The Alliance Forum once had a question: How did language originate?
Natural evolution? Created by a god? Born of social interaction?
The Alliance's General Treatise on Language put an end to the debate:
"Language is a standardized form of expression, with symbols and sounds, created by the Alliance. Only humans possess language."
And losing language means you are no longer human. This is the consensus among all Alliance citizens.
People call the condition of losing language mermaid aphasia, also known as deer-born aphasia.
The name came from Lu Ge's mother, the first person to lose language and the Alliance's last licensed linguist.
In Lu Ge's memories, language research was abolished by the Alliance after his mother lost her language. Human language then became something created by the Alliance.
Only humans possess language, and those who lose it are no longer considered human.
Those afflicted with mermaid aphasia are called mermaids.
Mermaids lose their voices to grow legs. Those who lose language are simply mermaids who have grown legs, and they will evaporate when the sun rises.
So Lu Ge's mother was also the first mermaid to evaporate.
As more and more mermaids evaporated, linguists became a thing of the past overnight.
All that remained were thought pharmacists, who implanted existing languages in children, and corpus tailors, who invented new speech.
Lu Ge became a corpus tailor. Every day, he changed "hello" to "you good person" and "thank you" to "people thank people." That was his entire job.
Then one day, during an emergency aboard a spaceship, he encountered a monster among the debris in space.
It had a long black fish tail and hung upside down from the ceiling of the spaceship like a spider, speaking human language to him.
According to the Alliance's definition, anyone who speaks human language is human.
But according to the Alliance's definition, humans must have human forms.
So what was this thing that spoke human language but looked like a mermaid...?
What was it?
Lu Ge's brain overloaded for a moment.
1. A black-bellied, multilingual merman top who speaks eighteen languages x the last human linguist as the bottom. More or less a heartwarming little story about a pair of freaky husbands hurting each other while exposing the Alliance's dark side.
May include melodramatic plot twists, foolish side characters, bizarre values, and more...
2. My take on a slightly interstellar era, a hilariously bad space horror movie with special effects worth three cents.
3. The protagonist follows in his mother's footsteps as an illegal linguist, but his day job is corpus tailoring. The top speaks eighteen languages, and after splitting into multiple bodies, the group can all speak different languages at once.
4. What, you're studying linguistics? You're in for a hard time.
5. 2025.4.25 (third version)
Theme: May you be as free as a fish and as light as a deer
