“I can’t believe you really found it!” Kyris wore a stupidly huge grin on her face as she brought the rock piece just a bit too close to it.

“Pfft, believe it.” Papa Miloq gave a bashful, proud smile and scratched the back of his neck with his tail.“You’re the one who told me I would.”

Kyris grinned, inspecting the piece. “I did do that, didn’t I?”

Miloq gave his usual what-am-I-going-to-do-with-this-girl shake of his head and playful smile as he sat in Kys’s dirtling “playing seat” and opened his third lava-ade of the night.

“You and your obscure hobbies girl…” he teased.

Kyris gave a high pitched squeal, breaking her concentration. “Hey! Papa Oq! You said you would stop with the lava-ade!”

Miloq looked around thinking before taking another sip, “No, I said I would drink less. And why do you act surprised anyways, huh? Silly dramatic girl…” another sip, a teasing smile, “I’m sure you had already seen with your traveling eye.” He waved off her chastise with his tail.

Kyris’s own tail tensed for a second, frustrated, but it loosened just as quickly; she could not stay mad at Papa Oq. Still she insisted, eyebrow furrowed, “How many did you have today?”

She waited while he took a sip, a long one. And something hung in the air, fear, concern. She knew she wouldn’t like the answer and not because she had seen the answer, her eye could not travel everywhere after all, but because she felt it in her instincts.

“Three.” Miloq shrugged. Three wasn’t that bad… until Kyris glanced at the clock and saw the day had only just started four trips ago.

“Papa Oq! That’s so bad!” Kyris whined.

“Alright, alright. Enough of this, Kys. I’ve had a long day, huh? Went to planet Dirt for work and with a special mission to fetch you the dirtling’s earliest use of language we could get. So, what does it say?”

“It’s called dustlife not dirtlings Papa, please…” she corrected him to correct him more than anything, not because he would ever actually listen. Even before finishing the thought, she was back to deciphering the stone.

“Yo-lana Elisa-bet Mar-tinz” Kyris looked up at Miloq, eye wide and mouth open.

“What? What does it mean?” Miloq asked, before sneaking his hand toward the mini fridge.

Kyris clearly noticed but was too caught up in the neat coincidence. Or maybe it meant something? “Isn’t that what they called us? Martins? What are the odds that it’s in this text. Do you think this was about us somehow?”

Miloq shrugged, chugged down his newly opened drink, and waited as Kyris kept reading. “Won dowsen nin hundid ayetee fa-eev to twu dowsen zeerow hundid ayetee won. These are travel stamps. That’s great, it’s mapped! But why would it take so long to write this?” Kyris frowned, there was something she was missing. And she knew once she uncovered it, it would seem so in her eye.

“Twu twu dowsen? Isn’t that Twintee twu dowsen?”

“What?” Papa Oq had broken Kyris’s concentration, she hadn’t meant to sound so harsh but what was he talking about? Oh…

“No, I said to not twu. The line means to. Dustlife said the two words the same way. To is a connector it shows movement from one space to another, from one friend to another, from your emotion to your target; you go from our planet** to** Dirt for work, you bring dustlife items **to** me, I am happy **to** learn more about Dirt. Like that. They think the words are so similar because you can’t use to unless there are twu things to connect. Dustlife was very poetic like that. But this is only one dustlife language there are so many more…”

Kyris trailed off as she finally realized. “This is a series stone!”

“A what?”

“A series stone! It’s what some dustlife used to honor their loved life’s series! To show how long their loved dust held breath! Oh….” Kyris looked at the numbers again, through a new lens. “Oh but how little they lived.” She grew visibly sad, her tail curling close to her body, as if to hold herself.

“And you’re worried about me? The series on that rock was my childhood! Wow!” Miloq shook his head and sipped.