Ouroboros 2: Before Read Free

of translating them. With the examples of the written alien language she had collected from the house, and the spoken language the scanner would be picking up off the radio waves, in time the scanner would be able to create a coherent language model.
    While it was doing that, she set about looking for some clothes.
    She found some in one of the upstairs rooms, and now gathered them together.
    Using the scanner again, she told it to monitor the airwaves for any kind of visual data, and finally it began to show her images, the pictures appearing just over the bed of the scanner in small 3-D holograms.
    Needless to say, it was a confusing mix of colors and forms. She saw what she assumed was the alien race, then examples of technology, plants, animals, rolling hills, and well-lit cities. It was a colorful jumble, and made little sense to her.
    But she didn't need to make sense of it yet; she simply needed to understand what the people of this time looked like, and what they wore.
    Once she figured out what they wore, she sifted through the clothes she'd found, until she selected ones that matched what she assumed was the current tastes.
    A pair of black, sturdy pants for Carson, a white, high-collared shirt, and a brown, worn leather vest. And for her, a long skirt made of quite beautiful alternating strips of blue and green fabric. The green fabric had detailed little flowers embroidered over it, and led up to a tight, almost bodice like top with more embroidery over the bust line. Underneath this, she wore a black, long sleeved, tight shirt. She was lucky enough to have found a pair of elbow length, black, almost opalescent gloves too, which handily covered her glowing left hand. Then she finished the entire outfit off with a blue, beaded veil that wrapped around her neck and head, and sat low over her eyes.
    There was a mirror in a room she assumed was the bathroom, that she considered herself in for a good few minutes, even twirling around on the spot and watching the skirt dance around her ankles.
    She looked completely different.
    And she was well covered, which was a particularly good thing; when the entity woke up again, it would probably make her entire body glow blue, like it had before. And though Nida didn't know much about the people inhabiting this planet, she could bet that glowing women were not usual around these parts.
    Once she was done with the clothes, she sat down and tried to figure out how exactly she would make the rest of her body look like one of the aliens on this planet.
    Thankfully, they were humanoid, and as far as she could tell, were about the same height and weight range as your average human. But that was where her luck ended.
    These people had white hair, jet-black eyes, ridges along their arms, necks, and cheeks, and vibrant blue spots to finish it all off.
    While she could probably get away with things by just tugging her veil down, and relying on the fact that the rest of her body was completely covered, Carson would be a different matter.
    Realizing she probably couldn’t figure this one out on her own, she set to work analyzing what she thought were food stores in the kitchen. Though the scanner was busy trying to calculate a language model, it had enough left over power to help her assess the chemical constituents of the packets she found, and she soon selected some that wouldn’t kill her or Carson. They weren’t exactly perfectly nutritionally balanced for humans, but they would do. Then she spent a strange 20 minutes opening several of the packets and trying to . . . well . . . figure out how to make them palatable.
    It was while she was doing this, bending over what she thought was a stove, that she heard footsteps behind her.
    ‘ What are you doing?’ Carson asked.
    She yelped, surprised by his sudden entrance, and accidentally tipped forward, losing her balance.
    She threw out a hand, caught the edge of the bench, and managed to steady herself though. Then she