Part 1 - Multilingual

It started off quite small. only a select few were taking them, and even fewer actually experienced anything; there was a certain state of mind - a mental frequency if you like - that you had to be in to use them.
They came in the form of a little pill, and they were originally produced by scientists hell bent on playing god and improving people artificially… by implanting knowledge in their heads, only temporarily. But gradually, as the illegal doses on the street got higher and higher, they released a permanency of the effect upon the user; a sort of halfway house, where they were affected but not affected at the same time, sometimes just sinking into a vegetative state and sometimes actually alternating between normal and ‘high’.
It was a bad idea to give it to general public as a test. Soon there were formulae being passed from hand to hand, improvements being made, and people paying more and more for an impure sample of the stuff.
Pretty soon there were all types on the market; Most of them based around languages, since it was the easiest to work with. French students would pay anything up to £150 just for half an hour’s worth of ‘frenchies’, or pills that made you speak fluent French, only for them to realise once they got into the exam that they could no longer understand the English instructions on the front page. German students were trying out ‘germs’ and those studying Spanish would pay upwards of £500 for a set of ‘Spaniards’ which not only made you speak fluent Spanish, but left you with your ability to speak in English as well, as an interesting side effect. Nobody knew why it was only Spanish that had this effect.
The purer the pill, the more refined the speaking style was. A pure frenchie would make a Frenchman believe he was talking to one of his own kind, while a dirty one, often mixed with sugar and watered down, would leave you as advanced as a schoolboy; understandable, but imperfect.
Well it was only a matter of time before people were creating drug cocktails, mixes that allowed them to have an even wider range of knowledge; frenchies were mixed with Spaniards so that they could speak French and English at the same time. Unfortunately the effects were often far from desirable, sometimes leaving the user unable to speak anything but gobbledygook, and in very rare situations leaving the user speaking fluent Basque.
Soon the formulae were improved and Latinos and Russkies began appearing on the scene. Grecos were the next addition, and there was a brief revival of dead languages, until Hindies and Japs were brought onto the scene and everybody became decidedly eastern.
Japs became particularly popular with artists who were intrigued by the whole written language and became obsessed with the Kanji. There was a sudden tidal wave of paintings based around Japanese calligraphy that passed as quickly as is began after the next drug came on the scene.
And what a drug it was. The ability to speak every language in the world was invented, and it suddenly became the craze. Frenchies and Spaniards were still being sold, but only to the connoisseurs, who enjoyed the finer quality of conversation available from the pure versions.
The muddy mixed pill was a temporary obsession to the backstreet ravers; suddenly people were flirting in Hebrew and picking up phone numbers written in roman numerals. The whole world was forced into central London for a night, before being squeezed back out by a good morning’s sleep.
Gradually, the pills were dropped, and people went back to their ordinary lives. There were still the faithful few who became so addicted that the effect on them was almost permanent, and there were those who had stuck to one type all the way making good livings as language teachers.
There were very few who were sticking with the universal pills, and they were looked down on by the elite for being impure and dirty. Still, in the gutters of side streets there were those who were continuing with their routines, unable to stick to one language, constantly flitting mid-sentence from English to French to Hebrew to Hindi to Russian to Italian… and they were completely unintelligible, unable to make their minds up, unsure as to their first language, and never sure which to stick with.
The problem is that after a while, all languages become foreign to you, each just as imperfect as the last, and in order to express yourself, express that particular shade of anger you're feeling with that Russian word, or describe the type of snow in Inuit, you keep on flitting between languages, floating amongst the words and touching gently on their letters and symbols and alphabets before taking flight into another deep, unrecognisable dialect. The feeling you get when you're flying so free between the gaps of language, it's like... it's like un petit mort, vous comprendez?

*****

Pt. 2 - International

The first time I took a pure frenchie, it Etait juste insensé. Je suis senti m'aime Baudelaire sur l'acide, Jean-Paul Sartre sur le speed… c'était mental. Cuando obtuve más alto y más alto, así que hizo mis grados franceses, y pronto yo decidí a Probeer het in het spaans ook uit.
Mijn eerste Spanjaard was een beetje van een ontgoochelt na de frenchie. Ik beteken, het was zeker een
能同时说英语的奖金（它在我的朋友在跟我谈话时在法国教训里是相当不熟练的和我只能在法国人中回答）但是质量是更低的。	Det var det samme med de universelle pillene. De hatt aldri et navn, jeg ikke tror… de var akkurat aldri det viset til, bare sett og brukt. De var en lav kvalitet, men det var noe passer å blåsing om være kyndig tale i hver enkelt som visst language; reading original Latin and Greek texts and reading manga and watching manga animations without having to buy a version Col subtitles inglese; stupiva, e sono diventato agganciato.
Era certamente un colpo quando io ho trovato non mie potrebbe si esprimere qualunque più senza svolazzando… è sembrato ero giusto Unfähig, ordentlich in einer Sprache zu sprechen. Wörter haben angefangen, mich zu versagen, und ich könnte nur eine Konversation durch Schaltensprachen jedes jetzt und wieder halten. Es ist schlimmer bald, und ich befürchte, dass ich nicht tatsächlich überhaupt bald; Hunderte von Sprachen in meinem Kopf und eine Unfähigkeit darf sprechen können, das richtige Wort zu finden.
Теперь, я делаю это подсознательно. Я только мелькаю от один до другого, неспособный концентрироваться на один, и никто не может понять меня больше, никто не слушает …, потому что никто еще не может понять меня. Они могут понять небольшие биты(частицы), но в целом, я неразборчив. Если only I could write a whole sentence in one language… I’d start to get it back again, I know I would… but for now… I… non… kunn ikke … haga no qué …不… больше …