“The sun looks nice from here.”

  …

  “Trees have a nice orange hue.”

  …

  “The moon is full tonight, huh?”

  …

  When he first arrived ashore, it was early morning—the horizon still had a hint of lemon.

  “aichokakocho… kachoaihecho… ishlishueko… eihubikmo… loshbiksujmuloipa~”

  Under the full moon, shaded by the same spruce forest he’d gotten poisoned from, the intoxicated Lish woke up. Most endearingly, he had company.

  “Good morning, sunshine. It appears our body managed to process the toxin, funnily enough. If I had to guess, our past experiences with cyanide and arsenic enabled us to survive this would-be fatal intoxication. No brain damage, no inhibition of neurite growth, overall, a healthy body.”

  He hadn’t the constitution to realize there was another person in the vicinity. His conscience, too, hadn’t the awareness to recommend an overlook.

  “Why would berries have neurotoxin in them? Such a weird world.”

  “loshbiksujmuloipa… sohopu eihu?”

  The girl was speaking softly—whispering even—as she were hiding from a monster. Lish didn’t understand her one bit; the language she was speaking sounded like a syllabary.

  “rahiezipvieli… seahu?”

  “Maybe the soil’s too acidic and it needs mycelia to base it down. And the shrooms feast on only protein so the ecosystem had to adjust to meet the demand. It was tetrodotoxin so, I’d reckon the soil has enough nutrient to sustain a grand forest, but the nitrogen content is a bit too much. And hence tetrodotoxin’s a sodium channel blocker, it’s the most perfect for killing mammals and other land dwellers.”

  “Are you saying I almost got executed to be eaten by a dung fungus?”

  As if she wasn’t right next to him, Lish continued talking to himself, even getting a bit angry at himself, supposedly, for almost dying a stupid death.

  It was a notable appraisal, however. The acidic spruce litter would result in an excess of nitrogen, causing the forest to thrive. But the lower fauna would resort to using that excessive nitrogen collection in some form hence the tetrodotoxin, C11H17N3O8. The fungus hypothesis was also not far from the truth; there were micro-organisms neutralizing the soil and keeping the plants’ diet balanced.

  “It’s just that perfect balance of relieving and suffocating, sweet and sour, atmosphere this forest gave off. Quite wondrous, isn’t it?”

  At that point, Lish realized. There was a girl: feet tucked close to her chest, sitting meekly and quite worried, watching a “big-eyed white fella” talk to himself as if he hadn’t just died.

  “Ты в порядке, девочка?”

  “Why would you ask, ‘are you good?’ in a different language than the Lingua Franca, worse yet, in Russian?”

  “Just cause. It felt fitting.”

  “uu? Mo shicho soan. Tsie so hu?”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  In any story, there is a plot device. A “universal translator” would’ve been perfect for this one, but only if this was also a perfect fantasy. Unfortunately, this isn’t anything perfect, more so just a reality with a wrapper of fantasy, so his struggles of language barrier wouldn’t be relieved with much ease.

  “Tsie so hu?”, said the girl, pointing dead center on Lish.

  “So?”, he asked back.

  “Wai mo!”, evidently annoyed, “So! Tsie so hu?”

  “Mo? Mo Lish. L-I-Sh. Tsie so hu?”

  Yet the design had shown some generosity. In his previous life, due to his profession and unluck, he would’ve been, what is essentially, a disabled person—constant injuries to his head, nerves, and sometimes his spine resulted in his psyche and compulsions being “spaghetti meatball”. But his memory was then seemingly perfect. Especially in Nowhere, he couldn’t get his mind to set on anything.

  Now, his speech, his thought train of thousands, could be maintained to perfection; what to say, how to say it, and when it was said before, he could remember everything.

  She didn’t seem well. From the way she talked to the spots of bruising on her arms, she was not okay. Judging from the clothes she wore, her social and financial standing was just—that of a person who would flee to this kind of forest.

  “Mo Jul, Pashsuno li. Si dz’shuple’an ropho?”

  There are several phrases one may use when communicating with a beginner level speaker. “What is your name?”, for example, is a common and easy question that every level of speakers should know. But there are variation to this: “Who may you be?”, “Who are you?”, “What are you call?”, etcetera.

  Shaking his head,

  “Mo…”, he clutched his hand then took a handful of the litter off the ground.

  While this may seem arbitrary, the “universally accepted” gestures of “yes” and “no” that we know are only exclusive to those of Earth culture. He gestured so because: One, he already knew he was seen as an outsider, two, an empty hand usually means a negative annotation and grasping something off the “land” after that should get through as “not this land”, and three, a native would just say so if he was from there—with that intricate of a move, he furthered his “outsider” identity.

  And the girl got it, one way or another, as she started using signs and body movement more.

  She first asked where he had come from. By pointing at him, taking a handful of leaf litter, and putting on a “curious” smile, she also got her point through.

  “So ldz’kie hu?”

  Lish pointed his thumbs at himself, then spread his arms as far as they could, trying to say, “I’m from a faraway land”.

  “Za… ldz’tsabcho kohu…”

  Nod.

  “Wai!”, shook her head; “Noi!”, nodded her head.

  “So, ‘wai’ means ‘no’ and ‘noi’ means ‘yes’?”

  Nod.

  Then he asked a question of his own, “Where are you from?”, by mirroring her gestures and adding,

  “So!”, at the end.

  She was fleeing from something, sure, but what exactly? What exactly prompted her to run deep into a forest that holds neurotoxic berries and proteolytic fungus? Alike a swim in the cold Pacific Ocean at night, it is a death wish to head into a forest like this, no matter how much experience one might have.

  She looked scared, occasionally glancing in a direction as if she was expecting a flank from there, and she talked softly. A look closer towards the direction, the faintest of warm light could be seen piercing through the foliage.

  “Are you really going to sit here idly, Lish?”

  “I know she’s human and she needs help, but what help does she need exactly?”

  “Does that really matter, though? Don’t you just want to help her out of the kindness of your heart?”

  “…”

  “Well, of course not. You just want to figure out what a girl as innocent as herself would hide, don’t you? She didn’t even distance herself away from you, a complete alien, and her guard is up only towards the direction of the light.”

  “Well, you’re not wrong; I do want to know why she’s here; maybe you’re spot on. You’re like a transparency agent, aren’t you… Glass? How does that sound to you?”