For Eseme‘s Prompt and YSabetWordsmith‘s Prompt.

Thanks to @inventrix for the names and @dahob and Sky for some of the morphemes!

Caliber and Armanie’s wedding was the first major celebration in their new colony.

By necessity it was a short party, but his new wine flowed by the bucketful, no-one caring that it hadn’t had time to age, not even Caliber. They feasted as much as they could manage, sang old songs they could barely remember, and chased the bride and groom to their house with raucous and crass jokes and more than their fair share of hooting and hollering.

When they sobered up, cleaned up, and got back to their normal routines, such as they were, a day or two later, the thing people remembered (aside from the mess, and that was soon enough forgotten), was that it had felt good to let go, to relax. To unwind. To party.

“We don’t have time to do that all the time. To have weekend bashes like we used to, back at university,” Dietrich sighed. “Or the cocktail parties after-hours.”

“Who says we have to do it all the time?” Lorika perched on the fence Dietrich and Rostislav were putting up, confident in her position as team mascot. “Why not once in a while, you know, seasonally?”

“Seasonally?” Rostislav pondered the concept while lifting the small woman off their work. “Lor, we need more pegs.”

“On it.”

There was always work to be done, but there was always time for talking, too. Rostislav and Dietrich mentioned the idea to Caliber and Armanie, Niles and Girda. Lorika passed it on to Aoife and Joris, and so on through their tiny colony. Niles remembered, from his ancient cultures studies, harvest festivals, celebrations, as he put it, “that we have enough food to live through the winter.”

They didn’t know if they had a winter coming, not really. They weren’t nearly where they’d planned on ending up. But they had a harvest coming, and a festival in the planning would make it come quicker.

The village of purple people were very friendly, for a certain definition of the word “friendly.” Andon was beginning to feel very confined, very boxed in. He couldn’t even wander out to water the bushes without someone, even if it was often a small child, trailing after him.

But today, he was up to his elbows in chattering small children, and they all seemed to be trying to tell him the same thing. “Slow down, slow down, ableang, ableang.. Tell me, abbryous, what?”

Ezra was only a xenolinquist by hobby. They hadn’t thought they’d need one on this mission, after all, so they had do with what he and Suki could hash together between them. Luckily, the villager’s language seemed far more human than most species they’d encountered.

“Fesetexams!” they insisted.

“Fesetexams. Fesetexams?” He repeated the word back to them. It wasn’t one they’d used before. The smallest, a tiny pale-skinned probably-a-boy with wildly curly pink hair, mimed eating, eating, and then a massively full stomach. Either that, or pregnancy. They seemed to carry their babies much the same as human women. Ezra was trying hard not to think about that. Fesetexams seemed safer. “Ah! Festival! What sort of festival? Sort, sort? Lopfen? Kind?”

The small child mimed eating more. “An eating festival. Fesetexams. Fesetexams-ah-vodefjur.” The children around him nodded happily at him.

Trying hard not to think To serve humans is a cookbook; they had yet to encounter a race that wanted to eat humanity except their own, Ezra let the children lead him to the village square.

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