I keep trying to make my stories in my world independant of each other, but it's getting harder and harder. I knew that I couldn't write this story entirely in either first or third person, so I made myself split it apart. It's also twice as long as my usual story...surprising for me. I've been reading so much Metamor Keep(On story 65!) and D.Ein that they're both starting to influence my writing....Um, comment as you wish. By the way, I do the thing that occurs in the "long paragraph"(You'll notice it) FAR more often than is healthy...Hope you enjoy it!(Or skip it)
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I stared at my military ration with both a sense of hunger, and a sense of disgust. I knew that I had to eat it, eventually. But my mind was distracted by the quiet mundane conversation downstairs, as I tried to pick out what I could. I loved learning English in school; it was a nice change from the rote Fox I was forced to memorize. However, that had been foxified English; I knew that this was the real deal, and I would not have this chance often once the war was over.
So, I threw down the phrasebook, picked up my bag of edibles, and walked downstairs. I walked on two feet, rather than four, so as to appear a bit more natural. My commander said to minimize contact with our hosts during our stays here. He was afraid that these people would be traumatized enough by the fact that they were now required to provide room and board for one of the occupying fox soldiers; they didn’t need any help from those said soldiers trying to make conversation with them. However, I determined that I would NOT let this opportunity pass me by.
As I clumsily reached the bottom of the stairs, they turned to look at me, and I sort of froze for a moment.
“I was wondering,” I asked in my best possible English, “If I could eat here. With you.” The older man silently nodded, and another chair was immediately added to the table. “It’s relatively lonely upstairs,” I added for the finishing touch.
There were four of them. From my studies in human psychology, this was a standard family unit with one father, one mother, and two children, a boy and a girl. I could tell the father apart from the son by his authoritative posture, and the mother apart from the daughter by the obvious size difference between them.
I believed that if I didn’t start any conversation, they would have been perfectly fine eating in silence. “Since I might be here a while, may I ask for your names?”
I never finished my concentration in human psychology. But from what I did learn, since they lack both moveable ears and a tail, they use the position of their mouths and the tone of their voice as their primary means of expression, aside from the obvious case of diction. I analyzed them intensely as they introduced themselves.
“Jonathan O’Connor,” the son hastily replied. He didn’t meet my eyes, instead looking slightly off to the side. I deduced that he did not appreciate either my presence or the fact that he was required to introduce himself; however, I didn’t know which one, for sure. Perhaps it was a little bit of both.
“Patrick O’Connor,” The older man said lightly. Since he decided not to use his full voice, he did not know if he was making the proper method of introduction towards me. That’s natural for most humans here. They just need to learn to be themselves around us, and it makes it better to understand them.
“Julia O’Connor,” the mother replied. She was the first one to smile while introducing her self. However, her smile was forced, because the tone of her voice refused to shift. This meant that she didn’t know the proper tone of voice to correspond with her feigned emotions.
“Cecilia…” the youngest answered. I could not figure her out for the life of me, the entire time I was down there. She looked at me dead-on, but with not any readable emotion. I think she perceived me as some kind of large dog, and I firmly believed that and minute she might ask if she could pet me.
“My name is Andrew Markin,” I told them, trying to keep sight of all of them at once. It was a bit silent as I chewed a chunk of jerky from my rations, and I contemplated what I would ask them, since I knew that they weren’t ever going to ask my anything.
But suddenly, out of NOWHERE, the father asked me, “How long do you think you will be here?” Even though I was thrown off for a bit, since I already knew my response before he asked the question, it was easy to reply.
“As long as need be. After that storm a few days ago, most of us became ill from sleeping outside, so this policy of boarding was made. Hopefully, it will not last for long, only until we find other means of shelter here.” Ow. That one felt straight from the phrasebook: we were taught it before coming here. After I said that, I decided that I would form my own sentences.
Suddenly, the son stood up from his place at the table, said “Excuse me,” and walked upstairs. As he walked upstairs, the mother shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she told me, “He’s just a bit nervous about talking to you. That’s fine, right?”
“That’s fine, it may take some a while to become used to our presence,” the words spilled out of my mouth before I even had a chance to think.
“No,” the father looked at me, “He was a soldier.”
“Patr-” the mother tried to stop him.
“But fortunately for him,” he continued, “The war was over before he even got the chance to fight. You fight fiercely, quickly, and without too much damage. I respect that.” He drank his water as he waited for my reply. I absolutely misread him.
“Well,” I began, “If he still wants to fight, he could apply for a position in the new Imperial army.”
“What?”
“Since this island is part of the Empire now, we’ll be recruiting soldiers from here for the army as well. Hopefully, the army will have human soldiers as well, for those who choose to apply, and it will not be just a wolf and fox army. There are…” I trailed off, and decided to force myself to devise my own sentences, no matter how bad I sounded.
“We can always…be helped,” I shoved through my muzzle.
On the voyage over here, we practiced all the phrases on each other. “If you ever need anything, please contact…We are sorry for the inconvenience; this situation will be dealt…If you have any information regarding the…” But then I realized that if these phrases are all that we ever use, we’d never learn how to understand each other.
“But, how could you fight with us? We are two different species, after all,” I never grasped the father’s deeper meaning until the conversation was over.
“We fight with wolves. We are two different species, after all,” If I did know, would I have answered any differently?
“Oh.”
We sat eating our meals in silence, with the absence of the son. I thought that Cecilia was looking at me, but when I looked over at her, I realized that she was looking right above my head. As we locked looks, she finally piped up.
“Why do your ears move when you talk?
As foxes, we don’t normally think about the movement of our ears too much. They simply move according to our indicated tone in the conversation. However, I never stopped to think that these people might not even be able to interpret them. I knew that now was a good time as ever to introduce them to the concept.
“Well, I use my ears to express emotion,” I enunciated my words to make sure they understood. “For you, for example, when you are happy, then you smile, when you are sad, then you frown, however, we use our ears to do this.
“For example,” I tilted my ears back, “When I am sad, then my ears are like this.”
“Aw,” she cooed. She was quite peculiar in her way of expressing it, but I knew that she was beginning to understand, “It’s okay,” she added.
“When I am happy, then my ears are like this,” my ears tilted upwards, and my tail bristled up as well. I then reverted back, “To be honest, I cannot understand you sometimes.”
“How long have you been learning English?” the mother asked, “It can be hard to know ALL the words in a language when you begin learning it.”
“I understand all the words, but there is more to what you say than…what…you…say,” looking back on it, that was a perfectly logical statement, “I also need to know how you say it, to understand what you mean.”
“For example, we have a famous example of this. We say ‘There is a boat on the horizon’ to show this. I can say this phrase two different ways,” I tried to make myself look as unnaturally happy as possible; “There is a boat on the horizon!” I then tried to return to looking normal. “However, I could say it this way as well.” I widened my eyes, drooped my ears, and froze my tail in place, “There is a boat on the horizon…” The girl looked spellbound by my acting.
“I said the same words both times, but because I showed you what I look like when happy and sad, you know there is a difference in what I said. If I said it the same way both times, then you would never know that there was a difference.”
“Wow.”
“So, when you talk to a fox, it helps if you make sure they understand how you say something. It is even more important than what you say to them.”
I sincerely hoped that all of this sunk into them.
“Honestly,” the girl said, “I think you’re nice.”
“Thank you,” I replied, and purposefully tilted my ears down, as a practice for her, “A lot of people do not think we are nice.”
“Why?”
I could see the two parents growing uncomfortable at the developing conversation.
“They think that we only want to hurt them. They think that we want to take all of your things, then go back home. No one believes us when we say that we want to stay here and help you.”
“It’s okay,” she smiled, “I believe you.”
After a brief moment of silence, I nodded to the three humans still seated at the table, stood up on two feet, and folded my empty ration bag into a simple square. “Even though it is still early, I think that I should rest. Thank you for…” I stopped myself just in time, “It was nice to talk with you.”
With those words, I departed up the stairs to the room they gave me. The room was intended as the guest room, and since I was a guest, I guess it was only natural that they put me here. As the lights of the city gradually grew him, I stood up and began slowly pacing back and forth around the wall farthest from the door. Gradually I sped up, my four paws pacing faster and faster, for I knew that I had one very long and tired night ahead of me.
