Which is why Vavel returns home to find a strange girl passed out on his futon.

She looks grimy enough that this is either cosplay or very concerning. Either way, she should probably be somewhere else.

Shake.

OH NO YOU DON'T Matoka is fast at getting to the other side of a room wait okay orient. This is a vision that is a figure they are dressed in ... clothes that don't need to exist outside of visions where they're made of textiles and get covered in dirt.

They have a big, visible soul gem, attached to their lapel.

Is this the closest thing to a full magical girl she has yet seen?

She weighs things for an instant more and then bows. 

!!??

He only wanted to wake her up and allocate her elsewhere, not give her a heart attack!

"Are you okay?"

She does not understand what the figure is saying.

It's best to stay calm because doing the opposite can make visions go worse. 

"Curiosity about decision-making, great one," she says, her voice shaking a lot.

The language gap is mutual!

Wait, hold on. He recognises that last honorific. Kind of?

There are a few thousand or myriad people who speak Mitakiharan natively, mostly old people in rural former Mitakihara. With the radio and textnet, most of the friends you talk to don't know Mitakiharan, so there's not much point in retaining it.

There are also a few thousand or myriad people who can read liturgical Mitakiharan. Pink ribbon has since been supplanted as ideology and it was always a little impractical.

Liturgical Mitakiharan is used primarily for the three books of Huella Maki Matoka Makika. It is not suited for use in conversation, because HMMM is written entirely in a formal and poetic register. Trying to order from a cafeteria in it would sound ridiculous. A few hundred people can hold a conversation in it, if for some reason they wanted to do that.

Exactly one person on this planet can rattle off liturgical Mitakiharan as fast as a rocket while sounding like a country bumpkin and her name is Matoka.

He replays it in his head and yes that is liturgical Mitakiharan. Something, uh, decisiontheory, addressed to Matoka. He knows a lot of the wishes but that was either nonstandard or he didn't catch it.

He doesn't really want to deal with this. "Unquote," he says. 

And maybe for a little amusement, he says, uh, "ending the vision" in Mitakiharan. 

She did something wrong. / Her body is on a boat and it would be convenient to go back.

"I understand," she says.

Nothing happens.

Things are still ok?

Now that he was expecting it it's easier to catch the sentence. Interesting choice of first person pronoun, it took him a second.

Sigh.

"Unquote," he says, clearly, "ending the vision", "do you know where you are \q", "which one is your place".

"I would prefer to speak with you in Standard \meta"

He doesn't want to be fucked with and also he can see that heart rate.

Matoka continues to only catch about half of what the figure is saying. They say half a sentence about a vision ending, and then a question, but she can't understand the rest. Even the parts she does understand are quite difficult; the figure is talking like they're from a distant village. It makes sense, there weren't any magical girls in her village.

"My body is on the boat," should she say it - yes, it feels safe - "being attacked by a witch. My soul is here."

Still no Standard, and while he's having trouble understanding. "Witch" comes through loud and clear but all Vavel can really get is that it has not been communicated to him that she understands that she's in Vavel's house.

"please bring me talking more slow," he says. That should help with the language barrier. 

"sitting down," he says, motioning towards the futon. She's spent this conversation kind of in the corner scanning for escape routes and he feels bad even though he's somewhat confused and annoyed here. "next," liturgical Mitakiharan doesn't have words for modern technology, "asking the", liturgical Mitakiharan does not have a word for Modernity, "local lord for saving you".

(He was kind of tempted to use "Goddess" for Modernity but while connotationally better it would be confusing wrt to the causal chains involved. This language makes poetic religious metaphor far too easy.)

Matoka sits down on the floor and kind of curls into a ball. 

She is somewhat curious about what a magical girl / vision entity considers a lord.

"For help with the witch?" she says, pronouncing each word slowly as was requested. 

Vavel is too confused to aid with this. Witches are not real, and possibly he could reassure about that, though there's enough of a language gap that he doesn't really understand what the girl is trying to communicate, and there are people better at psychological model formation who could place more accurate bids on this.

"having doubt and can't save you. next, the local lord is saving you more."

He starts tapping into a terminal to file an incident report. 

Hey, this is a fun one! 

So, she isn't speaking in or responding to Standard after an unquote, right? Only liturgical Mitakiharan? 

As far as I can tell.

"which one are you speaking?" he asks.

Um. "My name is Matoka," she says. 

Huh.

Y'know, if that's what it sounds like, this is actually kind of a standard pattern, people thinking they're Matoka. He can almost imagine a story of a girl introjecting a Matoka fictive from reading too much HMMM and that headmate having amnesia and then being extremely confused by everything in Tetratopia until she finds a house that left its door unlocked. Pieces of that story don't make sense, so that definitely didn't happen, but it's schematic.  

Rephrase: "which one of speech are you speaking?"

"I'm speaking and I'm saying this sentence?" says Matoka. 

"you'llbepaid"

Either no other languages or I am unable to communicate the question.

Do you know her ID? Was messaging us your idea or hers? Can we bill this to your voucher if we find it spurious?

I don't offhand and 90% asking won't get anything useful.

My idea.

Yes.

If Tetratopia was infinitely wealthy, they'd have a liturgical Mitakiharan interpreter on the first response. But that's probably not worth it at this level of information; it would be much cheaper to even hire one starting tomorrow.

There does happen to be one of the few people who can speak it nearby in City 00, though.

Would you be willing to interpret liturgical Mitakiharan for initial response?

For three megacredits prorated, and warning that I'm effectively level two.