Runaway to the Stars: Page 37

Posted on June 25, 2024 by Jay Eaton

All about bug ferrets, and their intense pattycake game of a language. The language stuff is honestly still a work in progress so don't be surprised if all the BFL-2 dialog gets changed later.

Transcript

LOG 1.2: Bug Ferrets

Image: A group of bug ferrets exiting a tunnel. Their fur has a variety of colors from dark brown to reddish pink to white, and their visible unfurred skin is pale green. Most have magenta eyes.

Caption: Bug ferrets have been in space the longest of any of the known sapient aliens, and they created the wormhole generating technology that links interstellar space. Avians were the first sophonts they encountered by throwing wormholes into new systems, followed by humans, both of whom had colonized their local systems. Most recently they contacted centaurs, who had only rudimentary electronics.

Bug ferrets are unisex (meaning simultaneous hermaphrodites, like snails or earthworms) and extremely gregarious, living in family groups of up to 30 adults and their children. Native to a cold planet with most of its surface occupied by barren ice caps, bug ferrets evolved to live in the vast biogenic tunnels and cave systems of chemosynthetic organisms beneath their planet's tropics. Ferrets have poor vocal flexibility compared to other sophonts.

Although some spacefarers get cybernetic implants that allow them to speak alien languages, native bug ferret communication is a combination of visual sign, tactile sign, and expressive barks. Unlike human sign languages, many bug ferret languages are made of non-representational syllables and can be spoken in complete darkness. Their most commonly "spoken" sign is a constructed inter- national auxiliary language (like Esperanto, but far more successfully adopted) known as BFL-2, as it was ironically the second bug ferret language encountered by humans after first contact. Because of the clunky way that BFL-2 words are transcribed, bug ferret names and entities are usually either given acronyms or nicknames in English.

BFL-2 (Bug Ferret Language 2)

BFL-2 reading order is bottom up, right to left. Three symbols are transliterated as:

[B-X Grasp D-C Drag]
Image: The signer grasps their hands around the outside of the receiver's arms and drags them from the second joint to the third joint.

[B-P Fist B-D Drag]
Image: The signer makes their hands loose fists and drags the knuckles on the outside of the receiver's arms from the wrist to the second joint.

[L-P Palm-O B Twist 2]
Image: The signer makes their left hand flat with their fingers together and thumb out, and rotates their wrist twice to flutter it, tapping both sides of the receiver's right wrist.

Image: A large underground space connects to the cold blue light of the surface through a small skylight. Buildings extend down in a column, cut through by transportation corridors, horizontal areas in reach of skylight growing blue-green plants. Under the column, where it spreads out, a cross section shows homey tunnels flooded with warm light from bioluminescent organisms.

Caption: Bug ferret living spaces are a dense tangle of rooms with blurry delineation between public and private spaces.