[Placeholder] (Complete) NaNoWriMo 2016

Of Dark Horses and Longshots

"So, you're not sick anymore?" The Muse looked around at the odd setting. There were rows of long tables covered in white cloth and a plethora of computer equipment. "And where are we again?"

"Hackathon." Said the Writer, not looking up from the notebook. "I'm volunteering, which is 99% sitting around waiting to be useful and 1% frantic scrabble."

"Well that's... nice?" The Muse grabbed a seat at one of the tables full of ghostly shadows of laptops and programmers. "They don't mind us being here, right?"

"Not unless Cat and Simon start roughhousing. Again." The Writer peered around suspiciously, but the fictives were thankfully absent.

"So are we getting started on that outline then?" The Muse eyed the giant pile of notes.

"Yup! So set the timer, it's time to catch up!"

~*~*~*~*~

Waiting-by-the-water wasn't quite sure what he had expected of the new crew member, but not this. He twitched whiskers in amusement at the memory of the creature enthusiastically throwing itself into working out an amalgamated version of their two languages.

The first thing they'd done was have Simon trade the face paint for hand gestures. It was a bit of a learning curve on both ends, but incredibly simpler. The cat hadn't been much of a linguist before, but found it was a fun puzzle trying to work out what could be chopped from his heavily layered language and still keep the heart of the meaning.

The ship had kept out of the conversations and Cat had a feeling the mechanical beast was sulking. Their own efforts at communication had been a resounding failure, but if the ship had it put in even a small bit of effort over the years the cat had been onboard there was a possibility that they could have developed a similar system. Oddly the ship seemed to place the blame solely on Cat for not making a stronger attempt.

The ship had focused on communicating primarily with the previous crew member and Cat's ruff shivered a little at the bitter memory. The movement confused the human who shifted to confused-concerned stance, with false markings that leaned towards worry that it had done something to offend.

Cat shook his head, mimicking it's negative, and the human relaxed. The cat had been trying to learn the alien language as well, although they had both given up on trying to pronounce the words and settled on generic noises.

It was interesting how well they could communicate given the significant difference, although Cat chalked that up to the incredible effort the human was making. He had expected the same situation as the last few crew members, where they each talked to the ship and not each other.

He would have loved to explain what was going on, have true conversation about the ship and their lives and what it all meant, but that was beyond them still. But in a five-day if they had come this far... Cat held out hope that they could develop the language to the point of true conversation.

But for now, they concentrated on the basics. Cat shook himself out of his meandering thoughts and got back into the serious business of trying to work out a way to do conjugation.

~*~*~*~*~

"You are doing a lot of POV hopping," the Muse pointed out. "Is that even necessary?"

"I think it's needed, there's no real way to intuit what Cat is thinking and it gives more depth of story when I use Ship." The Writer leaned back and looked over her notes. "I might clip it back down again in the edits, but for now it's a nice way to expand on things."

"So I take it this book is going to end up with a lot of DVD extras?" The Muse mused.

"Pretty much!"