"Ummmmm.  Umm.  If you're right about everything, then the adults who told me I would hate it aren't real, because the reason they would know that is because of astrology.  But if you're wrong then nothing is wrong with my head.  Or someone is hurting me on purpose and it wouldn't matter."

"Well, some people do believe in astrology," he sighs. "Do you know how you would have teleported here? If you weren't wrong about anything at all."

"Ummm.  I remember everyone always telling me that monsters weren't real - unless scientists make them, but those would really just be weird animals and not want to hurt me any more than regular animals would - but maybe one escaped from this world and started bringing people back here."

"Is there being other worlds a thing you knew about?"

"No..."

"It's not something I knew about either. So either there are new things neither of us knew about going on, or basically the thing I think is happening is the thing happening."

"Is there a way to get a superhero to try and fix me?"

"I'm not sure exactly how to do that. I would be able to figure it out at h- in Canada but I'm not sure how here. It's not really DDSI's job. But I bet it can happen, it'll just take a bit because I'm new here and still working on Japanese."

"I hope your mother comes home soon."

"Yeah. I hope so too. ...if you wanna learn Japanese I can get you started with the alphabets."

"Yes please."

He has by now opened a box with notebooks in it and finds a blank one for her. "Japanese has three alphabets, kind of, but none of them are alphabets with one letter per sound like how English has. Instead there's kana - hiragana and katakana, it's not really like capital and lowercase letters but it's more like that than it's like anything else - and each one of those is a syllable. Or N. Which you pronounce kind of longways like it's a syllable, nn. Kanji you can save for later." While he is explaining this he is writing out a hiragana chart, with English consonants for each column and vowels for each row. "There are only five vowels and they are always pronounced the same. A, e, i, o, u. But sometimes it matters how long you hold them out for. Like ie is 'house' and iie is 'no'. This chart is all the basic symbols. But if you want to write something with a G sound you start with the K column one, and then you add a little quote mark sort of thing, like this," he writes ひらがな above the chart and points at the が. "Same with making D out of T, and Z out of S. And also for some reason B out of H. If you do a degree symbol instead, like a tiny circle, that makes P out of H." The chart is almost full. "And there's no 'ti', instead it's 'chi', and there's no 'si', it's shi', and both of those are J if you do the quote mark, and there's no 'tu', it's 'tsu' and that should turn into dzu but I think it's basically just zu the same as if you do it to su. And there's no hu, it's fu. ...am I going too fast?"

"Ummmmm.  Not if you don't say more things now."  She starts copying the chart, with neat and very slow writing, flipping back and forth between the reference and her page.

"Iiit also matters which order and direction you write the lines in for some reason, and I... don't know if that changes if you're left handed."

"Oh."  She tears out her page, collects all the paper fuzzies from inside the spiral, and folds it into quarters before starting over.  "I can learn the right-handed order with my left hand?"

"I'll draw in the arrows and the little numbers for you." He does this, though sometimes he has to stop and think about it and write a character entire on the back of her torn-out scrap.

"Thank you."  Copy copy coppppyyyyy cooooooooooopy.

"Let me know when you are ready for more stuff." He goes back to his copy of Japanese Harry Potter.

She's there a while, and sometimes she messes up and has to very delicately erase a bit, and it's hard because the wire binding is on the left side of the paper, right where her hand wants to go, instead of the top.  And then even after all that, she doesn't feel like she really knows it, so she starts a third one.  At least for this one she can tear out her previous attempt for easier reference, although it doesn't have the arrows and numbers.  ...She supposes she could also copy the arrows and numbers onto it; she does that.

And once the new chart is neat and done, she goes to stand next to Haru with her hand raised.

"...what?"

"I'm ready for more information about Japanese."

"Oh, okay. So sometimes you have to make combination letters, like how in English T-H is 'th' and not 'tuh-huh'. And you do that like so -" He writes and says as he writes "cha, ちゃ", and then others in the same vein. "With the tiny ya making the chi into a cha. And you can get combinations like 'nyo' or whatever that way too -" He writes "にょ” accordingly. "A thing I did when I was at this stage was I would try to write down a sentence, like an English sentence I mean, with all the sounds turned into Japanese as much as possible. You can't do it perfect. Like everybody's going to pronounce my last name 'Su-wan', but they might say the 'u' part really really fast. But you can do it pretty okay and that's actually how a lot of Japanese loanwords are. Like 'orenji' for orange the color."

"....But a W is already just saying an 'oo' very quickly?"

"I don't really think so but I guess you could say it that way. But also words like - uh, 'words', for instance. You have to pick vowels to go in between stuff. So you wind up with wa-ru-zo, I'd spell that with a tsu with the dakuten, that's what the quote mark thing is called, just in case somebody would get what I meant there and put the d and the z properly where they go, but they might leave out the d sound, so if you really didn't want them to do that you could do wa-ru-do-zu."

"Is there a right way to choose vowels for this?  Or is it up to whimsy?"