“Oh, hello.” Robin was surprised to run into Sabo and Hack again outside the cargo hold. She was carrying the bread and soup that she’d saved from supper. Hack was holding cut fruit and sparkling water, while Sabo had scones and tea.
The three of them had had the same idea of bringing a snack to Koala, who was working through the dinner hour without any food. They’d run into each other with uncanny timing outside the door.
“Hey, this is perfect,” said Sabo, holding out a small basket containing tea and scones to Robin. “You take this to her. If me and Hack are there, she’ll refuse it to impress us.”
“Indeed,” Hack agreed, handing Robin the plate of fruit and water pitcher. She didn’t have enough hands to hold it all, so she grew a new one.
“Are you sure you want me to go in?” she asked. Koala was clearly hesitant to ask for deciphering help from Robin, the proper archaeologist. Wouldn’t it be better for Sabo and Hack to go in, given that she wouldn’t be as proud around them?
But Sabo simply said, “I think it’s better this way. Thanks for doing this, Robin,” and the two of them scurried off down the hall.
She had a tray with bread and soup, a glass bowl of fruit, a pitcher of sparkling water, scones, and a pot of black tea. It was far more than just a snack. Just when Robin went to knock on the cargo hold door, she heard a voice crying out inside.
“Found it!” Koala shouted, from the other side of the door. It sounded like she’d just made some progress on her task. She sounded so happy, in fact, that Robin couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
“I’m guessing that something good just happened?” she asked quietly, opening the door. A book with blue binding was open in front of Koala.
“Robin, look! I found it!” she exclaimed. “Look, right here!”
She was pointing at a block of text that did indeed look very similar to the Eucaly script. According to the caption beneath it, the language was Soncrucian. It was the first script Robin had thought of when she’d noticed that Eucaly looked familiar to her.
“I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’ve finally taken the first step forward!” Koala bubbled, brimming with delight. She seemed close to levitating off the ground.
“You worked so hard for it,” Robin said, smiling. She reached out and caressed Koala’s cheeks where bags were forming below her eyes. “I’ve brought you some food. I think now you ought to take a break.”
A sound coming from the table in the middle of the room drew Koala’s attention, and she noticed the soup, fruit, and scones that Robin had just set down.
“Oh, yay! Thank you, Robin!” She leapt up and hugged Robin, her stomach simultaneously emitting a loud and insistent growl of hunger.
Robin sat across from Koala while she carefully scooped bites of cabbage from the soup bowl. Koala, the fish-man karate assistant instructor and Revolutionary Army officer, despite her lofty titles, was just a regular girl. The way she brought a small chunk of bread up to her mouth reminded Robin of a squirrel chewing on an acorn, and it made her smile.
Koala noticed the gesture and asked, “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Robin murmured. “So why did you decide you wanted to decipher those ancient runes?”
“What? Well, I was just dusting things off before we loaded them up, and I happened to pick up this clay tablet, and…” Koala pointed at the center of the tablet, which had been shunted off to the edge of the table to make room.
“See there? You can see a spot where they made a mistake and rewrote it.”
Sure enough, there was a mark where one letter had been written incorrectly and then rubbed out. The writer could have filled in the spot with clay and rewritten it, but the scribe who had written this was clearly too lazy for that.
“Seeing this little detail made me realize that this writing didn’t just appear in the present moment. A person who actually existed wrote it. At first I was just thinking of this tablet as a precious object to be handled carefully and transported. But now…” Koala traced the tablet’s letters with her finger and exhaled.
“Whoever wrote this had information they wanted to convey enough that they went to the trouble of putting it into physical form. Yet this clay tablet has been buried in the earth for centuries, unread by anyone. For some reason, I just wanted to read it, right away.”
“Why did you feel that way?” asked Robin.
“Hmmm,” Koala murmured. “I’m not sure. But it seemed painful to me that these words weren’t being seen.”
Robin nodded knowingly and examined the writing on the tablet. The person who had written these words was lucky—through a miraculous combination of factors, their words had survived to the present day and found Koala, just the kind of person who would fervently want to know what they said.
Even though Robin was sure that she wouldn’t be able to eat it all, Koala actually finished every last bit of the food, and wasted no time in doing it.
“Whew, now I’m stuffed,” she said, sounding a bit pained. Maybe it had been too much.
“I suppose you didn’t need quite that much food,” Robin replied.
“Maybe not. Sabo and Hack think I eat as much as they do.”
“You knew it was from them?”
Koala laughed. “Of course. I saw Hack buying this fruit when we were docked, and only the person in charge of food has access to the scones. They gave it to me even though what I’m doing isn’t for the benefit of the army. They’re both too soft on their comrades.”
Robin gave her a look and chuckled. Koala was too sharp not to notice the ways that Sabo and Hack favored her.
Having finished her meal, Koala returned to the desk. “All right, time to read!”
“You’re quite close to deciphering the text at this point. Soncrucian already has a complete phoneme grid, after all,” Robin pointed out.
“Huh?” Koala blinked with surprise.
Robin grabbed the book with the blue cover and flipped through it for a moment. “Ah, here we are,” she said.
The page contained a table of modern writing and Soncrucian characters, as well as how to decipher them.
“Oh, wow!” Koala exclaimed, staring at the page before her.
In the chart, the character looked very similar to in Eucaly. It was apparently pronounced “zgu.” The Soncrucian sound was identical to the one symbolized by the Eucaly character, and the chart was close enough that you could read the two characters and their pronunciation side by side.
“Amazing. This pretty much tells you exactly how it sounds. Now I’ll just have to decipher the grammar.”
“I don’t think you even need to do that. When the Eucaly civilization was at its peak, it was already under the umbrella of the World Government.”
“Really? In that case…”
If the Eucaly were already under the government’s banner, then even if their script was different, their spoken language would have been unified with the common tongue. Of course, language evolves over time, but a gap of just a few centuries was close enough that you could get a good sense of the meaning. After all, both Robin and Koala were speaking that unified language.
Looking skeptical, Koala examined the clay tablet once more. Following the grid, she sounded out the letters one at a time.
“ must be S, and is E, I think. So that means this is…S-E-S-A-M-E and W-H-E-A-T!”
She could read it. And it made sense, too. Kind of.
“Sesame and wheat…?” Koala was taken aback. “What could it mean? A receipt, maybe? Or a list of crops to be used in a ritual of some kind?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Robin, touching the stacks of stone stored in the hold. The stones had fine white dust stuck to their surfaces.
I think I know, she thought. “See how the sand on all of these excavated pieces from the ruins is white? Lands where there’s a lot of limestone in the soil can’t support tall trees. So a large structure like a palace would have been built with stone rather than wood.”
“I see,” Koala murmured, then looked up. “Huh? But these clay tablets hardened when there was a fire at the palace…”
“Right,” Robin continued. “And it’s hard to imagine a palace of stone burning for long. If the temperature of the fire was hot enough to bake this clay, the tablet must have been somewhere very close to its source. For instance, say, in a kitchen.”
Koala blinked rapidly. She looked back and forth between the language grid and the tablet. “Are you saying that this is a cookbook?”