If he could kick himself he would have.
Of course trade required communication. You had to communicate interest and value if you wanted to trade. That means using trade as a means to communicate required that you have a way to communicate in the first place.
Something he currently lacked and was using trade to establish.
Curse him and his half circular thinking. That’s what he gets for being too lazy to come up with the second half of the plan. Too bad it took a full day of being avoided and a very nervous cat enthusiast to point out the flaws in his brilliant plan. Big waste of time all around.
On the bright side he managed to get the girl to approach him while he was talking. It had just been soft rambling to get her used to the sound, but she had come and eaten and then got a drink.
It was a good thing he had been sat there a while. He forgot to leave a drink out for her near the food, so he had to slid the one he had gotten for himself over so she didn’t have to get in arms reach. He didn’t expect her to get even that close, but she surprised him again.
He was beginning to suspect that the analogy was less ‘abused animal’ and closer to ‘feral child’.
It would be much better on his end, as teaching her how to talk in the first place would be easier than having to deal with a past that had been locked away due to trauma. Wouldn’t be much quicker to the finish line, but the situation would improve a lot faster in the beginning. Seeing as how the beginning was the important part in survival, he was fine with the tradeoff.
All that time sitting in the mess hall waiting for a visit did give him time to get a very crude translation going though. Turns out you could get up and running pretty fast if the signs you were trying to translate where literally pointing at the thing they were a sign of. Some quick and dirty letter swaps got him some understandable, if untrustworthy, single word translations for the wall signs.
Great for orienting himself and getting an idea of where he was, not so great if he encountered full text of any kind.
He would probably have to start over from scratch if he found some, letter swaps probably not the greatest way to understand a language. Other than the bathroom being called the ‘comfort room’ though, everything seemed to line up with his own sensibilities.
Or they would have if he was fancy, he wasn’t about to go around calling them ‘dining quarters’ or ‘living arrangements’.
There seemed to be another line though, one he hadn’t managed to find a label for. He could just be paranoid, but there was a space the exact distance needed to have another line between two of the colors. It was near the bottom, so he could be off his rocker, but the space bothered him something fierce.
Other than it driving his OCD mad, he hadn’t managed to find the purpose of that space though. It wasn’t present everywhere and the places where it was present didn’t have any hints. He would have simply dismissed it as shoddy craftsmanship even then, but for two bits that made it stand out.
First, his brain was rotting due to lack of stimulation. Unless he managed to find more words, or even better, a way out, he had nothing to really occupy his mind. Mindlessly ransacking empty bunks all day everyday was soul crushing and the random finds in the ‘occupied’ bunks didn’t have enough clues for him to put his archaeologist hat on.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Not that he had one.
The not-line gave him a mystery that he might be able to solve by simply exploring. He had avoided opening anything that didn’t look like living space up to this point, but that would need to come to an end soon if he wanted any chance to keep them both alive.
He couldn’t wait for the food to run out before he started opening potentially dangerous areas. If fighting for their lives was going to be a literal thing, they would need the calories. It might just be stalling, but as he had yet to find a food storage area, he could hope that the not-line was a miracle fix to all his problems.
The second reason?
Well, the not-line was only in the area where his cryo pod was. The cryo pod that had looked like it was in the middle of an empty room without doors.
Maybe it was the brain rot talking, but something didn’t sniff right about that, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t the kitty-cat in desperate need of a bath.
<hr>
It seemed the not-line would have to wait.
It turned out that the stuffed cat and its owner did not appreciate forgetting the drinks with their meal. Considering that he didn’t think it was a great way to go about gaining trust, he had stopped planning to trade the girl for her meals. So when she stopped showing up in the mess hall with him present he wasn’t all that worried about it.
He probably should have been though.
She had decided to, uh, glare? her displeasure at the thoughtlessness the next time he was staring at the not-line, willing it to reveal its secrets.
She had come close. Much closer than any time in the past. Any time that wasn’t a trick at least. She was in arms reach for himself and she could probably reach him if she leaned a bit from her crouch.
Suffice to say she was in nasal range and she decided he needed a good staring. He ignored her at first, hoping for a repeat of her previous visit in the tunnel, but as she kept silent he had to reconsider.
If she squeaked at him, he might be able to learn some words, but she seemed disinclined to talk his ear off. If he kept ignoring her, he wouldn’t be able to get her talking at all, but if he did the wrong thing she might run away again.
Why was getting used to his presence and useful interaction such a difficult line to walk?
Ultimately it was his nose that decided. She needed to be ‘civilized’ at least to the point where she took care of her hygiene. He didn’t care if she showered every day, but at this point he was worried it might turn into a bio-hazard.
Nothing worse than dying to an infected paper cut because you didn’t wash your hands.
He turned his eyes to look at her without moving much at all and ‘rumbled’ a bit in his chest, again getting her used to the noise. It did seem to catch her attention though, as she tried to ‘rumble’ back.
Well, it was sorta communication, right?
It seemed that she wasn’t averse to noise so much as she was averse to sharp noises. He kept his voice deep and low and kept repeating ‘kitty’ over and over again. If she could at least recognize a word, he could get her attention. If said word was the name of her stuffed toy, it might make her more interested in learning more.
He kept it up long enough for the girl to be able to vocalize a sound with a close semblance of kitty. It would take a while to get her vocal cords used to speech it seemed. She was clearly not used to the act. Once he stopped, she kept going a couple more times before she fell silent as well. He figured he may as well push his luck and hid a choco-stick in his hand before slowly reaching out to her.
She eyed his hand pretty closely, seeming to debate whether she should run or not. His plan was to touch her knee, it being the closest body part to him, and give the choco-stick as a reward. If he could get her used to his hands, he could lead her to the showers and at least get her to wash her hands. Sadly, it wasn’t to be as she seemed to lose her nerve before he touched her. It was close enough that his hand brushed her thigh as she turned and sprang away, running off down the hall.
Hmm, this was tricky. He was sure he could simply overpower her and manhandle her into the showers if needed, but he wanted her to enjoy the showers so she would go herself and he didn’t need to do that every time she got a bit ripe. Scaring the crap out of her and traumatizing her towards water kind of went against that purpose.
While he could file that way as a last resort, finding a better plan to try first seemed like the best option.
Maybe if he got his hands on that cat toy.
“I wonder if its waterproof.”