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A Multiversal judge arrives in a strange city
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Wow, she's not in the system! She must be really committed to whatever bit she's doing!

Can she... spell those names?

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"Sure. My husband is J, [unintelligible], [unintelligible], [unintelligible], [unintelligible]. My kids are [unintelligible], M, M, [unintelligible], and V, [unintelligible], V, [unintelligible], [unintelligible], N."

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...What language are these names from? Is it, by any chance, a documented language, rather than one constructed for the specific purpose of whatever sort of prank she's engaging in?

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"...they're just standard English names in the standard English alphabet. English is the most common language in the world; it's the one we're speaking right now!"

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"What? No it's not."

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"Then what language do you think we're speaking?"

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"Sure, if that's what you call it. Is it not the most common language in your... world? ...timeline?"

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"I've been hearing you speak Eifweni, the most common language in my 'world' or 'timeline' or whatever, except when you tried to spell the names of your family, where you used a bunch of unrecognizable letter names. My prediction based on my understanding of this situation so far..."

The Squirrel Watcher stares at the Providence officer through their binoculars for a moment.

"Is that you will say the same."

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...that isn't a particularly impressive deduction to anyone but the character this woman is playing, but yes.

They would like a name to label the fingerprint scan with so she can be identified later, by the way. Since she apparently doesn't know the standard letter names, can she state the place and manner of articulation for each consonant in her name, and the general position in vowel space — which is, to a first approximation, a 3-manifold whose extremes are a, i, u, and ɚ, with positions distinguished by formants?

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"Oh, okay, is this an alternate timeline with a slightly different dialect of English? I suppose that's one way for the bit-plotter to make this look like an alternate universe without going to the trouble of designing a whole new language. Although I haven't actually learned every language yet, so you could have just used a language I didn't know. So that implies you couldn't afford to hire actors who spoke a rare language."

"Our letters can correspond to more than one sound." Despite her best efforts to change the alphabet. "But sure." She spells out the consonants and vowels. "Those are just rough estimates; it's been about ten years since I studied those."

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...they're copying down her descriptions verbatim, as well as writing down the letters that sound closest to the phonemes she's describing. That'll probably be enough data for people to not miss that they've got the same person due only to a different choice of name transcription.

Is there anything else she would like to request help with? Probably it wouldn't be too hard to, say, find someone in Nemesia who would consider it an exciting challenge to provide her with information that would be impossible for a bit-plotter to fake, or something. They love providing evidence that meets really contrived standards around here.

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"Sure! Can you pull up a book on recent history?"

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