Chapter Text
The aliens’ language is difficult, not in the least for the odd way their voices work, but Kara listens to Ma and Pa speak as carefully as she can and repeats everything they make a point of telling her. Their names, and their words for certain things–“brekk-ist” is the morning meal, and then the midday meal is “lun-chuh” and the evening meal is “sup-purr”. They don’t have an afternoon meal, but sometimes there’s “suh-nack”, which comes at random times sometimes, but always right before bed. They have inorganic lighting in their home, but don’t use it much; they typically go to sleep soon after the sun sets and wake up just before it rises, which she supposes makes sense for Laborers.
Kal takes his little stuffed dog everywhere he goes, and Kara takes him everywhere she goes. Ma and Pa give her a sling so she can carry him on her back while she works, though they don’t ask her to do very much work. She usually has to press for more, or just follow them around and help wherever it seems like she can. She assumes they think she’s more frail than she actually is, after how awful the crash must’ve looked, but being out in the sun and doing work is the best she’s felt since her parents pushed her into her ship. She’s heard how doing things like routine chores and physical labor can distract someone from grief, but they’re even more effective at it than she would’ve expected them to be.
So of course she keeps doing them.
Ma and Pa store the wreckages of both of their ships in the back of a building that Kara thinks is a barn and cover them with thick, heavy fabric. Kara takes the crystals out of them first, obviously. The ships themselves are little more than scrap now–they weren’t even true ships, just emergency escape pods with rudimentary flight programs–but they’ll need the crystals one day.
Not yet, but . . . one day.
She and Kal both wear alien clothes and eat alien food and she does her alien work and he plays with his alien toys, and Ma and Pa . . . Ma and Pa fuss, Kara can’t help feeling.
Sometimes other aliens visit, or they go into Smoll-Veel for supplies or to eat at the restaurant or visit places Kara doesn’t always understand the purpose of. There’s a park, and a shop for textiles, and a . . . library, she thinks? Ma and Pa don’t exchange money for the things they take from it, anyway; just scan a card, and then bring them back later. Kara thinks they’re some sort of . . . paper records, from what she’s gathered–sheets upon sheets of paper, all bound together on one side. Some of them are slimmer and have pictures, and Ma and Pa like to take turns reading to Kal from those. Some of them are thicker and don’t have pictures, or at least not many, and those they either read in silence or read to each other or even to her.
Kara doesn’t understand the words, of course, but . . . it’s . . . nice, she thinks.
She actually thinks they might be stories, not just records. Especially the ones with pictures in them seem like they might be stories.
So it’s very nice, that Ma and Pa are sharing those with them. Very . . . very kind.
In the settlement, Ma and Pa introduce Kara and Kal by slightly different names, and everyone there calls them Mar-Tha and Jona-Than, not Ma and Pa. Kara thinks maybe this planet has private names on top of their public ones, though she’s not actually certain.
They call her “Ka-Lair” and call Kal “Ka-Lum” when they’re talking to the other aliens, though they pronounce them a little oddly–“Claire” and “Callum”, more like. Or that’s as close as Kara can get, anyway, and she can’t get her tongue to make the strange smashed-together syllables come out to the same cadence and rhythm the aliens use. Sometimes Ma and Pa call them “Ka-Lair Zo-El Kent” and “Ka-Lum El-Ot Kent”. Kara’s not sure why Kal gets a Laborer title attached to his name too, but supposes it must be that children on this planet are associated with their guardian’s guild until they’re old enough to choose their own. She thinks different ages might have different ways to identify their houses too, given Ma and Pa use “Zo-El” for her but “El-Ot” for Kal. Or just different sexes or genders do, maybe? Or different social roles, or family members? Maybe “Zo” means “guardian”, and “Ot” means “ward”, or maybe they mean “current apprentice” and “apprentice’s family” or “working” and “dependent”, or . . . really, any of those things.
Really, they could mean “yellow-haired” and “black-haired”, for all she knows about what the aliens tell each other apart by.
Either way, the pronunciations are still odd. More like . . . “Claire Zoelle Kent” and “Callum Elliot Kent”, Kara thinks.
She still can’t match the cadence and rhythm of them, though.
Most of the aliens in Smoll-Veel are kind, but none of them are as kind as Ma and Pa. Ma and Pa are . . . they’re so kind. Ma teaches Kara how to make her “pye”, and Pa teaches her how to play a catching game with a small white ball and a peculiar webbed glove and sometimes a wooden club to hit the ball with, strangely, and they both teach her how to work on their little farm and help her take care of Kal. They’ve even gotten him his own little bed, with tall fenced-in sides so he can’t roll or climb out of it, and set it up in a bedroom for him and her to stay in together, with a little closet full of alien clothing for them both and an ever-growing box of alien toys for Kal and a stacked shelf of thin paper records with pretty pictures inside of them that they read to him from every night after “sup-purr”.
She thinks that Ma is female and Pa is male, now, and is mostly certain that they’re either mated or married or whatever this planet does, not related or just friends. Definitely not just coworkers, either way. They still call Kal’s toy dog “Krippo” instead of “Krypto”, but given Kara’s problems getting her own tongue around their language’s words, she’s not going to hold it against them. Kal understands what they mean when they say it, so that’s all that matters.
She feels vulnerable and uncomfortable whenever they’re off the farm or in town, and sometimes even on it, but . . . but Ma and Pa are so kind, and it’s hard to feel uncomfortable with them.
Vulnerable, maybe, but not quite in the same way as she does out in Smoll-Veel.
Kara learns the best she can, because she needs to learn everything she can about this world to best take care of Kal in it. Sometimes Ma and Pa activate a small viewscreen in their living room and watch other aliens’ images on it. Usually they seem to be either delivering announcements–relaying local information or orders, maybe? or maybe general planetary news updates?–but sometimes Kara thinks they might be stories.
Ma and Pa put on the strangest images for Kal sometimes. Some of them look like the pictures in the paper records they read to him, but they move. They look–drawn, Kara thinks. Or painted, or . . .
She’s never seen stories told quite like that, and sometimes she watches them with Kal and wonders what they’re about.
Kal likes the images with the blue dog best, Kara thinks, but he loves the recordings of the strange alien puppets with expressive fabric bodies and loud voices. The blue one with the hooked nose is his favorite. That one has a lot of white birds like Ma and Pa’s–“chee-kens”, Kara thinks they’re called. He also likes the green one that flails around a lot, and the pink one with curly yellow hair that wears the prettiest clothes.
Kara likes the ones that play music, and the small green one that she thinks must be supposed to be the flailing green one’s baby. They look similar enough, anyway, and they seem to spend a lot of time together. So she thinks that’s right.
Likes them as much as she can like anything, anyway.
It’s strange to see stories about so many different species living and working together, though . . . not in a bad way. Just . . . strange. Kara’s never heard of any aliens that look like any of the puppets do, which makes her wonder about the different species they’re all based on, but she doesn’t have the words to ask about them. Though maybe if Ma and Pa let them stay long enough, someday she’ll be able to.
There’s a lot of things she’d like to ask, at this point. Which aliens the puppets are based on, and why they picked out the little white dog for Kal, and what all their stories are about, and what “pye” is made of.
Why they’ve been so kind, when they never even had to be polite.
Kara cries about it sometimes. At night in their room, when she’s sure Kal is asleep and Ma and Pa can’t hear her.
Kara cries about a lot of things, when she’s sure Kal is asleep and Ma and Pa can’t hear her. How kind they are is one of the nicer ones.