This is technically a rewrite of another story I posted here, but I changed so much it's basically its own thing.

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Canned yinrih. That's what I call the particular odor you smell from the back of a cramped train car. The nose wasn't built to be assaulted by all this olfactory information at the same time. It was the combined musk of a gross of people, men and women, pups and gray-muzzled elders, sires and dams, bachelors and maids, angry, happy, sad, exhausted, all blended together into an overwhelming potpourri. It made my whiskers twitch.

It was all too much for the guy next to me. He had a glob of mentholated nose balm on his rhinarium to dull the combined musk of all those commuters. For as long as I'd been taking this route we had shared these two seats in the back of the train, his snout buried in the same old claw-written notebook and my eyes fixated on the bad news scrolling on my HUD specs. We'd never shared so much as a chuff in greeting, only the silent understanding that neither of us wanted to share this seat but at this point in the route it was the only one left.

A polite voice crackled over the announcement system. «Attention, passengers, the City of Windward meteorological agency has issued an upwelling warning until further notice. All passengers must exit at the next stop. Citizens are urged to take shelter until the city passes over the storm.»

The scent in the air shifted. You could tell who was a native Welkinsteader and who was a tourist based on how they reacted to an upwelling warning. The soup of collective emotions gave way to eleven dozen per gross mild annoyance, and one dozen per gross panic and terror.

A woman in front of me began hyperventilating. «Oh Light, I don't wanna die. Not like this! Please, not like this!»

The fellow next to her attempted some reassurance. «It's just a bit of gas comin' up from the lower atmosphere. Look, none of these other folks has got their tail in a knot. Worse comes to worst ya lose a lung. Ya got three more where that came from.»

«You're not helping!» She barked.

The train came to a stop. The passengers piled out onto the platform and trudged off to find shelter. The woman followed her new minder off the car, leaving the way clear for me. I gave my backpack a quick pat down with my tail to make sure it was still with me.

Mr. notebook hadn't budged. I clicked my claws on the floor. «Hey, dude, come on.»

He started and scented the air. «Oh Light blind me, I missed my stop again.»

«It's an upwelling. We need to get to shelter. Everyone else just got off.»

The two of us disembarked and hopped down the ladder to the tunnels. We were surrounded by the train passengers as well as others who were caught outside when the warning sounded. That same canned yinrih smell assaulted my nostrils.

There was a thunk as the safety door slid closed, then a hiss as the gasket inflated. The positive pressure system engaged, making my ears pop.

Mr. Notebook smelled positively miserable at the prospect of milling around in this tunnel for hours.

«I smell you every day but I don't think we've really met,» I said. «Name's Swift wind.»

«Fire soul,» he grunted. «Say, you usually get off here, know where I can find some water?»

«Nowhere close. This is a residential zone. But you're welcome to come back to my apartment until the storm passes.»

He smelled unsure.

«Don't worry. I promise I'm not gonna murder you.»

His thirst and sense of self preservation waged a brief silent war, then he flicked his ears in resignation and followed me. The smell of the crowd faded as we turned down the tunnel leading to the northern residential block.

We spent a few minutes walking in silence, the only sound the clicking of our claws on the floor. These dreary tunnels dated back to when Windward was one of thousands of gas extraction platforms on Welkinstead, and the atmosphere outside was made of the same noxious gas currently ruining our day. Used to be these tunnels were all there was, with nothing open to the air. But after millennia of all these platforms extracting and refining gas, polluting the atmosphere with oxygen, the air became breathable. Terraforming Welkinstead was never the intent, but a happy industrial accident.

Once it was safe to be outside, they started building on top of the vacuum pontoons keeping the platform afloat, shops, houses, a railway, the stuff you'd expect a normal city would have. Soon Windword looked like any other city on terra firma. You'd never guess we were drifting lazily through the upper atmosphere of an ice giant.

That is if it weren't for the upwellings. Only this layer of the upper atmosphere had the right mixture of gases at the right temperature and pressure, and only along the northern and southern subtropical high pressure belts. Go too far down or drift too far to one side and your lungs would be burned away by the cornerstone of Welkinstead's economy.

Upwellings were normally predicted weeks in advance and timed down to the heartbeat. But especially during the summer there would be one or two surprises when a convective storm lower down in the atmosphere burped up some gas for us to deal with. All the local met agency could do was watch the drop sonde telemetry and lidar to see if anything was brewing downwind of us and give the rest of us a tug on the tail if we needed to hunker down.

But that's why they kept the tunnels. Exactly how accessible they were varied. Cities close to the edges of the breathable belt had entrances in every building. Other cities closer to the middle just had to have a certain number of entrances accessible from anywhere on the surface. Older cities like Windward combined both. Ancient residential blocks like the one we were headed to had direct tunnel connections in every unit in addition to the normal exterior doorway, but newer sections of the city had publicly accessible hatches on street level every block or so.

«Here we are.» I opened the hatch leading up into my apartment.

«Oh Void no,» he muttered. I followed his gaze to the wall of guns visible from the entrance.

«It's OK, dude, they're antiques. The ammo for them hasn't been manufactured in millennia.» I flicked my tail in a beckoning gesture. «Come on up. I promised I wouldn't murder you, remember?»

He didn't move.

«Here, if it makes you feel better, you can bludgeon me with this if you think things are going sour.» I handed him a heavy lump of aggregate with jagged crystals jutting out at odd angles, some byproduct of the gas refining process sold in every shop in town as a dust collector for tourists.

He flicked his ears again and climbed up.

«Water, right? You want ice with that?»

He tilted his muzzle up.

«Take a seat anywhere you like.»

He flopped down into the bowl couch in my den. «What's the attraction?» He was nervously passing the lumpy crystal between his rear paws. «Why do you like collecting them, the old guns I mean. You don't look like an ear notch.»

«Well if you have good firing posture you won’t blow a chunk out of your ear. But no, I’m not a gun nut, well not THAT kind of gun nut. It’s the craftsmanship. I like the leatherwork on the saddles, the paw-forged iron barrels, none of this all-polymerite nonsense. It’s amazing what we were able to make with our own four paws before we invented fabricators.

I handed him the bowl of ice water and he began lapping it up.

«What about you?» I asked. «Got any hobbies?»

He sat the bowl down next to his claw-written notebook sitting on the end table. «Oh, just this and that.»

«This and that?» I probed. «You seem awfully attached to that notebook.»

«Oh, that. It’s nothing.»

«Clearly it’s not nothing. It's practically been glued to your forepaw every time I see you on the train.»

He let out a long sigh. «Those are my worldbuilding notes.»

«Ah!» I yipped. «So you’re a writer!»

«No, well not exactly.» He began running a rear paw through his tail and I smelled nervousness in his musk. «I've got a few stories in here, but it’s just for fun, you know. Pups make up imaginary worlds, and I just started documenting mine as I grew up. The stories are exercises to flesh out the lore, that's all.»

«Tell me about it.»

He hesitated. «Are you SURE?»

«It's either that or awkwardly sit here in silence until the storm clears.»

He started wringing his tail like a towel with both rear paws, and his shyness stank up the den. «So it’s about this race of star folk called.. well we can’t pronounce their language.»

«What do you mean we can’t pronounce their language?»

«Well, they have a very different vocal tract from us; no muzzle, more muscular lips that can form an airtight seal, flatter more crowded teeth, a smaller and much more nimble tongue. They use their tongue to shape the sounds coming out of their mouth to speak.» He had opened his eyes wide and his ears were pinned back. He was clearly excited to have someone to share all this with. «The tongue is so important that many of their languages use the word for tongue to mean language in the same way we use the word for throat.

«So the best I can do to tell you what they call themselves is give you all the sounds one by one. The word starts with a voiceless glottal fricative, then a voiced palatal approximant, close back rounded vowel, voiced bilabial nasal, mid central vowel, and finally a voiced velar nasal.»

I wanted to ask him what in the void a 'voiceless glottal fricative' was but he continued.

«But that's the singular, like if there's only one. If there are more than one you take that word and add a voiced alveolar sibilant fricative to the end to make it plural.»

«You went to all the trouble of designing their ’vocal tract’?»

«Yup. And some of their languages, too.»

By now he was holding his tail in a death grip like it owed him money. «Constructed languages. Honestly sometimes I feel like the languages are the main thing and the world is just there to give them more life.» He opened his notebook to what looked like a table of different word forms in an alien script written left to write. «That word I gave you comes from this language called, well, again we can’t pronounce the name.»

I braced myself for another onslaught of 'nasals' and 'fricatives', but I was mercifully spared.

«Ultimately the name comes from this tribe who lived on this island in the northern hemisphere.» He turned to a page showing an impressive world map and pointed to a large island to the northwest of a massive continent. «So this tribe invades this island after this other empire falls.» He pointed to a peninsula on the southern edge of the continent jutting out into a nearly enclosed sea. Anyway, this tribe becomes an empire in their own right after a few centuries.»

«Centuries? Seems awfully fast.»

«Oh, yeah, they only live a tenth of our lifespan. Makes things move a bit quicker, gives me an excuse to play around with more languages.» Now his rear paw was picking at loose whisps of fur on his tail.

«Anyway, the tribe becomes an empire and they spread their language as they expand. They found some colonies on this other continent.» He pointed to another landmass across an ocean to the west of the first. «And these colonies rebel and found their own country which eventually spreads all the way to the west coast. The tribe become empire is still expanding despite the loss of some territory to these rebels, but after two massive worldwide wars this empire also falls and the rebels turned country become an empire in their own right, with their own variety of that island tribe’s language spreading across the globe in its turn.

He turned back to the table of words. «So this language is spoken by two different empires and becomes a de facto lingua franca around the world. It’s their version of Commonthroat.»

«Sounds like they haven’t terraformed any other planets,» I say.

«No, they achieve spaceflight right before we find them.»

«And besides this ‘vocal tract’ of theirs, what do they look like?»

«Well, they have no tail, and almost no fur except on top of their head, so they weir cloth coverings like a healer. They used to have fur and live in trees just like we did, but they started living in wide open grasslands. Their rear paws lost the ability to grasp.»

«That doesn’t sound like much of an advantage, not being able to grip things with their rear paws, especially given they don’t have a tail.»

«That’s because they walk exclusively on their rear paws. Their hind legs get much longer and more muscular. It’s all so they can run long distances to catch prey. That’s also why they have no fur, it’s because they excrete saline from pores on their skin that evaporates to cool them down.»

I wrinkle my muzzle. «Sounds gross.»

«Oh that’s what the missionaries that find them think at first. It smells really pungent. But eventually they grow to like the odor. They say it smells like a friend.»

«And the wildest thing is they can’t write.»

«What do you mean; you showed me that alien alphabet earlier.»

«Well they can’t write naturally like we can. They don’t evolve it, they have to invent it. So they just speak for tens of thousands of years before finally inventing writing.»

«So no history? How do they preserve information then if they can’t write?»

«Orally at first, passing it down from sires and dams to their pups.»

«Doesn’t sound very reliable.»

«Oh it’s not at all. They spread across the globe long long before inventing writing, and don’t even remember one another until they meet again thousands of years later. At that point the different groups have developed vastly different cultures and languages.»

«More languages to invent?»

«Exactly!» he yipped.

He suddenly smelled embarrassed. «You probably think I’m the crazy one now.»

«Crazy? No. Look, dude, you absolutely stink of nervousness. Don't be. I'll admit I've never heard of someone making up a world for the fun of it and inventing languages, but this isn't something to be ashamed of. Why not post those stories of yours on the internetwork. I'm sure there's a bulletin board out there that'll lap them up.»

«But my stories are terrible.»

«And they'll always be terrible if you don't have the courage to fail. Back in the tunnel you were half sure I was going to shoot you dead, but you not only came in anyway you opened yourself up to me. That takes guts. Now use those guts to open up to others and listen to what they have to say. Besides, are those stories you've got now really that bad if they're worth the time it takes to read them? It's not like there's a law that a story has to have perfect prose and an immaculate plot and ocean-deep characters just to be unironically enjoyable.»

My ears popped again. «Positive pressure system's deactivated. Looks like we're out of the storm.»

He coiled his tail around his notebook and walked to the entry hatch.

«Hey,» I called after him before his head disappeared below the threshold, «I'll be honest, these weird flat-faced furless bipeds may not interest me, but they will be interesting to someone, go find that someone. And if you don't, I sit next to you on the train every day. It'll beat reading bad news. Maybe they'll grow on me.»