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

[unblinkered]

Max shrugs and goes to check his Reddit thread.

"Prepositions, prepositions. It'll make it an order of magnitude easier to talk about things if we can talk about relationships between them. In, under, on, before..." Trevor supplies.

"Might want to stick 'clip art' in your search, cut away details that'll distract her from identifying the thing you're trying to show?" Max adds, hearing that. Trevor takes a deep breath.

[inourhead]

"We don't know much about how familiar she is with stylization. Stick figures translate, apparently, but clip art might be confusing in a completely different way," Victoria says. "The blocky colors, for instance, or things like - most grapes aren't purple and a lot of diamonds aren't diamond-shaped, that sort of thing is visual shorthand she won't have. I'll see what I can find in the way of - colors, and then we can do prepositions with colored dots." Typety typety.

[unblinkered]

Trevor digs around in a box for some markers- he finds yellow, orange, green, pink, and light blue highlighters, a red pen, and a blue pen. He draws a row of colored circles, and then transcribes the pronunciations of their names in the the Nlaaki alphabet as labels. Some don't quite fit- the right vowels aren't available.

It's an awkward transcription, and Trevor gets frustrated. He eventually sees Victoria pulling up colors on her laptop, and hastily crumples the paper. She can handle this.

[inourhead]

Sohng's attention bounces as directed. She writes her own approximation of the sounds, and her own translation (she obligingly teaches the linguists how to name colors in Nlaaki likewise).

Then Victoria collects a little cardboard box that once held chalk and some of Trevor's highlighters. She teaches Sohng the word "box" and gets to work on prepositions: the green one and the red one are next to each other. The green one is in the box. The blue one is on the box. The pink one is next to the box. The box is under the blue one.

Sohng writes and nods.

[unblinkered]

Trevor asks for and takes down the Nlaaki words for these, and suggests trying to figure out verb tenses, if applicable.

Max, meanwhile, likes a suggestion that has been provided regarding the money issue- rather obvious, but probably easy to do. Turning objects into gold and pawning them- if she could make an entire apple peanut-y with a single peanut, it'd likely be even easier to do with a simple elemental material like gold. He'll have to investigate, later, whether there's any limitation that would prevent this.

[inourhead]

Sohng is not yet schooled enough in English to have any hope of following a Reddit thread, so she can produce no comment.

Eventually all the basic prepositions have been added to her glossary.

[unblinkered]

Max passes the time by reading up on sleep. As he suspected, sleep doesn't actually increase the body's available energy, but rather regulates a number of metabolic and mental processes.

Which... does not actually make it less confusing to Max that sleep can be offloaded onto a mouse. Surely mouse sleep differs enough from human sleep for the transfer of "sleepiness" to be considerably asymmetrical? And it can't just be offloading the chemical signals telling the body it's tired- somehow the processes of sleep are actually being done, presumably. He gives Sohng a funny look from across the room.

Trevor quizzes Sohng on some simple pronouns, and learns 'sin' and 'mri'. "D'you think they distinguish between subject and object pronouns?" he asks Victoria.

[inourhead]

"We can find out. Unless she's deliberately simplifying everything for us and that's a simplification it would occur to her to make," says Victoria. And she starts brainstorming a list of little skits to act out with their small available cast of people and verbs in order to elicit that kind of distinction.

[unblinkered]

In the course of these skits, they discover that Sohng uses a different pronoun to refer to the group of Victoria, Trevor, and Max than she uses to refer to Victoria and Trevor alone. After some confusion with regard to the referent of "you" when asking Sohng about Sohng and Pyay together, they nail down the dual numbered pronoun.

[inourhead]

"Old English had dual pronouns," says Victoria chattily. "In the first and second person. If it's common to have two people in one body no wonder they'd need it in Nlaaki."

[unblinkered]

Trevor draws a table of Nlaaki pronouns next to their English counterparts, indicating which numbers and cases are exclusive to each language for Sohng to look over. Max gets up and peeks at the table.

"No gendered pronouns, huh? Did you establish if they have gender the way we do?" he asks the linguists.

[inourhead]

"Do you mean did we establish if they mark it in language or did we establish if they have genders? She seems happy to use the same third-person pronouns for all of us."

[unblinkered]

"More... is she going to understand where you have that gender column, what we're dividing 'he' and 'she' based on? Since they don't have it marked... I mean, they still probably have it, I'm just checking."

"We'll handle the 'just checking', thanks," Trevor replies, scrutinizing his table.

[inourhead]

Sohng chooses this moment to helpfully point at everyone in turn: "She. He, he. She." Victoria, Trevor, Max, herself. "Yes?"

They did go over this with Gloria earlier.

[unblinkered]

"Ah! Uh, okay. Never mind, then." Max, after looking over some of the notes on Nlaaki, heads back to his laptop.

Trevor looks up at a clock on the wall, and turns to Victoria. "S'past office hours. I'll probably be staying late, but when's your girlfriend expecting you back?"

[inourhead]

"Oh, good point, I should probably get going in the next ten, fifteen minutes," sighs Victoria. "We're supposed to watch The Wire together."

[unblinkered]

Max looks up. "You- Trevor- you're going to be in your car, if she needs anything tonight?"

"I'm going to be in my car, and I'm going to be asleep, and if she wakes me up I'm not going to be happy."

Max gets up and points out the window to show Sohng Trevor's car. "Trevor sleeps in that car. If you need..." He's not sure if she knows 'need', yet, it's come up a few times...

"Gh- you just told her- why would...!" Trevor sighs. "Never mind. Fine."

[inourhead]

Sohng doesn't seem to fully understand, anyway. Blink, blink.

Victoria starts collecting her belongings.

[unblinkered]

Max puts away his things, too. He's not sure about leaving the girl/s behind for the night- they're his only lead on a new and upsetting disturbance in the natural order of things- but he's not keen on sharing his less-than-ample apartment space, and she probably won't disappear during the night.

"Sohng and Pyay alone... nine or ten hours? ...Six maaso. Yes?"

[inourhead]

She shrugs. "Yes. Mm - water - water water water and -" Vague gesture, embarrassed expression.

[unblinkered]

"...Oh." He leads her into the hallway and shows her the water fountain, and then follows the signs to a single-occupant restroom. He... doesn't know if she'll understand how Earth's facilities work, but... this is the place for it. He opens the door and gestures at the small room, hoping she'll understand what it's for.

[inourhead]

She has to stare at it for a little while, but eventually she nods.

[unblinkered]

Rrrright. He nods in return, and points the way back to the linguistics commons. And then... heads downstairs and out the door. He'll worry about long-term plans for her later. For now, home and sleep.

...And calling in sick for tomorrow. First time he'll have to make use of a substitute teacher for his own class. He grimaces- he didn't prepare anything, and he knows from experience how annoying that'll be for his stand-in.

[inourhead]

And the girl(s) go back and park with their English notes to study for the night.