[center][h1][i][color=darkred][b]Fumiko - Out of the Frying Pan...[/b][/color][/i][/h1][/center]
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Fumiko muttered a long, elaborate string of curses under her breath as she glared out from under the shade of her haphazardly constructed personal wagon. It was adorned with spacecraft debris, everything of value she had been able to salvage, plus some structural components she was determined to turn into a functional mobile shelter. Some day. 

For now, though, she was just trying to keep out of the damned [i]sun[/i]. She had never seen sunlight so bright - in truth she had barely ever seen sunlight at all. Only the thin polar night of distant lights to the south, from those other nations her own had in the past warred against. She had never left Yatovina’s borders, and though bright light was not something she was unaccustomed to, bright [i]sunlight[/i] certainly was. The heat, too. The heat was horrendous. She couldn’t escape it. She’d only felt something close to this when stuck in protective gear in a heated lab – usually it was [i]cold[/i] to which she was accustomed. Bitter cold. Always trying to seep in from the perpetual nuclear winter outside. Warmed and lit only by the dimly glowing remnants of the world’s star and by the wan light of the suns of the southern Gods, she had known cold all her life. 

But this damned heat? Nothing like it. She was sweating buckets, even with the cooling properties of her suit. It was built to keep her cool even in volcanically heated environments, or within the confines of a cockpit that would get hotter with every passing second, or indeed the balmy interior of a spaceship. It certainly alleviated the worst of it, but still, the heat was murderous.

And yet despite the heat, she was curious. Curious about this world that was, like it or not, her new home. Curious about the people she’d found herself traveling with - having had the good fortune not to encounter some sort of medieval highwaymen instead. She was curious about this desert city they’d stopped at, too. She hadn’t learned much about it - her grasp of their common tongue was far, far too limited. She had mastered… a few words. The most basic of sentences. Not enough to glean much more than the name of the… polity? under whose banner they now rested. 

And she was curious about that one human - the woman, if she remembered the term correctly. The one who kept making the strange symbols whenever she saw her, and who behaved strangely. Strange even by the standards of terrified inhabitants of a medieval world encountering a literal alien in their midst. She certainly understood fear - she was afraid herself. Her copilot was dead. Dead and laid to rest in some strange forest in a strange world, away from the songs of home and the familiar spirits that would have accompanied him. The ship’s spirit was with her at least. And that was something. The shrine - a tiny little thing that gave him something to bind to - was just a little talisman that presently hung around her neck. She held it in her hand, claw gently tracing over the finely engraved details on it. 

A hand rested on her shoulder. A familiar warm presence. He [i]was[/i] right behind her after all. She had figured he might be off invisibly poking around the camp - but no. He was here. With her.

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she looked back to him. “Ah, there you are.”

“Here I am.” Came the matter of fact answer. “You know. Sitting here does you no good. They’re as scared of you as you are of them. You’re eventually going to need to go speak to them some more. You may as well start now.”

“Yes, yes, Nesora, but what do you expect me to say? I speak… what, thirty words of their language? I can barely understand a single word they say. What conversation am I going to have?”

“The one human that keeps making the weird hand signs? What about her? We’re both curious to find out what they mean, no? Stop making up excuses and go.”

Fumiko sighed, jumping down from her wagon. Her boots hit the hot sand, and she was once again reminded why those comical looking boots for desert operations existed. The sand seemed to eat up her feet. They were admittedly smaller feet than a human’s - digitigrade like those of a fox, rather than the strangely flat and ungainly human feet. But their bigger feet did have one advantage - lower ground pressure. She grumbled, stepping awkwardly through the sand as she trudged over to the strange human’s wagon. She made a unique sight, she was sure. A creature unlike anything else in this world wearing clothes and weapons without like or equal, struggling along with what looked very much like another of her kin walking lightly behind her but with the sand showing no disturbance where he stepped. 

The strange human’s wagon was distinctive enough, at least. She didn’t need to awkwardly ask one of the caravan members to help her find it. Hesitantly she approached its door, knocking on it and then, awkwardly, “Eh… Morvanu, right? I… am wanting to… tahk?”

Heavens. She hated this language.