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]

"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.

[unblinkered]

Max studies these drawings. So... if he understands how heat works correctly, muilsroo seems to be following conservation of energy properly, here. He's not sure if that's in contrast to it being violated with the sleep thing, or if sleepiness isn't technically a lack of energy, and talking about sleep in terms of energy is an idiom he hasn't examined properly. Max decides he needs to go for a wiki walk on the subject of sleep sometime soon.

But... yes, she can set a leaf on fire by stealing all the heat from a large object... instead of just swapping their "temperature", it's actually moving the energy. So... she warmed up by killing off her mice, stealing their heat and freezing them to death? It seems kind of wasteful, but he nods with understanding anyway.

[inourhead]

She flips through the dictionary. "Two, three mouse -" She taps his alive-mouse picture. "And, Pyay cold, muilsroo cold mouse, Pyay no cold, mouse cold, mouse -" Taps dead-mouse picture. "And one, two mouse -" alive-picture tap tap.

[unblinkered]

So... the more mice she distributes the cold across, the less chance they have of dying? Unless... she's using "two" and "three" to refer to specific mice, not saying "two or three mice", as an approximation? He's not sure what she's trying to point out, but he nods in agreement.

More interesting is that muilsroo appears to be a free heat pump- creating heat differentials of arbitrary sizes at no cost. Either it circumvents entropy- god, he hopes that's the case- or it's drawing on a power source that can transmit over distance and across the boundaries between universes. The latter, he imagines, might help the physicists track down Kweengow, unless the power source is no closer to Kweengow- or, Kuigao- than it is to Earth. Both options are encouraging.

"Muilsroo cold..." he trails off. He's not sure how to ask about it, but... why take heat from all those mice? Why not from the ground, or the air, or... just a single mouse? He doesn't recall her dead mice being at absolute zero- a limit on how much heat can be transferred from something?

Trevor comes back, toting what appears to be an older desktop computer and monitor. He sets them on a desk and starts wordlessly plugging them in.

"No laptop?"

"No laptop."

[inourhead]

Victoria appears shortly afterwards with a laptop. "I miss anything?" she asks.

[unblinkered]

"Discovered that her magic thing might violate the second law of thermodynamics, but... that's for the people at the physics department to worry about. She knows the word 'dead' now, maybe?"

[inourhead]

"Charming," says Victoria. She plugs in the laptop and opens it up. "Anybody have suggestions on where to start with the google image search vocabulary expansion project?"

[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.