Another Six Sentence Nano Sunday

Hi everybody. Once again, I’m skipping forward by a few scenes, and sharing some more description involving my aliens.

They weren’t paying the humans much attention any more, now that Jody had given up on trying to teach them vocabulary. They had set up a table next to the cart, on an elaborate system of springs and shocks which seemed to be designed to keep it steady and cushioned from any kind of irregularity or even movement of the ground. and it was what was on the table that was the focus of all their attention now.

It was hard for Brett to describe what was on the table in the terms of a whole, although he could recognize most of the parts of it. At the center of the item was a crystal sphere – a crystal ball even, looking like the sort that a fortune teller stared into at carnival shows back on Earth. And the sphere was at the center of a series of concentric geometric shapes… yes, it was made up of the five platonic solids, each nested one within the other. “Good for the Greeks – those shapes are truly universal – not even aliens can come up with a sixth platonic solid in three dimensional space.”

 

Six Sentence Sunday, Nano edition continues!

Hello.

This six is from later in the same scene as last week, after Brett’s spent a while observing the alien natives while Jody tries to communicate with them.

One of the natives suddenly spoke up with a rather long and enthusiastic speech, but he was facing one of his fellows, not Jody, and both of them broke out into renewed activity while the third stood near the cart and watched the new people. Jody let out a sigh that seemed to deflate her inside, leaving a very tired and very sick young woman standing before them.

“What’s wrong, Jody?” Colin asked, in a way that might have been encouraging if the question wasn’t so pitifully obvious.

“There’s not engaging with us in terms of real communication,” Melissa put in. She wasn’t a languages expert like Jody, but from her communications studies she must have picked up some of the theory. “The key to translating an unknown language isn’t just getting vocabulary – it’s getting context.”

Roswell

R is for…

Long-time readers of this blog will have probably heard me mention the television show ‘Roswell’, especially in connection with the fanfic and fanart I’ve created based on the show. It’s a bit of an interesting story how I got so involved in Roswell fandom. It’s not really one of the best shows that have been on television, but I think that possibly its flaws are just big enough to give fans room to slip through and play on their own.

I tuned into the show in the fall of 1999, after it had been on the air for a few months – mostly because I wanted to see what Julie Benz was up to since leaving Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ironically, the first episode I saw was the end of Julie’s recurring arc on the show – she returned for one more episode later in the season, and I caught most of her other episodes in reruns, but that was all for Julie.

But I started following the show – the teenage leads had some charisma working for them, the writing was witty and engaging, (Jason Katims knows his stuff, and so does most of the writing team he put together,) and most of the plot holes that crept up were easy to gloss over.

Around this same time I was participating in a crazy crossover RPG on egroups, and later yahoo groups – Roswell wasn’t part of the canon for the RPG, just Buffy, Angel, Charmed, and the movie ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ It was a lot of fun, and the moderator of the game was also a big fan of Roswell. She ended up pointing me to a few fan sites, and gave me my first taste of Roswell shipper controversy.

To explain this part fairly briefly, over most of the first season of the show, there were roughly parallel romantic arcs between three couples in the show’s teenage cast – Max Evans with Liz Parker, Michael Guerin with Maria DeLuca, Isabel Evans with Alex Whitman. Each of these pairs was one alien character, (Max, Michael, Isabel) and one human, (Liz, Maria, Alex.) There was also another teenage regular human, Kyle Valenti, Liz’s ex-boyfriend, but he was more of a foil for Max than anything else at this point.

Sunday Blogisode Twelve

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“That’s alright,” Exec told him. “Are any of us feeling the worse for the extra oxygen in the air? Remember the symptoms that Peterson listed.”

“With respect, sir,” Jody replied. “I don’t recall you and Ensign Peterson discussing symptoms for hyperoxia, just treatment.”

“No?” Exec turned to Archer, who nodded a slow confirmation. “My mistake. As well as I can remember, you’ll want to be watching out for tunnel vision, ringing in your ears, nausea, severe anxiety, dizziness, or a frequent cough.”

Jody froze in her tracks. “Sir, then it might be hard for me to determine if I’m suffering from hyperoxia in time to receive treatment. I was already experiencing several of those symptoms before we landed. I ascribed them to Kane syndrome – the hyperspace sickness.”

Exec considered this. “Then you should probably go back inside the yacht, just as a precaution.”

“But what about when you find the natives? I can’t do my job if I can’t talk to them.”

“There’s the intercom,” Archer suggested. “Or we could bring them inside through the airlock.”

“I’m not a xenobiologist, but I think it’s a bad idea to bring a native of this planet into a lower-oxygen environment than they’re accustomed to,” I said.

Sunday Blogisode Eleven

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The airlock was quite cramped with the Exec, Colin Archer, Jody and I crammed inside, but I was glad enough that nobody was being left out – especially because I didn’t want to be the one waiting behind – even if Melissa was staying back in the shuttle for now.

Lieutenant Archer hit one of the control buttons on the wall. There was a hissing sound and I felt a noticeable pressure building in my ears. After a moment, Archer turned to Exec and actually saluted, which in the tight quarters made that he was step closer to Jody, to avoid putting his elbow through the wall. “External pressure has equalized, sir. I do not see any need to equalize atmospheric composition with the outside.”

“By no means, Lieutenant. Let’s take a look outside.”

So Archer opened up the external door, and I could feel the planet’s breeze blowing in, smelling exotic but fresh. I wasn’t quite sure if I could really feel the increased oxygen content, or if I was imagining that part.

The sun was at a high angle from behind the shuttle, so that the shadow stretched for about a meter and a half in front of the door. The sun was just a trace bluer than the sun of Earth was, and I wondered if that spectral difference was what made the sky seem slightly greenish and the shadows a kind of a muddy brown.

“I think that we’ve been noticed,” Archer said, pointing out the door. “If I’m right, he’s making tracks for the center of the base.”