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Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but he can't do specific enough conditionals to get his grander ideas off the ground yet. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
Still, they're taking a chance on Lucien by approving his application to join the expedition, so he definitely really shouldn't be late for his first day of work. He also probably shouldn't be running along a poorly maintained trail in Bolivia, but between that and the possibility of being late he knows which he prefers.
Well, which he prefers right up until he's tripped on a branch and sent tumbling towards the portal.
"-are you able to understand me because there are other people who can speak English nearby?"
"Are you able to understand me because you have the ability to understand every language?"
"Uh, in an amount of time less than the amount of time it took for us to get here from where you found me?"
"Will you be able to talk to me again before um, I have to sleep t-actually why am I not just using normal units. How many hours will it be until you can understand me again?"
Siiiiiigh. She cups her ear and says "Dasar jiam!" Then she puts her hand flat over her ear. "Pon po dasar jiam." Then she collects some silver coins from her storage trunk, lines them all up on the floor, and dubs each one individually "dasar jiam". She picks one up; she cups her ear; she puts it back in the trunk and then flattens her hand. Then she picks up a new one, and cups her ear again.
Oh no he is being exasperating. And also he keeps having to do things and he's terrible at that it turns out.
"Sorry. Um."
"Can you only understand what I say for a brief period of time a certain numbers of times per day?"
He did a good job and she is smiling at him about this and this is very good.
"Oh uh, that's not how omniglotism works on my world.... does yours work on writing?"
"-I have a notebook and pen in my backpack, would it help if I wrote out a bunch of words so you can point to ones you want to say instead of playing twenty questions with me?"
Lucien isn't sure what the shrug is about and starts writing down every word he knows.