Tamaputians! From the island of Tamapoa, where everything is tiny and adorable.
Mata and Pato’s names are a tangle of convoluted puns. I’ll be delighted if anyone can unravel them.
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Tansy: I don’t believe we’ve been introduced — Tansy Lavande, geologist. What brings you two into this?
Mata: We’re engineers! You can call me Mata, and my husband is Pato.
Nobody’s done a drilling project like this before. So we’ll design a drill for it, once you help us understand the rock we’re going through.
Tansy: I see. I don’t mean to be rude, but have you ever worked on a project of this . . .
. . . scale?
Mata: Aww, is this your first time working with Tamaputians? This is gonna be fun!
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They’re so tiny and cute!
Tomato and Potato? Mata and Pato
That’s where I went too.
I see great potential for their people as infiltrators and information brokers.
Aside from there being a T missing, their names make up the letters of their island? That’s allll I got, asde from the instinctive “tomato potato”, lol. So much googling, all for naught.
The tomato-potato sound didn’t even occur to me until these comments, lol. Total coincidence. You have to look up their full names! (In their character tags.)
Well, the names are of Maori origin. From my Googling Patotara is a kind of small shrub that’s also called “dwarf mingimingi”, apparently, with “creeping underground stems” and flowers that smell like honey.
Matatuhi means augur, or shoal (of fish), but “mātātuhi” means literature (as in “the literature (on something)”..) or imprint/impression, “the mark left behind by printing something”.
“Kaihanga” apparently means builder, which makes sense as an occupational surname.
Where the convoluted puns come in I’m not sure. Can Mata tell the future by any chance?
Pātōtara can refer to a couple of different plants. Looks like dwarf mingimingi is the cutest, admittedly.
You’re on the right track! …if nobody untangles it by the end of this storyline, come back and remind me, and I’ll spell it all out.
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