IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.1, Exploration 2.3, Growth 3.2, 3.4, 3.7, Exploit 4.3, 4.7, 4.11

She spoke English, though. The odds of that were pretty much impossible. Did I have some kind of translation power? Was that the “secret power” from the abilities list? Kind of a tame secret, isn’t it?

—IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.2



"Our village is coming here," she said. "We have a lot of things we can give you, to help you grow. Do you understand?"

I frowned. She was speaking slowly, treating me like a child or a simpleton. I was a little insulted, but... considering what else I'd heard, I was starting to guess my fellow dungeons were a bit simple-minded, to say the least.

I made my spider nod, and used one of its fangs to write on the ground.

"My name is Taylor"

There was a short silence. Gwen's shield had dropped completely, as had her jaw. Cirys' and Bob's eyes were wide, and Kamella's mouth was open in shock.

"...it's writing," Gwen said.

"Druids Eternal," Kamella swore, hand clasped on the amulet around her neck.

Bob seemed more practical than them both. His shock turned into a scowl, and he glanced at Kamella. "Can you read that?"

The old woman shook her head. "Those symbols are like nothing I recognize... they are absurdly simple, but absolutely a writing system of some sort."

My spirits fell. I had hoped the people of this magic world would just mysteriously speak and read English, but apparently at least that much wasn't working by video game logic. Damn it all.

—IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.3



"So with that in mind, I thought I would teach you how to write in our tongue, if that is acceptable?"

My wasp nodded. Several times.

She tittered. "It's so nice to have an enthusiastic student! I have to twist poor Maryll's arm to teach her anything, and Cirys is somehow worse." She collected herself, then said, "Then, I'll begin with a simple sentence."

She tried to push a finger into my dirt floor, but found it hard and unyielding.

“Hm… I wonder if…”

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a green-tinted crystal. She made it float, then said, “Spirit of kindness, make this ground fertile!”

Green tendrils floated from the crystal and onto my floor, and I felt a weird tingle as the spell took effect, like I was being tickled by a dozen feathers behind my neck. A circle of ground around her became softer, which let her start to draw onto it.

“Not what I’d normally use this spell for, but it works for now, doesn’t it?” she said, tittering. “Now, a simple sentence.”

I watched as her finger started tracing lines with practiced ease, from left to right, then top to bottom. Strangeness happened immediately, however, as the symbols blurred as she was writing them, transforming into English words that piled on top of each other. ‘Action of’, ‘ocular organ’ and some other words I wasn’t able to read from the mess it made. An instant later, the mess had clarified and turned into the word “To observe”, in English.

This was going to be a problem.

“Words are made of several symbols that are put together to create a greater meaning,” she continued obliviously, “This here is a general symbol for ‘action’, words that have that are usually verbs,” she pointed at something I couldn’t see, a bit above the ‘b’, then moved her finger right so it sat above the ‘r’, “and this is the symbol for ‘eye’.” Below ‘b’, “this here means ‘distance’, or ‘far’, and the final one here is ‘thing'. So the entire symbol means ‘to look’. If you don’t know what a symbol means, you can look at the parts of it and figure out what it’s meant to be.” She paused. “Well, most of the time. Some words are just meant to look like things. Or they’re taken from another language.”

She shook her head. I felt like I should interrupt her and tell her about my problem, but this was honestly interesting, so I held back.

“Now, this next word is a very common one. It’s one of those that don’t follow the rules, so remember it,” she started drawing, this time her finger going over the entire symbol. In my eye, though, the symbol she was drawing was a blur of letters. Within moments, it clarified and became ‘this one’. “This word means ‘I’. You’ll see it often. And this last one means ‘clear sky’. So we have ‘distance’, ‘up’, ‘blue’, ‘sun’ and… ‘place’” she described, drawing while the words piled in my eyes into an incomprehensible mess.

When it clarified, it took the previous words with it, and the sentence ‘I look at the clear sky’ appeared.

I’d spoken to these people several times before, and only now did I realize their language followed a Verb Subject Object structure.

“Now, this is a simple example, and we’ll use it as a template. If you wanted to say, for instance, that the sky had clouds, you would…” she trailed off, staring at my wasp. “Is there a problem?”

How she had figured out I wasn’t able to follow her lesson plan, I did not know, but I used that opportunity to show her the problem. I traced the words as I saw them. She made a noise of surprise.

“Why are you writing on top—“ she interrupted herself, her mouth dropping as I made my wasp point at its own eye. “Oh! Are you…” she frowned, thinking carefully. “You can read it, but it appears in your original language?”

I nodded through my wasp.

“That… is a problem,” she said. One of her fingers found its way between her teeth as she thought for several seconds, and she finally sighed. “Then, if it’s not possible for you to learn our language, I will have to learn yours.” She eyed the letters I’d written. “…Assuming I can make heads or tails of this. I’m assuming the space between the symbols are word demarcations, then the symbols must be… sounds?” she crossed her arms, “And, of course, you have no way of telling me what each one sounds like.”

She and I spent several minutes trying to get her to learn English. I wrote the alphabet for her, and rewrote the sentence in the word order she expected to see (“What a strange idea, to have the action in the middle of the sentence…”), but as she’d exclaimed, I had no way to produce the correct sounds. Swarm-talking wasn’t a trick I’d mastered with the relatively small number of insects I had, not to mention these insects were much larger and produced entirely different sounds. I wished I could control the deco bugs in my other rooms, but I could not. We tried having her guess the sounds, but to my surprise I found I couldn’t even hear random syllables unless they were part of words or translatable expressions; and those expressions were translated.

In other words, this translation effect was very thorough and very helpful at making me not even realize they weren’t speaking English.

Whatever is doing this, stop helping. Please.

My plea was met with silence.

The best we could do, we found, was that she would write random words, and I would write the English translation, and she would try to memorize it. A few things came up; apparently, question marks qualified as words in their language and went before the verb, at the very start of the sentence. I'm pretty sure I managed to confuse the hell out of her when I tried to teach her the intricacies of the interrogative sentence. We finally ended that session with a mutual headache, and she told me, “I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to remember most of this.”

Sadly, I was not an English teacher. Maybe mom would have found a way.

“That said,” she continued while standing up, “it does appear we have a way for you to talk to us. If you had something like a wall on which our words are written, you would be able to use your minions to point us at what you want to say.”

—IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.2



“I had some thoughts about our mutual communication problem today,” Kamella said. She hadn’t wasted any time. After I’d welcomed her inside, she’d gone straight for the clean room, used that fertilizer spell to soften my floor and sat down. “I think I may have a way for you to teach me the sounds of your language.”

Did she now? I tilted the head of the ant I’d chosen to use as a communicator this time.

“Could you write my name on the floor, please?” she asked.

Ah.

Ah!

Of course!

“As I thought, you can hear our names properly,” she said, smiling after I was done. “The sound of a name is itself the meaning of it. Now let’s see. That’s… more symbols than I expected, but—ah, a combination, of course. Then… this must be ‘--’, and with this one it becomes ‘--’…”

It was a bit strange watching her try to read the sounds without being able to hear the meaningless, wordless syllables she was making. I could not help or correct her in any way, so as I waited for her to finish dissecting her own name, I started drawing what I’d wanted to ask her yesterday, a rough copy of the ‘map’ Maryll had drawn for me a few days ago. She eventually looked up—“but I don’t know why this symbol is repeated”—and noticed what I was doing.

—IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.4



I popped a wasp out of my entrance, moved it to the wall and started picking words. Kamella noticed, and recited out loud as I 'spoke'.

"I want to help you," I heard her say.

The sentence she was reciting changed as soon as I completed it. Or, at the very least, my awareness of it changed as soon as a complete sentence entered her mind. Even though I knew she had recited the words as I'd pointed them, I couldn't remember hearing the sentence in the 'wrong' word order.

Hm... how does one put a dungeon in M/S confinement?

—IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.7



And now, for the last thing I wanted to raise up.

Take tame creature Kamella Tyr Ulfric

And on the ground, I wrote “Karjn” and “Olivia”.

If they took tamed monsters––familiars, they were apparently called––then I would have a constant eye on them instead of having to rely on stray glances and nearby bugs to hear them. With these specific people... uhm... bugged, then I would be aware of what the village’s leadership was doing.

While they were reading that, I paused to wonder how the hell I knew how to write Karjn’s name. It was pronounced somewhere between “Karen” and “Karon”, how did I know to put a ‘j’ there?

In the end, I put it down as Translation Spell Fuckery and focused on my interlocutors. Kamella had, by now, figured out whose names I’d written down by elimination––“Why is there a ‘--’?” she’d wondered, and for once I had no answer––and the sentence had been understood.

—IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.3



A thought occurred to me. How did the author of this bestiary know exactly how each creature was called? Identifying variants was a simple business of finding which forms were always together, but I seriously doubted that, for instance, the author had stumbled on the name ‘small lesser ant’ by mistake. Had she possessed some kind of skill? Was there a spell for it?

Or, maybe, it was yet another artifact of my translation power. The book used whatever name the locals used for any given creature, and the translation effect translated with the real, Planet-approved name. That was probably it, I decided after thinking about it a little.

—IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.7



As if reading my thoughts, Kamella frowned and said, “Hm… right. Your communication issues would make it difficult… But I may have an idea. If I’m not mistaken, your pixie is in the area right now, isn’t it?” At my confirming nod, she added, “Can you guide it to draw just one line?”

There was an ink pot on the desk, yes. My pixie wasn’t strong, but it could at least grab a quill. I hoped. Or I could just make it draw with its bare hand.

“Then, I will guide you through each individual stroke of the word ‘Name’ and the question mark,” she said. “If you draw it stroke by stroke, it does not matter if you can or cannot see the final result, does it?”

…Kamella, you brilliant woman.

I made my pixie grab the quill… I made my pixie dip its hand in ink––seriously, I was going to send it to the gym when it got back––and followed Kamella’s instructions. The next moments passed in a blur.

Literally.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what actually happened there. The fact that, the next thing I knew, the paper my pixie had been drawing on had a giant “NAME?” on it told me it must have worked, but the best I can remember is writing each letter very, very slowly. Which I know didn’t happen. But I remember it anyway.

—IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.11