As he closes his hand on the fish rock, the shell cracks, something inside is squashed, and viscous goo flows out over his hand and onto the floor. 

There is not a flash of light. Almost the opposite, for a moment the fish rock seems to pull in light. Then there is a invisible pulse, which is felt in the gut, in the mind and in the soul.

It is a scream, and it carries out and echoes across dimensions.

GRYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

Everyone within a kilometer can feel it, less intense the farther away. It's not painful, nor damaging, but it's startling, and it's intense.

So everyone notices, and so does...

It is a quiet cycle. The ecosystem is at peace, and the Restorer spent most of it observing a new school which was finding its bearings.

The particular fish species has been gathering in one major population for a long time, and this splinter threathened to veer into new territory, but it seemed they found a set of landscape formations that suited them, so the Restorer could leave them to their settlement.

 ..gryaaah..

The distant echo rises beyond the background noise of what can be conceptualized as a psychic ether, only because it is a ~frequency of sorts the Restorer is paying close attention to.

The Restorer feels a moment of joy.

<Ah, the humans!>

<Wait, it's been a while. Why now? It's likely an emergency. Let's go!>

They stop in the middle of their swim, change their fishtail into bipedal legs, and disappear in a warble and a rush of bubbles.

8 seconds after the scream, in the next available space that Vornmeth is not occupying, the Restorer appears, accompanied by a warble.

They promptly inflate like a balloon. and then gradually acclimatize and deflate over a few seconds.

Then they notice the goo all over Vornmeth's hand, and they make a gesture with their hand. The goo drips off of Vornmeth and becomes a blob which eagerly crawls over to the Restorer's foot.

The Restorer looks around and takes in the room, curiously.

The room is actually a tent, pitched on the sand, because the diplomats were worried about their chances of communicating the problem with limited vocabulary.

Vornmeth turns to them and begins signing.

"Hello Restorer of Salt Water. I am Vornmeth. That is a hurricane."

He points out to sea, at the dense storm clouds crouched on the horizon. Already, the wind has started to pick up and fat raindrops spatter across the tent.

Then Vornmeth gestures back at the city, visible on the other side as a collection of tall glass and steel buildings.

"The hurricane will crush our town halls. The hurricane will crush us."

The vocabulary is, as always, fresh in their mind, but vocabulary they have not before heard remains unknown. They'll repeat back what they understand.

"I am Restorer of Salt Water. You are Vornmeth."

Oh, that is macroscopic atmospheric movement.

"That is a hurricane. Hurricane... is the crusher of town halls? Hurricane is the crusher of humans?"

That does seem like an emergency.

Time pressure, potential large scale improper death, explicit call for help.

Yes, Vornmeth will be able to bear the cost.

"I atypically-display... I am the atypically-displayer of Vornmeth? I atypically-eye Vornmeth? Vornmeth atypically-eye me? Vornmeth is a screen that displays me? I am a screen that displays Vornmeth?"

They seem like they're hesitant in which words to use.

<Wait wait wait there was a thing...>

"I atypically-link me to Vornmeth?"

None of those sentences make a super amount of sense except the last one. But it's quite promising.

"You atypically-link you to me," he agrees.

<Ok great!>

The Restorer makes eye contact with Vornmeth, and the normally quite intense eyes become multiply more so. The red of their eyes start glowing, and others in the tent can see it lightly tint the room. 

For Vornmeth it is as if the eyes pierce through him. 

He suddenly gains awareness of a pressure on his mind, which his brain conceptualizes as a

knock knock

He can feel a new affordance in his mind, related to it. Does he do the new thing?

A) This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened in his life!!!

B) Yes.

He takes a deep breath because this is actually still an emergency situation, and then reaches out toward the new mental affordance, intending to 'link' into it.

Some thing enters, or is invited in, or makes itself known. There is so much new stimulus, so the brain does what it always does, and maps it to something familiar.

He finds himself in the part of his home or other safe location where he'd eat with visitors, perhaps a dining room. 

On the walls, there is a tapestry of thoughts, memories and associations. When he thinks of the hurricane, there is a miniature of it on a desk. When he remembers talking to the diplomats, their faces appear in a painting. Deeper memories and tacit knowledge appears faintly on the wallpaper.

A being which quickly condenses into the shape of the Restorer enters the room. They walk carefully, as if wary of not stepping on anything that can't take it. They also carefully keep their eye fixed on Vornmeth, and does not look at the memories and thoughts on the walls.

Vornmeth finds himself sitting in a chair, and the Restorer sits down in a chair across from him, mimicing his posture.

What is the location his mind picked for this meeting?

They're in his tiny city apartment — small because it's on the top level, and has a view out over the city — with all the reconfigurable furniture packed in the public-facing configuration. That means his personal belongings are mostly packed away in opaque cabinets and patterned screens have been pulled down over the edges of the room, to conceal the exact details. It's a location that takes easily to being used to display memories.

Vornmeth spends a moment to take this in, but quickly grasps the metaphor. He puts his sense of direction on the table, and paints the path of the storm (past and projected) onto the resulting map. Then he grabs the memories of the briefing meeting about population numbers and evacuation progress, and layers that on top as a purple haze — sparse in the industrial district, packed elsewhere, narrowing into dense channels that run away from the city along the primary train routes.

The Restorer picks up on the intention to Show something to them, and looks down at the table.

They take this in, carefully cataloguing the information about the storm. As they sit in this space, their body language gradually becomes more human. When they get to the population numbers, they startle.

<So many!> 

The thought can fuzzily be made out by Vornmeth, as if it was an echo.

They point to the purple haze and sign "Humans?"

Vornmeth nods, and then realizes he has better options.

"Yes. The purple haze corresponds to population density. There are other creatures that live in the city, but it is primarily designed by, built for, and inhabited by humans."

He speaks slowly, speaking and signing at the same time, each word following the previous with a deliberate pause as he thinks about the meaning of these things in a way that he hopes echoes to Restorer of Salt Water in the same way that a fuzzy thought came to him.

The Restorer squints and focuses through this. Then they interrupt him with a very human shake of the hand, palm toward him.

"I am the... atypical-pusher of Vornmeth."

They reach out a hand as if to give him something, and a glowing ball materializes, hovering over their hand. They nod invitingly and gesture to touch it.

Might as well pay for the full hour, as the saying goes.

He reaches forward to touch the orb.

As soon as he touches the orb, images flash through his mind. He experiences a series of concepts tied to hand gestures, one after another, in rapid succession. Then a set of templates of how these are allowed to be combined. And then it ends.

If he's studied the records of the first contact, this list very closely matches the complete known vocabulary and grammar of LCTL sign language of the Restorer, 

There are some areas in which his understanding of the sign differs from the conveyed one. For example, the intuition behind "town hall" seems to be closer to "nest". It seems the new, constructed meaning of "atypically" is consistent between the þereminians and the Restorer, it's indeed the supernatural things the Restorer can do, but there is added context of them being "gifts" as in literally gifted, as well as a sense of "channeling" or being the conduit. The grammatical construct for "if .. then .." seems to not imply any causality, it's just a list of events in sequence.

This rapid transference of information blanks out his sense of the mind space. He comes to in the apartment, now with a complete understanding of the very few words the Restorer knows.

"Vornmeth is the atypical-pusher of me!" they say, with a sense of invitation and reciprocity.

Ah! That's really cool!

Vornmeth spends a moment working to isolate LCTL, since sending a mixture of languages sounds likely to confuse things. With determined focus, they pour their understanding of the language into the same kind of abstract glowing ball.

It is bigger than what Restorer of Salt Water shared. Maybe too big. A whole grammar, thousands of words ... but Vornmeth has trusted them so far, so he continues to trust that they will not ingest an energy field big enough to harm them.

The Restorer doesn't seem concerned about the size of the energy ball. They reach out and touch it, and then relax back in reverie as they sort through the large collection of concepts.

Unlike Vornmeth, they seem able to continue to be present in the mind space while experiencing the transfer, and they gaze out over the landscape outside the apartment window. As they do, they seem to borrow a bit of the space, using the landscape to place word-concepts upon, so Vornmeth can follow along in the progress.

It still takes a while, and Vornmeth has a moment to think while the Restorer absorbs.

How is Vornmeth's own understanding structured? Or, which artificial structure did he create as part of collecting LCTL, if any?

Is he providing the spoken mode as well, in addition to the signed mode?

Vornmeth learned LCTL as a second language, his native language being SCOL. So, he has the regimented, explicit understanding of someone who learned first by rote, and only after that became fluent.

LCTL's signed, spoken, and written modes aren't really separate. The grammar corresponds exactly, and he learned all three forms of most words at the same time. So the Restorer gets it all, a wibbly-wobbly pile of pragmatics layered atop a more structured framework of grammar and semantics.

Utterances are made out of statements, statements start with relation-words, the arguments to a relation have marked cases, here is how converbs work, here is how reparenting works, ... And then here are the words, as they are defined, and then as they are used, which is almost but not quite the same. Here are the phrases that are in the middle of lexicalizing but which have not yet been rendered down into vocabulary. Here are the rules for inventing new words.

He was going for thoroughness, over purity. Some fragments of SCOL come through as context, no matter how much he has tried to get LCTL and only LCTL. There are still gaps in his technical vocabulary. But it is, by and large, complete.

(And now we arrive at the moment where the character knows more about a conlang than the author, which means there is bound to be mistakes in the text, that a deep sea creature specialized on learning to communicate with anything would not make. You have my condolences, though not my regret. I made this bed very consciously, I'll lay in it snugly. :3)

As they make their may through the vocabulary, they start signing along, very quickly. Relation-words, statements, utterances. Words, sentences, grammar of increasing complexity. They pause with some amusement when they arrive at words they learned wrong the first time.

Then they examine the written and spoken modes.

<Oh that's how the noises work!>

They go back to the beginning and try the new modes out, by doing all three modes together. The written, by summoning text on the landscape, letters flashing by. The spoken, audiating sourceless words out loud to the mind space. The sounds are all in Vornmeths voice, or in the voice of the person he associates the phrase most strongly with.

When they've done a pass through the corpus a second time, no more than 2 minutes have passed.

They look back at Vornmeth and summon noises (mouth closed), images of written wordand sign along at the same time. Sometimes stopping to search for a word or to correct themselves, they say:

"Thanks you... Thank you for the gift of your patterns, hm, language. It is a beauty of experience... It is beautiful to experience.

The noises. The spoken.. mode of the language, you make the sounds with your... Mouth, yes? Do you have an understanding of the shape... Of the anatomy of the.. vocal apparatus? Would you be willing to share that understanding? I have opportunity... I have the ability to change myself, if I know what to change into."

"Oh, certainly!" Vornmeth agrees. "Here —"

He recalls basic anatomy, a cut-away diagram of the human airway appearing on the curtain behind him. He quickly runs through the phonemic inventory of LCTL ("pa, ta, ga, na, ..."), the diagram moving along with his speech and the points of articulation labeled.

"The trickiest part is probably the voice box," he adds, tapping his Adam's apple and creating another diagram, this one a close-up of a voice box. "There are folds of muscle that stretch like this to change pitch, and you can use that to alter the quality of the sounds. But using only the signed mode is also acceptable — there are some humans with broken voices who just sign, and that's fine."

They follow this with interest, and seem to gain as much information from what is being explicitly presented, as from tacit knowledge absorbed through the mindspace through the implicit consent.

"Thank you very much!"

As Vornmeth was describing the anatomical of the human voice, a background ~noise that had been steadily rising gets over a threshold of being noticable. Vornmeth can conceptualize it as noise, and simultaneously as a distorted blackened fuzz covering everything in the landscape beyond a certain radius from the apartment. It slowly creeps closer, and the noise slowly increases.

If he pays attention to it, it feels like the nonsense generated in the space between waking and sleeping, like a thousand dreams and a thousand despairing thoughts intermingling, like white noise meets static meets clipping, like the desire to give in and fall, like the space between remembering and forgetting.

The Restorer perks up at this, adopts a worried expression, and speaks somewhat hurriedly:

"The way we're, hm, linked at the moment is not stable. Your type of mind can only experience it a limited amount without a break. If we push it too far, you'll experience harm, best described as echoes of insanity.

We yet have a fair degree of margin, but we shouldn't waste time. Try not to tune in to the noise.

Are there more spheres of information, or spheres of a skill, you wish to share before we end this connection? Something it would help if I understood in detail, or a task I could perform competently, that would help for this crisis? I estimate you can safely share about two such transferences."

Vornmeth struggles not to focus on the noise, an unpracticed sort of mental exercise.

"I — now that you have language we can explain things, but ..."

And he builds another 'skill ball' about Emergency response — what systems are in place to help support people during emergencies, what the plans are if Restorer of Salt Water cannot help with the hurricane, where he expects things to break down first, and the sort of wordless intuition of 'how bad is it' that one builds up during a career in Emergency Services.

"I can give you another on the mechanics of hurricanes, if you need it? But I would prefer to disconnect with more margin before going insane."

As they absorb the emergency response skill ball, they adopt the concerned expression which is so often associated with such professions.

"Thank you. I do not have intuition for how... Air behaves at scale. It seems quite different than the streams of the Depths. It would be useful for using my gifts on it. And I do think we have safe margin still, but it's your call."

They gesture to a lever stuck to the ground, which Vornmeth automatically understands is an affordance for ejecting the visitor out of his mind.

a tree with an umbrella with a flower pattern that grows new petals that fall in fall as the leaves brown a platonic triangle snuggle the essence of every concert there is a concern about how we handle crises and you've always known your mother was always behind you with pancakes the train is late cold sweat overheating computer core an awkward interaction in a queue throwing cue balls at the wall making patterns and writing that haunts you if you forget and

Just fall

... yeah Vornmeth trusts their visitor a lot but he's out. Someone else can explain hurricanes with actual words. He yanks the lever.

He very suddenly finds himself alone in his own mind again, chair across from him vacated. 

The whispers and the noise don't disappear, but he can see the fuzz immediately stopped approaching. Instead it seems to have started to recede, getting farther away at a pace much slower than the previous approach. A certain kind of pressure disappeared.

loneliness on a hilltop with tea and biscuits falling into deep water and joyously fleeting like a trumpet with a toothache

As he examines the emptiness left by the Restorer, he notices he can see his real world senses overlaid. Perhaps he always could, but wasn't paying attention, like when you're focusing on feeling the shape of something in your pocket to the point where you don't pay attention to your visual stimulus. He has a sense that, with practice, he could act in both places simultaneously.

Without the Restorer's presence, though, the awareness of the apartment room starts to fade, to completely disappear after a few minutes. If he tries, he can hold on to it and have it fade slower, but he can't stop it.

In the tent the Restorer is still looking at him, but without the piercing red glow active. The body language has changed dramatically, they now meet eye contact and then look away periodically in a socially comfortable way, they stand at ease instead of completely still like a hunting animal, and there are readable facial expressions. While paying attention to how he comes out of the mind space, they're also palpating their own throat.

How has the people in the real word reacted to the two of them staring silently and unmovingly at each other for the last five minutes, lit by the red of the Restorer's eyes?

As much as he wants to cling to the visualization, the topic expert said that he should avoid paying attention to the fuzz. So. He is going to let it go.

While they were out, someone helpfully moved the table such that if Vornmeth had fallen over, he would have fallen safely on the sand instead of bonking his head on a metal table. Other than that, and some cautious staring, the attending Emergency Services personnel left them alone to complete the process.

"Sorry to eject, that ... thing on which I am not focusing was scary and uncomfortable," he speaks-and-signs, because he's not sure how much the Restorer has integrated their knowledge of the modes. "A hurricane is powered by the evaporation of warm water off of the surface of the ocean. This rising warm air meets descending cold air to create a vertical storm cell. When these cells form in the right pattern, they can create a low-pressure zone in the center of a spiral of cells. The existence of the low-pressure zone draws the storm cells inward, speeding their rotation and reinforcing the motions of the storm. To stop or weaken it, you need to either kill it's angular momentum, decrease its temperature relative to surrounding air, eliminate the low-pressure zone in the center, or ideally some combination of these. But we don't actually have to stop the hurricane, we just need to keep it from hitting the city. Diverting it south is safe; that area is not inhabited by humans at the moment, and the ecosystem is more used to hurricanes, since they rarely hit this far north. The hurricane has some momentum, but will change course to follow low-pressure zones."

"... if you want to try linking with someone else, I can get you a meteorologist, who will have an intuitive understanding of these processes."

The Restorer listens to this, with a look of focused attention. At the end, they sign "I see" at the same time as opening their mouth to emit a SCREEECH.

When they see someone startle at this, they sign "I apologize. Could you all look away for a moment?"

They put their fingertips back on their throat and massage it thoughtfully. They then walk up to the wall of the tent, and when everyone is looking away, there is a warble, just the same as in the recordings of the first contact.

When everyone looks back the Restorer has walked back to where they stood, now experimentally sounding out vowels. If someone peeks into their mouth, there is a black tongue and marbled teeth instead of the earlier baleen.

"Aaa.Ooo. O- A- Eee" 

They then move on to the consonants, in the same order as Vornmeth described them in mindspace.

"Pa. Ta. Ga. Na..."

They start experimenting their way through longer combinations of phonemes, and try some sentences out.

"Oadev is oed. Wader is wed. Water is wet. Water is wet."

"The trickest bart is brobably. propaply. Pro-ba-bly. The voice box."

"The trickiest part is probably the voice box."

"A hurricane is powered by the evaporaton. Evaporation of warm water off of the surfaf. Surface of the ocean."

They then address Vornmeth again, now mimicking him in speaking-and-signing. People around may notice that the Restorer has inherited any dialect or idiosyncracies that Vornmeth has when speaking.

"I have some doubts about whether I can affect the hurricane directly. Air is not my domain, the scale is grand, and my power here is limited - I am far from the depths and thus my connection is weak. Perhaps there is something I can do to encourage the water to redistribute in such a way that less warm water is close to the surface of the ocean, so it doesn't... Evaporate?

Communing with a meteorologist may well give me the understanding required to know more.

What other areas of the emergency response may I be helpful in?"

They look around the room. If there is a standard for which roles are filled during an emergency response meeting like this, they'll start identifying people in the room from clothing or context clues, with only slightly worse accuracy than Vornmeth would if he found himself in an unfamiliar team. ("And you must be the diplomat..?")

Who is there with them?

This is þereminia! Of course there's a standard!

In this case, it's specialized shoulder patches denoting roles. Present in this tent are: a linguist, because they were expecting communication problems; a coordinator, who is currently helping to organize the deployment of storm barriers; Vornmeth, for executive decision-making; a communications specialist, currently idle after getting the satellite link up; and a general gopher and a driver, who are both double-checking the high-wind-rated anchors on the tent and equipment.

This isn't actually the main dispatch area — that is, sensibly, in one of Emergency Service's hardened underground bunkers about two hours north. This team was just intended to try to contact Restorer of Salt Water and then retreat into the city proper.

(After seeing powerful and finely-controlled wide-scale hydrotelekinesis, they weren't inclined to underestimate how much water Restorer could stop).

"If you can bring cold, deep ocean water to the surface, and send the surface water to the depths, that will help," Vornmeth agrees. "Same thing with inverting the air layers, but if air is harder than water it's not worth focusing on that. While the winds are dangerous, most secondary damage is going to come from the storm surges. Are you capable of either quickly erecting or acting as a break-water to keep waves from hitting the city? Alternatively, can you get the water that is currently in the city drain system out into the ocean so that the drain system can handle the storm better? Part of the danger of the hurricane is that the early rains are already taking up capacity in our drainage system, which lowers the peak surges of rainwater they can absorb."

"If those are unviable we have a list of more ideas."

Just because they weren't inclined to underestimate Restorer of Salt Water doesn't mean they didn't make a priority-ordered list of possible interventions. That's just good planning.

The Restorer asks a few clarifying questions about the responsibilities of each person in the room, partially to verify they're using their bestowed emergency response skill correctly, and partially they ask questions that resolve ambiguities in a way that implies fairly high seniority.

If any of the humans communicate that this is a temporary shelter, they will suggest that they start moving.

"I could probably have a noticable effect in moving ocean water around at scale, but this water is not my water. It is not of the Depths. It does not heed the call as eagerly. It is likely worth a try though."

"Air, I'm profoundly inefficient at. At this scale, it's not viable at all. There are costs associated I'm not willing to pay."

"I could likely easily act as a break-water, and there are possibilities for erecting permanent structures, but they would involve bringing a piece of the Depths here, which has its own downsides. Your species are brittle to many of its effects. Not to say I would veto it, it just means there will be cleanup and follow-up problems. It would be quick though, and I wouldn't need to stay in place."

"Moving water through narrow pathways to move it is feasible, but I would need to commune with someone who has a deep understanding of where those pathways lay. As mentioned, this water is not my water. It would not tell me its location lightly."

The Restorer looks out at the hurricane again.

"Shall we start with one of these ideas while continuing to communicate and plan other actions? It seems we're under a bit of time pressure."

"I have the gift of Transversal. It is the gift of making large distances small. If at least one side is the Depths, my range is immense. If none of them are, it's modest but significant. I would need to be able to see where I'm going, or commune with someone who has a good understanding of the location I'm going to. I can bring people with me, but experiencing the, hm, atypical (they smile slightly) is something one of your kind only can do a limited amount before needing time away from it. Several trips should be fine, with only temporary symptoms. Many trips I will not agree to bring the same person on."

"Is there something we can do right now? Is anyone willing to come with to continue communication?"