A havenworlder has a soft, higher-pitched, voice and the human only catches half of what they say most of the time. They are both heading to a medical hub, the human to get treatment, the havenworlder to do their internship. While there, the human explains about that annoying ringing in the ears called tinnitus, and how humans who have accidents, listen to too many loud noises, or just start to get elderly, can sometimes end up with hearing damage. -- Anon Guest
"All right," sang Medik Fluph. "Human Jan, is it?"
Human Jan was engrossed in their datareader, apparently playing something involving bright colours and tapping at them.
Medik Fluph circled into their field of view. "Human Jan Mettistov?"
Human Jan startled. "Hah? What? Oh Yeah. That's me. Sorry, I didn't hear you," their voice was pitched a little too loud for normal conversation. "I'm here for my tinnitus. It's acting up."
Humans had odd words for everything. Fluph checked hir dictionary of confounding Human terms and found very little about it. "Tinnitus?"
Human Jan was squinting. "Sorry, it's real hard to read what you're saying by sight only. I have this ringing in my ears, I caught a bacterial infection as a kid and I've had trouble with an intermittent ringing sound ever since. I thought it was fixed and then I got too close to a docking port during a hard engagement? I haven't been able to hear much over it ever since."
Aha. A Deathworlder hearing canal failure. Fluph looked up the varying syndromes that matched the history and found what ze was looking for. Oh, so that's how it was spelled[1]. "Aha. Yes. I can see the problem now. Do you consent to have bodily maintenance nanobots injected into you to restore a Human Average version of normal?"
"Sorry what?" Jan was squinting at Fluph. "It's hard to read your beak."
Fluph broke out the text communication app. Ze tried to lower the range of hir voice, with dubious success. "Other methods are necessary." With the help of their datareader and large font, true communication could commence.
Once communication was solved, consent was achievable.
[1] Galactic Standard contains far more sounds than common in Terran tongues, and is often spelled phonetically. This is usually not a problem with the standard array of useful words, but Humans - as always - tend to mess things up.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / rob3000
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