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]

That, uh...

For a moment, he thought, hm, maybe the reason they think it's flat and the reason they don't have day and night are the same, maybe their planet's spin is in sync with their orbit, like the moon, and so the world seems to "stop" at an icy boundary...

But, nope. Nothing so simple. Some kind of binary star system thing...? Or...

Oh, they're here. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. Conklin Hall. That's... not really what they're looking for, is it? They might be able to point them in the right direction, at least. There's got to be some linguists around. More resources than a middle school, at any rate.

Automatic doors open.

[inourhead]

Behold, a secretary-type.

"Can I help you?" the secretary-type inquires.

[unblinkered]

"I... yes. Do you have a directory of... I'm looking for someone here who's... I have someone here who doesn't speak English, but not- not Spanish or Portuguese- and we're looking for a... someone who studies linguistics, more generally. Are we in the wrong place?"

[inourhead]

"Yeah, the linguists are two doors down." The secretary-type points. "I think on the third floor."

[unblinkered]

Oh, that's good.

He leads her up the stairs- and, in the spirit of language learning, points out "stairs" and "door" on the way up.

"Song- linguists study words. Study Nloggy, teach English."

[inourhead]

Sohng - who has apparently quietly dried the damp notes on something when he wasn't looking - writes this down.

[unblinkered]

He notices. Song English, Pyay mweelsrow... they seem to switch off fairly frequently. He starts wondering how it works, in there, how they can be in sync yet maintain individual personalities.

...Insofar as they have individual personalities. Do they? He hasn't been trying to notice for very long. Song is maybe more relaxed and agreeable, Pyay maybe more focused and intense? He could just be seeing patterns where none exist.

There's a door marked "Linguistics Graduate Commons", two doors down from the stairs. He knocks.

[inourhead]

Someone who's either a young professor or a very run-down grad student opens the door. "Hi?"

[unblinkered]

"Hi! I, uh... have someone here who speaks a language, that..."

It strikes him that "a language we don't know" is marginally less likely to be immediately captivating to linguistics researchers than "a physics we don't know" was to physicists. How to get a foot in the door...?

"She... let's just start with... I don't know where on Earth it's from, and, let's say I need help identifying it."

[inourhead]

"Ooh. Okay, fun. Has she got any English?" she inquires. "Have you figured out anything about how it's structured, what sounds are in it...? Hey, Trevor, over here!"

[unblinkered]

"Uh, I haven't, analyzed it, no. I know a few words, but mainly I've been... just trying to teach her English, since I don't think there's anyone else around to speak... uh, she calls it 'Nloggy'. There's... I guess more oohs and ees-"

Trevor gets up from his seat, finishing off a glass of water. Short, round, pushes some of his too much hair out of his face.

"Yeah, yeah, I heard... look, just have her talk for a bit, I can probably get an idea of the language family and look it up from there."

Max looks at him skeptically. "Sure. Um. She hasn't said much in it since she realized no one else speaks it here, but... Song, you say Nloggy words?"

[inourhead]

Sohng doesn't immediately think of anything to say, but then shrugs and starts talking, slowly and clearly.

The first linguist fumbles for a little tape recorder belatedly.

When Sohng stops talking and blinks at them:

"I have no idea what that was. No clue whatever. Agglutinating, maybe? I think she was doing vowel length?"

[unblinkered]

Trevor is flipping through a pair of books. "No, it was... I've got it, it sounded like... was it...?"

Max steps over and closes one of his books.

"Hey! The fu- the he- what are you doing?"

"You won't find it in there. Assuming those books are all about languages from Earth, anyway. My problem is that she's a magic wizard from another dimension."

Trevor wordlessly stares at him with disbelief and disgust, like he'd just thrown up on the carpet in front of him.

[inourhead]

"Pull the other one," snorts Trevor's colleague. "Oh, I get it, it's a conlang, she memorized a few paragraphs of - or is it even, is it just gibberish? Where's the camera? You were hoping we'd say it was fucking Turkish and then you could point and laugh?"

[unblinkered]

Trever groans. "What she said. Get the fu- get out. We're not a da- dang joke."

Max grimaces. This was... really the outcome he should have expected. Should've led with the demonstration... he can salvage this.

"No, it's... god, that's what you'd think, right. Should've thought of that. Um..."

A convenience of doing this in a school: an abundance of miscellaneous office supplies. He grabs a black and red pen lying on a table, and hands them to Sohng. "Pyay- mweelsrow?"

[inourhead]

She rolls her eyes. She takes the pens. They are now each other's colors.

[unblinkered]

He can imagine it might be tiresome to have to, say, do jumping jacks in front of everyone you meet in order to prove you're a wizard in the Land of People Who Can't Do Jumping Jacks, but he doesn't really have any other ideas for her.

Trevor gets up and snatches the pens from Pyay. He looks at them closely- they're his pens, he recognizes the logos, he knows that this pen ought not to be red, he says "What the shi- what the... how on earth?!", as might be expected.

[inourhead]

"What'd she do?" asks Trevor's colleague Victoria. "Wh- how did she do that? What does mweelsrow mean?"

[unblinkered]

"Mweelsrow's magic. It's the magic thing she does. Which is why I said she's a wizard."

Trevor sputters something not quite words, approximately furious.

"The magic wizard part isn't your problem, I brought her to the physics department for that. That's... the other dimension thing, is why I'm here. Because nobody knows her language. So I can't just ask about the magic, which is frustrating."

[inourhead]

"Okay, wow," says Victoria, and then, because that doesn't seem to suffice, "okay, wow. Okay. What do you already have on her language besides 'mweelsrow' - anything? What's her name?"

"Name Pyay," says Pyay, leaving the complexities to Max.

[unblinkered]

"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."

[inourhead]

"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.

[unblinkered]

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.

[inourhead]

"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.

[unblinkered]

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."