Jasleh

Cycle 6
Coords: (9, R9)

Captain's Log 0006

Captain Renni Star commanding.

Hired a couple locals to take me and Sky out on safari to see the native wildlife, after setting up a few mutually understood signals via Tavi. Sky because she's the actual expert on the topic and me because like hell was I going to miss this. Alas, we didn't see shit, although the trip was still interesting. Seems that for all the locals go up and down the tree trunks like they're nothing, they are otherwise not all that arboreal, traveling by ground rather than branch. And I'm fairly certain that wasn't just for our benefit as I noticed that in the city as well. 

Hopefully it wasn't me that chased away the animals... although it did sound like most of the wildlife wasn't easily spooked. Sky though, damn. She's clearly descended from ambush predators. When she's using her color changing skin to blend in instead of talk? You have to know where to look to see her, it's amazing. She moves super quiet too.

At any rate, we'll have to try again tomorrow. While we were out, I asked Tavi to talk names with the locals in town. Obviously, formally naming the planet in Galactic Standard is gonna take planet-wide diplomacy efforts by someone who ain't us, but in the mean time I wanted to float the idea of "Melody" as a stop-gap name - in honor of the local languages.

He had a more productive day than Sky and I did, and it seems they like the idea! So, for the time being, I'll refer to the planet as Melody and the native sapients as Melodians.

When we close to the city on the way back, we heard music on the breeze and I asked our guides if we could go that way to see what was happening. While I know they only really got "that direction - question?" from my gestures, they seemed happy enough to take us there.

What we found was a circle of Melodians around what I would consider in my admittedly limited experience to be a normal-sized tree. They swayed back and forth as they sang, all four arms waving in perfect synchrony. It was amazingly beautiful, and I'm sort of hoping they'll consent to having it recorded so I can play it in the ship.

When we got back to Tavi, I had him ask our guides what that ceremony was. After some discussion, he said that the tree was a sapling of one of the giants, and the song was to aid its growth. I asked how old the tree was, which seemed to require a great deal of discussion as to the nature of time, but the tentative answer seemed to be less than 5 local years? And by Aggie's calculations, years here are a bit shorter than Standard. Just how fast do those things grow??? I'm certainly going to have to try to put something in the report about the local plantlife, after we finish the Fauna section.

 

<- Prev | Next ->