Little Kesatan Punk

I was more than a little startled today when a young Kesatan decided to sneak up on me while I was down in a little observation ship looking out underwater through force fields. First of all, you must understand, I've grown very wary of Xala force-fields. I'm always afraid they're going to fail when they should be protecting me from an energy blast, explosive decompression, or in this case, a great massive flood of the entire building. The Xala are always reassuring me that the second a crystal fails, there will be a metal barrier put up so the shield can be taken down for repairs.

All that aside, I was still nervous when I looked out on a little coral reef that some Kesatans were tending to. (The Kesatans sometimes cut chunks of coral for materials, but these guys seemed to be working on herding some schools of fish and harvesting snales, mussels, and starfish for some of that Kesatan food I mentioned in the last post.) Anyway, out of the blue, this huge, oddly-shaped chunk of rock I'm looking at suddenly flashes all colors of the rainbow and turns into, what else, a young Kesatan staring me in the face.

My interpreter, ever helpful, pointed out his lack of feelers (adult Kesatans have little catfish feelers on their upper jaws), so I knew he was young. That very useful yela'kaja also told me that the posture and color patterns on the Kesatan I was staring at "indicate amusement" -- his words, not mine. Somehow Xala have the weirdest way of stating everything as an interesting scientific observation, even when some young Kesatan punk that is probably barely out of metamorphosis from a tadpole (giving him the mentality of about a two-year-old) is making fun of the stupid human!

Anyway, the yela'kaja went on an on about Kesatan camouflage ability. Somewhere somebody told him about squid and octopus camouflage, so he brought up the similarities. "Of course, Xasedla* can't take the wide variety of shapes that your cephelopods can. Xasedla are limited by their skeletal structure, so if you have their basic body shape in your head you can usually identify a camouflaged Xasedla about forty percent of the time."

To that, I said, "That's nice," keeping from him the fact that I didn't know what a 'cephelopod' was until now.

*Xasedla (kha - shez - la) is another term the Xala use for Kesatans. The yela'kaja here uses it a good bit, but I forgot it in my original list of names for Kesatans. It basically means "salamander man". Would you believe that that's actually a very acceptable term for them?