Welcome to Gaia! ::

While many of Velencya's social mores were beyond Fae-Fae's concern, that didn't make her a rebel. She had always dutifully tended to her people in her own way. Her indulgent emotional displays were most often an expression of her patriotism. And when she had joined the Vanguard, she was diligent in completing her training and fulfilling her obligations.

So, even she knew that it was highly inappropriate to laugh at the Commodore.

But she couldn't help it. There was a huge, fuzzy, clumsy black-and-yellow insect following him around and hovering around his head. It kept landing on his face and probing at his ears and eyebrows with its little face appendage, confused that it couldn't find any nectar but also determined to not give up on this truly colossal flower it had found. The sight clashed so strongly with the image of Lyndin her people had cultivated back home, a giggle burst out of her before she could contain it.

She was here to share her progress on her English literacy project, but the bumblebee didn't know that.

"Perhaps he wishes to join the Vanguard," suggested Fae-Fae, still giggling.

Laughing and joking? She was on thin ice now!

Still, she appreciated the sight. While a creature unique to Earth was part of it, it still brought up memories of elders and friends dealing with their own annoyances back home. It parted the glamour created by Lyndin's well-earned fame. Here he looked like a normal Velencian she could have bumped into in any neighborhood on their synthetic world. That's how she wanted to see the leader who was so thoroughly admired by her people.

He was, in her mind, the most individualized person on Velencya, but it wasn't his fault. She wondered if that got lonely.

The Cadet's face illuminated thoroughly with joy, and she did her best to chase more laughter away before it completely took her over. There were, after all, things to get done.

Even the tiniest touches of nature could add so much meaning to the time she spent with people, though. It was like the Earth itself was always offering its own feedback to the activity and the conversation with its insects and flowers and clouds and weather. Was this what life on Velenia used to be like? She was in the company of someone who could answer that.

But answering the Commodore's question came first.

She began by summoning her screen in front of her and waving him in to look. There was a dense, chaotic swirl of data on display, enough that her ComTech might actually start to lag if she piled on any more. There were pictures and paused videos and notes and scan results and more notes and color-coded lines stringing clusters of information together with more notes clipped onto the lines. Her pictures of every sunrise she had seen (fourteen so far) were shrunk down to a thin strip down the left side of the screen.

Fae-Fae pointed at a random speck in the noise, and her English notes appeared. It could get confusing to work on two languages with the same alphabet, so more color coding was present here as well: English words were the same green as the grass around them, while Velenian was in the Vanguard's thistle. At the top of her notes was a green list of homonyms transcribed from a list Sailor Albireo had helped her find. Along with the definitions, she had written: Factoring in peripheral words should resolve most automatic translation issues.

"I know enough words to communicate with a human pen," she continued. "Though some humans don't understand that I am talking."

Now it was her turn to look exasperated.

Lyndin was met with an approving nod in response to his question about Sailor Albireo. Fae-Fae had been quite pleased with the human's help, in spite of a few boundary issues.

For the next several minutes, they looked through the rest of the English notes together, with Fae-Fae providing occasional extra context or interesting details. She still had quite some work to do before she could truly call herself proficient without a converter's help. At the same time, the progress she had made so far had led to some suggestions on how they could improve translation quality. Some areas, unfortunately, only had the wisdom of the reader to rely on -- so many of the names they applied to various bits and pieces of their society would likely never make sense.

She laughed a little more at that. It was just so charming.

At this point the bumblebee had at last bumbled over to a cluster of actual flowers nearby. It looked to be one of the last of the season, and the bee was eagerly shoving its face in every blossom it could land on. Watching it was quite calming. Fae-Fae got momentarily distracted by the sight as she closed her notes, once again revealing everything else she had been doing lately.

She peered thoughtfully into the vortex of data. It was clear she had been trying quite hard to understand something, hoping that more information would answer her question if she just kept at it. Now, with the Commodore looking at it, she wondered if she might have gone a little bit overboard with it all. There was no helping it now. Now she stood squinting, with her arms folded tensely in front of her, attempting to manifest an explanation for what she had started to see.

There were quite a few images of things that, for the most part, she honestly didn't care for at all: impractical food, impractical clothing, strange images and designs, and so on. They had caused her immense confusion for days. Clarity had not come from the explanations that had been suggested or given. It always felt like something was missing, until quite recently.

"On Velencya, we apply our creativity to a purpose," she said, her face still knitted in concentration. "But these items are different."

They all invoked some kind of emotional response in the recipient, that was well-documented. Several Cadets had found the food and art pleasant in the same way humans did; the same way Caedus appeared to. For how poorly some of humanity's shoes and clothes served their original purpose, the humans who acquired them in their odd little commerce rites had appeared quite pleased to find them.

So, what was the purpose for the maker?

"It's as if they've made creativity a purpose unto itself," Fae-Fae suggested. "I find that astonishingly wise."

"Yes!"

Fae-Fae, wide-eyed, had said it quite suddenly, right on the tail of Lyndin's question. But then she blinked, blinked, squinted again and shook her head vigorously while waving an open-palmed hand in front of her.

She was quick to correct herself. "No. I do not care for them personally." This was said rather primly, with an affect not unlike ruffling feathers. Fae-Fae didn't worship pleasure the way humanity seemed to sometimes. She was proud of her ability to resist the Earth's numberless temptations.

"But. Yes. It is distracting!" Now she was nodding, with increasing vigor, until her fluffy hair was flapping and rustling around her face."Put another way, it engages the mind." She nodded, and nodded, and now her entire body was caught up in the momentum of it. "In a manner quite similar to nature."

A few meters away, the bumblebee continued busying itself with its task collecting pollen.

The first sunrise observation had provided her with some useful social data. Most of the Cadets who attended had been strongly impacted by it, and easily taken in by their natural surroundings beyond that. She'd written a small report on it already. And now, by saying the right word in the right context, Lyndin had suddenly provided some of the connection and understanding that she had been searching for.

"They have a similar effect," she repeated, "and one is derived from the other,"

The thought was left unfinished. Now she was looking between her two index fingers, brought up close to her face, one holding nature and the other holding humanity for her to compare. Unlike their own world maintained with resources found scattered among the stars, Earth was the singular source of everything humanity made, including its strange whimsies. She didn't know what to make of it, but she had suggested that, in spite of their personal positions on it, this aspect of society was a rather significant portion of humanity's relationship with the Earth -- and perhaps worth understanding on those terms.

Fae-Fae was now swaying and bobbling in her spot, like a sapling caught up in a strong breeze. There was more nodding punctuating the motion, saying, yes, she would very much like to continue, and she had many thoughts on why. Most of them would have to be saved for a written update later.

For the time being, she raked her fingers through all the clips and images and other such bits on her screen, dragging large chunks of them into folders or deleting them entirely. A lot of it had suddenly become irrelevant. Her mind and her ComTech were both visibly relieved to have some free space again. A final wave of her hand dismissed the screen from the air, revealing the pleasant scenery it had been hiding.

"Humans have good ideas they execute inconsistently," she said. "We may be observing inconsistency on ideas with no Velencian equivalent."

Truth be told, it was uncertain whether she would find those ideas in the time they had left on Earth -- but she could try.

She could try.