Captured by aliens (It was his own fault)

30. A bit of a shocker

Tonuk's perspective:

After having gotten a scolding from Tegnuk, Ri went to help out on cooking for the Turo's, while he went to Toru's room and see what he could do to help cheer it up.

Before going in, he decided to check out what Toru was doing, and good thing he did, since it seemed to be grooming itself, so it was probably best to let it finish up, either way, he still had to check out Tegnuk's document on Toru's emotions.

He went over to his office and read through part of the document, since Tegnuk had divided the document into two, the first part was a guide, along with pages to the second part, which was used to catalogue all the proof, explanations and reasoning for why each expression meant what it did.

He used the cameras to see Toru, and thankfully he could see its face, and using the guide he could see that it was either curious or happy.

It was a bit nice seeing that they were right on most things, though it was a bit sad seeing that Tegnuk was right about Toru often being uncomfortable or sad.

He was about to start working on some paperwork, until he took a quick look at Toru's room and saw it playing with a puzzle he had gotten as a gift from a friend.

He quickly went to Toru's door while looking at what it was doing, hoping that it wouldn't break it.

Thankfully, it seemed to be careful with the toy, though he was initially a bit worried about letting it keep a string, which it could choke on.

Eventually, after a bit of watching it struggle on the puzzle, he went in, mostly to continue teaching it words, like Tegbuk told him to do, but also a bit from having had to see it go back and forth on the same section again and again.

Thankfully, didn't put up a fight when he took the toy from it, though he still wondered how it even got there in the first place.

He showed it the solution, remembering back when he solved it and gave it back unsolved.

It still couldn't solve it but by now, it seemed to start getting frustrated, so he tried to distract it by teaching it more words while he silently took back the puzzle.

This worked, and so he taught a lot of random words to Toru, and though he tried to have it be some useful words, he was running out of them.

They went out and continued walking around, saying random things, but eventually, they went to the Turo's room, where he taught him Tegnuk's name.

Tegnuk initially showed a bit of disappointment, but this quickly went away as he realized that Toru had a curious expression, so maybe it started to get used to him.

Eventually, two Turos started to play with Toru, juggling some balls around, which was nice, since this once again confirmed that they accepted it.

After this, Ri came out of the kitchen, having gone out to collect some vines, which were one of the few good things about the heavy winter.

Basically, the snow isolates the vines from air, which it uses to produce sugars to survive, and so it collects the molecules to make the sugars for later, and when more air is given to it, it becomes very sweet.

The Turos immediately recognized the smell and went crazy, excited about getting to eat them once again.

He noticed that a Turo was sharing some of the vine with Toru, which was fairly odd, but it would be nice to know why later on when it gets researched more properly.

After all the Turos had eaten, they went to huddle up to sleep and digest the food, pulling Toru along with them to the little cave-like room they had hidden in the place.