what in the longdark spitting-pit is that

[inourhead]

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)

Comments

[inourhead]

"Oh! Kuigao people buy food, yes. Money, suns."

[unblinkered]

"Right, okay, so..."

...And he realizes that this hardly helps the situation- he can't say he doesn't have enough money to buy her food, and even if he could explain that he'd rather not strain his wallet by offering to feed her... he's not sure she'd be sympathetic, considering her state of emergency.

Trevor picks this moment to come in the door, bearing several items. Half of a cinderblock, a stick, a large pair of fuzzy dice, and... a pizza? No, a pizza box containing several pizzas worth of uneaten crusts.

"You don't eat the crusts? Isn't that a waste?"

Trevor glares at Max. "No. I don't usually eat the crusts."

[inourhead]

Their extradimensional visitor investigates this largesse. She takes the cinderblock and the stick, seems bemused by the fuzzy dice, and peers into the pizza box and reaches for a crust but looks to Trevor as though for confirmation. "Food?"

[unblinkered]

Trevor shrugs. "Food, yes. Not good food, but... more good than mweelsroo food?"

[inourhead]

She deciphers this sentence, then says, "Yes. Water?"

[unblinkered]

"Gah- uh, right." He grabs a large cup of soda from a nearby desk and finishes it off, then steps just outside the door to clean and refill it in the water fountain. He hands the cup of water to Sohng.

[inourhead]

She takes it and pulls a little sponge out of her bag, dips it into the water, squeezes it until the small amount of water is evenly distributed in the sponge, then picks up a pizza crust and somewhat de-stales it by this mechanism. Munch munch.

"It kind of says something that she'd rather eat pizza crusts than do her thing to the cinder block," says Victoria. "Poor kid."

[unblinkered]

"So... that ought to be enough food for one night, right? She's all set to stay here, once you've got to go home for the night?"

Max grabs his bag and zips it up impatiently- and then realizes he'd probably benefit from staying as long as the two linguists are here. He puts it down on a sofa on the other side of the room.

[inourhead]

"I mean... yeah, I suppose," says Victoria. "There's pretty limited trouble she can get up to in here and she doesn't seem like a troublemaker."

[unblinkered]

That appears to be enough for Max. He takes a seat on the sofa and withdraws his laptop computer. He has some ideas for crowdsourcing get-rich quick schemes...

Trevor, meanwhile, opens to a blank page in his notebook. "So, the two-people thing... they keep switching off, right? There's probably something in the language that denotes which one of them is talking, or it'd get confusing. Do you think we should look for it in pronouns, verb conjugation... something else?"

[inourhead]

"I'd guess pronouns, but I'm not positive they'd bother to mark it," says Victoria. "Why should they, if it's a usual thing? People who know them well enough can probably tell and she never looks confused enough for there to be zero internal knowledge exchange so I bet with other people it doesn't tend to matter very much."

[unblinkered]

"I'm not sure I buy that," Trevor replies. "She bothered to correct that guy a couple times when he called her by the wrong name, and seemed pis- uh, upset about it- like she expected him to be able to tell. If it's not marked explicitly in the language, there might be some other cue we're missing. If there's people in her world paired together, who aren't so easily told apart, they'd need something like that..."

He flips through his notes, looking for something.

"...but then, we don't know whether it's even important to tell people apart, for them. We don't know how these pairs function, culturally. Hard to make assumptions."

[inourhead]

"And we only have one of them to interview. Almost anything could be a personal quirk."

Pyay noms pizza crusts.

[unblinkered]

Max appears to be figuring out how to make a post on Reddit- he'll pose his situation as an idle hypothetical, and take advantage of people trying to show off their cleverness. He is, however, stuck on the registration page.

Trevor puts down his notes. "Gah- okay, we need to... we've got the sounds and alphabet, that's good... where do we want to go from here, though? Usually I'd start asking about pronouns and useful prepositions, but we don't know if they even have grammar terminology, much less how to ask about how their parts of speech work."

[inourhead]

"I wish there was a way to get a good read on how much she's picking up by sheer immersion. She can probably understand more of what we're saying than she knows how to respond to, if nothing else from tone of voice," Victoria says.

[unblinkered]

"We... could try something like that- say sentences, ask her to try to translate into her language and draw a picture. We could get a read on what she's absorbed and collect some vocabulary, that way, although it'd be time-consuming."

[inourhead]

"I think she needs more vocabulary before that will be anything more than frustrating. I'm going to go get my laptop, Google image search is our friend." Victoria sweeps off to wherever she left her laptop.

[unblinkered]

"Ah- yeah, good idea. Same." Trevor heads off in the opposite direction, the same way he went to get his car.

Max looks up at... whichever one she is. She hasn't said much since the mweelsrow questioning, so he's going to guess... Pyay?

He stops himself from asking "You doing okay?", since she likely wouldn't parse it right- and settles on "Is the food good?"

[inourhead]

"Mm," she shrugs. "No good good."

[unblinkered]

"More good than mweelsrow food good?"

[inourhead]

She flips through the makeshift dictionary. "Yes," she concludes.

[unblinkered]

His thread- posted about a minute ago- has received so far a single commenter proposing they pass it off as street magic and busk for donations. Max decides this is unlikely to pay useful dividends, and that given Pyay's impatience with demonstrating mweelsrow it would hardly be a good fit anyway. He may, he muses, have to wait at least five minutes for commenters who'll think about the problem for five minutes.

...He wonders about her mouse supply. She discarded several dead ones, earlier, and he doesn't know whether that's normal and if she'll need to buy more mice on top of food, later.

"Uh, mouse..." Both of the linguists are gone- he's back to having to puzzle out how to phrase things. He doesn't know if she knows "die" or "new"...

"Your mice sleep, but... before, hours, maaso, mice... dead, mice..." He takes a scrap of paper and draws a mouse lying on its back with Xs in its eyes. He's not sure it's recognizable, so he draws a live mouse next to it for contrast.

[inourhead]

She puzzles over this drawing. "Oh," she finally says, "mm - tlaa - Pyay muilsroo -" She is clearly frustrated by her lack of words; finally she picks up two pizza crusts, sets them down, and pokes them both with the smallest bit of fingertip she can. She flinches back after doing something to them - one of them starts to steam gently with the moisture she swapped in from the sponge, suddenly heated, and the other acquires subtle condensation. She points at them. "English, English?"

[unblinkered]

Max is befuddled by this- he notes that mweelsrow- probably 'muilsroo' by the transliteration of the alphabet lying on the table- does heat, in what appears to be defiance of one of the laws of thermodynamics. He's not sure what this has to do with his question, but he points at the crusts and labels them "hot" and "cold" respectively.

[inourhead]

"Hot, cold," she says, mangling the pronunciation. Write, write - her handwriting is different, though the alphabet is strange enough that it would be easy to overlook. "Yes. Uh -" She draws a stick-girl up a tree and a nasty monster, keeping her treed. She points at the picture. "And..." She draws a hand, with a leaf in it. Arrow goes from tree to leaf. "Hot!" She traces the arrow, repeating "hot", then draws a leaf on fire. "Hot tlaa. Cold -" She taps the tree. "Mouse mouse mouse cold -" She tilts her head, squints her eyes shut, lets her tongue loll out. "Pyay cold! Cold mouse, Pyay not cold. Mouse -" Miming of deadness. "Tlaa hot -" Miming of deadness.