Quills: the Rise of the Northern Matriarch-Chapter 62: New Northern

Nora strummed the taut strings of the Teere, a guitar-like instrument. It had been easier for her to pick up with her experience with guitars. Once her head had stopped throbbing, she decided to take a step back from absorbing new world knowledge. Using the interface was painful afterward and would be for a while according to Kadir and Janel. Her head and left eye still throbbed slightly when she accessed it. She practiced old Northern folk songs and painted during the days. Nora had decided to embrace their culture as it was part of her identity now. She began to practise the lyrics which Liem had long translated into Calloran in his youth. Two cycles had passed, she had visitors. Amrita had shown up with art tools among the items that she had brought for her son. First she tried her hand at art. She produced a few landscapes she remembered from home. Beautiful landscapes from the country home, Switzerland from boarding school. Different flowers and animals she remembered from home. Painting and drawing turned out to be another way to help her in her research.

The gorgeous instrument in her hand was from the Allari storehouse. Located below her were mounds of treasures and antiques. Vast basement floors were laid below the Allari complex. It was exciting to find out. She longed to explore down there. Life above was tediously slow. Vida Halid had come to socialize with her. She was fascinated with her painting and had joined in painting. Vida and herself had exchanged paintings with her. Cerez mentioned that she had mounted and displayed a pastoral featuring a flock of sheep which Nora had learned were called Caora. She learned a lot from her visits. The mothers had all been visiting so much more frequently. Each of them was more and more surprised at how long her miraculous pregnancy had been lasting. Nora was ready for them to come anytime soon. Literally, the sooner, the better.

Her hands suddenly stopped playing. Nora's eyebrows knit, wondering if she could hold on a bit longer. Daven was currently in their care, and she found he slept best when she practiced. Nature called. She sat the Teere down and waddled off to the bathroom. After she was done, she rubbed some oil on her itchy belly. Her skin was really starting to stretch to its limits. She was eight cycles into her pregnancy, or 36 weeks. She saw a flutter of activity as she rubbed.

"How can you two still move with so little room? Come out already." Nora said to them. She knew that they did not understand her, but she was huge. Nora heard Daven, her nephew, start to cry from the main room. She sighed exasperated and waddled back to start playing again to lull the three-cycle-old infant back to sleep. Allurai and Leilanna needed help for the day, and they needed experience caring for an infant. Nora sat down determined to lull him back to sleep.

"Why don't we record it so you can take a break?" Liem asked. Nora nodded nervously. Liem retrieved the infant monitor that they created with audio and video storage. "It would be nice to put it in the sound storage for playback," Liem said bashfully. Nora's face flushed red. She looked at him with an incredulous look on his face.

"I would feel embarrassed, I am just learning the instrument and my accent is different from everyone else's, especially when I sing," Nora said. Her accent made her sensitive.

"You have a beautiful voice. You should not be shy about it. I love listening to you." Liem said, encouraging her.

"But what if other people hear it? You guys like it, we love each other. Women do not sing here. What if people think Quill is a joke because of me?" Nora asked, looking self-conscious.

"The fools that would offend you would have trouble with our families. We are not to be reckoned with. Now, can you play again from the start, Nora?" Liem said and he booped her nose cutely. Nora nodded. Liem slid the new monitor they had engineered at Nora's request, which looked like a robotic cute owl out of its package. Nora was insistent on it being bird-shaped. He sat the device on the table in front of her. It cooed as it started up. Its wings flapped as it powered on, and the head spun along with the multi-directional camera lenses. It was superb. Daven giggled as it moved around. Daven loved it, which was a positive vote of confidence. It allowed for the parent to interact with the child through the speaker and microphone, as well as built-in AI to soothe the child when the parent was unavailable. She could not help but to smile, looking at the device and hearing that laugh. It was her intent to make sure it was as friendly as possible. Her little beta tester was impressed.

"It has playback features, as well as the ability to input comforting phrases as well, the AI can take on your voice.." Liem said while arching a brow. "It was a great decision to add the audio and visual storage, Kadir." Liem said.

"This is the central device, the smaller ones are in storage and link to this main device. The system will replace the current visual recording", Kadir said. Nora's lips bowed in a large happy smile. Kadir had expanded on her product suggestion for a baby monitor and was going to replace the Allari hardware with their own. Nora was overjoyed. Liem finished linking the software to his Interface.

"Alright. It is ready." Liem said.

"If I am going to do this, no visual recording." Nora said shyly. Liem disappointedly changed the settings and nodded. "Lie to me, and you'll sleep out here again." Nora said. Nora awkwardly sat and started strumming the instrument and hummed as Daven started to calm down enough to start recording. Nora started to play. She gave her best singing as she went through song to song. He then waved his hand for her to stop and started playing the recordings. Nora sighed in relief, as she really needed a break. She went and laid down on the long chaise near them and quickly became restless.

"Do you want to learn to speak 'New Northerner'?" she said to her spouses in code. Leilanna insisted on having a visual and audio feed open to their home to curb her anxiety over the next three to five days when she and her spouses would be working on their next child. Although Daven would not stay overnight, they still had time to wait until they could change the current monitoring system. Nora had her own thoughts on their next child or children, but that would wait until she knew the outcome of their paternity.

Having a secret language that they could use around others would be very helpful to their future plans for changes that would impact their segment of society. Now that Nora was on board with their plan to remove the social credit system from the classes. A new reform to ensure that people were prepared and stable enough through evaluation to be parents would be put forth. Their goals also included real protection for Alphem males. No one should be forced into a binding or to be a parent. This included Matriarchs, but she did not foresee a future where that would change. It was how matriarchs and clans kept power.

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The ability to survive was the main reason why the stiff restrictions were put in place and these people were forced to serve t based on the circumstances of their births. If you look at the people who encountered the pandemic that caused infertility, these people would be mostly classified as Gimmel and Daleth if they were labeled. If they had just retired all the infrastructure and banded together sooner, they would have been able to recover from extinction. They would have suffered a great deal for hundreds of years. In comparison, the centuries of pain and suffering caused by choosing the easy way was greater. Because the answer to the problem they chose was selfish, as their children married and fell in love, so did the numbers of live female births. Kadir looked up from his Interface screen along with Liem and Cerez.

"We should learn more about your culture. This would be a great way to bond together" Cerez said, smiling. The Interface software had already translated the Common Language into English, so romantic languages that could eventually be deduced from English will be out. Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Japanese were left. Korean was by far the easiest of the languages to learn. She recalled how her friend Nari had taught her to write and speak so quickly. She grabbed a piece of art sheet. It was like paper made an Alphabet Poster with the Korean characters and their equivalent pronunciation. She had to get up numerous times in between breaks, but she finally completed one large chart and three smaller charts for the men.