why is there a word for that | Glowfic Constellation

unmarred

"He saw that you were upset," Mark corrects.

abeance

Aurin mulls that over, disconcerted.

unmarred

"It's possible he would've come around even so. I can assume from your example that most dragons would be upset to have their language rearranged, and he'd care about that even without the personal connection. But the agreement they come to is going to look like this: Draconic is blatantly stupid and evil, but it's not worth it to change how it works for everyone if you hate the idea that much, and changing how it works for Mial alone is an acceptable alternative. At which point it really does become Mial's problem to be dealt with at Mial's discretion, and Milo will be content to help."

middlingalong

Linyabel Miriat ⍟ "Linya"

"I guess I can live with that," says Aurin.

isthisart

"Good. I would begin to have opinions about it if potentially risky and certainly nonconsensual mind-altering somethingorother was more clearly on the table than 'Milo had an immediate dramatic reaction'."

unmarred

abeance

Jann sits with his alts.

"So tell me about ourselves," he says.

His alts begin to catch him up on the state of the art of Ivans. And teach him to play their most recent card game.

Their conversation meanders. It comes up in conversation that Jann is the only single one. It is unspoken but understood that if there were another single one they'd be attempting to surreptitiously sneak off and cheat on their mutual absence of girlfriend, but this is not the case and none of them is too broken up about it. Jann and Ivan explain horses to Aurin. Ivan explains spaceships to Jann and Aurin. Jann explains to Aurin how his princess-napping dragons work and Aurin explains to Jann how non-princess-napping dragons work. Aurin explains to Jann and Ivan the curlicues of vocabulary that screw over Mial and that Milo has proposed throwing out the entire language to deal with - "siad" versus "shren", the exclusive turn of "siaddaki", etcetera. They discuss their respective tastes in olives, music, brunettes, and socks. Jann has his sword with him and shows it off.

thisvorlunatic

And eventually, Miles comes downstairs.

"The league is ready to rejoin civilized company," he reports.

abeance

Jann hops up and goes to fetch Milo.

middlingalong

Ivan meanders back to the topic of Draconic, meanwhile. "So when you say I can't speak Draconic you obviously don't mean I can't learn words from it. They don't mix and match right?"

"They don't mix and match like a regular language, anyway," says Aurin.

"So you can't - take them apart for suffixes? You wouldn't understand if I did it?"

"I mean, I'd understand. It's a thing you'd be doing in English, with loanwords, and I speak English, it's not going to be gibberish if you're doing it in some sensible fashion."

abeance

Down comes Jann, carrying Milo and followed by Mial and Stalas.

middlingalong

"So I don't get it," says Ivan, "how the language is constraining anything to speak of, if you'd understand it perfectly well if I said something like - I have what, three words to work with here - shrennaki."

Aurin startles rather as though someone has popped a balloon inside his chest.

thisvorlunatic

Mial claps both hands over his mouth, wide-eyed, and makes a sort of quiet strangled shrieking sound.

unmarred

"You don't go in for bloody half-measures, do you?" exclaims Mark, sounding for once in his life not at all charmed by an Ivan-utterance.

middlingalong

"What the - what?" says Ivan. "What'd I say?"

"You know exactly what you said!" says Aurin, sounding vaguely faint. "You couldn't have gotten that over with while he was upstairs?"

"Why didn't you teach me how to say anything else in Draconic then?"

"I didn't know you were going to do that! It would never have occurred to me!"

abeance

Jann looks highly uncomfortable. He puts Milo in a chair.

thisvorlunatic

Mial is still frozen, his initial sounds of distress trailing off into a quiet keening. His hands creep up to cover his face and he sinks to the floor and curls up in a little ball and cries.

unmarred

"For fuck's sake," says Mark. He gets up and goes over to Mial and sits on the floor next to him and hugs him.

thisvorlunatic

Linyabel Miriat ⍟ "Linya"

Mial shudders.

"I don't know what's going on but I'm very alarmed about it," says Miles.

isthisart

"I was not listening closely enough to the conversation to know what the offending word even supposedly means."

middlingalong

"Don't bloody say it again," says Aurin to Ivan. "It doesn't. Mean anything. He just wants it to."

thisvorlunatic

Mial shrieks very loudly with some combination of anger and despair.

middlingalong

"I don't understand how this never occurred to anyone before," says Ivan. "I'm sorry!"

Aurin drops his head into his hands and groans.

unmarred

Mark hugs Mial and pets his back soothingly.

"I know what it means and I know you know what it means, all right?" he murmurs. "And we could get it through to all your alts without much trouble. That's a decent start right there. H'sh."

thisvorlunatic