Erman was a young man, a great student and rather brilliant linguist. He was the top of his class at the university of Shalvok, and was working on a paper about long-dead languages. He could speak fluently every language known. Still, there was nothing in his skill set that would warrant him having to sign a non-disclosure agreement, at least as far as he could figure. Whatever it was, it had to be important. He signed the paper, and someone finally spoke for the first time since he'd entered the building.

"Please, come this way."

Getting up, he followed the uniformed man down the hall and out of the building to where he was ushered into a black car with black windows. They were taking him somewhere else, now. He couldn't see out, so he didn't know if they were taking him to another sector or if they were just driving in circles, but it took the better part of an hour. When they finally stopped and opened the door for him, he stepped out to find himself deep underground. A grey metallic tunnel that seemed to go on forever in each direction, the only thing breaking the endless grey was the occasional glowing light strip on the ceiling. And the door right beside the car.

"Inside, please."

Through the door he went, which opened like an elevator door. He thought it a little odd, until the small empty room on the other side started going down. At the bottom, the door opened again and he was ushered out into another empty hallway. The need for all this secrecy was weighing heavily on his mind, but at least he was pretty sure it meant they were not there to snuff him out, for whatever reason they might have to do that. At the end of the hallway was a double door, which one of the men guiding him along held open for him. None of them followed him in, instead closing the door behind him without a word. Now he was in an empty observation room, looking down at a strange sight. There was two women in the room below, which he had observed no way of reaching as the hall behind him also had no doors. The only thing he could think of was that the elevator must have had another place to stop. Otherwise, an entirely different and tirelessly long route would be required, and the more he thought about it the more he realized how likely that seemed.

The first of the women was a doctor, obviously. An older lady with white hair, probably several times his age. The second woman was lying in a bed, covered in a thin white sheet. No tubes were connected to her, no machines or instruments, nothing. She was just laying there, her eyes closed. This woman was younger, around his age, had a very unusually light skin tone and long white hair with the faintest hint of either blue or lavender, so faint that he couldn't tell which it was. This certainly didn't seem to be his area of expertise, but he was terribly curious.

The doctor looked up and spotted him. She grabbed a nearby device that really just looked like a green sphere and spoke into it. "The observation room is designed so that I can hear anything you say, and you can only talk and look. What's your name, young man?"

"Erman Kadestri. I assume you know why I'm here."

She nodded. "Yes. You're here to find out about this young lady. Who she is and where she's from."

"What can you tell me to start with?"

"Only that she was found floating around near the core, stark naked. She woke up about a day ago, but we have no idea what she's been saying."

The girl on the bed opened her eyes, like the conversation woke her up. She sat up, and the sheet dropped. She quickly covered herself when she spotted him in the observation room. She said something to the doctor, but it sounded totally foreign to him. Unlike any language he'd heard in his life, and he knew them all.

He cleared his throat. "Is, uh... is it possible for me to come in there?"

Over the course of the next day, Erman was shown to the room so he could sit with the doctor and the young woman. He'd been given a writing pad that he'd requested, as it would make communicating easier. At least, it was supposed to. She understood what it was, clearly, but nothing she wrote or drew made any sense. By the day's end, he'd tried absolutely every letter of every living language and ancient tongue, and nothing looked remotely familiar to her, if he was even reading her facial expressions right.

It had to be past midnight, and the doctor had left to get some sleep, when he was ready to surrender, to give up. They had made zero progress, and he didn't know what step to take next. She was sitting up in the bed, the sheet wrapped around her rather humorously, and the writing pad in her hands. She wasn't doing anything with it. Just sitting and staring at it. Perhaps she was just as frustrated as he was, and was simply hoping, waiting for some idea to come to her. Anything to help.

It had been a very long day and a half since he'd first seen her, and he'd gotten sleep only when she took a nap as well. He leaned back in the chair he'd been given and brushed his fingers through his hair. He looked over her, something he only got away with when she wasn't looking. He didn't know what she was saying, but he felt like her tone was clear enough whenever she caught him looking. She'd snapped at him and even shouted. If only he knew what she was shouting.

He let out a long sigh. "If I could have one wish right now, it would be enough to just be able to say one thing that you'd understand." She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes and trying to determine if he was crossing her boundaries again. "If I could say one thing... it would have to be 'Let me take you out on a date.'. But then, I don't even know if you're familiar with the concept of dates. I'd like to show you what it's like. I... don't really know if they'd even let me take you out of here. I guess not, at least until they know you're not dangerous somehow. But you don't look dangerous. You just look lost. At least as lost as me."

She turned back to the pad and scribbled something on it, then showed it to him. It was a simple, six-part pictograph, possibly a letter. He counted fourteen straight lines, one large curve, and one squiggle that may have been two smaller curves joined together. It was wholly foreign to him, and there wasn't even the slightest hint of what it meant or how to pronounce it, and he observed that it was even far simpler than everything else she'd written or drawn. That is, until she pointed at it and spoke slowly, enunciating each part of the word.

"N-A-G-I-S-A."

He looked over the otherwise senseless lines for a moment, before simply repeating what she'd said. "Nagisa." She nodded. "Nagisa. ...Are you hungry?"

It was pretty clear that she understood how far from the mark he'd hit. She erased the scribbles, which he was beginning to realize may have been an entire word comprised of several letters. She left only the first piece, two parallel lines joined by a diagonal line that went from the top of the parallel line on the left to the bottom of the line on the right. She pointed to the single, simplest thing she'd done yet and made a small sound.

"Nnnnnnnnnnnn..."

It was a letter. It was a letter and that was the sound it made. It looked so simple and easy, so small and insignificant, but it was the door to understanding her. He took the pad and wrote down the rest of the word she'd said before. It was very simple, he had no problem remembering exactly what it looked like. He checked with her to make sure he'd gotten it right, then proceeded to stare at it for several minutes. It took a moment, but knowing how simple the correlation between sounds and letters were, he worked his way through it. There was one letter that was present twice, and he remembered that the word she'd spoken also repeated a sound. The three in the middle followed, if he'd assumed correctly that each letter represented only one sound.

"Nagisa."

She said it faster, slower, and enunciated different parts of it differently, stressing different parts differently, but each time it was the same word. One word could sound so different so many ways, but it was always the same combination of five different sounds and one repeated. What did all the permutations mean?

She finished, pointing to herself. He was worried that body language might also fit into the equation, changing the mean yet again. She tapped her chest with her hand. "Nagisa."

Perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps, just like the letters, the word itself carried the same meaning every time, every different way it was said. Maybe... just maybe, it was her name. It seemed like a bit of a jump, but he figured if he were in her position he would attempt to communicate his name. For all he knew, she didn't even understand the concept of a name, but with an obvious written language he figured she probably did. And it was probably Nagisa.

He spent the next whole day tirelessly learning and memorizing the letter system that she used. Not all the letters were as simple, and he learned that many of them made several differing sounds depending on various forms of context, including the formations of the surrounding letters. Being the linguistic student that he was, even this foreign language was not so hard to keep up with all the various rules that he observed from her. He was hopeful that he would be able to start working on full words the following day.

The next day, they began by him teaching her to say his name. She seemed to have trouble with the concept that it was only his name when said with the precise speed, enunciation, stresses. Any variation could possibly mean something totally unrelated to him at all, and he was fully aware that one particular variant was considered offensive. A variant that she seemed to ultimately decide was close enough to his name, settling on just calling him that for the rest of the day. She didn't sound as concerned about his name as he was about her own.

The next thing he learned was that when she patted the bed in order to illustrate another word she'd written for him, the word she uttered did not mean 'pat', 'touch', 'feel', 'hit', or any other action that was remotely synonymous with what she was doing. She proceeded to grab the bed and lift the entire thing over her head, repeating the word before setting it down again. Needless to say, that one moment made him realize just why it may have been a decent choice to have her hidden away so far from the public knowledge. Her small size and pale complexion, which would normally be a telltale sign of illness or at least severe vitamin deficiency, belied a hidden strength that was frightening to say the least. It was a large bed, made of heavy alloys, solid through and through, built to not move without machinery and had the capacity to hold someone nearly thrice her height and up to seven times her body mass.

All this led him to learn the meaning of the word. It was the bed. The word, if he'd been paying attention right, likely referred to beds in general, not differentiating between large or small, who they were made for, hospital beds, restraining beds, sleeping beds, made or unmade, comfy or hard. All beds were called a bed.

Then she wrote down another word and picked up the pillow.