Discovery
Discovery Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
I was aiming for exactly 77 words. 🙂

Getting two ships close enough to converse, especially warships of very different designs, was not a quick process, and it was based in part on trust.

Captain Titrian & the garishly-dressed foreign captain relied instead on mutual curiosity and a great deal of hand-waving, while their ruler stood at the bow, smiling, accompanied by a nervous-looking attendant.

Titrian didn’t blame the attendant. He had been listing the ways this could go wrong; he was up to thirty-seven.

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Discovery
Discovery Part II
Part III
Part IV

Otondyoo was not pacing.

Otondyoo was not pacing, because they were close enough that they could see the foreign ship, and that meant the foreign ship could see them.

Otondyoo wanted to pace, because the foreign ship was crewed by – not Bitrani, they didn’t look quite like Bitrani, but still – by tall people with sun-chapped redness over pale skin, hair in brown and blonde and a fiery red Otondyoo had never seen. Their clothes were in blue and grey and green, cut in strange ways, the pants only to the knee, the shirts leaving their arms bare. They must be freezing.

The Emperor was smiling, and if anything, that made Otondyoo want to pace even more. It was a vicious smile, not a diplomat’s face. “Did you know, Otondyoo, that there’s a particular artifact in the imperial treasury that claims to be able to read the color of a person’s aether?”

“But people don’t have aether, sir. The scholars determined that…”

“Indeed. Of course.” The Emperor’s smile grew. He passed the telescope to Otondyoo. “Tell me, what do you think they’re feeling right now?”

Otondyoo had already looked at all of them. “I think they’re cold, sir.”

“Look again.”

Obediently, Otondyoo looked again. “Their leader… I think their leader is worried. He keeps looking at us and then back to his first mate. And to the Calenyena-looking one they’ve got on the aft rigging.”

“Indeed. Do you think they were expecting to find someone else?”

Otondyoo dropped the spyglass down to study the armament. “If they were, sir, they might have not been expecting them to be friendly.”

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Discovery
Discovery Part II
Part III

Captain Titrian and his first mate spent a few moments staring at the ship coming out of the harbor.

It was flying a flag, that much they could tell, and although it was no flag they recognized, Titrian at least had not expected it to be. Over a thousand years had passed; nobody still flew the same flags or bowed to the same kings.

It was also flying pennants in every color known to mankind; it was painted in horizontal stripes of red, blue, and green; its sails were red, blue, green, white, pink, teal, and black. It hurt Titrian’s eyes to look at, but he looked anyway. Because under all that brilliant color was a sleek, pointed ship unlike anything he’d seen before, and he could count, painted to match the stripes on the ship, at least ten cannon.

This gaudy thing was a warship, and it was coming out to meet them.

That itself was cause for alarm.

Standing at the helm of the ship, however, dressed in as many colors as the ship if not more, was a man who looked to be a hundred years old if he was a day, his beard and hair both white and both braided into many tiny strands. In the spy-glass, Titrian noted a crown. He also noted that the man – king, what have you – had dark brown skin and a face far more like the Ideztozhyuh than like Titrian’s own people.

“‘What happened to the lost colony?'” he muttered. It was the question everyone had been asking when this mission left. “Clearly, they were lost.”

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