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"Hello, Water Princess."
Some business has taken us near a graveyard clearing in the mountains again this morning.
The young woman turns, and stands, with a quizzical expression and a laugh. "Do you mean me?"
"Do you see anyone else here? -- besides your parents and my sister, and my brother-in-law, I mean."
The referenced adults indeed work in a clearing nearby, partially obscured from our view by trees.
"I suppose not. You're Ceri's brother?"
He nods.
"But if you call me such a thing, should I call you Earth Prince?"
The young man laughs. "You swim well. I don't know your name."
"And I don't know yours."
The two eye each other, half warily, half inquisitively.
The young man points to a stone near himself. "My great grandfather was buried here." He stoops and reads the name and the date, his pronunciation clearly accustomed to the language.
"Oh." She takes out her notebook. "May I?"
"Sure. Do you think he's related to you? Ceri said you were researching your father's lines."
"Maybe he's a great-great-uncle or a distant cousin several times removed."
She writes down what he tells her, and together they wander around the field, searching through the deep, purple-tinted grasses and lavender shrubs, reading what is recorded on the stones they find. The young man deciphers words that have weathered to almost unreadable, filling the information in with stories that have been passed down to him. After each stone, he checks her notes to make sure that she has been properly distinguished between the rumors, traditions, and supposed facts he has told her, and what is actually written on the stones.
After the fifth or more, the young man shifts his attention from the stones and looks around. "I thought the others would join us."
The young woman looks around as well and laughs. "I guess my parents thought they should get out of the way. Sometimes I think they plot against me."
The young man laughs too, hesitantly, perhaps a little self-consciously.
She continues. "But it's not necessary, really."
"No?"
"I'm still kind of young for that kind of stuff. Don't you think so?"
"Uhm, well, ..."
"Barely passed my first hexadecade. And it's not like you guys are going to be falling all over yourselves to talk to me, is it? I mean, a face and a figure like this, ..."
"Ehrm, ..."
(Hexadecade. I suppose you are not familiar with hexadecimal numbering? Most of the countries of this world have standardized on enumerations based on powers of two, hexadecimal being the most common. A hexadecade is twice eight years -- decimal sixteen.)
After an awkward pause, she looks at him and says, "Sorry. That wasn't fair of me to say was, it?"
He doesn't answer, just looks down, and his jaw juts briefly to one side. Then, making a discovery on a nearby stone, he begins reading again, and they continue talking of events past and people gone beyond.
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[JMR20190312: Backed up here:
https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2018/05/bk-we-0-03-researching-together.html
]
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