The Proposed

Let's look at this logically.

She... can't read minds. She doesn't know what anyone's thinking, let alone what you're thinking, which is good because let's be realistic. Not even you know that, most of the time.

But she can sense my confusion, my ... she could know

Randi didn't ask for this. She admitted she should have told me before, but honestly, neither of us suspected there'd be an after. Right? But she'd have known before I'd have. There's so much that goes on between the instant of attraction and the decision to act on it, and she was... she was privy to all of that. It might have even helped her make her decision, which would in turn have "helped" me make mine.

I just... I guess I just want to whine and say I don't understand. I don't understand, because I was sort of... ready to maybe jump in feet first. For cryin' out loud, I had a spare shirt tucked into my bag just in case last night happened again. Who is that? Not me, not usually, and what was different this time? Oh, right, the proposed lady-friend can read my mind. Kinda.

There's a conclusion there I don't want to draw. It's not even worth thinking through to decide whether it's even possible, because Randi wouldn't do that. But even as I sit here writing fervently about how it's not worth thinking about, I'm thinking about it. She... I thought it was so cool how she smiled at all the right times, said the right things, knew what I was feeling and how to sorta... fix it... Well of course she did. But. Those are my things to feel and deal with, and I just can't help feeling infiltrated and smoothed over when my unsettled emotions were inconvenient for he

This is clearly going to take more than 27 minutes writing in a journal to resolve. But I have to try to leave on a good note. Randi needs... well she didn't ask for help. She didn't ask for my help, and that's a whole journal entry by itself, but regardless, she needs it. Probably. Someone to talk to. Maybe eventually, I can be that for her. She was forced into telling me because of what we fell into together, but now that she has --

Well. Eventually.

So I Will

Mark Jacobs is dead.

I just had to write that out and stare at it for a while. And now that I've done that... I guess it's time to record the day for posterity.

Only, I don't really... want to. I've already written down the worst part of today. But in the future, I'll look back and the memories will be fuzzy - let's be honest with ourselves here, self. The memories are already starting to blur together, jumbled up by drugs and conversation and circular thinking as I sit here in Sonya Wilcox's guestroom, mixed around by life continuing on as though nothing's happened.

So I will.

Early this morning, we all got the call. The briefing was huge. The pictures were grotesque. I was thoroughly dwarfed by the magnitude of our mission. Eight went off without me, and while I worried about them, I have to admit I was relieved. And I had a mission of my own.

A mission which I put off in favour of walking Randi to wherever she needed to go. I was worried about her, for sure - she's not usually so agitated - but there was an element of procrastination for which I feel extraordinarily guilty now. Minutes wasted cost how many lives? I can't change it now, nor can I say with a certainty that walking around with her didn't do something to clear my head, that if I had stayed, I'd have been more frazzled and unable to do my job at all. But still.

In the end, all I did was do what someone else asked me to do. Ferris found an underlying infrasound signal, isolated it with all his devices and know-how, and all I did was the code-breaking routine. Drone communications are simple enough - I just had to decipher which signal groups were meaningful components and glean from our own radio communications what sort of drone action corresponded to it. And I think I got snappy at people doing it, which just sucks more. I did some reading online, though - the effects of infrasound on the old noggin are supposed to wear off in a few hours. So I can't blame being snappy on that any more. Sigh. Maybe in conjunction with the concussion...

Which brings me to Josiah's monumental screw-up for the day: Going out and about after we'd solved things but before we'd actually fully implemented it. There is no glory in getting mauled by the bad guys after you've told them to go away. It's just stupid. Stupid and... stupid. I ache everywhere. Randi had to cut my shirt off. Just embarrassing and ... stupid! And my head hurts. This isn't my first concussion, luckily, so I'm not wanting to puke every few minutes because I've turned my head too quickly or stood up too fast or, you know, looked at something too hard. But it is pretty miserable. I don't think I'll go see Randi tomorrow like she wants.

She might tell me I can stay in my own quarters again.

Here's to you, Lieutenant Jacobs. You saved all our lives, and we'll repay you by complaining about how tired, sore, and miserable we are. I'm sorry we didn't come up with a better plan. I'm sorry your last vision must have been of thousands of hungry, horrible drones bearing down on you. I'm sorry I sent them to you. But I'm not sorry that you went out the way you did; we all have to go sometime. You'll always be remembered by the people who know better as That Guy Who Saved The World.

a Day, in Two Movements

Today I woke up in my own bed for the first time since setting foot on base. It wasn't the glorious, restful, peaceful experience I'd long dreamed of. Air Force mattresses leave much to be desired, and I'm considering getting a lift to a camping store for an air mattress to go over top it later today. We shall see - I've gotta put in some time on that translation. And check in with Molyneux re: the RSP key. And find Silverhawk to ask her something about my report. And figure out which songs on my iriver would best educate young Sean of the hideous taste. Related to that, I've gotta make a note to get Glo to get Harriet to fuddle through my things and find my laptop. I hope she and the lads haven't donated all that junk yet. Some kid's gonna get a terrible piece of junk with my whole music collection and every episode of M*A*S*H on it. What a horrible fate.

-8:39 am

So Randi and I had lunch again today. She's one of those people I enjoy watching, thinking about her reasons for things. The usual question - why she chose to wear what she did - doesn't really apply, since we're all strutting around in doofy-looking army stuff. But everything else stands. Why's she choose that for lunch? What's going through her mind when she looks away to formulate answers to my questions? I know how this sounds, future-self-who-may-read-and-not-clearly-remember, but I'm not falling for her. Remember, we did the same thing with that inmate, that time in Prison Ministry? And he was a guy. It's the same thing.

She's fascinating.

Anyway, so we had lunch and I watched her speak and eat and think about things. She really listens - one of those people who actually hears everything you say before thinking about her reply. It's nice. Something I've tried to do all my life and usually fail at. Oh, she's also really perceptive.

All right, enough about her.

Translated - well, formulated transcription anyway, most of the day. I thought I was close to done, but it turns out that t->k only sometimes, and I've yet to figure out the rule for when it doesn't. So I started translating, but it's slow-going.

Didn't get around to meeting with Silverhawk today, and didn't get around to getting out for that air mattress. It wasn't even really that bad, separated now by space and time. I was probably just grumpy earlier.

Tomorrow, I plan to go outside and explore a bit. We'll see how that works out.

-11:54 pm

A Travelogue

For the third night in a row, last night, I didn't sleep in my own bed. Of course, this time it was my own fault.

We got back from P5X-208 around 5 or so, er... 1700 hours, right. As soon as we stepped through the gate, there were a couple of moments where I really thought I was goin' down, gonna smack my knees into the grate and just take a nap on the ramp. Luckily I didn't, because in retrospect, that woulda been pretty embarrassing. Especially now that everyone's told me we had a pretty nice, smooth mission compared to... well, everybody else.

So the routine is: Get home, Get checked out, Debrief, Go write your report. We got home, and then we got checked out. The nurse who did it was nice enough. No major anythings. She winced along with me when she pushed around on a sorta dark bruise on my arm from falling, but she didn't say anything, which was nice, because the rest of the team were sitting around nearby and none of them were complaining. And she apologized for having to keep me a little longer to run extra tests for having dropped yourself in a room of cold, foreign sea-water. I looked around for Kelly but she wasn't around, which was a shame. She owes me one.

Next up: Debrief. Have I mentioned I hate meetings? Man, it's like I park my butt in a meeting chair and my brain says, "Oh, nap time." I mean, I lived through it the first time around. Old news, boooring. But I tried very hard not to be a 12 year old in a history class and managed to at least look like I was alert. No idea if I succeeded.

Anyway, I got to talk a little about stuff, and it got me kinda worked up to start working on the translation from the Haleauau journal. Only I figure I sat there looking at whatever for maybe ten minutes before crashing out.

SOO when I woke up at eight and called Sonya for what I thought was a late-ish night coffee, I got somewhat bemusedly informed that it was indeed 8 am. In the morning. Cripes. (s'Why there's no journal entry for yesterday.)

I didn't shave or shower, and the closest clothes I had at hand were civvies, all of which Silverhawk called me on later, much to my embarrassment. I mean, I was happy enough to've got my hair to lay down flat. She didn't yell at me though, really. Just off-handedly mentioned it when I was leaving, so now I'm left to wonder whether she was just making sure she did her job and doesn't really care if I go around in BDUs all the time, or what. But I don't think I'll make her resort to yelling just to test my hypothesis. Which is why I changed before going to work, and why I changed back into them after dinner at Sonya's. And when did I start thinking of her as Sonya? If someone'd told me a year ago that the woman whose work I was shamelessly stealing would be inviting me to her house for dinner, because the commissary in the top secret alien-fighting military base I work in is utter crap, I might've bashed that person over the head with a book or something.

Anyway, the point is, yesterday I was on a planet far, far away, checking out hidden doorways and high tech alien labs, and today I spent mostly in my office, translating an alien language that used to be an earth language, and wow. Just. Wow.

Note to self: Self, come up with cover story before Maggie starts to ask. Also, think up a way to give Sean Lester a musical education without sounding like a music snob. Maybe a mix CD? Is that gay? If it would keep him from singing along to his headphones, I might not care how gay it looks.

Dr. Rookwood and the Big City

Three Years Ago, Baltimore, USA

"You're late, Doctor."

Josiah laughed and waved her off. "Sorry, Glo." Gloria Great, his boss and senior by some 25 years, a larger than life sort of woman who embodied Baltimore in all of the good ways and few of the bad. He shook out his umbrella and left it in the foyer, open. "Bus. You know." He shrugged.

"You should get yourself a car," she said, tsking over him without actually tsking. She looked up at him over her glasses and quirked that eyebrow the way she had of doing, the way that made him want to shrug sheepishly and make excuses. "You know them busses don't run on time."

"Sometimes they do," he managed weakly, gingerly pulling off his coat. He ignored her frown as he hung it up. "You got that study I put on your desk?"

"Mmmhm." Oops. Mmmhm meant that she wasn't interested in anything he had to say excepting what he offered as answers to her questions. Questions he had to guess, of course. How unfortunate that she was so much smarter than he was.

"Ah..." he foundered, flipping through possible targets. "The principal isn't pressing charges," he suggested.

"Oh, I know. That's my doin'." Josiah must've looked surprised. "We go back," she said simply.

The linguist nodded uncertainly. "Ah... ha. Well, then..."

"You're dripping all over my rug. Sit yourself down," she ordered, and he did, raising his brows. "There's hot water on, if you want."

"Uhm, sure." Tea sounded good. Or coffee. Or a nice warm bed. It was only 11 am, though. And he couldn't just turn around and come home after standing in the rain to catch the third bus to pass his stop. "Hey Glo?"

"Yes, baby?"

Josiah smiled. It was Baltimore, which meant any woman more than 20 years older than you was allowed to call you little cute things. Expected to, even. Same as servers in restaurants in Hampden were allowed, expected, to call you "hon." Doctor Professor Gloria Great, PhD times two, called him "baby" because he was a little white boy from the midwest, because she felt protective of him, and he had to be fine with that. So he was. "What's up?"

"You have to ask?" She turned to face him full on, and her serious gaze was a little startling. She was imposing of stature and not given to lightheartedness to start with, so when she got serious, she got very serious. "You ok, kid?" Kid? That was like a mom using someone's full name, and it got his attention even more than the head-on seriousness she was exuding.

"Yeah- Yes. Fine." Oh, ok. This was about - He smiled minutely. "I'm fine, really."

"So if I told you I had an assignment for you back at that school, you'd be fine with it this time? What about the Y?"

"The Y? What's..." He trailed off, and felt his face go pale as he mentally traced the route he'd have to take to get there.

"Look in a mirror this morning?"

"Uh... Yes?" He hadn't liked what he saw, either, but more because he was embarrassed by the questions. How'd you get that black eye, buddy? Whoa, what happened to your face?

"Then you got no excuse for that scraggly shit on your chin."

"Ah..." As usual, he was at a loss. "Sorry. I'm just gonna go up to the study, get some of the pre-lim done..."

"I didn't tell you you could go," she said firmly, gently. She leaned forward, the whole mass of her, and he suddenly couldn't meet her eye and found himself staring at her cavernous cleavage instead. "Joe." He hated being called Joe, but it never made him angry. Now, he felt angry.

"Josiah," he corrected, softly, but just as firmly. She smacked her palms on the desk in annoyance and the sound shattered his anger into a split second's worth of terror. He jumped. And then he dropped his head forward to rest his forehead on the heel of his hand, elbow propped on the chair's arm. "Crap..."

"Didn't shave."

"I don't want to talk about this, not just now," he murmured.

"Were you actually afraid I'd hurt you?"

"No." Crap. He sounded petulant- petulant for cryin' out loud.

"I got a new kid upstairs in the study. Bright boy, top of his class. He's a black kid. You're not gonna have a problem with that, right?"

That snapped his head back up. "What? No!" He'd expected her to be frowning at him, maybe even... if she thought he was a racist or something, if that's what she thought, maybe she'd even be angry enough to fire him, and he didn't know where he'd go then, maybe back to Boston, maybe IBC would take him back after all these years, maybe - but she wasn't frowning at him. She looked concerned, her big ol' face done up in laughlines turned now into creases of worry. Over him. "No," he repeated insistently.

"I didn't think so."

"I mean, unless he put 'beats up scrawny nerds for their bikes' on his resume. Then I think I'd be pretty mad at both of you..." He smiled weakly.

"Did they find it?" She was just Gloria again, now. No mysterious 'figure out the questions to the answers you already know' sort of thing going on. "The cops called earlier for you."

"Yeah, they found it," he replied, leaning back and trying to relax again. His heart hadn't stopped pounding from the totally terrifying sound of a 50-something lady smacking her hands on her equally horrifying desk with pictures of cats on it. "Not salvageable." His beautiful seafoam green 1969 Vespa. Totally demolished. "They got me at home."

"Had a bad year, huh?"

"Uhm..." Josiah thought about it. Losing the Vespa - no, call it Being Beaten and Left for Dead in the Street, that's the part she's talking about. Whatever - last week had just been the latest in a string of bad luck. Witnessing the near rape had been horrible and he'd almost gotten his behind handed to him, except that he'd called 911 before yelling and rushing in headlong, and so saved himself from too much hassle and prevented a girl being just another statistic. So that was good. And coming home to find his lock'd been wrenched and lots of his stuff was gone or broken had been... harrowing, to say the least. But he hadn't come home when the robbers were in the middle of the act, so he hadn't been party to any violence or anything, so that was good too. "Not really," he replied then, and smiled.

"There it is," the old black woman said enigmatically. "Been waiting around for the real one for this whole week. So, you gonna shave tomorrow?"

The linguist scratched through his thin, reddish stubble. "Ah... maybe." She was harping on it, which meant she knew. Stupid intelligent woman. But maybe, sure. "Ah..." He gestured with his eyes toward the ceiling. "What's with the new guy? Throwing me over? Damaged goods?"

She laughed. "Hell, no, child," she exclaimed. "This city takes too much. I ain't about to let it take you, too." Josiah pinked up, and felt all warm and squishy. Being loved really, really never got old. "He's working on your project."

Josiah frowned. "My project? But the budget can't support two-"

"No, it can't-"

"You're moving me? Glo - you can't - this is my--"

"Would you calm down and let a lady talk, you great gaggling oaf!" The linguist shut himself up, but all the questions and protests were written across his face already, and he didn't feel like trying to erase them, even if he could. "The budget can support exactly one chief researcher and one assistant. So I'm giving it to you."

Josiah stared.

"Giving it to you. Understand? Give?" She made the universal motion of giving something to someone else and cocked her head like she was talking to a complete moron. Which he was, for the moment. Shake it off, Jack.

"Giving it to me," he repeated dazedly. "I'm the..."

"Chief researcher."

"On the project... I get my name on the... And I'm... And you're?"

"Still your boss." She grinned. "Get to work. You got a kid up there probably filing everything wrong and crashing our 800-year-old computer."

Josiah grinned back. Yeah. He was a boss now. Maybe he'd shave tomorrow. Maybe his hand wouldn't shake every time the blade got too near this throat. Maybe the close, dark hallway leading from his room to the bathroom wouldn't echo with teenaged laughter, heckling him until he could get to the switch just inside the bathroom door. Maybe tomorrow.

P5X-208: Day One, part two

Ok, so it's been... three hours since I sat down here by the fire with my pen light and notebooks and camera. For posterity, maybe because this is my first mission ever, I'll just list everything I know so far.

- there are way too few consonants for as many vowels as this language has.
- like Japanese, it favours CV constructs. Unlike Japanese, this favouritism is exclusive. Like Japanese, it considers L and R allophones?
- there are way too many missing minimal pairs to be any kind of language based off Latin, which is my first choice right now because of the writing samples and pieces of culture we've found.
- common errors and erronial drift due to graphemic representation don't actually coincide with natural language procession; this language doesn't seem to have evolved into writing. The culture was pressed into having a written language?

Annnd, that's about everything I know. I can read most of what I brought back from the library now. Or sound it out, anyway. I'm pretty sure now that the three key words do refer to the places themselves rather than just abstractly standing for them. "Pipiliokeka." Library. There's something so... familiar sounding about that word, but at this point I can't be sure that it's not just that I've said it under my breath so many times now, called it out at the top of my lungs over rushing, murderous water, or created that initial, sort of intimate relationship with it when I first sounded it out and transported myself to a whole other place.

Words have power, which is sorta why I took this job. I just never thought the notion would be so ... literal.

Ok. So. If this language didn't evolve graphemic representation on its own, then... it's possible that the original word didn't actually sound anything like pipliokeka. And it's possible that the CV construction isn't native either. So... if voiced plosives did exist, but didn't get written, much as aspiration doesn't in English, then...

bi bi lio... gega? kega? bibilio--

Ahhh ha. Biblio (/i) = book; bibliotek = library. What kind of language considers k and t to be...? OH.

So... borrowed words. Oh oh oh. Obviously if the native language didn't have a written counterpart, then it wouldn't have had a word for library. It's gotta be a borrowed word, transliterated according to rules. (Refer to mission book 1-A, page 13.) I'll spend some time looking through the scrolls we brought back to try to pick out likely suspects. Bibliotek is Latin, so... I'll look for mysteriously Latin sounding words.

Oh. Atriolum. For akaliolum. Has to be. Which means it's definite, the CV thing. No compound consonant clusters. Still don't know what ke e na means. Even with all of the options for K... Must be a native word.

And I still haven't answered the question about k and t.

The language isn't without historical representation, though. I found what appear to be instructions for hand signs, like a sign language. It looks pretty structured, although it involves more than just hand movement and placement. I moved through a couple of the smaller motions earlier when Austin'd moved out of sight a little, and ... it's sort of like dancing. Formalized, linguistic dancing. Amazing. Course, I have no idea what it means until I can translate the little definitions under each movement. And as fascinating as it is, unless I can find a way to connect it to the symbols around this place, some culture-based influence that can help me figure out who was here or where the other words on the RSP go, it's not that helpful.

I'm going to look through the reference stuff I brought with me, just to try to jog the whole intuitive leap process. I know now that it's not Greek and only sometimes Latin, so really, I'm just going to give myself a 15 minute break to look through books before I start in on the serious code-breaking.

P5X-208: Day One

Well, the best thing I can say about today is that I did not sprain my ankle.

I thought maybe, which is why even though I really, really wanted to, I didn't take off my boots to change my socks after going to... hale au au. Whatever that means. Big room full of water. For all I knew, keeping my boots on and tied tight was the only thing keeping my ankle from swelling up, and I really, really didn't want to be incapacitated if we had to climb or run or jump or frolic, or whathaveyou.

But we didn't. Thank goodness. And we got out, thank goodness again. And boy, was Silverhawk mad. But she's a medic, so even if she was pissed, I'm pretty sure she'd still patch me up if I somehow broke myself, which is why I waited til camp to pull off my boot and inspect the damage.

And I did not sprain my ankle. Whoopie. Just a twinge, fine by tomorrow, sort of thing.

I did, however, manage to transport me and two of my team to parts unknown, bereft of radio contact. And I did manage to nearly drown myself. I really deserved worse than she gave me, but I'm not gonna complain.

For future reference, cuz I'll probably have to put it in a report: When trying to decipher the symbols around the stone on the ring system podium (find better name, maybe... RSP?), I accidentally brushed the stone while sounding out the word in the upper left hand corner, "ha le au au." I was transported to a dark room full of water about two inches over my head. I was swept off my feet by a current, but found the ceiling of the place to be a mere foot above the surface of the water, and so, had a hand hold to keep myself from being pushed around. The water was cold, frothy, and tasted of seawater, so I surmise that the room is near the shore, possibly on the other side of the gate from the city. I doubt the EO (note: don't write "EO" in official report) of this place would intentionally put a waterlogged room on the RSP, so my inclination is that the room is on this continent, near the volcano. Cracks in the integrity of the room were caused by an eruption, which allowed seawater to flow in. Probably, the air I ringed in with me is what saved my life. (Uh... don't put that part in report.) I managed to get my hand back onto the gemstone in the RSP while keeping my face above water to say the keyword to get back to the library, "pi pi lio ke ka," and was transported back to the library.

So anyway. Silverhawk: I thiiiink we might be making headway. After today, I figured I'd have a hard time of it, and I was right. But at the same time, while everything was actually happening, I wasn't that worried. Except for those ten seconds in the drink, of course. I think I still have water in my ears. When we got back to her though, I saw just how worried we made her. I made her. Not that she looked all mother-henny, not even a little. Man, she was pissed. I find myself never wanting to make her that mad again, but not for the obvious, 6' tall reasons. She owns her responsibility for our safety. For my safety. And I royally screwed that for her today. And she didn't even yell at me.

But we had a little talk, and I'm happy to say that she's a completely reasonable human being. She says she's going to have to adjust for having a civilian on the team, and even though I didn't say it, I'm pledging to make adjustments as well.

We'll see how well that works out.

And Austin?: He's ... funny. Funny haha. And serious. And he's unpredictable about when he's going to be which, too. I make a joke, and he takes it literally, and then I'm babbling about linguistics stuff I should be keeping in my own head for the sake of the people who have to listen, and he comes back with light hearted jokes. I don't know if he's just trying to make me feel comfortable and safe or... what. I can tell he's underwhelmed by my field expertise. That bumble today with the hand signals thing? Man alive. I got the more interpretive part and bunged up the whole "one" thing? What the Heck. Next time, I'm just gonna nod and smile and do whatever he does. Hopefully, he wasn't too too annoyed by my whole... presence, thing. He's nice enough and says he doesn't have an issue with civilians, but I don't know if he's ever had one make him disappear right out from under his CO's nose before.

Jacobs: We didn't get to talk much, unfortunately. There was a nice lunch, some wild animals, then we fell through a floor. My fault. Then we got ringed away. My fault again. And then he was off doing his job and I was at the podium doing... well fixing my screw up. And then everything was awkward on the way back because ... well. Cuz of me, again. If I don't shape up, I'm gonna get a guilt complex.

Annnnd James: We haven't talked at all. She cleared the debris, I dug out the fire pit. Then we adjorned on our own to settle in. Maybe tomorrow. When I'm doing just what I did today, but on orders, and therefore not screwing up.

And now, to work on translations until I pass out.