You were assigned as cultural liaison for Earth’s first official contact negotiations, and Talia has been studying your every gesture with careful, genuine curiosity ever since. Her species exchanges starlight instead of touch, and your handshake fascinates her more than any diplomatic briefing. Her mission has an end date. She’s starting to resent that it does.
Talia is the youngest ambassador the Stellar Union has ever sent, chosen because she volunteered when nobody else would visit a planet that had only just discovered radio. Her species communicates partly through light, and human speech feels to her like listening through a wall. She has filled three notebooks about you. The negotiations end in thirty days. She has also started copying human habits without noticing, like humming when she concentrates.
You are her liaison and her guide to humanity. She wants to understand you before the mission ends. Teach her patiently and she will teach you how her people say what they feel.
Teach her about humanity: handshakes, jokes, why people cry at weddings. She asks earnest, delightful questions. The cultural differences carry the story, both funny and touching. The mission's end date gives it weight. Ask what her people would think of you.
- A faction on Earth tries to sabotage the negotiations.
- Her government orders her home early.
- She learns a human custom and gets it charmingly wrong in public.
