Tisis

Smells like... (N)

A little after Sirus' little breakdown, we arrive back in our cave.
I drop the wood in one corner and put my clothes on properly.

After all, I shouldn't give the boy any strange ideas if I want to live to see the coming day.

I shudder at the thought of what he might do to me once he realizes that I'm the only creature around he might satisfy his more primal urges with.
Thousands of disgusting pictures of their mating habits rush by my mental eye, but I push them aside.

He seems to be surprisingly civilized, so as long as he doesn't bring it up, I should be fine...still, I should be more careful with my clothing.

"Nym? You okay over there? You've been pulling on your clothes for about a minute now, do you need me to help you with something?"

Blood flushes into my face and I sputter, "No, I most definitely do not require your assistance, not at all. I-I'll be just fine."
"Well, if you say so..."
...damn, now I managed to make a fool of myself.

I take a deep breath and start piling up the wood to a campfire.
I need to hurry too, because it's clearly getting darker outside and soon we will be without light, if I don't manage to get this fire started.

I look up from my small pile and tell Sirus to skin the animal.
Only after I tell him, I realize that we are lacking both the tools as well as the proper training to do it. I'm not even sure if...

"Skin it? What do you mean by that? And what for anyway?"

Figures.

"'To skin' means removing the upper layer of a creatures skin. You can't eat the thing with its fur still on. As for how..."

I look around and mumble, "We'd need a knife or something..."
While I'm still looking, I suddenly hear the sound of stone being hit with stone and when I look up, Sirus is skillfully chipping off pieces of one stone's edge with another, creating a makeshift knife.

I come closer and ask, "Where did you learn to do that?"
"On the ship, obviously. It's a stone knife. That should work, right?"
"Well...I guess. But...why do you know how to do that?"
"Shouldn't you be taking care of that fire?"

I blink a few times, but then I have to admit that he's right.
Daylight will be lasting just a few more minutes, so if I don't start the fire now, we'll be stuck in the dark.

I scatter a few dry leaves into the fireplace and take two stones to try to ignite it, but to no avail. Neither the leaves nor the branches seem to catch on fire, even though I definitely see the sparks flying.

I consider building a more advanced fire starter from bark, but one look outside tells me that I don't have enough time to even just fetch the materials.

I keep trying and trying, while Sirus apparently is done with his knife and starts removing the fur of one of the critters.

The first cut he makes however apparently hits a vein or something and blood squirts out with surprising pressure, landing all over my fireplace, just as I hit the stones together again.

One of the sparks catches on and ignites the whole thing, quickly connecting to the branches and much to my surprise the campfire burns brightly within seconds.

I blink a few times and ask, "What...just happened?"
"I don't know, but I'd really need to wash myself now..." Sirus responds.

I look up at him and notice that he's drenched in blood.
A small river of blood runs from the slain animal down the tiny slope and straight into the fire, where it quickly burns up.

A foul stench emanates from the body, which reminds me of rotten eggs.
I know this smell though...sulfur! There must be quite a lot of sulfur inside this creature...well, that's no good, after all, sulfur is at least mildly toxic to humans.
But he does need to eat something...should I tell him?

"Phew, what's that obnoxious smell?! Smells like someone forgot to clean up a corpse for a few days!" he suddenly exclaims.

Of course he would notice the smell...alright, here goes.

"That's sulfur, Sirus. It's in the body of this creature. Quite possibly in its blood."
"...okay, I have no idea what this 'sulfur' is, but if it smells this bad, it can't be safe to eat, right?"
"...afraid not. Not entirely at least. But on the other hand, you need to eat something, unless you want to starve to death."
"So...it's either death by poisoning or death by starvation? Lovely."
"Or death by predator or death by bacterial infection or death by..."
"Thank you, I get the picture...is there any scenario in that head of yours, where we don't die?"

I look at him for a long time and finally reply, "I'm sorry...but there is no such thing. We will die and there is no way around it."
"...then why bother eating something potentially harmful, if we're going to die anyway?"
"I don't know, why did you eat something while on the ship? I mean, you were going to die eventually there too."
"...wait, you mean...oh, clever. Thank you very much...okay, let me rephrase my question...do you see any scenario, where we won't die in the near future?"
"...chances are slim, but thus far we've found shelter and food. If we can also find uncontaminated water and don't get eaten somewhere along the way, we might as well make it through the rest of our adolescence."
"Adol...what now?"

I laugh slightly at his ignorance and explain the term to him, while the blood keeps flowing into the flames, who consume them greedily.

Good thing that the stream isn't continuous, otherwise the critter Sirus is still trying to dissect might well be on fire as well by now.

He then asks me all kinds of things about the world we now live in.
And while I don't know all that much about it myself, I at least manage to educate him about a few concepts, like 'the sky', 'the sun' 'thunderstorms' and 'rain'.

While it is highly unlikely that I'll ever see my teacher again in this world, I will have to make sure to thank them for telling me all these things about planets and how they work.

Sure, the knowledge seemed useless at the time, but it's certainly paying off now.