A Tentacle Romance Novella

~~~

"Can you give me that?" Melina's companion asked, pointing at her lab robe resting on the blanket.

It had only been about a day since she'd arrived, but her host's vocabulary had already expanded dramatically. It wasn't just his vocal mimicry that was impressive; he also showed a keen ear for context, and remarkable memory retention. The more time she spent with him, the clearer it became that her companion wasn't just an intelligent, civilized being, but actually smart.

"Sure." she answered.

She picked up her robe and handed it over. Her host lifted it high over her head to examine it better, turning it over and rummaging through her pockets. She almost tossed out a quip about it being rude to go through a lady's things, but she didn't want to confuse him. In fact, it was actually entertaining to see just how fascinated he was by the few possessions she'd brought with her.

Even more than his intelligence, it was her host's sheer curiosity which drove the rapid growth of his vocabulary. She assumed he must have some sort of daily routine under ordinary circumstances, but since she'd arrived, he'd spent almost all his time tending to and trying to communicate with her.

"What's this?" her host asked, drawing a pen from the pocket of her robe.

"That's a pen." Melina said. "Here, I'll show you."

She reached out her hand, and her host passed the pen over to her. Even with his tentacle stretched, it was still thick enough to make the pen seem tiny in his grip, but he seemed to have no difficulty handling it without damaging it.

"You can use this to write or draw. Um..."

Melina trailed off, looking for a way to demonstrate its use. Not having any paper on hand, she considered asking her host to hand her back her robe. The white fabric would be an easy way to show off the pen's function, but it wasn't as if she had any backup clothes. Instead, she settled for scribbling over her hand.

"See? You can make marks with this." She said.

"Oh!"

He let out a distinctly human sound of recognition. It seemed as if he was learning to emote for her benefit. He rushed over to one of his high piece of furniture again, and returned with... a blank sheet of paper. It was about the right size to be a page in a tremendous atlas, but in every other respect it looked like ordinary paper, one of the most familiar materials in her life. He placed it on the floor in front of her, clearly expectant.

The gravity of the situation felt like it called for more than sharing a few letters. Instead, Melina began to draw, sketching out her own figure in pen. She'd never been more than a hobbyist, but she put some effort into it to avoid embarrassing herself as this world's only representative of human art. When she finished, she pointed to the picture, then back at herself.

"Me." She said.

She launched back into her work, this time sketching out a picture of her companion. She looked him over more carefully than he had before, not wanting to offend him by getting some detail wrong, and he held still for her benefit, his tentacles coming to a complete stop for the first time she'd seen. There were twelve of them, growing four to a side in three angles from the top of his trunk. The ones facing her were arranged above his eyes, so she could guess that he probably had three "faces" to match his three root-like legs. A radially symmetrical body, like an anemone.

"You." She said, pointing to it when she finished.

She gave it another moment's thought. She couldn't let her companion go without a name. Even if he clearly had one, she couldn't even think that warbling sound, let alone say it.

"Melina." She said, pointing to her own picture.

She pointed at her companion's picture.

"Nomy." She said.

"Nomy?" He asked.

"You." She pointed at him again. "Because you look like, uh..."

She started on another sketch, her best rendition of a sea anemone. She tried to keep it passably close to his appearance to sell the comparison, even if she wasn't sure there were any real sea anemones which looked that much like him.

"An anemone." She concluded. "But anemone is hard to say, so I'll call you Nomy."

"Anemone is hard to say?" He asked.

"Well, probably not for you." She admitted.

Introducing him to sketch art opened up communication of more ideas more quickly than the alphabet would have. She could get to that later- would certainly have to get to that if she was ever going to communicate anything as complicated as the magic she needed to get home- but for now, she'd start small.

She ran through numerous quick sketches illustrating simple objects and ideas they both recognized. He had no trouble picking up the idea of "running" from a human figure; even after having seen it, she had no idea how to draw him running. Nomy positively drank up the information, recognizing the pictures and their associated concepts more quickly than she would have thought possible.

Melina decided to move on to more abstract vocabulary. She drew herself sitting, resting her chin on her hand, a thought bubble rising above her head. Inside the thought bubble, she drew a rough sketch of herself talking to Nomy. Then, she sat down, assuming the same classic thinking pose.

"Thinking." She said.

"Thinking." Nomy repeated with the same tone of recognition he'd shown for all the other words.

That gave her pause. It couldn't be that easy, could it? She'd had enough experience as a teaching assistant to suspect that any student who seemed to understand everything immediately was probably too good to be true. But apart from that, she and Nomy probably shouldn't share basic body language. Why would he recognize a "thinking" pose, when his species didn't have heads to rest in the first place?

"Nomy, can you show me 'running?'" she asked.

Nomy held up a tentacle, then glided over to one of his pieces of furniture, and returned carrying an object roughly the size and shape of a large conch shell. As he put the tip to the paper, she realized it was a pen, shaped for his tentacle to grip by spiraling around it. He quickly sketched out his own figure, pitched forward, his root-legs swinging in motion.

Melina stared in shock. It wasn't so strange if his first thought was of himself running, rather than a human figure. But surely it would have been easier to demonstrate the action rather than drawing it. She'd never said she was thinking of a drawn figure.

"Nomy... can you hear me think?" she asked.

Nomy held up a tentacle and waved it back and forth, a picture of indecisiveness.

"Small yes?" he said.

He paused for a moment, then continued haltingly.

"I can understand small, and only close. Only small. I still need words."

He tapped a tentacle on the floor, near his trunk.

"I can hear." he said.

Then, he shuffled a couple dozen feet away, just outside of what she'd come to learn was his tentacles' reach, fully stretched. He tapped the floor again.

"I can't hear." he said.

That was easily the most complex statement he'd made so far, but it was easy enough to understand. It was also vaguely discomforting, but it explained a lot. It was hard to imagine he could have picked up so much of her language with just one day's exposure otherwise.

He came closer again, once again moving within reach.

"You can't hear?" he asked.

"No, I can't." Melina answered. "Did you think I could?"

If this was something his entire species could do, it might be strange and unexpected to discover that she couldn't, like suddenly realizing her entire species was blind.

"No, I think you can't." He waved a tentacle back and forth. "You see me, you think..."

He paused again, his tentacles undulating in the air, apparently struggling with the limits of his vocabulary.

"You think I..." he pantomimed swinging down one of his tentacles, like when he'd crushed that creature the other day.

"I was scared." Melina said.

"Yes!" Nomy seized on the word. "You was scared. So I think you can't hear."

"Oh." Melina blushed a bit, remembering just how she'd responded when she first saw him.

"Well, thank you for helping me." she said.

Nomy silently waved his tentacles in place, another gesture she couldn't read. She felt a pang of guilt. He didn't have the vocabulary to say 'you're welcome,' even if it was insincere. She'd never had a reason to say it to him, she'd never done anything he could have thanked her for. And she was already thinking of relying on his help in order to make it back home.

Nomy reached out a tentacle towards her, stopping short of her shoulder, as if uncertain if he should touch her.

"I want to help." he said.

That made her blush deeper. Her own anxiety must be completely transparent to him. The only thing she could think to do for him in return was to show him she wasn't afraid now. She reached out and grasped hold of his tentacle.

"Thank you." she said. "I don't know if there's anything I can do for you in return, but if there is..."

"You can talk to me." Nomy said.

In spite of everything, Melina couldn't help but smile.

"Well," she said, "I can definitely do that."

~~~

Melina tread water, and let the shampoo sink into her scalp.

The heat soaked into her body, relaxing her muscles in a way which made it slightly awkward to exert the effort to keep herself afloat. She let one hand rest on the edge of the pool for support as she splashed water on her hair.

Overall, she counted herself lucky. Turning baths into a sort of light exercise wasn't bad in its own way, and having a heated bath of this size would have been extravagant even in a palace back in her own world. Having passable shampoo was also a stroke of good fortune. There might not be a single other creature in this whole world which had anything like human hair, and yet the gel Nomy used as body wash had proven entirely serviceable. Admittedly, she hadn't had access to a proper mirror in weeks now, but at least her hair still felt smooth and clean.

Still, as she pulled herself out and began to dry off- with a soft, lush towel which had probably once been a dishcloth or something- she couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt at the waste. Nomy's bath, set into the floor like a swimming pool, was over ten feet deep, and without any sort of ladder, she could only get back out again if he filled it right up to the brim. The result was deeply luxurious, a hot bath which didn't seem to cool no matter how long she spent in it, but she flinched at the thought of what it must cost. He'd told her not to worry about it, but he might have thought it was demeaning to ask her to bathe in a soup bowl instead.

Wrapped up her towel, she walked over and banged on the door. She'd had to completely give up on being self-conscious about how hard she hit it; at its size, she couldn't make herself heard properly on the other side without making her palms sore.

"Nomy!" she yelled.

She couldn't hear him moving from the other side, but after a short wait, the door opened a crack, and he reached a tentacle inside holding her bundled up, freshly clean clothes.

"Thank you." she said as she took them from him.

Leaving her laundry up to Nomy was another source of awkwardness while living here, but so far, a necessary one. Nearly all of Nomy's household appliances were simply impossible for her to operate. Sooner or later, her clothes would become too threadbare to wear, and she'd have to figure out how to make a toga or something out of raw cloth, but she'd cross that bridge when she came to it. As inconvenient as it was having only a single set of clothes- the only clothes made for a human in this whole world- she couldn't bring herself to simply be naked in front of Nomy. All the more so ever since their conversations had confirmed, with the help of some slightly embarrassing drawings, that Nomy was in fact a male of his species.

"Your food is ready if you're hungry," Nomy said. "Do you want to eat with me?"

"Sure." she said.

Since she'd arrived, she'd only had the same bland stuff he'd served her on the first day. An exploratory taste of one of his own meals had confirmed it as inedible, and left her with a nasty case of indigestion later that day. Unappetizing as her food was, it might be the only thing here which was actually safe for her to eat. And while Nomy seemed unaccustomed to laying out his own meals on the floor, his conversation was a necessary distraction to make herself force down enough of the flavorless sludge. And by now, after weeks of him pushing her for information on her world, she finally felt confident enough in his vocabulary to start asking him things back.

"So, tell me something." she asked him. "What are you eating anyway? Where do you get your food from?"

Nomy paused. By now, Melina was familiar enough to read uncertainty in his movements. Using the pair of tongs he used in the place of a fork, he picked something out from his plate.

"This is a plant covered in seed paste and cooked in hot oil." He said. "The seed paste gives it a... stiff coating, and makes it taste better."

"Sounds a lot like human food." Melina said.

From experience, any of those ingredients would probably taste like table varnish to her, but not being adapted to eat anything on this entire world, she really couldn't expect any better.

Nomy picked up a helping of some kind of lavender-colored paste with his spoon.

"This is the underground part of another plant. It has to be cooked for a pretty long time before it's safe to eat."

"A root vegetable?" Melina asked.

"Oh, you have those? Yes. It's also mashed into a paste after it's been cooked."

"What about those?" Melina asked, pointing at another object on his plate.

"These come from the body of an animal. Its..." Nomy trailed off, and flexed his tentacles, as if gesturing at his own body.

"Its body parts are ground up into these tube shapes and cooked." he said.

His voice didn't hitch, but she could tell her was nervous. After all, she'd been deliberately scoping him out for fear of being the first to raise the subject herself. If Nomy's species didn't eat meat, it could have been gravely embarrassing to admit to being an omnivore.

"So, sausages then." she said.

She could see his tentacles relax when she said that, and felt a surge of accomplishment in her ability to read his cues.

"It might be pretty similar." he said.

"So, what am I eating then?" she asked.

If everything that would have made for a normal meal in her world was inedible to her here, she had no idea what sort of food might actually be safe.

"Oh, that." Nomy paused again, seemingly mulling over his answer.

"When you were asleep after you arrived on the first day, I ran some tests on your body. I didn't think you'd be able to eat anything here, so I... tested what your body was made of. I was able to break down other foods and turn them into something you ought to be able to eat, but it had to be very, very simple."

Melina gaped. That sounded like he was reducing food to its constituent parts and reconstituting the organic parts into entirely different nutrients. That sort of thing might be possible in a lab back at her university... if they'd had months to prepare the process.

"You did that in just a few hours?" she asked.

"Yes. I had to work very fast, but I was lucky that I already had the tools for it."

That was beyond just lucky. The summoning spell which had brought her here was meant to perform a random search through other worlds. It was becoming increasingly clear that if she'd ended up nearly anywhere else in the vast expanse of worlds it could have sent her to, she wouldn't have had even a hope of surviving.

If it had been the other way around, if Nomy had gotten stuck in her world, there probably wasn't a single place where they could have managed to make food he could eat before he would have starved to death. And ending up a world with no intelligent life at all was probably even more likely than that. For her to end up by complete chance right near the home of someone who already had the necessary equipment to feed her... that seemed like casting a thread from the top of a high building in a hurricane, and having it thread a needle on the ground.

"Can you show me where you made this?" she asked.

"Of course." he answered.

He didn't even wait to finish his meal first, lifting his plate off the floor and stretching a tentacle over to put it on top of a high table. Melina had already had enough of the bland sludge that finding out where it came from was more enticing than eating the rest of it anyway, and she followed his lead down into the hallway.

Nomy's whole house was laid out on one floor, and was consequently quite spread out even in proportion to his own size. Given the distances involved, he'd never given her a tour of his whole house, and given her inability to open his doors on her own, there were still rooms which she'd never seen. He brought her to one of those, one laid out with hard tiles over the floors and walls which reminded her of an alchemy lab. In fact, if he had the equipment to synthesize something she could eat out of otherworldly components, it might be exactly that.

Unfortunately, as in most of his rooms, the equipment was too high up for her to actually see anything. Since Nomy had no need to sit, surfaces around his house tended to be just around the right height for her fingers to scrabble uselessly against the tops when she jumped, without even a chance of pulling herself up.

This wasn't a time to be reserved though. She pointed towards the top of his massive desk.

"Can I look?" she asked.

"Sure. Hold on." he answered.

He reached out a tentacle towards her, holding it out in front of her as if to shake her hand. As she grasped hold of it, he looped another tentacle behind her knees and around her hips, and hoisted her into the air. Her stomach lurched as he lifted her, not unpleasantly, and in a way that had nothing to do with the smoothness of her ascent. Having spent so much of her life feeling too big for the world around her, she felt a bit of a thrill at the feeling of being lifted so delicately by someone else, a sensation only partly muted by how little Nomy looked like an actual human. But that was only a momentary distraction from the more important revelation of finally being able to see the tops of Nomy's furniture.

There were numerous objects laid out across the surface which were completely unfamiliar, but others were immediately recognizable. A rack of test tubes, graduated flasks, tongs... and she finally recognized the bowl she'd been eating from for what it was- a mortar for grinding reagents. She could see a couple sheets of paper, heavily written over in symbols as unreadable to her now as the day she'd arrived. But even if she couldn't understand the contents, she could still recognize the form of mathematical equations.

"Nomy, what do you usually use this place for?" she asked.

"I use this place to run tests, and make materials I need for my work." he said.

That was a vaguer answer than she'd expected. By now, he had the vocabulary to be more thorough than that.

"What kind of work do you do?" she asked.

He paused, much longer than he'd normally take to pick out his words, long enough that she started to feel anxious before he spoke again.

"I research... magic focused on travel between different worlds. How to send information between them, what they might be like, whether they have life of their own. I've used this place to create... very simple life, too small to see, which isn't related to anything else on this world. So I had the equipment I needed to run tests on your body and make something you should be able to eat."