, I reckon.”

Dora pondered the implications of that for a moment and decided that there wasn’t such a thing as non-invasive questions with this man.

Rusty waited a moment for further questions, then went back to flicking through pictures. “Here we go.”

Fen was just as interested in the picture as everyone else. This picture-Fen was even shorter than the earlier glimpsed pictures of them, with bright blue down-feather fluff over most of their body including some patches on the leading edge of their wings. Scattered throughout the fluff was pinfeathers and even a few dark blue contour feathers.

Their wings were also bright blue, and their eyes were brown and so dark they were almost black. They were wearing a scarf and trousers, but no shirt. Even knowing that they’d lost their right arm to Scrappers recently, it was a little odd to see them with both flesh arms. They looked awkward, in that way adolescents did sometimes.

They were also standing behind Dorothy, holding one hand behind her head in a two-fingered gesture that made it look a little like she had rabbit ears.

Some of the not-quite-suppressed tenseness Piper had relaxed a little. “No snood?”

Dorothy shook her head, smiling. “Nope. Scarves were very important in Tumbleton and a bit less important in El Machino. Covering the head was mostly important where Rusty’s from. Fen picked it up from me, we only found Rusty again later.” She paused. (Dorothy was at least as old as Fen. Dorothy was four centuries old. Humans were not supposed to live that long; every answer these people gave raised a whole array of questions.)

Dorothy nodded; Rusty picked up the screen again, closed his eyes, and made it go straight from the picture of Fen as an awkward teenager to an older, larger, but still slender-morph Fen. It was still recognizably Fen, Dora realized with a jolt. There was the darker face, the grey antennae, the hindwing patterns that were just about as unique as a fingerprint. Their hand-chitin was still reddish under the paler pycnofibers. Dora wasn’t sure how they’d gotten taller again. Perhaps they reached physical maturity before skeletal maturity, and remained at the same size for an extended period of time before shooting up to a larger final height after years, decades, or even centuries. Perhaps there was some environmental trigger for a metamorphosis. She really should have asked the sprites they’d transported a few months ago, but she’d been asking too many other questions about their homeworld.

It turned out that their homeworld had had some sort of ecological catastrophe, and as part of trying to repair it some of the precursor species to sprites had gone to the only other world they could reach that had known life on it – Earth, hundreds of thousands of years ago – and taken many, many samples. Using a combination of the Earth samples, surviving life from their world, and advanced technology including stuff akin to the thought-mythical steambot “alchemy” and “druidic sciences”, they’d repaired their world, and doomed themselves. Sprites had been an attempt at recreating a type of pollinator that their world had once had, that unexpectedly gained sapience. The first of the sapient sprites had overlapped in time with the last of their accidental creators, and some of them had preserved the story.

Very obsessively. The sprites had refused to even let her read it without at least two sprites as escorts reading over her shoulder, checking to make sure there was not a single letter out of place.

While she was pondering, Rusty had switched to another picture. This one had Fen holding a chicken like they didn’t know what to do with it or why they’d picked it up. The chicken didn’t look like it knew why it was being held either.

Sally grumbled a little. “Ah say that’s not Fen.”

Everyone turned their gaze to Sally.

Fen looked politely confused. “That is definitely me?”

Piper sighed. “Sally. If Fen says these pictures are of Fen, then the pictures are of Fen.” Piper would have strong feelings on this. Dora had seen her inaccurate wanted posters.

Dora decided to weigh in before it turned into an argument. “The wing patterns are the same, and the Fen in the picture has the same unusual markings as the current Fen. I can think of multiple reasons off the top of my head as to why an adult sprite would have a growth spurt.”

Fen tilted their head until it was nearly upside-down. “Do humans not have a height change when they switch morphs?”

Piper shook her head, Sally looked confused, Dorothy buried her head in her hands, Rusty shifted his gaze to Fen, and Dora discarded one of her hypothesises. Not a case of physical maturity before skeletal maturity, but rather a case of some sort of metamorphosis.

“Wait.” Piper looked like she’d just realized the answer to a question that she hadn’t even considered to be answerable. “Is that what the muscle memory comment was about.”

“Muscle memory comment?” Dora paused, remembered the by this point comically outdated wanted posters of Piper and that the different morphs of sprites did have some internal differences in the relative size of some internal organs, and realized that between them they’d probably had the information to figure this out months ago. “Oh.”

Piper swallowed, looking troubled. “Is it reversible?”

“What?” Fen, Rusty, and Dorothy all looked equally baffled. Sally still appeared upset, but had softened a little at the hint of an explanation. She’d grown to trust Fen more over time - especially after the time Fen had saved her life on a Vectron ship.

“I know you said you liked being tall. But if you had to, or if you changed your mind and stopped wanting to be tall - can you switch back?”

Dora also wanted to know the answer to that question, although for what she suspected were different reasons. “I’m curious to know if sprites can shrink as adults, too, or if it’s just growing.”

“’Course they can shrink,” Rusty said, shrugging. “Now that’s sorted…”

Dorothy suddenly grinned. There was still a tenseness to her, but only as much as there’d been in the bar in the first place. “Hey. Want to see a picture of the worst moult Fen ever had with us?”

Fen flinched theatrically. “Oh no.”

The screen flickered to a different picture. Fen had splotchy brown-and-blue eyes, a few patches of their bright blue downy child plumage, their flight feathers, and some contour feathers on their head.

Even with the poncho they were wearing it was clear that they were mostly bald. One of their antennae was mostly missing, with just a little bit of new growth at the base – it didn’t look ragged, and it was a different colour compared to the remaining antenna, so Dora suspected that it had been shed like a baby tooth. One of the sprites they’d transported had mentioned that happening.

Sally muffled a laugh. “Ah’ve had chickens that did that.”

Fen dramatically flopped down to rest their head on the table, wings askew.

“Dot. This is embarrassing.”

Ah, family. Always quick with the embarrassing childhood stories - or in this case, photographs.

They talked over the photographs for hours; sometimes the photographs sparked memories in Fen, sometimes they didn’t. Dora did her best not to ask too many probing questions, but Rusty, while quiet, was a goldmine of information on sprites. The two of them managed to raise more questions than they answered and were just as clearly unaware they were doing this, too used to people from the isolated city they came from. Eventually, the discussion wound down and Piper invited them to stay long-term, and they happily agreed.

Chapter Text

Having Rusty and Dorothy on the ship long-term turned out to be…interesting.

Rusty had switched hats to one with two holes in, for the small sprite antennae that he somehow had. Dora wanted a closer look, especially at the base – how did they attach, how did the muscle attachments work - but he refused to take the hat off where other people could see it. Same with the scarf.

The same was not true of his shirt. Wherever he came from originally, covering the neck and the top of the head was more important than covering the torso. Dorothy came from a nearby place that covered the neck but not necessarily the head.

Wearing some sort of headgear was the norm in current human-and-dieselbot culture, of course, but it was more important to Rusty than it was to most of the crew. Going hatless was to Dora about as odd as going bare-footed everywhere; but to Rusty, it seemed like “naked” meant “not wearing hat or scarf”.

Which meant that the crew ended up seeing rather more of shirtless Rusty than they liked. Fen and Dorothy didn’t particularly care, used to him, but the crew of the Déjà vu were much less comfortable than them.

Some of this was because they weren’t that comfortable with this person they didn’t know very well being casually shirtless (and checking his scarf and hat were still there when people told him he was half-naked – half the crew had said that, once each), but mostly because it was even more clear that he was not baseline human.

It wasn’t just the arm, or the antennae. It was all of him.

His eyes glinted bright blue when the light caught them right, especially in the darkness – the man had tapetum lucidum, which meant his retinas had been replaced.

The metal arm turned out to be the lower end of a partial-replacement cybernetic, like the other arm. His legs, too, were significantly modified, with some sort of glowing mechanism visible. Some sort of fall-dampening mechanism, able to even out the force of sudden acceleration changes so long as they were in the vertical direction. They could also move a lot faster than regular human legs, letting him get up to a much higher speed than he otherwise would have. His feet were insulated on the bottom, with a texture that visually looked like a dog’s pawpads. He did not want people touching them. Valentine poked him in the feet anyways, and got wild flailing and a startled screech in response with a two-layered harmony that required a syrinx or other such nonhuman vocal organ.

(His vocal cords must have been replaced. Probably a lot of the rest of his throat, too, as the syrinx of a sprite was located much lower down in the respiratory tract than a human’s larynx, and the larynx had functions other than producing sound that would need to be accounted for.)

Valentine did not repeat his attempts to tickle Rusty.

The most major modifications that were easily obvious from the outside, though, were on his torso.

The man had wings. Insectoid, tightly folding, sprite hindwings. He’d managed to hide them with a mixture of folding them tightly, lightly binding them, and that poncho, but was clearly glad to have them uncovered, able to move, emote, and flap. He couldn’t fly with them as such, but he could glide, change directions in the air, jump high, and climb steep slopes with a lot of flapping.

Arrayed between his arms and his wings were black small objects with faintly glowing dots that he said were supercapacitors. Dora wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not until he’d unleashed his stored charge in midair, combined with a burst of flapping, to do what could best be described as a double-jump to get to a pipe on the ceiling. Dora’s best guess was that the electricity formed a powerful magnetic field around him, strongest around his feet, that squeezed him upwards. It left him wreathed in a mixture of St Elmo’s fire and crackling electricity, like a fully-charged Fen, that had to be discharged before he could do a midair jump again.

Unlike Fen, who clung to the power and used it actively, Rusty tended to let it go when he next touched the ground or a wall.

The extra limb pair meant extra muscle attachments, too. Rusty didn’t really have a kneelbone, but with his tendency to go around shirtless and his build, even with the short pycnofibers forming a layer of ‘fur’ over parts of his chest, back, and stomach, it was obvious that his muscles had been shifted around and in at least some places replaced with more compact cybernetic replacements, and that he had two sets of pectoral muscles.

Just under his ribcage, there were a few holes on each side, like gill slits. They even had opercula. Dora had seen them gape open briefly when Rusty yawned, alongside the quiet sound of a running fan – coming from Rusty. With a little questioning, she’d discovered that they were alternate entries and exits into his respiratory system, and were fan-ventilated rather than having air pulled and pushed through them via movements of the ribcage.

Dora thought on that, looked at the Y-shaped gap in the fur on Rusty’s torso like the Y-incision of a dissection, and came to the conclusion that he could open his own chest the same way he’d open his arm and access his own internal organs like that. Normally, opening up a living being’s chest required that they be placed on a ventilator until the chest was closed again, as the lungs relied on the negative pressure caused by expanding a chest that was sealed except at the respiratory system openings; Rusty’s partially fan-forced respiratory system didn’t have that limitation.

Dora knew better than to hope the ability to open Rusty’s torso up like that without surgical tools was just for maintenance of his implants. Dorothy mentioned they were self-healing, and Vectron did not care at all about bodily autonomy; Rusty had probably had Vectron dig around in there. There were rings of scarring on his wrists and ankles; at some point he’d been forcibly restrained and struggled until the restraints had broken the skin and carved into his right wrist’s metal - more than once - and Dora found her latest nightmare to be of Rusty, chained to a dissection table, torso opened up like a cadaver while someone rummaged around in his insides, awake and struggling, unable to even scream. It would be in character of Vectron.

It would be in character for some of Dora’s old colleagues.

Dora did not ask if she could have a look. She didn’t want to remind him of that.

There was a Vectron power core set into his abdomen. Combined with how little he ate – usually foisting the food off on Dorothy, who didn’t seem at all surprised and sometimes foisted some of it off onto Fen in turn – Dora hypothesized that he derived all or at least most of his energy from the power core’s power generation process and merely needed food for raw materials.

With fur like that, too, and the wings and antennae, there was no possible way the human-looking parts of this man were entirely human. If just part of him had been changed into a hybrid, his own immune system would reject either the xenotransplantation (if it wasn’t replaced) or the remaining human tissue (if any part of his bone marrow was replaced).

The status screen set onto the upper left of his chest was almost minor by comparison, although even with her limited knowledge of sprite writing systems Dora could tell it was tracking various vital signs relating to his respiratory and circulatory systems.

He was clearly some sort of sprite/human hybrid that had then been heavily modified, far more heavily than any of the sprites Dora had seen. It must have taken Vectron decades of work to create such a hybrid.

Other details they’d mentioned left Dora with enough information to conclude that Rusty had been modified as an adult, having started off as a human. Every part of his body had been taken apart and reconstructed, down to the cellular level – and he’d implied it had happened while he was conscious, over multiple sessions.

Dorothy, by comparison, was almost normal. She, too, had been heavily augmented – but in a very different way from Rusty.

Rusty had been rebuilt, bit by bit, changed fundamentally into a hybrid, by Vectron to fulfill a purpose – and then he had escaped.

Dorothy had moved to a city that used ancient steambot technology to modify themselves, as an important cultural practice. There was an array of what they called “upgrade stations” or “upgrade podiums”, including some that had been lost in the depths after cave-ins and were mourned. Choosing which upgrade podium or podiums you visited was a deeply important decision, and while you could decide to opt-out it was considered odd.

Dorothy had climbed into every upgrade station she’d found. According to her, this made her a “hopeless gearhead”.

The upgrade podiums did not try to disguise what they were doing. They were not designed to be a trap.

They tried to avoid changing that which they did not need to change. Rusty’s modifications were massive sweeping changes even if all they did practically for him at the time was give him a recipe for explosives.

(It had been four centuries, and Dorothy was still clearly mad at Vectron for this.)

Some of the changes had been systematic, but not in the same way as Rusty’s – Dorothy had alchemical patterns inlaid into some of her upgrades, that had an effect on her whole body. She was, as a result, astoundingly heat-resistant and didn’t bother with oven mitts, but this was an active effect that she could disable, rather than an inherent part of her. It did require her to swap out part of her right hand, but that was almost as easy for her as it was for Fen – while the metal limbs did have some form of nervous system integration, it didn’t work like Rusty’s.

Dorothy could remove her metal limbs. There were no blood vessels running through them. They were intended to be upgradable, changeable, something she could tinker with. Dora watched her tinker with them in the workshop a few times; removing plating by unscrewing it was painless, unlike with some of Rusty's metal limbs.

While some of her metal parts really were functionally unremovable, it had been kept to a minimum. She casually mentioned having a few slight brain modifications – additions, not replacements, to handle the increased load on her motor control and sensory processing systems – and her inner ear had been replaced which she had made very clear was optional, but the difference was still night and day. Dorothy’s modifications consisted of all four limbs from the elbows and knees down, her inner ears at her request, one pair of tubes, and one artificial sensory-and-motor-control ganglion.

While she did have a pair of removable plates on her head, they were far more minimal than the full-access hinges Rusty had on his limbs and torso – the main inner mechanisms were self-repairing but some of the more external parts of the ear modifications were designed to be accessible and able to be tinkered with without major surgery (arguably modifying them counted as minor surgery) and had auxiliary input ports. In addition, they were not covered in flesh.

The most extensive single modification Dorothy had was the jetpack. It needed to anchor to a lot of her ribcage, and she’d apparently requested that an upgrade podium give the jetpack a link to her right arm – which Dora had to be told about, as it consisted of a pair of tubes, functionally just extra blood vessels that happened to transport plain water instead of blood.

(The jetpack was mixed air-and-water cooled. Dorothy was prone to rambling about her cybernetics if asked, sometimes with an air of quoting someone else. Dora could see why she described herself as a hopeless gearhead.)

The jetpack didn’t really come off, not for long – Dorothy described having it removed as highly unpleasant due to phantom sensations, not to mention nerve-racking as she was left groundbound after centuries of having the option of flight – so she’d learnt how to disguise it as a backpack.

Dora had fallen for it.

When Dorothy had realized the Déjà vu had a workshop – it had been designed for mixed dieselbot and human habitation – she’d claimed it for over an hour and came out with a pair of mechanical somewhat-avian wings attached to the top of the jetpack.

They didn’t flap, not really, but they were flexible and clearly based off of a sprite’s forewings, with three sections – upper wing, a single aerofoil; middle wing, another aerofoil; and a ‘primaries’ section consisting of nine independently motile long feather-mimics.

The wings were mostly for steering and flight stability, but Dora could see a change to how Dorothy emoted with them. She was just a little more like Fen and Rusty – it probably made her body language easier to read for the hybrid and the sprite.

Dorothy, unlike Rusty, didn’t tend to go around minus any major articles of clothing. (Thankfully. One was bad enough.)

She did, however, have a hookshot for a left hand. It was amazing the amount of mischief someone could get up to when they had a reach of multiple meters, even if they weren’t particularly planning on mischief.

And, the jetpack’s fueling port had chemosensitivity – ‘tastebuds’ – just like dieselbot fueling ports. Exactly like dieselbot fueling ports; she mentioned that dieselbot technology was descended from her jetpack technology, a phrasing and situation that had implications that some of Dora’s old colleagues would probably be willing to kill to explore.

Without any other motives, even. Dora understood why the duo had been so anxious and on-edge at first; in hindsight Rusty had been at least as terrified as Dorothy, just better at hiding it.

The ability to taste what she was putting into her jetpack did not stop Dorothy from putting things that probably did not belong in a fuel tank in there. Dora had seen her pour window cleaner, nail polish remover, lamp oil for an antique lamp, and paint thinner in there.

She didn’t even put any form of proper fuel on the life support list, even when Piper gave it to her and asked for any additions three times in one day. She just requested more lamp oil.

The worst part of having the two of them on board, though, wasn’t Rusty wandering around shirtless and accidentally shocking or sneaking up on people or Dorothy ending up in improbable places and grabbing things from across the room.

No, the worst thing was that Fen, Dorothy, and Rusty all knew the same four languages. And codeswitched.

Relentlessly.

Dora understood some sprite-speech, and one of the languages the trio knew was Scots, which was mutually intelligible with English.

That didn’t make her able to understand the result of switching from Scots to a modified human-pronounceable spritespeech mid-sentence without switching from Scots grammar, even when they weren’t throwing in smatterings of a sign language Dora didn’t recognize.

Rusty didn’t even bother with modifying the spritespeech. He just spoke it like any sprite would, when he wasn’t using that obscure sign language that Dorothy and Fen knew but nobody else on board did.

Almost every conversation between the three of them that wasn’t explicitly trying to include the rest of the crew was unintelligible to everyone else.

Dora supposed that was just one of the prices to pay for having the rest of Fen’s chosen family on board.

They’d decided to stay. In the end, everyone was glad.