A New Perspective of the Far Off Future

The Foreign Speaker

"I have never seen," Pler-son spoke after much deliberation. 

Krull focus Pler-son onto her vision while still never taking her forward-facing eyes off the small creature. She was fascinated, having never thought possible to keep an animal stuck in a cage like they had, much less a bird. She had seen the dragons stuck at the bottom of crested cuckoo shrike pits. But they weren't able to just fly away!

But they had gone through much trouble to catch this small things. After repeated attempts to capture it on wing, Pler-son finally realized that the only way forward was to devise some trap specific to catching birds. But of course, coming up with said trap, he was not helpful.

Being a crested cuckoo shrike, he was mostly limited to building the traps he had learned to build from his time as a chick. So of course it came down to the ingenious Tungra of this expedition to actually construct something that would work. And it only worked using a tool unknown to the crested cuckoo shrike, bait. 

And then there had been the problem of coaxing the small bird into a cage of the Tungra's making. The building of such a cage had been the easy part. Even though not one Tungra among them had ever even thought of such an invention before, through their time in Africa they had learned of such constructions through observing fisherman chiselpeckers. So at least they new it was possible.

"I don't get what's so interesting?" Krull asked, shifting her head to instead focus the small birds on her fovea, as if that might make it all the more clear.

Her speech, being far more articulate and fluid, took a moment for Pler-son to decipher the meaning of in his head. It had only been a few hundred years since crested cuckoo shrike started to be raised by the Tungra, and so time was needed for evolution to select in them the ability to easily understand and use language. And suprisingly, Pler-son was actually more adept at it then his fellows.

He didn't know how to respond to Krull. It was much easier to understand than to speak in language. Sure he could articulate rather simple thoughts well, but a whole bunch of complex thoughts rattled in his brain over this one simple bird, and he knew naught how to explain it to his friend.

"Trust me. Is," he spoke after a while, giving up on trying to find all the right words that would allow himself to be understood.

He hopped closer to the cage, staring intently through the holes in its woven structure to catch a glimpse at the small bird hopping within, its movements frantic. The sounds it uttered were complex and unusual to his ears, he just quite couldn't figure out what it was about those sounds...

But it was not the sounds that had first drawn him to this bird (they were only what kept his attention on it). It was the ability of premonition that these small birds seemed to exhibit. An ability he found eerily similar to the Tungra. For these birds would go from simple foraging, head buried deep in some earthly whole, to running from some predator at a moment's notice. A predator that had even escaped his own attention, but somehow these birds knew were there. And it was that ability that had made it impossible for them to catch when Pler-son first knew he had to study these birds more closely. And somehow he had to do all that without letting any of his companions know of his suspicions...

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The little bird hopped back and forth in her prison, sticking her beak through the woven bars to let out another small series of notes, a scream for help. 

"This is my prison! I see danger!" She cried. Her sounds, complex as they were, generated a well-understood meaning to any passing bird of her kind. And it was these sounds that were so unlike anything living on earth. For deep within her chest, lied a complex syrinx, a gift passed down from her song bird ancestors, but she used this gift in an entirely new way, unique among all other passerines. She spoke. But she did not speak like the Tungra or the now extinct humans (both of which do share many similarities in their languages).

For her words were not abstract, and quite frankly, literal. They were literal imitations of the sounds things made. The only change made to them was their simplification that made it easier and faster to communicate with her fellows. So when she spoke, "this is my prison", the only sound she had made was the sound the woven basket made as she struggled against its bars. And though simplified it was from this sound, any passing bird would immediately recognize this novel word as the imitation of the actual prison. 

But unfortunately, no one would be coming to her aid. Not with the predators guarding her as they did. She would be stuck in her prison until the predators decided to release her, if they even would...