Mountain, meet Endbringer | Glowfic Constellation

"It might be best if you two continued this conversation inside?" Alexandria asks.

"Sure. But I'm itching to do something useful sooner or later after I lost most of that island."

"You have saved countless lives and destruction would have been far worse without you." She starts leading them in and through the various scans and passwords.

"Some people's powers are to be very good at creating technology," Harry explains. "Those people are called Tinkers, and they are generally useful."

"Technology..." She turns the word over, attempting to extract more meaning for a moment, then shrugs.

"But what I mean is I feel the stones around me on an immediate and visceral level. Preventing that monster from tearing everything to pieces was like watching someone swing a hammer down on your arm, over and over, and you can only block half of the blows."

She winces just remembering it. "I don't regret it, of course, I'm just trying to explain why I want to build something so badly.

Harry furrows his brows. Alexandria translates some of that, and Harry's power fills the rest in and he translates it back to Alexandria herself.

"Technology is things people make that would not exist without people," Harry supplies, finally.

"And I understand your desire to build something. We have found you a nice spot to create a mountain," Alexandria says.

"Good. But to figure out my language, should I just keep talking or should I say specific things?"

"I will need to take notes while we talk, and ask you to write some things down," Harry explains.

That same slightly ragged piece of paper and pencil appears out of a slot on her back. She writes. "Well, here's the alphabet." It has sixteen letters, none of them taking more than two strokes to write.

Harry asks questions about how each letter's pronounced, about the presence of accents, and how words are formed from the alphabet.

Her answers are entirely consistent with a working language that wasn't made up on the spot.

That is good! Not that he'd been expecting something like that, but it is still reassuring.

He asks her to say things in her language, and write the things she's said, and he tries to repeat them and change them around some, and this can in fact take quite a while. Harry seems to like his job.

There will be food available when they need food.

She talks and writes and explains and eats and solicits intermittent English practice during all this.

There's a bit of a talent for languages there, probably from knowing seven (and a half, depending on if runes count) reasonably well already, but she won't be writing the Great American Novel any time soon.

That is interesting! Though without a power like his or Alexandria's, learning a language in one day is probably still infeasible.

Most of the notes will be sent to a computer anyway to create something that can automatically translate stuff (and be turned off when Mountain wants to speak English and practice, naturally).

Computers sound fascinating. She compares them to a "Hundred-layer-deep golem."

Well, that's not a bad comparison!

Eventually Harry grabs a book in English and starts asking how certain sentences there would be rendered in her language. Not everything can be divined based on conversation and a parahuman linguist's intuition.

This language apparently has lots of room for syntactic ambiguity. She writes two sometimes quite different versions of most sentences longer than five words. (Or maybe she's just not all that good at English yet.)

Well, with enough sentences and books Harry will be able to determine which is it, and hopefully help some with her English.

Mostly the second thing, apparently.

Okay, that's easier to help with! Apparently the active part of his power is having an easier time being understood, so if he repeats some sentences with the right emphasis most ambiguity problems should go away.

"English feels like four different languages smushed together... Valecana," (the language he's currently in the process of decoding,) "hates loanwords."

"Yes, English has many loaned words. Isn't there cultural coevolution of languages where you're from?"

"Yes, but Valecana is new as languages go, a few hundred years ago King Lica invented it and insisted all his ministers learn it. It was popular with everyone else because it was the 'Royal Tongue' and a few years later he had schools teach only in Valecana. Krellian gave us a few words like gata" (sickness) "But mostly just stopped existing."

"Most invented languages here are either from fictional universes, very old, or spoken by very few people. At one point people tried creating a 'universal' language to replace English as a language without a country but that project didn't work." He looks pretty disappointed about this fact.

"Royals of Graya are close to all-powerful, and even then it took a long time for it to stick. It probably wouldn't have if he wasn't also regarded as an administrative genius."