inourhead | what in the longdark spitting-pit is that

what in the longdark spitting-pit is that

This was a bad idea this was a bad idea this was a bad idea.

Holly runs as fast as she can but the demon's faster. She has no idea where Lightning's gotten to; maybe he found a tree to climb. She on the other hand has been diverted into a treeless hill and she's careening down a slope, trying very hard not to trip.

And the demon's gaining on her.

She's never seen anything like it and neither has Crystal; maybe Book knows what it is but Book's asleep. It's mostly mouth - it looks like a cross between a floorlength mirror of a mouth and a snake to propel the mouth along.

And Holly's not fast enough.

The mouth catches her.

But it doesn't hurt.

Where are we?

----

with Minus (kappa)

with Mark (kappa)

with Max (Benedict)

in Terraria (kappa)

with Emma (Marri)

with Erin (Rockeye)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"There's also, uh... she's got two names. Two... people. According to what I could get from her, there's more than one person in the same body? She's Pyay right now, but the one that's good at English is named Song."

Trevor snorts, but isn't quite disbelieving. "Structure, grammar, what do you know about that? We need more to go on."

Max furrows his brow. "I'm not... I know some vocabulary, the language's name is Nloggy, mweelsrow's the magic, the world she's from might be named Kweengow, or that might be a region in it... she knows 'word' and 'means', though, so if you can teach her an English word, you can just ask her what the Nloggy equivalent is."

"Song?" Victoria asks.

"Yes?" says, presumably, Sohng.

Victoria mimes writing.

Sohng pulls out her notes and Victoria grins. "Oh, good, she's literate, maybe we can get her to write us the alphabet, Trevor." She motions towards the notes, and Sohng hesitantly hands them over; Victoria gets a fresh sheet of paper and starts writing down one of each symbol, one to a line, while Sohng looks on in puzzlement.

Trevor grabs a book- something something phonics- and a pad of graph paper. "We're sure those are phonemes, not pictograms? How often do they repeat, how do they line up...?"

Max looks with confusion at the symbols. He hadn't looked too closely at her writing before, and isn't sure how this is a useful starting point, but... they're the experts. He sits down in a nearby folding chair.

"They seem to repeat pretty often, and look how they're clustered," says Victoria. "I don't think there's more than forty, forty-five." She offers her transcription to Sohng after she's gone over a page without finding any new ones.

Sohng studies the list of letters, then takes a new sheet of paper and writes two columns of sixteen letters instead.

"Oh, I wonder if they're - not capitals, probably, but some kind of character transformation - Sohng?" Victoria points at the top left letter. "What's that?"

"Pek."

"That?" The other letter on the same line.

"Pek."

And the next row is ti, and so on. Victoria writes downs IPA renderings of these names.

When they reach "ho", Trevor makes a note. "Voiceless... velar fricative. Hhh."

Max tries out the sound in his mouth- it's like how that one girl from high school, the exchange student, pronounced H.

Trevor shoots him a dirty look, as if Max were intruding on his personal space.

"Am I doing it wrong?"

"...No."

"I was right about vowel length," adds Victoria, as they come to the end of the alphabet. "I wonder if these are in an alphabetical order or if she just did them in whatever order came to mind. We'll need more common language to ask. I have no idea yet what rules govern when she uses the left-hand column as opposed to the right-hand one. Might need more text to guess without being able to ask. Are these notes she's been taking on English as she picks it up?"

"As far as I can tell, yes. There might be Nloggy words in there, but she usually started writing things when I'd tell her the name of... you know, you can just point and ask her, like 'Nloggy words, or English words?' She's picked up that much."

Victoria gets more paper. "Write 'Nloggy'?" she invites Sohng.

Sohng writes it out. Victoria peers at it. "Six letters, third and fourth the same. And it looks like the letters probably are at least mostly named after sounds that appear in them - I'm not sure why the 'cow' letter sounds like - Sohng, say 'Nloggy'?"

"Nlaaki," obliges Sohng.

"So I'm not sure why the 'cow' letter is turning into a hard G, but apparently it really is, that wasn't a mishearing on your part..."

Max peers at the paper. "So... those are the 'ah' sounds... when she says Nloggy, I noticed- you said something about vowel length- she holds the sound a little longer. That's not like, in English, it makes a different sound, but here it just... changes the length?"

"Yes," Trevor responds, "English double vowel syntax does not apply to every language in existence. I'm glad you're paying attention."

"You don't have to-"

"The real question is, does it extend past two? More vowels, you hold the sound longer? How do we check that?"

"Let's find out - has she got numbers? - we'll see if she has numbers," says Victoria. She draws one of the ah-sound letters. "One saa, yes?"

"Yes," agrees Sohng.

Victoria draws another. "Two saa, yes?"

"Yes."

And a third: "Three saa -"

"No."

"So, two lengths. At least for saa."

"Oh, there's- just remembered- one of her words, 'and' is 'room'- or, I guess... that's one of the drawn-out ones, so that's... ruke, coor, coor, meme. Means 'and'."

"Yeah. That'll help," Trevor comments. And then "...that'll help, actually. Yeah." Trevor begins jotting down a copy of the alphabet for his reference, and marks down "ruum <-> and".

Victoria, meanwhile, goes through Sohng's notes, asking her to pronounce things; when she gets answers that sound like English words she looks to Max for confirmation that Sohng might have written down those words.

When Max isn't sure, he asks Sohng to clarify.

Some time passes.

"So... you've got the alphabet down, right? What's your plan, now? Where do you go from here? Do you have an agenda besides curiosity?"

Trevor boggles. "Agenda... curi- the pursuit of knowledge isn't-"

Max backs up. "Whoa! No, that's- of course- I mean, do you want to document her whole language, or just learn to talk to her? What do you mean to do tomorrow, or the day after?"

"I want to document her entire language, but that will go a lot faster once we can talk to her better," says Victoria.

"So... unless you think you can do that in the next few hours, there's going to be a practical obstacle. Which is... she... sort of, was teleported in, from that other dimension I mentioned, and the thing that allegedly sent her here didn't send her here with... a food supply, or money, or a place to stay. And I'm guessing that if the physics department couldn't line up room and board on short notice for a literal magician, the linguistics department isn't going to have much luck either?"

"...Did they try something obvious, like calling Residence Life, or...?" asks Victoria slowly.

"They, uh... not the people at... there's, uh, Gloria, coworker, she called... child services? I don't know exactly what she did with that, she's handling... she didn't have any luck with, whatever she thought was obvious. I should've asked her, specifically what she..."

Well, no, he reasons, he couldn't have known any better than her what kind of people to call, so if she did miss anything he wouldn't have figured that out by asking.

...he could have known, though. If that were something he'd decided to learn about earlier. Not having known something he needed to know doesn't sit right with Max.

"I mean, I don't know anything about her - legal status?" says Victoria. "But in terms of finding a place to put her, calling the campus residence office would be the first thing I'd do, that's what they're for. How old is she, did you manage to ask?"

"Eh, we tore our hair out over that for a bit- the world she's from, it's... weird, it doesn't have days, or anything we could compare to tell time by."

Max thinks for a moment. Trevor, meanwhile, nervously mutters something about tenses and specifiers, and goes to grab a book from a shelf.

"I didn't... I didn't call the residence people, no. I can't really pay for university housing on a teacher's salary..."

Trevor scoffs. "What, are you serious? She's magic, just go win the Randi Prize or whatever. You mean to tell me you can't think of a way to make money off a wizard?"

"...the Randy what?"

"If he wins the Randi prize with her then isn't that her money? I suppose it could go to pay for a dorm for her anyway," says Victoria. "Oh, it's a standing million dollar offer by James Randi for anybody who proves magic."

Sohng, meanwhile, has figured out that these new people want to learn Nlaaki, and starts helpfully writing out a glossary with various numbers of dots and simple drawings.

"Million- well! Well! I mean... yes, that's a good idea, that's a really good... if I can..."

Max is not a cartoon character, and so his eyes do not literally transform into dollar signs, but they are making a good effort. He opens his laptop bag- he's going to see how expidiently these million dollars can be arranged.

Trevor leans over and watches as Sohng compiles her glossary, consulting his transcribed alphabet. He attempts to pronounce some of the phrases near the dots.

Sohng gently corrects him when he gets things wrong.

"Base eight!" realizes Victoria after Sohng has written fourteen lines.

"No, that's not- wait, is that- oh. Yeah. Base eight. You were..." Trevor doesn't say "right" out loud.

Max, meanwhile, has discovered that applicants must be at least 18 years of age, and that there is an application process of unspecified duration. He frowns. It's still worth doing, but it won't solve the immediate problem of not having a place to put her tonight.

...he's not going to have to let an insomniac little girl have the run of his apartment at night, is he?

Sohng stops writing numbers when she has gotten to thirty-two, and then starts writing a glossary of other things, getting Victoria to write down words she has learned in English next to Sohng's own transliterations and translations. "Yes" and "no" and "person" and "sun" and "rain" and so on.

Max sends the Randi application to his home printer... which, as it happens, isn't on. So that'll take a minute or two longer, when he gets back, hopefully without Sohng in tow.

He shoots off an email to Liu- asking if there are any expensive materials in their budget that they could directly obtain funds by having multiplied or whatever for free.

And he asks the two linguists "Do either of you have space at home to keep her for the night?"

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