New Home
Copyright© 2024 by maxathron
Chapter 4
Maxwell left Jake in the couch room.
“Living room,” corrected Maxwell’s Guardian, in Maxwell’s head.
Maxwell left Jake in the living room.
Maxwell wanted to get back to what he was doing before Jake came back inside. His goal was to explore the room on the other side of the hallway that ran between it and the dining room perpendicularly to the direction he was originally going in.
Maxwell hopped away from the living room and back towards the front of the house. He was actually hopping, using his legs to springboard jump by jump forward into the hallway. Maxwell paid no attention to the things Jake had in the hallway. He passed by a table on his left and the stairs on his right as he reached the main hallway in front of the dining room.
“Foyer, technically. It’s not really a true hallway so much as it’s a room in of itself.”
Foyer, then.
Maxwell reached the foyer.
On his immediate left was a cabinet of some sort. He made his way to it, continuing to hop along. The cabinet was ornate and wooden.
“What this for?”
“It’s a coat and shoe storage for Jake and visitors.”
“What coat mean? What shoe mean? What a visitor?”
“A coat is an outer covering used to keep warm. Jake doesn’t need one here in this climate, at least for most of the year. It’s warm here.”
“Me like warm.”
“Only like two weeks out of the year is it truly cold, though it can be cool.”
“Me no like cool. Me very no like cold.”
“You don’t feel anything beyond the temperature I am regulating over your fur.”
“Oh. Okay. What shoe then?”
“Shoes are things people wear on their feet, both as protection and for warmth.”
“Oh. Why pro-ah-tek-shun?”
The Catalum homeworld was not littered with small rocks or sharp outcroppings. Wind and water cut into the stone and smoothed the world down until very little was sharp and angular. That included the sand at the southern sea. Nature ground down and smoothed over the sand until it was very fine sand. The whole planet was almost tailor made to be a safe place for small creatures.
It was not, though. Tailor made that was. It was still safe for small creatures, nonetheless. During the one-hundred-fifty-million odd years that the Catalum Empire existed, various studies were commissioned by the empire to study their homeworld. While it was not clear that the biology on the planet may have been artificially spurred, the geology was normal natural geology.
Catalum did not know of minor bumps and scrapes. They knew of major bumps and scrapes, usually by falling off a cliff. But them being scratched was very rare and as a species did not have enough experience to have a collective memory for such concept. Catalum muscular skin biology was also naturally more durable and resilient to minor scuffles and the fur helped protect them from injury.
“Humans like Jake are vulnerable to being scratched and scraped, particularly on the bottom of their feet. Shoes guard against small sharp objects like the rocks on this planet.”
Technically, Maxwell already knew what shoes were. He was around on Earth back in the humans’ fifteen-hundreds. But it had been centuries since he was around and his previous travels led him and Helper to places where shoes were not needed. He thus forgot what shoes were.
“Oh. Okay. That is sense.
“Oh! What is vis-it-ore?”
“A person that does not live or work at the current private location but has come over for a temporary stay. They usually stay no more than one day.”
“Okay. That is sense.”
The little creature turned away from the cabinet. He was about to head right into the double door room when something caught his eye. It was green. It was some sort of clothing hooked on a tall vertical pole with branches sticking out. Maxwell thought it looked like one of those tree things from the planet without its leaf things.
Maxwell hopped over to the green thing hooked on the brown thing. It was next to a window which was next to the front door. Maxwell was not tall enough to get an accurate picture of what was outside and focused his attention back on the green thing on the brown thing.
“What dis? Dis nice. It looks sheltering. Maybe warm too.”
“That’s Jake’s jacket. It is not a particularly thick jacket as it’s primarily used for keeping the rain off his clothes as it is waterproof. It is a rain jacket.”
Maxwell stared blankly into space while facing Jake’s jacket.
Seconds ticked by. The Guardian realized he needed to clarify things to Maxwell because the puppy dog clearly ran into a mind wall and was not going to figure out this on his own any time soon.
“It is shelter from the rain.”
“Oh! That is sense! Thanks, Helper!”
The concept of a jacket was foreign to Catalum. Rain as a concept was foreign to Maxwell. The Catalum homeworld did not have much precipitation. Rain fell near the poles and ran through rivers that crisscrossed the planet underneath the plateaus and mesas. The water would eventually evaporate back into the atmosphere, but as actual rainfall was limited to the polar regions, Catalum didn’t encounter rain all that often.
The polar regions were not all that cold compared to this planet’s equivalents. There was ice but just barely as the temperature only went to ten Fahrenheit. However, since their homeworld was axially locked, it stayed ten Fahrenheit year-round. Compared to this Earth’s polar regions, the continent named Antarctica routinely averaged minus seventy Fahrenheit.
Ten Fahrenheit was still plenty cold for Catalum. Expeditions to the polar regions required specialized clothing to walk around outside. Because of their small statue, Catalum didn’t use the clothing often. Instead, they used machines. Specifically, robotic machines with an artificial intelligence at the helm. The first ones were really primitive but eventually they gave way to small terrestrial versions of Helper.
Moving back to the subject of rain, if Catalum did encounter rain outside the polar regions, the most common response was to look up at the sky as the heavens rained on them, their curiosity keeping them outside until a particularly big drop landed on their nose, startling them, and causing them to seek the nearest shelter, usually a burrow. They would wait out the rain from that burrow.
Catalum were odd creatures.
Maxwell sat where he was and did not move to go explore the rest of the house.
“Helper. You do not answer second curiosity.”
“Which one? Please remind me.”
“Warm. Is jacket be warm?”
“Ah, that one. Yes, the jacket technically help keep its wearer warm. You’re too small to realistically use this function, though, and this jacket isn’t meant to keep Jake warm. It’s meant to keep rain off Jake so Jake doesn’t become wet. Water is a really good conductor of heat.”
Maxwell stared back into space.
Sometimes the Guardian considered just dispensing with being polite and just downloading the relevant information directly into Maxwell’s head when he stared off into space. One-hundred-and-fifty-million years and they still reacted like this to indirect responses to their questionings. But in the meantime, he would help his puppy dog as much as Maxwell wanted help.
The Guardian gave Maxwell a mental prod.
“Why that? What is con-duck-ter?”
“Water sucks heat from your body and if said water is cooler than your body, it will make your body cooler too.”
“Cool water bad!”
“It depends.”
“Dee-pen-duhs? Why dee-pen-duhs?”
“Water is used to regulate your temperature. Your body can become too hot to function correctly and you become hurt. Water can help keep your temperature cooler than the danger point. Cool water can help you be safe.”
That wasn’t exactly how physics worked but it was needed to be worded that way for Maxwell’s head to wrap around the concept of too hot. Catalum liked being warm. However, they didn’t really understand on a day-to-day basis that being too warm was ultimately bad. Didn’t stop them from trying to sit next to heaters, though, like the human invention space heater. The Guardian rummaged through the logs of other ships that had Catalum here. The Guardian saw that one of Maxwell’s sibling, Tummy, would hop up to the heating vent in her owner’s home and just sit there with the heater blasting into her face until her owner or her ship would notice her and pull her away. She and the rest of Maxwell’s litter lived on this planet, one of three litters in the area, and ten total across the system. But in this locality, only Maxwell lived here.
Virtually all Catalum had to be reminded from time-to-time that being too hot was just as bad as being too cold. It was just that Catalum preferred a higher-than-average environmental temperature than what the humans around here preferred so they had a higher tolerance to heat.
“Hurt bad! That is sense. Thank you.”
Maxwell turned away from the coat hanger and the green jacket hung on it. He turned by twisting his body to the right and placed his front paws on the floor. He lifted his body off the ground a bit to twist it and position his hind paws in a new position to his left. Maxwell repeated this process a couple more times before facing away from the coat hanger and towards his destination, a room to the left of the entrance foyer if walking into Jake’s house.
Maxwell hopped into the room.
The room was a square. There was a large object in the center-back, vaguely shaped like an arch and made out of wood, like the dining room table and chairs.
“Desk.”
There was a desk in the center-back. It was really just a normal-looking desk with two pillars for draws and a beam sitting on top for things to be placed on the desk. Catalum would call this an arch.
“This is arch.”
“If you could call it an arch.”
“It arch!”
“Technically, it’s an arch. It’s really two columns and a beam placed on top of them.”
“Oh. Beam on columns then.”
To the right of the desk along the wall was many shelves with columns of many words and colors, though the colors were somewhat dull. The shelves wrapped around the room, broken by the window on the left side of the room, relative to Maxwell’s initial positioning, and a table behind the desk. The shelves went unimpeded across the right wall.
Of course, these “shelves” were actually bookcases and the words on them were the books. The Guardian made a note that Jake liked leatherbound books of many subjects. There was a trend of subjects related to outdoorsy topics like trees, hiking, and fishing. Jake probably spent a lot of time outside in his down time. It made sense seeing how Jake was the forester for the area.
Maxwell hopped to the desk in the center of the room. He made note of the window to the left of the desk but paid it no real attention. Maxwell continued until he went under the desk and out the other side.
“Seat!” Maxwell exclaimed.
There was, of course, an office chair sitting behind the desk. The Guardian observed it was a rather normal-looking office chair. Wheels, five legs, leather seat, wooden arms with leather armrests, and a cushioned back. Checking through the databases of this planet, the Guardian identified the wood color as mahogany. It wasn’t solid wood, though. It was wooden strips glued together with the mahogany finish. To most people, it would be considered fancy. The Guardian figured it was worth somewhere around three-hundred dollars, dollar being the name of the local currency.
“Up. Please.”
“Up where?”
It was important to specify where. The Guardian knew Maxwell wanted up on the chair but he wanted Maxwell to specify that. Sometimes Catalum did not remember what they could order their ships to do. Up could mean being attached to the ceiling, being placed on the second floor, or even being placed on the roof. Specifics were key.
“Up chair. Please.”
“Sure thing.”
The Guardian upended the local gravity around Maxwell and carried him upwards and plopped him on the chair. The Guardian returned the area to normal gravity. Maxwell turned around, happy that he was on the chair, tail wagging. He looked at the desk. Maxwell couldn’t properly see the whole desk but he could see enough of it to keep his interest.
“What this?”
Maxwell was looking at a machine sitting on the desk. It was a laptop. Wires connected it to a power station that went into the desk and into the floor where it was connected to the house’s electrical wiring.
“It’s a small portable computer. Jake probably uses it for his work.”
“Like you?”
“Like me. Except much lower tech. There’s probably a million years between it and me.”
“Wow. Low tech. Looks cool. Me getting down now.”