There was a persistent chatter, a mixture of the casual and the informed, over simple, carefully-selected music piped into the room. Projected upon a white screen on a wall were the following words: 12TH SOUTHEAST ASIAN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE

A tall caprine stood in one corner of the hall, dressed in a powder-blue suit and pale shirt. His eyes were set upon an array of crystal glasses laid out upon a table, each one filled with fruit punch. He leaned down, examined the glasses for fingerprints, and picked up one without any.

He rubbed on the little moustache-like tufts on the sides of his mouth after taking a sip of fruit punch from a crystal glass.

A few minutes before, a leonine professor of linguistics and his wife had spent some time conversing with Yaali. What began as a delightful description of Yaali's home town ended with a detailed lecture on a particularly esoteric aspect of the BaBEL signal processing system. The couple looked at him strangely, then moved on to other people in the hall.

As his eyes wandered, he noticed another person standing alone on the other side of the room. The person was a man half-a-head shorter than Yaali, with a build that reminded him of a chef or a mechanic. He had marks like a german shepherd, in patterns of brown, deep mahogany and beige.

A tall, heavy-set bear walked towards the dog and touched his shoulder. The bear whispered something into his ear, and the dog nodded in response, while smiling warmly. As the bear went out, Yaali saw him taking a cigarette pack out of a coat pocket.

The dog walked up to the table with the drinks, and stood next to Yaali.

"Hello, there. Lovely-looking little party, innit?" said the dog, apparently to Yaali, though his eyes were on the glasses and his fingers twiddled in the air over them. He spoke with a deep, gravelly voice in an English accent, though a few years of speaking in Malay have added a local savour to it.

The dog lapped a bit of the punch, and made a face when he found it a bit too sweet. He raised his head and put out a hand towards Yaali. "Hi, Shuraim. Malaysia."

It took a while, but Yaali shook Shuraim's hand eventually.

"I am Yaali. From ITB."

"Where is that, again?

"Bandung. The one with the elephant logo."

Shuraim lit up at this mention. "I love that logo. And the one for Airlangga, too. Quite a handsome bird."

The goat raised an eyebrow.

"I'm sorry, I'm always weird when I'm around so many people I don't know."

A twinge of empathy turned up inside Yaali, though he himself wasn't altogether sure he felt it.

"I lecture at a college in Kuala Lumpur. I publish a paper every few years, my own research."

"What field?"

"Uhm... electronics. Mostly. I think."

"You... think?"

"It's a bit hard to categorise."

The dog looked upon the Yaali from head to toe, and this left the goat feeling a bit unnerved.

"You look rather young to be here."

"Well, I am actually twenty-th..." Yaali raised his hand and checked his watch. "Oh, sorry, I turned twenty-four two hours ago."

Shuraim looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and dismay. "It's your birthday?"

"It is just another year closer to the end of my life."

"That's terrible."

"No, no, I'm fine. I have my research. I have my job. I have a home and a few friends I can go out with." said Yaali, as he took a very modest sip of the drink. "I am merely being pragmatic about it."

The dog frowned, and began sloshing around the drink in his glass. "That's just not the way to treat a day like this." For a while, Shuraim lowered his eyes and seemed to be looking at nothing, deep in thought. "Alright. This may not seem like much, but..." He raised his glass towards Yaali. "A toast to you, for another year of not dying."

The goat rolled the glass between his fingers for a time.

Then he raised it. For the first time that day, he smiled.



>> A lovely commission by  snowroserivenstar.

I like how he's somewhere in between the Yaali I'm writing and  pyurio's official Yaali.