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Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.
Isabella summons Cam
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kaolinandbone
"No. I'm saying that it looks like you took west and east and changed which direction they were pointing."
She points at where England is on the map.
"This island is clearly Grand Victoria, but that would place Ulvenwald to the east. That coast is clearly the mainland with Mori." Her finger slides across the pacific to North America. "And here's Ulvenwald, but it's inexplicably to the west. Is this what the rest of the continent looks like? It's enormous!"
She points at where England is on the map.
"This island is clearly Grand Victoria, but that would place Ulvenwald to the east. That coast is clearly the mainland with Mori." Her finger slides across the pacific to North America. "And here's Ulvenwald, but it's inexplicably to the west. Is this what the rest of the continent looks like? It's enormous!"
from_scratch
"This is a picture of my Earth. If this is some kind of mirror Earth, that's... weird." The picture winks out; he fiddles with some settings in the image's metadata; the Earth reappears, flipped horizontally. "That look more familiar?"
kaolinandbone
"That looks more correct to me, but the planet's still spinning the wrong direction. The sun rises in the west."
from_scratch
"What an interesting definition of 'west'." He switches the direction of rotation too.
kaolinandbone
"And you're saying the sun rises in the east? How odd."
Lioncourt shrugs with a smile.
"I suppose it's fairly arbitrary which word you use to refer to the direction, so long as you're consistent."
Lioncourt shrugs with a smile.
"I suppose it's fairly arbitrary which word you use to refer to the direction, so long as you're consistent."
from_scratch
"Yeah. We probably wouldn't even have this translation difficulty if your language weren't apparently related to some I already speak, I'd just translate your 'west' as whatever local word for where the sun rises. But, no, 'nishi'."
kaolinandbone
"Your world has languages close enough to mine to prove inconvenient? ... Wait, I should have asked this question first. How are you able to understand me in the first place?"
from_scratch
"Oh, summoned daeva get summoner languages instantly on appearing. Very convenient, prevents translation difficulties where the summoner is speaking German and the demon is trying to speak Arabic."
kaolinandbone
"Both of which I have never heard of, so go on: Your world has languages that are similar to mine?"
from_scratch
"This one we're speaking now is like a cross between Japanese, Latin, and I think maybe Gaelic but I have very little Gaelic so I couldn't say for sure."
kaolinandbone
"This language is Victorian. I know one other, which is Old Lupinian, but I'm hardly fluent in it. In Mori they speak Moritic, and New Lupinian is a completely different language from the Old Lupinian. I have no idea what they use in Ulvenwald. It's most likely Victorian."
from_scratch
"Yeah, your Old Lupinian is like a weird dialect of Ancient Greece. ...Do you happen to know where these languages are from, and what other languages they're related to? Locally?"
kaolinandbone
Isabella shakes her head. "Alas, I am not an expert on etymology or linguistics."
from_scratch
Cam points at Mirror Japan. "This is where Japanese is from, Gaelic would be from here or here," Scotland and Ireland "depending on the kind, and Latin is a dead language out of here," he points at Italy. "Greece is here."
kaolinandbone
"Well, Victorian being descended from Gaelic and Latin seems reasonable, but Japanese is in what we would call Oceania, which doesn't make much sense to me at all. Old Lupinian as a greek-analogue seems likely though, since you're pointing at the right general area there."
from_scratch
"Victorian is substantially more Japanese than it is anything else, although it's inherited enough Latin grammar to be even worse than Japanese in that department and enough Gaelic to be really awkward to pronounce."
kaolinandbone
"And yet Japan is the furthest away of any of the locations you have pointed out to me. It's quite a puzzle."
from_scratch
"Yeah, weird. Can you identify languages you don't speak, if you hear them? I could give samples of a few of mine and you could see what they sound like to you."
kaolinandbone
"I've heard a number of languages on the docks of Mark and other places in the world. Feel free, though I can't promise I'll recognize everything."
from_scratch
Cam produces samples of German and English and Mandarin and Spanish and French and Finnish.
kaolinandbone
Isabella identifies the cluster of Romance languages as all sounding vaguely like various dialects of Moritic. Mandarin gets a raised eyebrow and a 'That sounds sort of like the Church language.' Finnish appears to exist in roughly the same location as in Cam's world.
kaolinandbone
Arabic is similar to New Lupinian. Cantonese and Tagalog get shakes of Isabella's head after a few minutes' listening. Hindi is recognizably similar to something Isabella's heard before, but she can't place where she's heard it.
from_scratch
"Very hit and miss. So you've got airships but they don't go that far, there's unmapped portions of the planet?"
kaolinandbone
"There are unmapped portions of the planet. Victorian airships are fast and have a maximum operating range of roughly four thousand kilometers, but have the unfortunate limitation of requiring mooring masts to anchor safely. Most colonies are set up first by the navy and then kept supplied by air. Also, Mori is in a state of cold war with Victoria and is between them and the continent's interior. They may have a better idea of what exactly is in Oceania."