The Heart Daughters
Posted on 09 Nov 2022 @ 11:04am by Commander Calliope Zahn
Edited on on 09 Nov 2022 @ 11:10am
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Planet Obsidian, Itonian Bajada
Timeline: MD06 ~1200Hrs - Following Breckinridge: U Haul We Haul Pt 3
1008 words - 2 OF Standard Post Measure
Ayalou found that the stables were a very nice relief from the intense sweaty heat of the sun in the open pathways in the early afternoon. On the way to see the animals, Miss Shirin had given Ayalou some kind of leaf dish full of something that looked like oozie chopped plant guts with cubed fried beefy things on top. It hadn't passed the sniff test for Ayalou who immediately set to dramatic gag-retching. Miss Shirin hadn't seemed phased by that. In fact she seemed prepared for it. As if she'd anticipated that reaction, she had only purchased one of the lunches and shrugged as she ended up eating it herself. Ayalou settled for a handful of plain crackers that had come with the food, but only the ones that hadn't touched the offensive entree. Although the crackers were all gone now, she'd only eaten one herself. The rest she had been surreptitiously sharing with the petting zoo creatures.
This wasn't so much a farm or a zoo as much as some kind of educational or training barn on one end of a street of what Ayalou thought to be workshops. Whatever the stone faced buildings were, they didn't seem to be homes, and they weren't exactly stores, not big ones full of different departments of packaged new things and clothes and toys and candy and stuff. They had people in aprons doing tasks or standing behind counters and pulling things off of shelves. Things were like Kalara, but different. In Kalara they had dried-mud-looking buildings painted over in white chalky stuff with lots of tents in between. Here there were the pointy faced dark skinned people, but then there were lots of human looking people too, at least far more than she had seen when she had been to Kalara.
No one here had made her wear a headscarf this time, like they had in the other city. Although a headscarf might have kept all of the slobber out of her hair, as she was now being tongue cleaned in the face by a bleating chuchaki calf three times her own size, who was really searching her for more dried pita while she was hugging the baby animal around the neck.
There was a weird step, tap, step, tap, running rhythm and then another little hand reached up around the same calf. Ayalou looked up and realized now that another group of girls of different ages was jumping and hopping into the barn. They were all Obsidianites, and each one of the girls was... different. One had her sleeve tied off where an arm should have been. Another was in a small rolling chair with an older friend pushing her along, the older one having a long healed over cut through her lip and nose.
The grown lady with them was speaking a language that Ayalou's translator button didn't change right away. But her voice sounded weird, like she was talking with her nose instead of her throat. Eventually the translator caught up to the inflections—
"— and we can visit with the animals for a little while before we return to our studies, dear ones."
Maybe they were a school group. there were maybe ten of them or so. Ayalou looked down at where the other girl's foot should have been beside her own as they patted the friendly calf together. But she gasped reflexively when she spied a strange springy L shaped piece of metal where a foot should have been. Ayalou almost forgot about the calf.
"What happened to your foot?" She asked the girl.
"I just have the one foot and this one I put on in the morning."
"Did you get hurt or something?"
The other girl shrugged. "I don't know. I don't remember."
"Do your mother and father remember?"
"I don't have a mother and father. These are my heart-sisters and my Heart-mother."
"Heart-mother?" Ayalou didn't comprehend. The translator had rendered the word in the literal as there was no standard equivalent.
"Yes. We are born of her heart and not of her body. We are her heart-daughters."
"Why does she talk funny?"
"She was a heart-daughter once too. She was found without hearing in the desert. We were all found alone in the desert and brought to Itonia."
"I'm moving here too." Ayalou said, her feelings mixed. "My father is finding us a new home."
"We will be neighbors!" The other little girl said enthusiastically, but noticed the feeling wasn't the same for the Romulan girl. "There are some other devil-ears here like you."
"Devil-ears?" Ayalou sounded cross.
"That is what they are called. They live here to be safe. Are you coming here to be safe too?"
Ayalou looked down at their three feet and the one spring-foot. She decided she couldn't be mad. The other girl hadn't been mad when she had asked about her foot, and the girl didn't act like she was a devil just because she was called a Devil-ear. "Yes." Ayalou admitted. "My old home wasn't safe for us anymore. They took my father and my uncle away for talking about the wrong things. We had to hide for a long time. When my father found us again we came here. We don't have another place to go."
"Everyone who comes to Itonia has no where to go. They say 'We have our backs against a rock, so we will make our home in the stone'." the little girl related to Ayalou, reciting the saying she had often heard adults express. She reached out and held the pale hand of the other little girl.
Ayalou was about to cry.
"I will show you the Qatarak dust tank." The heart-daughter said, pulling her new friend into the little education building and hoping to cheer her up. "Don't worry, they are little and don't bite. Their sting has been taken out too. These ones like you to pet their backs and to feed them!"
"What's... a Qatarak?" Her sorrow was overshadowed by her thirsty curiosity...
