Hum

(This story was written by my good friend Raik, originally on March 5th, 2023. I'm hosting it here with his permission since it fits nicely with all the other stories, and I'd consider it 'canon' to my characters world.)

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Amber opened the door to her home, and heard her couch creak as her strange purple housemate rose out of it. Iekika, the weird woman's name, sprung upright with frankly alarming speed, and Amber's heart rate spiked as a foreign feeling of excitement washed over her mind like a wave... followed by a muted feeling of embarrassment as Iekika's movements slowed. Amber was... still getting used to that. And Iekika, clearly, wasn't quite adapted to being left on her own for a few hours.

Her bizarre guest opened her mouth, and her other mouth, and made a brief overlapping cacophony that may have been speech. Amber tilted her head, and Iekika blinked her one giant eye, and tried again.

"Ah, h-hello!"

Amber couldn't help but smile. "Hi! I assume that was a greeting in your people's language?"

Iekika's eye looked away ever so slightly at the words "your people". Amber had pretty quickly picked up that it was a sensitive subject, and that Iekika wasn't inclined to divulge anything about her race beyond the strictly necessary and the patently obvious. Amber didn't even know what they were called. In her head she'd been calling them "imps".

But the purple girl bounced back, her expression brightening a little. "Y-yes, haha. Sorry, it, ah... it is difficult to, um, to pick up your language without a conversation partner." She gestured to some simple picture books Amber had bought for her. "Even written down, it... the sounds are strange."

A soft hum punctuated every word as Iekika spoke English. It had taken Amber a bit to realize the source of the background noise: her "chest mouth" humming along as her "face mouth" formed sounds and syllables and words. Her native language seemed to use both mouths, which was unsurprising. Maybe she was just so used to speaking with both that it was uncomfortable to keep the lower one fully silent. Or maybe her respiratory system was such that she genuinely couldn't.

Regardless, it was an odd quirk, but not a bad one. It added a sort of depth to her speech. It was interesting!

"Yes, I can imagine how it would be unusual, with the... y'know." Amber raised her mechanical arm, pointing once to her own lips, then to Iekika's chest. Both of the imp's(?) mouths smiled in response.
"Yes, haha." When she laughed, she used both mouths. Reflex, Amber assumed. "But it is also much easier to learn the language when there is a, um... speaker! Who can anticipate what I will say next. It helps."

Another weird psychic empathy thing. The eye and mouths and horns and purple were easy enough to accept, but Amber was still wrapping her head around the mind stuff.

"Oh!" Amber suddenly realized she'd nearly forgotten why she went out in the first place. "I think I found a hammock in your size. Should be better than sleeping on my couch, at least til I can find a bigger mattress and sheets and stuff. Wanna help me set it up?"

Another feeling washed over Amber's mind that she couldn't quite put a name to. There was gratitude in there, and a layer of surprise, and deeper emotions she couldn't identify. Maybe she didn't know Iekika well enough yet. But she knew her enough that when she opened her face-mouth to reply, the humming from her chest seemed higher, brighter, giving her words a sense of sincerity and earnestness:

"Yes, of course! Thank you!"

Amber smiled.

---

"Hey Iekika, can you pass me the arc wrench over there? The big one."

Amber stood up from the abominable contraption she was working on, taking a moment to stretch. She had a bad habit of forgetting to take stretch breaks, something her purple friend was always teasing her about. Amber had the sneaking suspicion that "imp" skeletal structure and posture advice didn't really map perfectly to humans, what with the digitigrade legs and the... entire chest cavity situation, but that didn't make Iekika's comments about regular stretches any less true.

"Uhh, this one, right? I think?"

Amber turned, a subtle psychic wave of uncertainty hitting her mind before her eyes locked onto the object in her weird indigo buddy's hands. She smiled, shaking her head.

"Nah, girl, that's the torque welder. Sorry, I meant that toolbox over there. Second shelf."

"Ahh." Iekika followed the imaginary line from Amber's prosthetic arm to the toolbox, and her eye widened in hazy recognition. "Ah! Right, yeah, I rememb-"

Iekika took a heavy step towards the toolbox, her tail waving behind her in a single fluid motion which, in a scene of near-preternatural grace, perfectly toppled over the contents of three nearby shelves without ever once touching the shelving units themselves. Miscellaneous mechanical tools and doodads hit the ground with a series of heavy thumps, punctuated by an equally heavy moment of silence. Then Iekika swore.

Amber had never heard her swear before. There was no accompanying empathic wave of heavy stress, or bottled-up feelings of uselessness, or anything like that; Amber had learned to recognize those. This was just a single moment of "fuck damnit", but it was novel to hear Iekika instinctively reverting to her native tongue(s?) in an unguarded low-stakes emotional outburst like this. Her chest mouth flexed and pursed its lips, rolling an R and enunciating in a way that Amber had half-forgotten it was even capable of, she'd gotten so used to hearing the "imp" speaking in familiar single-mouthed words. Despite herself, she stared, and couldn't help but grin.

Iekika noticed, and her face flushed a brighter shade of purple.

"...What? Sorry, aah-"

An embarrassed hum-rumble reverberated from her chest.

"Oh, nothing." Amber smiled.

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"Three, two, one, heave!"

The two women pulled the rope one last time, putting all their strength into it. A series of pulleys and winches converted and translated that force into useful work, hauling the final component of Amber's latest "doomsday weapon" into place. It was actually farming equipment, commissioned by a local farm, but Kiki had pointed out that* all *of Amber's big projects look like doomsday weapons until they're finished, and Amber had to admit her friend might have a point.

This thing, at least, was looking a lot less apocalyptic with its final major segment in place. It wasn't quite finished, of course; the final segment needed to be properly bolted and welded to the rest of the contraption, then some other minor components needed to be attached. And then of course field tests would need to-

"Amber, you're doing the thing again. One step at a time, remember?"

Iekika's voice broke her out of her hyperfocused reverie. The two of them had lived together long enough at this point to recognize one another's bad habits, and one of Amber's was a tendency to fixate on the "next step" in big projects like this. She'd been so focused, she hadn't even realized how tired her body felt after all that exertion just now. Kiki was a little out of breath too, but she seemed WAY more chipper than Amber felt. Imps were just built different, she supposed.

"Hah, thanks. You know me." Amber laughed, embarrassed, and Kiki chest-chuckled back. "How about we sit down and rest for a bit, then we can-"

The imp raised a finger to cut her off. "Uh-uh, none of that. How 'bout you take a well earned break, while I clean up these pulleys, okay? It's easy work, and you've done a lot today."

Amber tried to find a good reason to protest, but found none. "...Okay, you win." Her shoulders drooped, but she was smiling. "Just give me a shout if you need a hand though, okay?"

"Okaaaay~." Kiki was already walking away, her tail swaying from side to side like it always did when she felt cocky. It was endearing, honestly.

Amber sat down, watching her best friend work. Setting up the pulleys was a technical task, but gathering them up was just busywork, and Iekika seemed to thrive on it. Amber took a swig from a water bottle, quenching her parched throat, resolving for the dozenth time to drink more water as she looked out to the hills, listening to the sounds of...

It took her a minute to piece together what she was hearing. As she looked back to the pudgy purple imp unspooling the rope from one of the winches, Amber realized that Iekika was humming to herself. She couldn't recognize the song, of course. Probably something from "the island", something cultural and private. She wasn't sure she should be listening. But the way her voice, her voices harmonized, deep and light and intertwined in rumbling melody, it was... beautiful. That was the only word for it. And as she listened, she suddenly realized that she did recognize one of the tunes Kiki was humming. It was a little jingle they'd heard in town a few weeks back and joked about, just a silly little earworm that had stuck in Amber's memory. And, apparently, in Iekika's.

Amber suddenly found herself eyeballing the distance between herself and Kiki, and trying to remember offhand the approximate working range of the imp's empathic sense ability, and half-heartedly willing herself to stop broadcasting the feelings of love welling up in her heart.

She smiled.

---

The door jingled as Iekika walked through, a bag of groceries on each arm and a third hanging from her tail.

"Hey Am, can you help me put this stuff away?"

Amber rolled off the couch, picking her prosthetic arm up off the table and beginning to reattach it. She'd been surprised when Kiki offered to go into town for her, but truth be told she'd really needed the opportunity to have a lazy day for a change. Things had been a bit non-stop lately.

"Yeah, of course!" Her eyes glanced over to the bag dangling from her girlfriend's tail. "Sorry, I didn't realize it'd be such a haul. Were you carrying that with your tail all the way home? Doesn't that mess with the, uhh..."

"Oh, the glamour?" Kiki grinned wide with both mouths. "Nah, people just sort of rationalize it in whatever way makes sense to their brain, I guess. But I do sometimes wonder just what people are seeing, because I did get a lot of weird looks! Maybe they saw me pulling a cart? Or holding a bindle?"

"Or a cute puppy walking behind you being all helpful, wagging its tail with groceries in its mouth." Amber paused. "Or a cat, maybe, if they're a cat person."

Kiki giggled. "God, imagine a housecat carrying someone's groceries for them."

"You could just drop the glamour, at that point. No risk of you standing out as unusual if there's a cat carrying groceries right there next to you." Amber paused again. "Or three pigeons all working together to lift a grocery bag."

Iekika laughed, and Amber felt warm inside as she took the bag and started walking to the pantry. "Oh, that reminds me! As I was passing through the park on the way back, I saw..."

Amber listened intently as her girlfriend rambled about her day. Her voice was chipper and bright, and the underlying hum from her chest mouth just made it brighter. Iekika had had a good day today, and that meant Amber was having a good day.

She finished putting things in the pantry, walked over to Iekika, and hugged her from behind as the imp was putting veggies into the fridge.

"Oop! Hey, babe, what are you doing?"

Amber smiled, her head pressed against Iekika's back, hearing the affection in her girlfriend's humming undertone as it reverberated through the two of them.

"I just love you a lot."

"Aw." Amber couldn't see Kiki blush, but she knew. "I love you too!"

Amber smiled.

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