They’re warming up to al-Kitaabi finally. Nothing else has changed. It’s so boring here. It doesn’t even feel like it’s worth writing in this diary.

They – they being the kelp-people – did introduce a new game to us, possibly to win over Kitaabi. He hasn’t learned their language yet, or even come close. They don’t seem to understand what his pointing at various objects and saying a word mean yet. Their speech is not too dissimilar from that of turkeys; they gobble primarily. It would be funny if it came from the mouth of something smaller and less covered in kelp. As it is, the kelp-men are intimidating.

This new game they have introduced will take a while to figure out, but it involves double-sided rocks – one side painted white and the other black – and a hexagonal gameboard divided into six triangles radiating from the center, and with each triangle divided into three parts by two evenly-spaced lines drawn across the triangles, essentially creating two smaller hexagons inside it. The kelp-men tried to teach us by showing us how it was played, and it was lost on me. Kitaabi might be getting it, though; it involves flipping and moving the stones between sections in a very odd way. The kelp-men play it very quickly, and don’t seem to understand that doing it more slowly might help us. Hopefully Kitaabi can explain it to us soon, once he figures it out. Maybe once that’s done we can figure out some way to really communicate.

Out for now.