6-154: Merchant Freighter Spanial – Common Room

Lia’s knowledge of the Felline, and Prrri, includes the following:

• Past interactions with Felline
• Certainly possible, although Felline are not that common off their home world, so ‘quite a number’ may not be that many in absolute terms, but yes we can say she’s she’s not a stranger to them
• Tactility
• Felline seem to be moody with regard to touch, and that varies within and between individuals
• In a nutshell, they welcome it enthusiastically except when they don’t
• ‘don’t’ can occasionally be as abrupt as ‘do’ can be enthusiastic
• Felline touch in greeting as humans do, less often on departure and also as cultural marker that seems to signify the start and end of recreational activities 
• The Felline seem to have adopted the human idea of a hug, but it isn’t something they historically tended to do among themselves 
• Among Felline touch includes
• The Felline equivalent of a ‘fist bump’ with any combination of hands, feet or tail – this seems to be the equivalent of a handshake
• Tails twined (Lia has only seen this once)
• Face stroke, with back of hand or tail tip
• Ear or neck scratch
• Back scratch
• Muzzle nuzzle (this seems to be among close friends?)
• Licks (possibly restricted to family or sex partners?)
• Lia’s not quite certain where all these fit on a scale of intimacy or appropriateness
• Prrri has demonstrated an ‘average’ level of touch responsiveness, he doesn’t seem to mind hugs and he likes having the area behind his ears scratched or massaged
• Prrri occasionally responds to Lia’s touch by scratching her hair behind her ear or a modified Felline action of rubbing her under her chin and her neck with his knuckle (it seems he would usually use his claws with other Felline)
• Group activities
• Felline don’t usually dine together, except as part of practical necessity or coincidence
• They play together, in pairs to small groups
• They enjoy communal sleep overs, where a group of two or more Felline will laze around together, chat, sing (which sounds dreadful to human ears), play intellectual games (word games, riddles, cards etc), and so on, and gradually fall asleep as a group
• Language
• Lia knows that the Felline language has two ‘modes’, basically soft mode and loud mode
• There are very different words for the same concepts in the two modes
• Some concepts can only be expressed in one mode or the other
• Soft mode is used conversationally and is what humans hear Felline using most of the time, it is a guttural, breathy, hissy sounding language
• Loud mode can be very loud indeed, and sounds more like Tibetan throat singing while standing on a cat’s tail
• I’ll say Lia knows a greeting phonetically, which she has been told is a Soft Mode phrase roughly equivalent to ‘Hi!’, and it sounds like a child imitating a ray gun followed by someone trying to hack up some particularly juicy phlegm

  

[That’ll do for now – have to sleep!]

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