Welcome to Gaia! ::

Although Murikabushi still couldn’t explain how any of the writing on his homeworld had come to make sense in his mind, he wasn’t exactly going to argue with that.

Sure, he’d tried to puzzle his way through multiple pages while exploring around the capital city, in a way that he supposed could constitute “studying” by someone’s definition, but everything about the process had felt so……odd. Continued to feel odd in retrospect, as well, and forced him to admit that he had no idea what was going on here.

One visit, the words before him hadn’t made any sense to Muri. He’d stared down at old political pamphlets, or scripts in some theatre’s backstage area, or letters he’d pulled out of someone’s desk. He’d tried to make the abyss of letters that stared back at him click into place, tried to get his mind around them in a way that turned them into words—proper words, that was—rather than haphazard assemblies of characters that meant absolutely nothing. Sometimes, he’d find a snatch of text where somehow, some way, he managed to understand what the words said, in spite of all logic that Murikabushi knew.

The next visit, he picked up the top pamphlet in a box he’d found in yet another secret basement printing press. Humming idly, Murikabushi had opened to about the middle, where he’d learned most pamphlet authors from a thousand years ago tended to put a big splash illustration that got to and addressed some of the major themes that they wanted readers to get out of their work. Here, though, he’d found a veritable wall of text—except, this time, as he’d dragged his eyes over the printed lines before him, something finally clicked. Not only letters had stared back at him like “hey, gurl, hey!,” but this time, Murikabushi had seen actual words.

Whatever had happened, he wasn’t going to argue with it, though. As much as he wanted to understand, Murikabushi was willing to overlook the hows and whys of whatever had gone on here if it meant that he could learn to read more space languages. Because of course, his homeworld couldn’t simply have one language like some kind of Star Trek monoculture that wanted to give him an easy time of understanding it. Pawing through different bookstores, old lending libraries, printers shops, and everywhere else he could find written text, Murikabushi had found multiple different scripts. It seemed only reasonable, in his mind, to conclude that only studying one of these languages would leave him with an incomplete picture of what had happened to his world.

“It’d be about as bad as going off the past life memories I’ve awakened without looking for any, I don’t know? Outside corroboration or anything?”

Glancing away from the book he was flipping through tonight, Murikabushi looked down at his lap—and, more importantly, at the young stag currently resting his head in his senshi’s lap. Barely bigger than stubs, his antlers hadn’t fully grown in yet. That seemed like the sort of thing that should’ve gotten on the poor baby’s nerves, but he didn’t seem to mind when Muri’s hand gently nudged around them while he bestowed gentle, affectionate skritches to the precious boy’s head.

“Look, I know that nobody’s going to argue with me, like, not doing this extra work or whatever,” Murikabushi carried on, his tone soft as he justified his choices to himself. “These characters are such a radical departure from that other language I was looking at? But they’re all over the shrines and tea-houses that seem like they were important to Airan.… Maybe to his culture? But at least to him, if not them.…”

This book had pictures, which at least seemed to be true of most books with similar scripts. Whatever Airan’s culture had been on about back in their heyday—whatever all they’d thought they were doing about anything—they’d been super into fully illustrated texts. While the art didn’t really help Muri make sense out of what he was reading, they did give him some vague ideas that he could bullshit about. In this text, the highly stylized pictures reminded Muri of old ukiyo-e prints. He wasn’t sure what kind of heads or tails to make of them yet, but he’d picked out some fierce-a** b***h in a robe with intricately drawn rose blossom embroidery and, in his gay little brain, they were absolutely The Main Character.

“I mean, Miss Diva has to be the one, right?” He looked from the book back to the top of the deer’s head, watching baby boy’s ears flick around idly. This, Murikabushi had noticed in dealing with his world’s cervine sweethearts, tended to indicate that they felt comfortable, wherever they were at the moment. “Listen, I know it’s not going to mean anything for you, if you look, but……”

Muri shifted the book, lifting it up so Baby Boy could look at the picture.

Baby Boy huffed softly and closed his precious little eyes.

“So, Miss Diva is in basically all of the pictures, right,” Muri went on as though Baby Boy was even remotely listening to him, and as though any of this made sense to the deer. “They’re also usually pretty central in the images, if not the only person there. Plus, the rose embroidery on their robe makes me feel like they have got to be important? Maybe it’s because of the senshi related things, but maybe it’s for the holy, sacred cultural connotations that these people tended to have? Or as far as I can tell, they felt that way about roses. It’s come up in some of Airan’s memories and I found this, like, space-ethnography, right? Where somebody writing in that other language goes on for a whole chapter about the fact that Airan’s people care about rose blossoms and rose blossom imagery, especially black roses, for reasons that have nothing to do with magical senshi anything?”

Baby Boy grumbled, and Murikabushi couldn’t really tell if it sounded like any sort of mood. Maybe he was projecting too many humanoid-adjacent emotions onto a deer.

With a soft sigh of his own, Murikabushi set the book back down in his lap. Turning back to the pages, he expected to see the exact same Nothing In Particular that he’d seen this whole time. Lines upon neatly ordered columns of characters assembled from meticulous lines and artful swooshes, each of them striking a familiar chord for him but distinctly failing to register in his mind as any kind of words, with attached meanings.

While the characters hadn’t changed, something in the back of Muri’s mind clicked into place like tumblers inside a lock. As he stared at one column, something about the characters finally made sense: Beneath the frozen sunrise, Lady Ametsubo waited for the promised emissary from the Wisteria Palace. Surely, she thought, no one would be enough of a fool to snub her by failing to meet her in Lady Sankojo’s name.

It took a moment for the reality of this moment to set in for him.

As the realization that he understood these words crashed hard into his mind, Murikabushi gasped. He shook his head hard, trying to shake off any surreal feelings so he could more fully appreciate this. The clearer he got his mind, the more he could comprehend this text outside the pictures (……probably. ……Murikabushi hoped).

Except, looking back at the characters on the page, he found them returned to the same state as before: beautiful and neat, but devoid of any meaning that Murikabushi himself could see, much less understand.

With a sigh, Murikabushi started flipping around, searching for the next illustration that he could pick apart and make up a story for. When he found it—a distinctly more risqué piece in which he could only spot Lady Ametsubo because her telltale rose blossom motif was ostensibly tattooed along her lower back—the name of the game was looking for any common characters, then trying to see if maybe, they were pictogram style ones, where they in some way resembled something that maybe tied into their meaning. 水 mizu did that, its shape meant to invoke the look and feel of flowing water, while 火 hi resembled the fire and flames that it represented.

No, this method wouldn’t be perfect, he realized that, but nothing would be gained without putting in some kind of effort, Murikabushi supposed. Maybe puzzling over characters more intensely would help him understand them better.