Early-bird contact
Prompt: "The lady was breathing."
The woman they had found adrift on what was left of a door turned out to be alive, and was taken to quarantine. She woke during the night, but nobody could understand what she was saying, and she didn't seem to understand a single word spoken to her either. One of the doctors diagnosed brain damage that kept her from speaking and understanding people correctly. The condition hadn't faded away by the time the quarantine had ended, which not only made everyone fear it would be permanent, but kept anyone from having an idea of who the woman was and where she came from. All they knew is that she wasn't from Dalsnes. Someone had shown her a map hoping that she could point to where she was coming from, but all she had done was look at it with a baffled expression on her face. With no idea of what else to do, she was given a room and work in one of the farms.
Sigurd took upon himself to try communicating with her. He found out her name was Frida. Within a few days, they reached enough of an understanding that he decided to try finding out the exact reason she had been unable to show where she came from on the map.
-Home. Not on map.
So that was the problem. Sigurd immediately realized that if she wasn't from Norway, what the doctor had mistaken for brain damage could be something else entirely. The brain damage had been diagnosed in part due to the people who had met Swedes and Danes before couldn't understand her, but he remembered that there was a fourth country in the world, whose people were supposed to speak a strange language. He proudly showed her a map of Finland, but she told him it wasn't there either. She asked for other maps. Sigurd didn't understand. There were only three countries with non-infected people in them besides Norway. They eventually found an old map that showed more places. On one of them, Frida pointed at a large island to the north-west to where Dalsnes was.
Sigurd took Frida and the map to his parents, and asked them about the island. His mother rambled on how she had made fun of the place for closing its borders when the Rash had come, but in hindsight she suspected its inhabitants to have known something others didn't. She also went on to tell him about how the island's habitants had started sinking boats that came too close to their coasts, so people had started avoiding the place and its waters. Sigurd's father noticed the face he was making and the awkward glances he was giving Frida, and got his mother to stop. It quickly turned out that nobody in Dalsnes had ever met an Icelander before or could speak the language. This, added to the fact that the whole country had isolated itself, had resulted in nobody considering the possibility that Frida could come from there. A few weeks later, an old lady from another settlement heard that Dalsnes was looking for an Icelandic speaker and offered her help. Thanks to her, they found out that Iceland was still wary of boats from other countries and would probably sink any boat attempting to bring Frida home. All they could do is wait, and hope for a safer way to eventually come about, just like Frida had. By the time Iceland abolished its isolation policy and made official first contact with Norway, Sigurd and Frida were married and had a young son. Dalsnes had become Frida's home.
Sigrun sighed:
-Nice try grandma, I'm still not learning Icelandic. Only brainiacs and traders need it, and I'm neither.
Fortunately, Frida had had plenty of willing students, including her own son and Sigurd's friend Trond, over the years. It was still a pity that her own granddaughter showed so little interest in her native language.