Maris brushed her hair from the side of her face, concentrating firmly on the datapad in front of her. She had managed her day's worth of Cheunh vocabulary neatly, and was determined to impress the Crahsystor when he came to check up on both her and Jorj.
Jorj sat slumped, with his feet overhanging the nearby couch. Maris frowned, her delicate features contorting as she did so. He wasn't as bothered by this new culture as she, and though he often teased her about her affections for a certain man of importance, she knew that he too was eager to impress the Crahsystor. Albeit for entirely reasons...
"Maris, how do you pronounce this one? Is it krah-jeez omnipa, or krajiza omnipah?"
Jorj said this whilst pinching the top of his nose with his forefinger and thumb, muttering the pronunciations under his breath quickly. Maris sidled over to him, looking over his shoulder.
"Krahjez omnipa, Sali-yara."
She smirked triumphantly, and turned on the spot, heading for her satchel. "You know, your pronunciation is awful Jorj, you need to practice more. The syntax of Cheunh..."
Jorj huffed as he sat upright. "I know, I know! Thrawn is always saying this. Cheunh is a complex language; it will take years for people such as you to learn it. I feel so hopeless. What's the point in all this anyway? We all speak Sy Bisti... I think he's getting more from this than we are!"
Maris rolled her eyes as she discarded leftover remnants of paper from her Coruscant days. "He probably is, but it can't hurt to try and understand these people. We're stuck here Jorj, until they let us go. Humour them? Just for a while Jorj, that's all I'm asking..."
Her female ploy had worked. Jorj yet again huffed and resigned back to reading his scruffy scraps of paper with crudely written Cheunh words hashed on them. Maris looked lovingly at the prize she had kept in her satchel, a holovid of some of the old times she'd shared with Rak. She realised he was a changed man now; he no longer had that lust for adventure that had driven her crazy when she was a younger woman. She inwardly sighed. Perhaps this explained her awkward attractions to the Crahsystor? She couldn't really tell, he was after all very much like the sort of man she had gone for typically before she had even met Rak. Creative. A lover and pursuer of the arts, devilishly handsome and of course a gentleman. Rak was many things; a gentleman was not one of them.
"Hey, Mar?"
She looked up from her satchel, quickly placing the holovid disc back in her bag. "Yeah?" she answered, quickly but casually so as not to provide an entrance to probing questions.
"How long do you think we're going to be here?"
His voice was sad, a little distant. Maris wondered how much he felt inside that he didn't let be known. Men were so much like that. Maris preferred to wear her heart on her sleeve, never thinking of the consequences until it were too late. She realised this was not a sought after feature, and for good reasons, but she couldn't help her romantic nature.
"No idea Jorj, just sit it out. Keep your mind off home." She walked over to where he sat; shoving his feet off the couch to make room for herself. He smiled back at her, and went back to reading his flash cards.
The electronic sliding doors made a "swoosh" sound as Crahsystor Thrawn entered the room causing both Maris and Thrawn to look up at him. He smirked, an arrogant twitch of the lips that was becoming so commonplace now that Maris often mistook it for his permanent facial positioning. He was so self assured, rightly so it seemed, that Maris often wondered if all Chiss were secretly like this. So far, their welcoming had been xenophobic and awkward at best. She wondered how the Chiss engaged in trade with other species when so far they had shown little inclination into bothering to learn about them. Thrawn was a little different to all the other Chiss though, she could sense that, even now.
"I trust you are now ready for your lessons?" He asked the question casually, raising one blue black eyebrow to enforce his question even harder onto the two humans.
Maris looked to Jorj, then answered quickly, "We're not as prepared as we had hoped, but sure. We're ready to learn." Game on. She thought, this time she was prepared. The organisation of the cheunh words on her datapad wouldn't be for nothing, she'd stayed up all night long to learn the words off by heart, much to Rak's dismay.
Thrawn smiled at her warmly, and then pulled a chair out from underneath a nearby table on which to sit on. He placed his hands on the table in front of him and clasped them casually.
"Firstly, the painting you saw yesterday Jorj, I want you to tell me of it."
Jorj raised his head to look up at Thrawn. "I don't get it. I can barely it!"
Maris thought back on the painting, barely remembering it. Greens and flecks of blue intertwined with oranges and red, clashing horribly. And yet at the same time superbly. It was a beautiful mess of erotic art, though the figures were far from accurate she presumed. Mere flecks and swishes of paint haphazardly applied to the canvas to portray a general idea.
"The painting symbolised... Oh, I don't really know. It looked like it was done pretty quickly though. I couldn't tell you what this says about the culture, but it was certainly... Interesting."
Maris grimaced internally as she waited for Thrawn's inevitable answer. As much as she admired the man, and had a great carnal love for him, she sometimes found his infernal correctness on issues to be somewhat annoying. She watched as Thrawn nodded his head in contemplation.
"Very good Ferasi. Although you missed the fact that there was an error made by the artist that was covered up ingeniously."
Maris' face flushed with glory. Thrawn had thought she had done very well! She swooned inside, the romantic within her dying of sheer happiness. She wished that she could share her feelings with Thrawn and that they could resign into a fitful frenzy of passionate lovemaking, but she had doubts as to the general Chiss sexuality, and she was pretty sure Jorj would have a few issues to raise as to being an innocent bystander whilst being forced to listen to their lovemaking. She smiled warmly, and looked off into the distance, completely unaware of those around her.
"Great." Jorj muttered. "I thought I was supposed to be the one answering the question?" he said, looking accusingly towards where Maris was sat.
The Crahsystor looked on in amusement. "Now Jorj, the flashcards I see that you have prepared. Would you care to recite them to me?"
"Oh right..." Jorj's voice was creaky, excuses being formulated carefully inside his skull. "About those. I'm not so good at this whole pronunciation thing. Fishing boat, traveller, whatever... It all just comes out the same." He winced as he waited for Thrawn's answer.
Thrawn's right eyebrow rose sharply. "Perhaps then, for today, we should practice using our mouths to enunciate and formulate the beauty that is Cheunh?"
Maris could think of plenty of beautiful things to do with Thrawn's mouth, though she daren't say them out loud. On that note, Maris realised that the day was going to be very long indeed...