Ten Zero

"Nailed the pronunciation and everything," I think to myself, and I can tell that the guy Ko-lee is talking to feels the same, because his eyes grow wide in shock. I do the whole face pointing thing, and he recovers, and repeats back "Nathom". So that's at least three names under my belt, which I'm sure will eventually translate into finding a laptop or a payphone, or literally anything that would let me get in touch with the wider world. I know it's only been maybe an hour or so since I last checked my phone, but I'm feeling impatient, so I go to take another look at it. Ko-lee sees me pull my phone out, and I can see some deliberation in her eyes, before she reaches out and snags the phone from my hands. I didn't have a particularly strong grip on it at the time, because I wasn't aware that she had a klepto streak, so the metal back slips easily out of my grip, and she stuffs it away in a pocket. "Hey, what the fuck?" I exclaim, absolutely confused by the turn of events. Ko-lee gives me a placating gesture, so I do my best to keep a level head while she explains the situation.

I can tell she doesn't know how to use the three words I know to form a functional sentence, so she hems and haws for a moment, before finally pointing at the sky, and making a 'no'. Then she points at the sun, and makes gestures across the sky, then follows it up with some short words I don't understand. She's holding up fingers as she does it, saying a word, then placing another finger up. "Is she counting something? Telling me to wait for something? What does that have to do with the sky and my phone?" The entire situation has me lost, and while I want to fight for my phone back, it wasn't actually being particularly helpful, nor do I want to start shit with the person who saved my life. I hold out my hand, in hopes that she might just give it back to me anyways, but she makes the no gesture again, then repeats the whole sequence of events. It's about as clear as mud, so I just throw my hands up in the air, and put them in my pockets, waiting for her to finish her conversation with Nathom, and hope that she ends up handing me my phone back at some point later in the day.

There's a brief look on her face, sort of apologetic and frustrated all mixed together, before she turns back to Nathom. She says a few more words, he responds, and they wrap up the conversation, both saying "Sho-lah" to each other. "Sho long and thanks for all the fish," I mumble, intuiting that the phrase is a goodbye. Ko-lee and I walk away from Nathom, and she turns to me at my mumbling, her expression lightening up. "chik, Antimony! Sho-lah ess sho-lah!" She gives me a wave, and pretends to walk off. I play along, and say "Sho-lah, Ko-lee!" giving her a wave back. She nods her head in affirmation, before adjusting my pronunciation slightly. Once she's confident in my pronunciation, she takes a few steps away, then turns to face me, and walks back, waving.

"Swazdo-lah, Antimony!"

It clicks immediately. I mean, how could it not? Every time you go to Cetus, Konzu hits you with the 'Swazdo-lah, surrah!'. I freeze fully, every thought from the last 3 or 4 days being reexamined through this new lens. I can feel the adrenaline start rushing through my system, as though my fight or flight has been activated. "There's no fucking way I'm in Warframe. There's NO FUCKING WAY. This can't have happened, that's impossible, getting isekai'd is impossible," but even as I think it, my brain is filling in gaps and clarifying everything I had been struggling to understand since I woke up in the forest.

The forest was toxic.

The people are Ostron.

The houses have the walls of the Unum.

I can feel my legs wobble underneath me, and I decide that sitting is a better solution than collapsing, so I make my way down to my butt with an undignified thump. "Wow, that's... this sucks. This... I mean... Warframe? Of all the places? Of every piece of media I've consumed, it's fucking the one with the crazy space children and warcrimes?" My leg starts to bounce up and down, and I'm doing my best to keep my self level, but every thought, every plan I thought I had has just come tumbling down around me. "Oh my fucking god," I exclaim with a sudden realization, my brain having finally traced all the way back to the inciting incident. "THE BEER WAS CALLED VOIDTRIP? That's a little on the nose!" and I can't help but start laughing. It's nervous laughter, my body expelling the energy it's generated in whatever way it can, but I also can't help but just feel so ridiculous. "*Am I just cooked? Maybe I can throw myself back in the void and hopefully end up back on eart- well, regular earth, I guess? Just... hope I don't get my shit rocked by Wally? God, this is so stupid,"* I think to myself, and I can see Ko-lee making her way over to me, a frown marking her face.

"Antimony?" she says as she approaches, with a look of concern. I just give her a thumbs up. "Swazdo-lah, surrah," I say somewhat quietly, and Ko-lee brightens immediately. "Surrah! Chik Antimony, surrah!" she says, followed quickly by something I don't understand. I give her a shrug, and her face falls a bit, but it's obvious that my untaught Ostron had excited her. I reach out for a hand, and she pulls me to my feet for the second time today, and I give her a "dah-dap," this time causing confusion. "Probably because I know like, 7 words and nothing else, and she doesn't understand how or why," I think to myself, giving her a sheepish smile in return. Overall... I find that I'm not actually emotional about this. Obviously, of all the places to be stuck, the Warframe universe is pretty low on the list, but everyone (or at least everyone interesting) has thought about an isekai scenario. 'What would you do if' or 'how long would you survive', they're fun little ice breakers that generally have little to no stakes because, well, this is the real world. That sort of thing doesn't happen.

Except it did, obviously, and so now I need to play it out. Warframe had never been one on the list, mainly because, at the end of the day, it's a looter shooter. After 13 or so years of the game existing, a lot of content had come out for it, and thus a lot of lore, but most of it was disconnected random tidbits. There was never any deep exploration into why there's only like 12 people in Cetus, or what the Tenno do when they're not slaughtering their way through the infested, or in general what life was like for a regular person. There were some high level story beats that were fun to explore, but as far as boots on the ground for living in the world? It was a bit sparse. It's probably why I didn't immediately grok the Unum walls, or the now very obvious Grineer tech scattered about. "The Grineer armor I was using for a trap," I suddenly think to myself. "That's actually really embarrassing that I didn't catch that one."

I realize that I've just been standing in the road with a slightly dazed look on my face for upwards of about five minutes now. Ko-lee has, for her part, been an absolute saint of patience, as she stands there watching me without a word. I do my best to gather all my scattered thoughts, and pull myself out of my head and back into the... real... world. "Sorry, sorry," I say, as I give her a smile and two thumbs up. I figure the best thing to do is to 'get some learnin' in me' so we can have a genuine conversation, so I gesture back to her house, and she nods her head in affirmation. We make our way inside, and I walk into the kitchen, which thankfully is empty. Sanza didn't seem like a bad guy, but he did come off as a bit intense, and I wanted to focus on getting me and Ko-lee on the same page. I sit down at the chair, and make a writing gesture at Ko-lee. She hits me with a "Chik", and steps out of the room for a moment, and I put my head on the table. I'm not particularly tired, but getting hit with that bombshell was... like getting hit with a bombshell, I guess. "Woof. Alright, so, new plan then. Get in touch with the Tenno? Talk to the Lotus? Is 'get thrown into the void' actually really the best solution? That seems crazy; I'm basically an adult. There's no reason why I wouldn't just go feral like with what happened on the Zaramin. Ughh, okay, forget long term. Short term, I probably want to make my way off planet? Actually, that seems like a bad idea too. I don't have a space ship. Ughh, shit, they make the whole thing look so easy, but I guess players are sort of rich in Warframe. Okay, broader plans then. I need credits. Someway to get them that doesn't involve the Index because Ha Ha No. My basic needs are currently being met, but that might not be a long term thing. Maybe-" my musing gets interrupted by the re-entrance of Ko-lee.

"Dah-dap," I say, as she hands me some paper and some sort of pencil. It's wrapped in string, but the operation is straight forward enough. I test it a few times, then write my name at the top of the page. "Antimony," I point at it. She looks at me with intense curiosity, and I hand the pencil and paper over to her. My game plan for the immediate now it to try to assimilate my knowledge as best I can. I want to learn the written versions of the few words I know, and hopefully, by the end of the day, have one functional sentence that I can use and understand. Then, by next week, I can start interrogating Ko-lee for questions. Because as many hours as I had in the game, the one assumption I was not going to make was that this was a 1 to 1 recreation of everything I knew. It was already pretty clear that I was out of my depths. I wanted to know what was real, and what wasn't. I wanted to know if I ended up in an AU. I wanted to know where in the timeline I was (and make some hard decisions if I was Pre-New War). Ko-lee, for her part, seemed happy enough to follow along, and took the pencil from me, writing what I assumed was her name on the other side of the page.

This was going to take a while.

Ko-lee was a little lost by the sudden turn around in behavior from Antimony, but she was utterly fascinated by the script that the woman was using to apparently write her name. "It looks nothing like anything I've seen before," Ko-lee thought to herself. "Definitely not Corpus." She was starting to wonder if her assumption was going to hold water, but she'd move forward regardless. She took the offered pencil, and wrote her name down on the paper next to Antimony's. There had been a look of frustration and resolve in Antimony's eyes since about 20 minutes prior that had seem to come out of nowhere, and simply from Ko-lee writing her name down, she saw that look grow. Antimony took the pencil, and for a brief moment hesitated; the tip hovering above the page. "Cetus", said the woman, before writing some more script down. She continued, jotting down script after each word. "Corpus. een fess tid. Grineer. Tenno. Alad V. Nef Anyo. Orb Vallis. Eidolon. sehn ti ent. Lotus." Most of the words Ko-lee knew, but occasionally Antimony would say a word that wasn't one Ko-lee recognized. Each word she spoke was followed by writing in that same strange script as before. Eventually, after about 30 or so words, Antimony finished, although it appeared to be mainly because she ran out of room. There was a brief moment where she grabbed the paper, and Ko-lee assumed she'd start writing on the back, but instead Antimony slid the paper and pencil over.

"I guess she's trying to get a handle on the language. I should probably be teaching her Origin as well," thought Ko-lee, and she used some extra space between her writing and Antimony's writing to fill in the Origin word for things. When Ko-lee started writing the second word, Antimony stopped her, with a inquisitive look on her face. Ko-lee pointed to her name, then spoke, "Ostron." Then she moved the pencil over to the Origin language, and spoke "Origin," although she said it in Ostron. She figured it would be best to label the two sides as well, so she wrote the respective names in their respective languages, and said out loud each word, so that Antimony could follow along. "Aw strahn. Aw strahn. Or ik en. Or ik en." Then she went down the list, tapping each word and speaking both the Ostron and Origin versions of each, as well as writing them down. Antimony, for her part, had an intense in her eyes, as Ko-lee ran down the list. Finally, when Ko-lee was done, Antimony took the pencil back, and once more went through the list, clarifying the pronunciation on various words, and using her script to write in what were likely notes in the margins around and between the words.

The whole process took about three hours, and she did end up writing more words on the back, but they managed to get through the entire paper. In some cases, Antimony had to describe the word she was saying, such as infested. In other cases, the things mentioned seemed to be proper nouns that Ko-lee wasn't aware of, so she couldn't do anything to help for translations. Ko-lee was confused and a bit surprised at Antimony's eclectic collection of knowledge. It was like she somehow managed to know a little bit about everything. She knew random bits of history, she at least knew of both powerful people and local people, and her knowledge didn't seem to be limited to the planet. There was a good chance that some of the untranslatable words were people in various positions of power, but Ko-lee was unsure how Antimony was connected to them, if at all. However, they had gone through enough words that Ko-lee figured it was time to get some answers.

Ko-lee pointed to the Origin word for Corpus. "Corpus," said Antimony, nodding her head. "Yes. Corpus. you?" said Ko-lee, pointing at the woman. Antimony looked confused, and shook her head no. "No?" said Ko-lee, mimicking the motion. "No," said Antimony, making a small note on the paper. Ko-lee had made sure to teach her a few words in Origin and in Ostron that would hopefully help her function a little more autonomously; yes, no, thank you, help, and so on. Antimony had been making small notes on the margins after every correction, likely to help her remember during the impromptu cram session. "No? You're not Corpus? Well shit. What are you then?", thought Ko-lee. She was convinced, due to the softness of Antimony's body, that she had to be some important person. You didn't get that tall and smooth unless you had powerful resources, but she wasn't sure who else Antimony could be working for (or with) if not the capitalist syndicate. "Tenno?" said Ko-lee, taking a stab in the dark. "No," said Antimony, but there was calculation in her eye.

"*She might not be part of the Tenno, but maybe she's worked with them before. There's something more there, but I don't know how to get it out of here with the words 'Tenno', 'help', 'food', and 'bathroom'" thought Ko-lee, semi-sarcastically. Antimony was picking up on words rather quickly, but they barely had enough to string together a full sentence, and it would likely be that way for a while. There was no way that they'd be having a full interrogation anytime soon. Ko-lee decided she could make one more stab at it, with a word that they didn't have on their vocabulary list. "Where?" she said, looking Antimony in the eye. Antimony looked confused, and her eyes drifted to the page, but Ko-lee grabbed her chin to force her to make eye contact. The brief moment added some color to Antimony's cheeks, which then caused Ko-lee's face to react in kind, but she did her best to ignore it. "No, Antimony. Where?" she said again, and this time flung her arms out, as if gesturing at the world around them. "You, Antimony. Where?"

Antimony looked at Ko-lee waving her arms briefly, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. "Where?" she repeated, waving her arms about alongside Ko-lee. "Yes," Ko-lee said, in confirmation. "Ko-lee Ostron where. Sanza Ostron where. uhhhh..." Ko-lee took a quick peek at a proper name that was written down that she could use, finding one near the bottom of the page. "Lotus Tenno where," she said, glad for her father's recently provided knowledge. "Antimony..." she paused, to indicate the missing word that she was looking for, and finished, "where?" Antimony's face lit up with the same expression she would get when she realized she understood a word, but it was quickly followed by confusion, and... sadness? She looked at her words for a moment, then looked Ko-lee in the face, and made sure to speak very slowly and clearly, as she said, "Antimony no where."