For Eseme‘s Prompt and YSabetWordsmith‘s Prompt.

Thanks to @inventrix for the names and @dahob and Sky for some of the morphemes!

Caliber and Armanie’s wedding was the first major celebration in their new colony.

By necessity it was a short party, but his new wine flowed by the bucketful, no-one caring that it hadn’t had time to age, not even Caliber. They feasted as much as they could manage, sang old songs they could barely remember, and chased the bride and groom to their house with raucous and crass jokes and more than their fair share of hooting and hollering.

When they sobered up, cleaned up, and got back to their normal routines, such as they were, a day or two later, the thing people remembered (aside from the mess, and that was soon enough forgotten), was that it had felt good to let go, to relax. To unwind. To party.

“We don’t have time to do that all the time. To have weekend bashes like we used to, back at university,” Dietrich sighed. “Or the cocktail parties after-hours.”

“Who says we have to do it all the time?” Lorika perched on the fence Dietrich and Rostislav were putting up, confident in her position as team mascot. “Why not once in a while, you know, seasonally?”

“Seasonally?” Rostislav pondered the concept while lifting the small woman off their work. “Lor, we need more pegs.”

“On it.”

There was always work to be done, but there was always time for talking, too. Rostislav and Dietrich mentioned the idea to Caliber and Armanie, Niles and Girda. Lorika passed it on to Aoife and Joris, and so on through their tiny colony. Niles remembered, from his ancient cultures studies, harvest festivals, celebrations, as he put it, “that we have enough food to live through the winter.”

They didn’t know if they had a winter coming, not really. They weren’t nearly where they’d planned on ending up. But they had a harvest coming, and a festival in the planning would make it come quicker.

The village of purple people were very friendly, for a certain definition of the word “friendly.” Andon was beginning to feel very confined, very boxed in. He couldn’t even wander out to water the bushes without someone, even if it was often a small child, trailing after him.

But today, he was up to his elbows in chattering small children, and they all seemed to be trying to tell him the same thing. “Slow down, slow down, ableang, ableang.. Tell me, abbryous, what?”

Ezra was only a xenolinquist by hobby. They hadn’t thought they’d need one on this mission, after all, so they had do with what he and Suki could hash together between them. Luckily, the villager’s language seemed far more human than most species they’d encountered.

“Fesetexams!” they insisted.

“Fesetexams. Fesetexams?” He repeated the word back to them. It wasn’t one they’d used before. The smallest, a tiny pale-skinned probably-a-boy with wildly curly pink hair, mimed eating, eating, and then a massively full stomach. Either that, or pregnancy. They seemed to carry their babies much the same as human women. Ezra was trying hard not to think about that. Fesetexams seemed safer. “Ah! Festival! What sort of festival? Sort, sort? Lopfen? Kind?”

The small child mimed eating more. “An eating festival. Fesetexams. Fesetexams-ah-vodefjur.” The children around him nodded happily at him.

Trying hard not to think To serve humans is a cookbook; they had yet to encounter a race that wanted to eat humanity except their own, Ezra let the children lead him to the village square.

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For becka_sutton‘s prompt.

This comes after The Sea And Sky.

Caliber was a little annoyed at their new planet.

They were all a little annoyed at their new planet, to be fair. It had any number of flaws and not nearly enough positives to counter them, far too many deadly problems and none, so far, of the things that sometimes made new settlements totally worth it.

Gentor, despite its scorching temperatures, had had garithite, which made several cancers visible in very early stages. The lovely and deadly Elrodre had produced Elriers Rouge, which prevented most forms of skin cancer. Kincaid, with its naturally-exploding plants and shrapnel-generating animals, had been found to have crustacean-like critters with shells naturally strengthened with tungsten. This planet? This planet couldn’t even grow grapes.

Caliber had brought all of his carefully-packaged rootstocks, filling up a good portion of his weight allowance with them, and then carefully tried one varietal after another. None of them would bear fruit, not here. Taking Armanie’s word that, once they were settled, they could afford to look further abroad, he had packed the surviving plants back up, and begun looking for a substitute for the short-term.

There wasn’t that much time to devote to it. Every member of the team had duties, just to survive. They hadn’t been able to get everything off the ship before it sank, so much of what they did, building themselves shelters, exploring the planet, planting and harvesting food, had to be from native materials with MacGyvered tools. It was slow-going, much slower than a standard colonization ought to be.

Still, Caliber found the time. It helped that his botany degrees dovetailed his hobbies and career, that he could test each food for edibility and then again for ferment-ability, so that he could gather plants on “work” time, and then, in the evening, in the hour of private time they each had before they slept, he could work on his wine-tests.

He was beginning to despair – they had found grain-substitutes, dye-substitutes, leafy-green substitutes, but no fruit-substitutes, nothing that made a decent wine (although he’d managed a very impressive beer that was very popular with the rest of the colonists.) They had been there for months, the season was beginning to turn chilly and damp. Was he going to be reduced to being a brew-meister and not a vinter?

Armanie proved, not for the first time, to be his salvation. Coming back from an exploratory run deep into the jungle, she thumped down on his desk a wide armful of plant matter. “Try this,” she demanded. “The stalks are edible if not tasty, but there’s something like berries, too.”

“Berries…” They were almost grapelike, he noted, noting, also, that she had brought a full bush, roots and all. He ran one of the rich, juicy things through his instruments and then, going for the empirical test, popped one in his mouth.

“Marry me,” he blurted out. “Oh, Armie, this, this is heaven.”

The team leader smirked happily at him. “You brew up some wine,” she told him, “and we’ll talk.”

Next: Harvest

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To an anonymous prompt.

This comes some short time after Greetings ()

it had been with effort that Paz and Malia had slipped away from their “welcoming committee” who were, after five days, beginning to feel more like benign jailers. Vas was still doing the staring-slack-jawed thing he’d been doing since they encountered the purple girl, and the rest of the team were baby-sitting him, trying to get him to snap out of it. That left the uncomfortable pairing of Paz and Malia, who had in common that they thought Vas was a bit of a jerk, to handle the finding-an-escape route and generally doing the job they’d been sent here to do.

They slipped out between two of the longhouses (it seemed silly to keep thinking “longhouse-like structures”) when the rest of the village was busily chatting via giant-horse-translator with the team. Malia had found a route that was overgrown by about a generation (If these creatures had human lifespans; they were still determining that) of disuse. It wasn’t hard to traverse – the plants here were mostly hardwood, slow-growing, and the vines were, unlike Malia’s last assignment, neither thorny nor poisonous; the trees here, unlike in other parts of this planet, seemed neither sentient nor carnivorous. The hardest part was getting a good hundred feet in without leaving a path. They wanted a chance to really explore before their “hosts” managed to find them.

Once they got past that line, the travelling got easier. At first, Malia thought it was just that they weren’t as worried about where they put their feet, but as they went deeper and deeper into the forest, she realized that the path itself was clearer; the stones under their feet were dry-fitted together and dressed so that barely a weed had grown up between. “Paz, are you seeing this?” she asked, kneeling down to run her hands over the pavers. The village cobblestones were not nearly as tidy.

“No, Mal,” he answered very slowly. “I’m seeing this, though.”

She looked up, wondering what he was talking about. Another moving tree? Some more pavers? “….Oh. Oh, well. What do you think happened to them?”

“I… have no idea. But I think we need to find out.”

They stood together, shoulder to shoulder, needing the touch of someone else they knew was human, as they faced a small city, formed of stone and metal, rising to the sky. One could argue a great deal for coincidence, paralleled construction and evolution, but the “New London City Hall” carved in English gave lie to every theory they’d heard voiced.

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