The Box

It was a warm summer night as Jake walked home from the pizzeria after a typical post-shift pizza party. It had been a few weeks since he had met those two girls with the blue hair, but he still carried around that box. He didn’t know what he expected to happen, but he knew that it would provide some sort of connection to that girl, Lihandii. He had tried doing some research on the name to try to figure out where it was from, but he had come back with nothing. He couldn’t even find a name similar to it.

When he had talked to his partner about it, Ayling had told him just to forget about her. He said that the girls had probably been illegal immigrants and had been deported or that they had been faking their situation and lied about their names, but Jake didn’t believe that. When Ayling had suggested that it might have been a ruse, Jake had decide to look at the box more closely.

The brushed feel of the metal casing on the box reminded Jake of a very expensive refrigerator, but when he took a magnet against it, it wouldn’t stick. Furthermore, upon opening the box, it sprung open as if on a spring, but he couldn’t find one. He tried to figure out what it was next, pressing the strange characters on what he was pretty sure was the lower half of the device. When nothing happened, he started to wonder if it was a prop or something. He had closed it and noticed the tiniest bump on one edge of the box. When he pressed it down, it clicked softly, like the button on a handheld radio.

After he pressed the button, Jake had noticed a quiet beeping sound from the device. Opening it again, he had been surprised to find that the top half of the device, which had previously been plain metal, was now a small screen, as if for a television or computer. Again, however, he was confronted with characters he couldn’t comprehend. Deciding to learn more, he had drawn some of the characters on a piece of paper and taken them to the library.

At the library, Jake had discovered that the characters were similar to something called runes, though these were more precise and mechanical, much like modern type. Jake had taken home a few books on runes and a few cultures associated with them. Transcribing the equivalent type into the Latin alphabet had taken him quite some time, but he was fairly certain that the characters on the bottom half of the device were mostly numerals, resembling something he had found called the pentimal system, though these seemed to count all the way from zero to nineteen, indicating a base twenty math system.

Just the previous night, Jake had finished a complete redraw of the device in a form easier for him to read, though he wasn’t quite sure that helped much, except to give him actual words and phrases that he didn’t understand instead of just pictures. He had recognized one word, though: Valkyrie. Now, as he walked back from the pizzeria, he held a flashlight to shine on the paper drawing he had made of the device, trying to make some sort of sense out of it.

“That’s impressive progress you’ve made, Jake.” The voice sounded so familiar, but it came from behind. Could it be?

“Lihandii?” Jake almost whispered the name, such was his apprehension should he be mistaken. He turned to the source of the voice and saw that same girl from three weeks prior. For a while, he couldn’t speak at all as she smiled gently at him, her eyes so captivating that they almost seemed to glow with green. Then, he found his voice again. “I thought you couldn’t speak English.”

She signed to him as she spoke, occasionally substituting a spoken word for a sign, “I couldn’t, but when you signed with us, it gave me an idea on how to learn to speak this language faster. I’ve been learning from the deaf.” Her accent seemed a bit odd, probably in part due to her native tongue but also in part due to the way the deaf spoke when she was learning.

Jake couldn’t believe it. She had learned a whole language in just three weeks, though he supposed she had really learned two with all the signing discrepancies between her language and ASL. He had barely transcribed a screen and some buttons from one character set to another. “That’s amazing,” he said. “But how did you find me?”

Lihandii pointed to Jake’s pocket, where he kept the device she had given him. “You’ve been carrying around my–” No, that word couldn’t be right, Jake thought. She hadn’t spoken it aloud, but she had signed the word, “telephone.” This wasn’t a phone. Phones had numbers and cables and that weird dial tone sound when you picked them up. This thing had numbers, sure, but there were no cables, there was no tone, and there was the matter of that weird screen when he had turned it on. Still, if it were a phone of some sort, it would explain why she’d have given it to him. It might also explain how she had found him if it produced some sort of radio signal. She may have used some sort of triangulation technique to track him down.

“Do you want it back, then,” Jake asked, pulling the device from his pocket and holding it out toward her. She walked closer to him, and he found that he didn’t actually want her to take it. If she did, she’d have no reason to talk to him again. Still, it was hers, so he held his hand open. She grabbed his hand from the bottom and placed her fingers along his own, curling them back over the device.

“Keep it,” she said. Letting go, she resumed signing her words. “I’d like to talk with you about this place. I know you don’t really know me, but I’d really appreciate if you could trust me.” As she spoke, her eyes looked around the street. As she did so, Jake noticed that her eyes really were glowing. It wasn’t just his imagination. Her eyes finally set on the house next to them, a plain white house with a picket fence and a large tree in the front yard. To Jake, it was a site as normal as any other, but she seemed to look at it as if it were one of the most mysterious things upon which she’d ever set her eyes.

Jake stammered for a few seconds, then remembered that words were essential to any conversation spoken aloud. “Yes, of course. I was just heading home, as a matter of fact. If you haven’t eaten dinner yet, I’ve got some pizza left over. You could eat while I tidy up.” He held up the bag of food in his hand, and even through the box and the bag, one could easily smell the delicious scents emanating from the food. She smiled again.

“I haven’t, and I’d love that.” She walked closer to him, grabbing his free hand, which had dropped his flashlight when he had first heard her voice. As they walked away, the flashlight rolled off of the sidewalk and into the gutter. There, it sputtered out.

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