Learning

The cupboard creaked as I crawled out of it. It creaked again as I closed it after me. With the soreness in my back, I had really hoped I would think of a way to buy a mattress. I could hear cracks as I stretched. I was still here, meaning nobody had found me, so that was good. As good as it could be, living in a decrepit, cold, and whiny house. I looked around my-

No, this house before I did anything. It held what appeared to be a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a fireplace. While there was almost no furniture or appliances- with the exception of the bathroom- I could tell what the rooms were intended to be based on their shape. The place being abandoned was no secret. The walls were barren, lacking even paint, and were made up of solid broken-down concrete.

Taking a closer look at the walls and noticing the state of disrepair they were in, I realized why this place got abandoned. It gave me a sense of unease just being there, as if something could fall down and crush me at a moment’s notice.

Even so, I was grateful for this place. It meant I could live here, away from everybody else, hopefully for as long as I needed. I walked over to the table, one of the very few things left behind. It made sense being there, as it was simply too large to fit through a door.

On it was the book that I “stole” from the library. I used it to write down what I knew and what I’d learned. It also contained a catalog of previous events for future reference.

So, to recap, I got murdered by a giant fox in my

bedroom, woke up in a cave with no exit as a yellow

quadrupedal fuzzball, almost died again, got rescued

by a gecko, “stole” a book, lied while getting food that

my name was Steve, and I reclaimed a house.

Not exactly in that order though.

When learning the language, there wasn’t much I could do besides my best.

I left the house to start on the day’s venture. After a fair bit of walking, I arrived. Inside the place I dubbed the library, I sat down on the only chair I could find next to the window, put down my journal with a loud thump, and listened to the conversations through the window as I looked through it.

I was right next to the market, so I just heard them all talking about transactions all the time. I would look at what they were holding, it was mostly berries and orbs, and then I would search for common patterns so I could identify where the nouns, verbs, articles, and other things were in every sentence.

Dozens of pages were used for just writing out what I overheard and making a process to reverse-engineer a language. Only on occasion would I stop the neverending scratching from my pencil to rest my paws and walk around, staring at the few bookshelves this place had. With the exception of the sun occasionally annoying me by shining in just the right way, practically nothing exciting would ever happen.

Sleep, study, eat, study, sleep; that was my schedule. On occasion I would stay up late writing, observing, and doodling thanks to my newfound night vision. My skills developed slowly, and over time, I started to have the confidence needed to promote myself from listening to passerbys to simple conversations with the people I bumped into. If I couldn’t think of anything to say to them or if they looked at me funny because I said the wrong thing, I’d vanish into the bustling crowd, get to the nearest table, then write it down. This strategy significantly sped up how long it took for me to learn. It hurt, as I didn’t know if they would remember me as “the weird guy,” but I had to learn to accept it. There was one word that I recognized, one that I was certain I kept hearing; and that word was “human.” These people seemed to only use it in either anger or curiosity, so the concern of what they could possibly want with me was haunting.

Thankfully, the language they used seemed to have very similar grammatical rules to English, so learning went by much faster than if I were learning, say, Chinese. By the twentieth or so day of doing this, I started to notice something strange… There was an Espeon who was following me around. I thought they noticed my strange behavior, and they might have wanted to do something with me. I couldn’t quite think of what that might be, but it was still a gut feeling; so I started to avoid them. That may have made the situation worse, I really don’t know.