Vanguard: Awakening

Awakening: Chapter Eight

The next two weeks passed easy, thanks to his regular schedule and the time he spent with Faring in the meantime. Faring had invited Cedric to the bridge, to get a good look at the planet they had been traveling for a little under three weeks to get to. They were ahead of schedule, and most of the crew seemed to be excited about getting some shore leave time. Cedric now had the vocabulary of a toddler, very basic words and meanings he was able to pick up on. The last week of their travel, Faring spent most of her time teaching Cedric her language. She wanted to get him to the point he could pick up children's books, and try to learn the language that way. It kind of worked, because any new words he encountered he had to ask Faring their meaning.

Faring gestured out the main viewport on the bridge, a large - almost glacial blue planet lay before them. It was beautiful.

"Here she is, Saint Amelìon! Hub of the houses."

Faring began to introduce Korellei into her English vocabulary when speaking, to get Cedric more exposure time with the language. Using it in day to day life made it significantly easier to memorize, and he was already making incredible progress. Said progress was only possible because of the time Faring volunteered to teach him. Cedric was grateful for her time, nobody else would dedicate as much time to teaching an entire language to someone. Or if there was, he certainly didn't know they existed. He was even engaging in small talk with some of her officers, but it never lasted long. Learning the language he noticed though, had them see him with much more respect than they first showed him. A natural boon of attempting to learn someone's culture, he surmised. In fact, he had enough knowledge of the words to look up new ones - as he understood the more basic words used to describe the more complex ones. He was proud of himself, he wondered if anyone else could learn a language as fast as he could. He still couldn't speak high Korellei, but most people used low Korellei anyways - so it wasn't important. Besides, those that spoke high Korellei all knew low Korellei regardless. He wouldn't impress anyone at a ball, but at least he could communicate. It helped that sentence structure was identical to English, one-to-one even - so for him it was more like simply learning new words, rather than a new language as a whole. He wondered if Korellei actually evolved from English over time, given just how identical they were.

"It's beautiful."

"Isn't it? It looks icy up here, but it's actually really nice when you get planetside."

Cedric noticed that over the course of this week, it had been getting harder to breathe. His micro tank was finally running out. Three weeks of air was incredibly impressive for such a small tank. It was his exercise routine that likely used up much of it. Given the time frame, it was probably supposed to last him a month.

"Is it? Gotta say I'm excited."

Cedric took a deep breath, feeling tired regardless.

"Actually, I really need a refill."

"Really? That tank supports atomized compression, that oxygen should've lasted you at least three months."

"Three months?!!"

"Yes, how did you go through it already?"

"How did you fill it so quickly?"

"Well, it's kinda jury-rigged from the life support magitech. I just had my magineers get oxygen from our stores and quickly toss it in there. Was sixteen percent not enough?"

"No, I need closer to about twenty-one percent oxygen or so. Speaking of, why do you have a gas that's poisonous to you just laying around?"

"It's securely stored, and necessary to keep the torch magic working on tools and the collectors."