The Etiquette of Elaris

Chapter One: The Feeding Ritual

Juno had imagined her arrival on Elaris would involve speeches, perhaps a ribbon-cutting ceremony, or at the very least a firm handshake. Instead, she found herself seated cross-legged on a floating cushion whilst an elderly Elarian named Moth'ara advanced towards her with what appeared to be a luminescent grape.

"This is brilliant," Juno muttered to herself, trying to sound enthusiastic. The orb pulsed between Moth'ara's delicate, six-fingered hands, casting shadows that danced across her lavender skin.

The orientation briefing had mentioned food. Juno had prepared herself for strange flavours, unusual textures, perhaps some light nausea. What she had not prepared for was Moth'ara's fingers approaching her face with alarming determination.

"Open," Moth'ara said, the translation device rendering her melodic voice into clipped English.

Juno's mouth remained firmly closed. Every instinct screamed that accepting food directly into one's mouth from a stranger's hand was, at best, peculiar, and at worst, a choking hazard waiting to happen.

Moth'ara's expression shifted. The geometric patterns across her cheeks, which had been glowing a pleasant amber, darkened to a murky grey. Around the ceremonial circle, other Elarians stopped their conversations. The silence pressed against Juno's chest like a physical weight.

"I... I can feed myself, thank you," Juno said, reaching for the orb.

Moth'ara withdrew her hand sharply, as though Juno had attempted to strike her. "You refuse the First Meal? You reject trust?"

The translation device couldn't quite capture the layered harmonics of Moth'ara's distress, but Juno didn't need perfect translation to understand she'd committed a spectacular blunder. On her first day. Within her first hour, actually.

Dr Okonkwo, her Earth liaison, had warned her: "Every culture has its currencies. Find out what they value before you start spending." Apparently, the Elarians traded in trust, and Juno had just declared herself bankrupt.

"I didn't mean to offend," Juno said quickly. "On Earth, we typically... we feed ourselves. Unless we're babies. Or very ill. Or…"

"You are neither baby nor ill," Moth'ara interrupted. "Yet you behave as one who trusts no one."

Put like that, Juno supposed she did seem rather paranoid. She glanced at her cultural liaison, Ven'ri, a younger Elarian whose patterns flickered with what might have been amusement or possibly indigestion. Ven'ri made a small gesture: Try again.

Juno took a breath. "I apologise. I'm not accustomed to your ways. Could we... start over?"

Moth'ara studied her for a long moment. Then, slowly, her patterns began to lighten, shifting from grey to a tentative yellow. She raised the orb once more.

This time, when Moth'ara's fingers approached, Juno opened her mouth. She felt ridiculous, like a baby bird, but she kept her jaw open and her eyes on Moth'ara's face.

The orb slipped past her lips. It tasted of starlight and honey, if starlight were a flavour and honey were a temperature. The sensation spread through her mouth, warm and oddly comforting, like being wrapped in her grandmother's quilt.

But more than that, Juno felt something else: Moth'ara's emotions, a gentle current of welcome and hope and nervousness. The Elarian was as uncertain about this exchange as Juno was, hoping this strange Earth child might be capable of understanding after all.

Juno swallowed. The moment broke. Moth'ara's patterns blazed brilliant gold.

"Now you," Moth'ara said, producing another orb and placing it in Juno's palm.

Juno stared at the glowing sphere. "Oh. Right. My turn."

She'd assumed the feeding went one way only. Of course it didn't. Trust wasn't a performance; it was an exchange.

She stood, rather awkwardly given the floating cushion situation, and moved towards Moth'ara. The elder opened her mouth, revealing teeth that were slightly too numerous and far too sharp for Juno's comfort.

"Don't think about the teeth," Juno whispered to herself. "Think about the trust."

She raised the orb. Her hand trembled slightly, and she wondered what emotions were leaking through the sphere into Moth'ara's awareness. Probably terror, mostly.

But as the orb passed from her fingers to Moth'ara's mouth, Juno felt it again, that current of understanding, acceptance flowing both ways. Moth'ara's eyes crinkled at the corners, an expression that translated perfectly across species: kindness.

The assembled Elarians erupted in a sound like wind chimes in a hurricane. Approval, Juno realised. She'd done it.

Ven'ri floated over, patterns dancing merrily. "Very good. Most humans vomit on the first try."

"That's encouraging," Juno said weakly, settling back onto her cushion.

"The First Meal establishes relationship," Ven'ri explained. "Food is vulnerability. To accept another's hand in your mouth is to say: I trust you not to harm me. To feed another is to say: I accept responsibility for your nourishment."

"On Earth, we shake hands."

"How violent," Ven'ri said, sounding genuinely appalled. "Grasping someone's weapon-hand? What possible trust does that demonstrate?"

Juno opened her mouth to defend the handshake, then closed it again. When you phrased it like that, hands-clasping-hands did seem rather aggressive. Two people essentially checking each other for concealed weapons.

"I have so much to learn," Juno said.

Moth'ara's patterns pulsed warmly. She produced another orb.

"Oh no," Juno said. "There's more?"

"The First Meal has seven courses," Ven'ri said cheerfully. "By the end, you'll be practically family."

Juno resigned herself to an afternoon of trust-building and tried not to think about how spectacularly wrong things might go if she burped.

Chapter Two: The Naked Greeting

The Purification Chamber looked exactly like something designed to strip away all of one's defences and dignity, which, Juno supposed, was rather the point.

"You want me to what?" Juno asked, certain she'd misheard.

"Disrobe completely and enter the Mist of Clarity," Ven'ri repeated patiently. "All visitors to the Council of Depth must be cleansed of pretence."

"Right. Of course. Silly me." Juno clutched her jacket closer. "And by 'disrobe completely,' you mean...?"

"Everything. Garments, accessories, barriers." Ven'ri's patterns rippled helpfully. "Also your memories of shame, fear, and inadequacy."

"My what?"

"The Mist draws out concealed emotions and displays them for the Council. It's perfectly safe. Usually."

"'Usually' is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

Juno peered through the translucent doors. Inside, several Elarians stood in swirling silver mist, their skin patterns blazing with colours she'd not seen before; deep crimsons and bruised purples alongside radiant golds. They looked peaceful. They also looked extremely naked.

"This is a diplomatic necessity?" Juno asked weakly.

"How else can the Council trust you? On Elaris, we believe that true understanding requires true vulnerability." Ven'ri tilted her head. "Do humans not bare themselves to those they wish to know?"

"We have therapy for that. Also alcohol."

"I don't understand."

"Never mind." Juno took a deep breath. "And everyone does this? Every visitor?"

"Everyone. I myself have undergone the Mist seventeen times."

"Show-off," Juno muttered.

She thought about Dr Okonkwo's final instructions: "Adapt where possible. Respect always. Remember, you're not just representing yourself, you're representing all of humanity's capacity for understanding."

No pressure, then.

"Fine," Juno said, shrugging off her jacket with rather more bravado than she felt. "But if anyone laughs at my knees, I'm filing a formal complaint."

"Why would we laugh at your knees?"

"They're knobbly. Very Earth-standard knobbly knees."

Ven'ri's patterns flickered with what was definitely amusement. "I promise your knees will be the least interesting thing in that chamber."

That turned out to be both reassuring and deeply unsettling.

Ten minutes later, Juno stood at the threshold wearing nothing but panic and regret. The mist beckoned, silver tendrils curling like fingers. She could hear the other participants breathing, their exhalations creating small eddies in the fog.

"Just walk in," she told herself. "It's like swimming. You just have to commit."

She committed. One step, then another. The mist enveloped her, cool and curious against her skin. It didn't feel like normal fog; it felt aware, somehow, probing gently at her edges.

Then the memories came.

First, small ones: the time she'd forgotten her lines in the school play, the physics test she'd failed, the boy who'd called her "too intense" at the year-end disco.

The mist pulled deeper. There was her father's disappointed face when she'd announced she'd rather study xenobiology than law. Her mother's tight smile when Juno had won the diplomacy contest, pride tangled with worry.

"No," Juno whispered. "These are private."

But the Mist didn't care about privacy. It was already reaching for her deepest fear, the one she'd buried so thoroughly she'd almost convinced herself it didn't exist.

The memory surfaced: Juno, aged twelve, at her grandmother's funeral. Everyone had been crying, sharing stories, but Juno had felt... nothing. Not sad, not grief-stricken. Just empty. She'd wondered if something was broken inside her, if she was missing some fundamental piece of humanity.

She'd smiled and pretended. She'd been pretending ever since.

The mist projected this memory outward. Juno couldn't see it, but she felt the emotional weight leave her body, suspended in the silver air for all the Council to witness. Her emptiness. Her fear of being emotionally insufficient. Her terror that she'd never truly connect with anyone because some essential capacity for feeling was absent.

Juno wanted to flee. But there was nowhere to go. The mist held her gently, implacably.

Then something unexpected happened.

Another presence entered her awareness. Not intrusive, just... there. Warm. Understanding.

Moth'ara's voice echoed through the chamber, speaking in Elarian, the translator rendering it softly: "We see you, child of Earth. Your fear of emptiness... it is known to us."

More presences joined. The entire Council, Juno realised, was witnessing her memory, her shame, her secret self.

"At twelve cycles, my bond-mother passed," another voice said; Council Member Thex'il. "I felt nothing. I thought myself broken. It took many turnings to understand: some sorrows are too vast to feel immediately. They must be approached slowly, like entering cold water."

"I once believed empathy meant constant feeling," Moth'ara added. "But empathy is not performance. Sometimes understanding means sitting with absence, waiting for feeling to arrive in its own time."

Other voices chimed in, each sharing a moment of emotional doubt, of feared inadequacy. The Council members' patterns blazed in the mist, visible now, interweaving with Juno's projected memory until she couldn't tell where her shame ended and their compassion began.

The emptiness she'd feared for so long didn't disappear. But surrounding it, holding it, were dozens of other emptinesses, other fears, other humans and Elarians who'd also wondered if they were capable of true connection.

Juno began to cry. Not from sadness, exactly. From relief.

When she finally emerged from the Mist - she'd no idea how much time had passed - Ven'ri handed her a robe and said nothing. The silence felt respectful rather than awkward.

"That was horrible," Juno said eventually.

"Yes."

"I feel like I've been turned inside out."

"Yes."

"Can we do it again sometime?"

Ven'ri's patterns burst into sunrise colours. "Now you begin to understand."

Chapter Three: Age Before Speech

Juno thought she'd been doing rather well with the Elarian language. She'd mastered basic greetings, could order food without accidentally requesting a funeral rite, and had successfully held a conversation about weather patterns that lasted nearly ten minutes.

Apparently, she'd been speaking like a toddler the entire time.

"Your syntax is infant-stage," explained Kor'val, the linguistics specialist assigned to help Juno prepare for formal Council addresses. "Functional, but emotionally... flat."

"Flat," Juno repeated, trying not to feel insulted.

"Observe." Kor'val gestured, and a holographic display shimmered to life, showing Elarian script that looked like musical notation had married a Venn diagram. "This phrase: 'I appreciate your assistance.' In infant-form, you simply state the fact. But in mature-form..." The script shifted, adding loops and harmonics. "You acknowledge the assistance whilst simultaneously expressing your own inadequacy in requiring help, gratitude for the time given, and recognition of the other's expertise."

"That's four different feelings in one sentence."

"Four is elementary. Adept speakers manage seven simultaneous emotional layers."

Juno stared at the script. No wonder the Elarians sometimes looked at her strangely. She'd been speaking emotional monotone.

"How do I learn this?" she asked. "How long did it take you?"

"I achieved mature-form speech at thirty-seven turnings. I'm considered precocious."

"Thirty-seven..." Juno did the conversion. "That's nearly sixty Earth years."

"Emotional complexity requires time to develop." Kor'val's patterns flickered sympathetically. "Do not despair. Most humans never progress beyond juvenile form. You're extraordinarily young, only sixteen Earth years, yes? By our standards, you're practically pre-verbal."

"That's... not actually comforting."

"Would you like to hear yourself?" Kor'val adjusted the hologram. "This is from yesterday, when you thanked Moth'ara for the evening meal."

Juno's voice emerged from the speaker, speaking Elarian. To her own ears, it sounded fine—polite, clear, properly conjugated.

Then Kor'val played a mature-form version of the same phrase, spoken by a Council elder.

The difference was staggering. Where Juno's speech was a single melodic line, the elder's was a symphony. Gratitude intertwined with respect, pleasure at the food itself, acknowledgement of the labour involved, a subtle note of familial affection, and was that a reference to shared history? All compressed into a five-second utterance.

"Oh," Juno said quietly. "I sound ridiculous, don't I?"

"You sound young," Kor'val corrected gently. "There's no shame in youth. But if you wish to be taken seriously by the Council..."

"I need to stop speaking like an infant. Right."

Over the following days, Juno threw herself into emotional linguistics with the same intensity she'd applied to revision before exams. Except revising for exams had never required her to simultaneously express joy, regret, and philosophical acceptance whilst ordering breakfast.

The breakthrough came during an unexpected argument.

Juno had been practising in the communal gardens when a young Elarian named Pax'et approached. Pax'et was roughly Juno's age, by Elarian standards, which meant approximately seven, and had been making Juno's life subtly miserable since her arrival.

"Still speaking baby-talk, Earth-child?" Pax'et's patterns rippled with condescension.

Juno's temper, which she'd been keeping admirably restrained, finally snapped.

"You know what?" Juno said in English, then switched to Elarian. "I'm tired of your mockery. I'm doing my best. I came here to learn, to understand, to build bridges between our peoples, and all you've done is—"

She stopped. Something odd was happening. The Elarian words were flowing differently, carrying more weight, more dimension.

Pax'et's eyes widened. Her patterns shifted from mockery to surprise.

Juno continued, the words arriving from somewhere deeper than conscious thought. "I'm young, yes. By your standards, I'm barely capable of complex thought. But I'm here. I'm trying. And maybe emotional maturity isn't just about age; maybe it's about willingness to be vulnerable, to risk looking foolish, to fail repeatedly in pursuit of understanding."

The outburst carried layers she hadn't intended: frustration, certainly, but also genuine hurt, defiant hope, and underneath it all, a question: Can you see me? Really see me?

Pax'et stood frozen for a long moment. Then her patterns blazed with something Juno couldn't identify.

"You just spoke in intermediate-form," Pax'et said quietly. "Full emotional clarity. Three simultaneous layers."

"I... what?"

"No one advances that quickly. It's not possible."

"I was just angry."

"Yes," Pax'et said. "Anger is honest. Anger strips pretence." She stepped closer, her mockery entirely gone. "I apologise. I mocked you because I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"That you'd master in days what took me years to achieve. That your youth - your human youth - would prove age irrelevant." Pax'et's patterns swirled with chagrin and admiration. "Apparently, I was right to be afraid."

Juno felt her own emotions crystallise: surprise, vindication, and underneath, unexpected compassion for Pax'et's insecurity.

When she spoke again, the words carried all of it. "I don't want to diminish what you've achieved. Your speech is beautiful. But maybe we're both learning, you're learning that growth isn't always linear, and I'm learning that sometimes the most sophisticated thing you can say is exactly how you feel."

Pax'et's patterns flickered through several colours before settling on warm amber. "Will you practise with me? I could use the reminder that sophistication without honesty is just... noise."

"I'd like that," Juno said, and meant it in at least four different ways.

By the time Kor'val found them two hours later, deep in conversation, Juno's speech had become noticeably more complex. Not perfect, she still occasionally lapsed into infant-form when tired, but present. Layered. Real.

"Remarkable," Kor'val observed. "What changed?"

Juno thought about it. "I stopped trying to sound mature. I started trying to sound true."

"Ah," Kor'val said, and in that single syllable, Juno heard approval, surprise, and the recognition that sometimes the best teachers are the worst students—the ones who break the rules and accidentally discover something profound in the wreckage.

Chapter Four: Gesture Taboo

Juno had become rather proud of her progress. She'd survived the Feeding Ritual, endured the Mist of Clarity, and was now speaking intermediate-form Elarian with only occasional grammatical catastrophes. She'd begun to feel almost competent.

Pride, as every tragic hero knows, comes just before the spectacular fall.

It happened during a formal diplomatic reception. Juno was representing Earth in preliminary trade discussions, nothing critical, just an introduction to Elarian commerce systems. She'd prepared thoroughly, memorised the appropriate greetings, even wore the ceremonial sash correctly for once.

The Elarian trade delegate, an imposing figure named Vel'moth, was explaining the intricacies of resource-sharing protocols when he made a small joke. Juno didn't entirely understand it—something about frequency harmonics and administrative bureaucracy—but everyone else laughed, so she laughed too.

And then, without thinking, she nodded enthusiastically.

Just a friendly "I agree with you" gesture. The universal sign of approval.

Except it wasn't universal.

The chamber fell silent instantly. Every Elarian present froze, their patterns draining to ash-grey. Vel'moth's expression - which Juno was still learning to read - shifted to what could only be described as profound horror.

"Oh no," Juno whispered. "What did I do?"

Ven'ri appeared at her elbow with impressive speed. "Come with me. Now."

Juno allowed herself to be hustled from the chamber, acutely aware of the shocked silence behind her. The moment they reached a private corridor, she turned to Ven'ri.

"Tell me. How badly did I offend him?"

"On a scale of min