why is there a word for that

[alicornucopia]

Finnah's just arrived at work to open the store for the morning shift; she has her apron on but hasn't put her hair up yet. She lets in the customer who always takes half an angle to determine that he wants four buttercreams, again, and then nips into the back to tend to her hair and check the overnight progress of the rock candy.

This isn't the back.

But that -

No, he's too tall to be Mial, if this is a Mial prank it's a stupidly elaborate one.

"Okay, I give up," she says, "what the hell?"

Comments

[first_and_final]

"Fine. Jann'll have to carry me there, though."

[abeance]

Jann scoops him up. "Lead the way, Other Milos."

[thisvorlunatic]

Stalas leads. Miles and Mial follow.

[abeance]

And Jann carries his cousin and puts him down someplace suitable in the room. "Somebody'll let me know when you want to come down again, yeah?"

[first_and_final]

The suitable place is definitely the bed.

"Yeah," says Milo.

[abeance]

"Right. Please do not inspire my bicentennial dragon alt to madness."

And off goes Jann.

[middlingalong]

"Are you sure this is going to work?" Aurin asks Mark.

[unmarred]

"Yes. They don't ultimately disagree."

[abeance]

Jann reappears.

"They don't?" says Aurin. "I mean, Mial thought of it but eventually he like - saw sense."

[unmarred]

"He saw that you were upset," Mark corrects.

[abeance]

Aurin mulls that over, disconcerted.

[unmarred]

"It's possible he would've come around even so. I can assume from your example that most dragons would be upset to have their language rearranged, and he'd care about that even without the personal connection. But the agreement they come to is going to look like this: Draconic is blatantly stupid and evil, but it's not worth it to change how it works for everyone if you hate the idea that much, and changing how it works for Mial alone is an acceptable alternative. At which point it really does become Mial's problem to be dealt with at Mial's discretion, and Milo will be content to help."

[middlingalong]

"I guess I can live with that," says Aurin.

[isthisart]

"Good. I would begin to have opinions about it if potentially risky and certainly nonconsensual mind-altering somethingorother was more clearly on the table than 'Milo had an immediate dramatic reaction'."

[unmarred]

[abeance]

Jann sits with his alts.

"So tell me about ourselves," he says.

His alts begin to catch him up on the state of the art of Ivans. And teach him to play their most recent card game.

Their conversation meanders. It comes up in conversation that Jann is the only single one. It is unspoken but understood that if there were another single one they'd be attempting to surreptitiously sneak off and cheat on their mutual absence of girlfriend, but this is not the case and none of them is too broken up about it. Jann and Ivan explain horses to Aurin. Ivan explains spaceships to Jann and Aurin. Jann explains to Aurin how his princess-napping dragons work and Aurin explains to Jann how non-princess-napping dragons work. Aurin explains to Jann and Ivan the curlicues of vocabulary that screw over Mial and that Milo has proposed throwing out the entire language to deal with - "siad" versus "shren", the exclusive turn of "siaddaki", etcetera. They discuss their respective tastes in olives, music, brunettes, and socks. Jann has his sword with him and shows it off.

[thisvorlunatic]

And eventually, Miles comes downstairs.

"The league is ready to rejoin civilized company," he reports.

[abeance]

Jann hops up and goes to fetch Milo.

[middlingalong]

Ivan meanders back to the topic of Draconic, meanwhile. "So when you say I can't speak Draconic you obviously don't mean I can't learn words from it. They don't mix and match right?"

"They don't mix and match like a regular language, anyway," says Aurin.

"So you can't - take them apart for suffixes? You wouldn't understand if I did it?"

"I mean, I'd understand. It's a thing you'd be doing in English, with loanwords, and I speak English, it's not going to be gibberish if you're doing it in some sensible fashion."

[abeance]

Down comes Jann, carrying Milo and followed by Mial and Stalas.

[middlingalong]

"So I don't get it," says Ivan, "how the language is constraining anything to speak of, if you'd understand it perfectly well if I said something like - I have what, three words to work with here - shrennaki."

Aurin startles rather as though someone has popped a balloon inside his chest.

[thisvorlunatic]

Mial claps both hands over his mouth, wide-eyed, and makes a sort of quiet strangled shrieking sound.

[unmarred]

"You don't go in for bloody half-measures, do you?" exclaims Mark, sounding for once in his life not at all charmed by an Ivan-utterance.

[middlingalong]

"What the - what?" says Ivan. "What'd I say?"

"You know exactly what you said!" says Aurin, sounding vaguely faint. "You couldn't have gotten that over with while he was upstairs?"

"Why didn't you teach me how to say anything else in Draconic then?"

"I didn't know you were going to do that! It would never have occurred to me!"

[abeance]

Jann looks highly uncomfortable. He puts Milo in a chair.