The bond between Esayr and I was worryingly silent. While I could still feel it there if I focused on it there wasn't a radiating warmth, or the tugging play of emotions filtering through that tether between us.

Once upon a time ago, I might have thought it would have offered me some semblance of peace, but all it caused was an unending jitteriness. I felt like I was overflowing. Emotions bounced around inside me and threatened to drown me as I felt less equipped to handle the onslaught. I hadn't noticed it before, but I thought that maybe we'd been relying on each other to help carry our emotional burdens, even unconsciously. And now that that bond between us had become stagnant, I was struggling to acclimate back to the volume of emotions I could handle on my own.

It wasn't a good mentality to be in to get any kind of sleep. It kept me on edge and anxious. I felt like I had too much energy that needed to be burned off somehow. I couldn't relax. I could --however-- highlight all questionable sections of the contract that the Communications team had so kindly provided for me...which was admittedly a lot. I'd ripped through their damn contract for hours last night in a fury.

"I just keep getting hit with bad news after bad news. This ends now. If not for me then for everyone else." I knew we really couldn't do anything to stop the contract at this point. It was in play and the Earthen governments got too much out of it. They'd be unwilling to revise it at this point.

I read through each of the yellow stained pages. The legal jargon was hard to understand, but I felt I'd managed to highlight the worst of it. I highlighted the 'compensation' I highlighted the entire section about what goes on once you're chosen. I highlighted the section and made a note regarding accommodations for anyone brought up here.

Each page was threaded through with lines of yellow. "These are the parts we'll have to start with and will move on from there." A process was coalescing in my mind of how we could combat this shitty media presence that the Humans and the Val'Dornn had created for themselves. Despite everything that had happened, I was free on this ship. I felt free on this ship.

The dowry nonsense was catastrophic to that thought process originally, but I'd gone to the communications bay and they'd unearthed some feeds from the original discourse regarding the contract with the American Government...and, sure enough, the concept was presented to them as traditional.

It made my blood boil. With no place for that anger to go, it simmered and simmered until now, when I marked down the final line that I felt troublesome. Then it all burned away and I just felt...exhausted. The muscles in my neck were tight and hunger gnawed at my stomach. When was the last time I'd eaten something? I wasn't even sure, though I'd guess far longer than reasonable if the headache had anything to say about it.

My gaze strayed to what amounted to the kitchen in our quarters. That cooking slab had slid back into the wall along with everything else. It was little more than an open room. I approached the wall and ran my hands gingerly over the smooth surface. I knew there was an interface somewhere around here, but where it was and how to correctly interact with it was a guess at this point. I don't even think we'd ever keyed my signature into the cooking surface, so for all I know I could end up running my hands over a section of the wall that could decide to burn me.

I brushed my hand somewhere off to the right and the interface lit up with a slight hum and vibration beneath my fingers. The smooth metal slab slid out, causing me to scramble back. I certainly didn't need a bar-shaped burn across my stomach.

The slab was a hefty dark stone, so dark my eyes seemed to have trouble focusing on it. It reminded me of the marble countertops more well-to-do people had in their homes back on earth.

I let my hand hover an inch above the surface. It didn't seem hot. So, I did what any reasonable human would do and touched it...quickly.

The surface didn't seem hot. Maybe room temperature or a little cooler. I quickly touched it again to verify. It felt the same. I pressed my hand palm side down to the surface. It was a middling temperature, almost cool to the touch, but not cold and then suddenly heat bloomed beneath my hand.

I ripped my hand back quickly enough to only feel a phantom warmth on my palm and not the sting of a burn. A warm red handprint graced the slab in front of me and then faded back to the black color. It isn't instant then. I'll just have to treat it like any other stovetop and not put my hands on it.

I rifled through cabinetry and even pressed my hand along the wall looking for that glorified fridge Esayr referred to as a temperature control unit, but I became quickly aware that I wasn't going to be able to cook anything in this kitchen.

I could have handled the strange appliances, the problem arose when I finally found the cookable items. Nearly all of which were foreign, or looked possibly foreign enough that they concerned me. I didn't want to give up on food, though. The headache wouldn't let me.

So I found myself at the interface near the door, drifting between calling Esayr to help me and just going out into the town to get food. Any other time I would have gone out to eat. I wasn't afraid to eat out alone, however, I was afraid to eat at a restaurant without any knowledge of how to pay.

I certainly had no money. Had Esayr paid when we ate out before? I should have been paying attention, but I wasn't. That's shitty date etiquette on my part, I guess. Not that I had much experience with that.

I brushed my fingertips along the smooth metal interface and it flared to life.

I felt stupid. What do I do? I eyed the futuristic layout. It looked just dissimilar enough to anything I was familiar with, that I was at a loss. I rapped a knuckle against the metal, absently, sending a faint 'ting' sound throughout the room.

I noticed movement on the screen in my peripherals and turned my attention to the interface yet again, as I knocked on the metal of the room.

A thin slicing line, which I had barely even registered as anything more than a reflection on the metal, jagged wildly across the screen at the noise. Cataloging it. At least that kind of visual I was familiar with. It was recording.

"Can you...please contact, Esayr?"

A cheery voice chirruped back a question in Vallan, asking me to please speak in a language that was programmed into the ship's database.

I'm the first human here. They probably haven't had any need to program any of our languages into the database, like they haven't had any males get their language updates. I switched to Vallan, "Desora, Esayr...ici (Get, Esayr...please)."

The computerized voice asked me to specify the Esayr I wanted to contact and again the concept blew my mind. I didn't know how many Addison's there were on Earth. Countless probably, despite the fact that it wasn't a terribly common name. Was the name Esayr any different? Was it common among the Val' people? I had no idea. Another idea I hadn't even considered: Did Esayr have a last name?

I said the only thing I could think, to single him out from any other male on the ship, "Kier'la Temanar, Esayr (My mate, Esayr)."

A faint pulse of light began, a small circle that grew into the pale white image of a hand on the otherwise unblemished metal. I assumed it was asking for my hand, so I obliged and pressed my palm to the light. Absently I noted that the light dwarfed my hand considerably. It wasn't unexpected since I was verifiably dwarfed by all on board this ship, but it was something that I hadn't ever quite dwelled on.

"Desori (Contacting)." The interface chimed before dimming entirely.

Well...guess it's done then. He'll contact me when he gets a spare moment. I stood by the interface for a good minute before I forced myself to step away and stop acting like a teenager waiting for a phone call.

I wandered back over to the table to survey my work. I'd turned the surface into a massacre of papers and writing utensils. The Comm team had offered me more high tech gadgetry, but I was too keyed up to want to suffer through learning to work anything when all I could think about doing was getting to the root of the problem. Will you ever be able to get to the root of this problem, Addy? Truthfully? Looking down at the outlined contract and seeing all the issues I'd found in it in just this one pass, I wasn't entirely certain that I could. But I wanted to try. Of that much I was certain.

*****A/N*****

Lmao, I'm flying by the seat of my pants currently on this language. I cannot for the life of me remember if I made up a word for 'my' already. I'll fix it in editing if I already have.

desora: --command-- literally "Get" (a fun miscommunication of colloquialisms --in the sense of "get a hold of" meaning the same as "contact"-- in English not translating well across languages)

ici: please

kier'la: (fem) my

temanar: closest English translation is 'soul' but the literal translation is something to the effect of 'piece of my soul' derived from the same word in Temani Bercari

Temani Bercari: Searching Soul, or literally "Soul Searching"

Long time no see everyone. It's been a hot minute since I've updated. A little over a week I think. I've had a very busy --and crazy-- week, so I'm sorry that I'm a little late on this update. I've had 1k of this written for a while, but only just now got around to getting it finished. I'll be starting some certification classes and some prerequisites for a Dental Hygiene program soon, so I'm hoping I can knock a lot of First Contact out of the way to the point that I just have a little bit to finish up during that time. And then I can start on the next book! Lord willing. Thank you all for sticking with me on this rollercoaster and hopefully on more to come :)

Layla's Advice for the day: Treat yourself gently and kindly. Do your best. Even if your best is 10% that day, I'm proud of you and you should be too. We're all works in progress and we're all learning. I'll be 25 at the end of this month and I'll tell you one thing: I have a lot I still have to learn. And I'll be learning it for the rest of my life, so take a deep breath and tell yourself you did your best and you'll do your best tomorrow as well.