And wondered what he was doing here.
None of the other ten Myomar Academy cadets had been ordered down with Parck’s shuttle. Eli didn’t have any particular expertise in unknown artifacts or tech. It wasn’t like he needed planetside experience, anyway—he was on track to become a supply officer. There was no reason he could think of why he’d been singled out this way.
“Cadet Vanto?” Barris said.
Eli wrenched his mind back from his musings. “Yes, Colonel?”
“The droids said there are half a dozen trade languages out here that use Bogolan script. You’re our expert on obscure local languages.” He gestured to the crates. “So?”
Eli moved closer, wincing a little. So that was why he was here. He’d grown up on the planet Lysatra in this part of Wild Space, pressed up against the so-called Unknown Regions. His family’s shipping company worked mostly in and around their homeworld, but they did enough business in the Unknown Regions that Eli had picked up proficiency in several of the local trade languages.
But that hardly made him an expert.
“It could be a variant of Sy Bisti, sir,” he said. “Some of the words are familiar, and the syntax is right. But it’s not standard.”
Barris snorted. “Hard to imagine a standard for a language so obscure that even the droids don’t bother with it.”
Eli held his tongue. Sy Bisti was actually a perfectly well-defined and eminently useful language. It was the people who still used it, and the worlds they lived on, that were obscure.
“You said you can read some of it?” Parck prompted.
“Yes, sir.”
~
Quientessential Eli Vanto.
Epically failing to be invisible given his unstoppable natural inclination to be unbiased, curious, and forthright.
We know him for less than a few paragraphs, and he is already, overwhelmingly, in our hearts.
[Photo: beautiful pin by @ritarussiandoll_pins, featuring one of the most prolific Thranto artists @iskelan_art. In the background, Eli chubchub plush by @penguinfairycrafts]
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