IrateRapScallion
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Chapter 52
🕑 Added 2018-11-24 19:48:06 +0000 UTC “Here you go, Mister Salvide,” Sofie said, handing the parchment to her boss as he finished packing the last of his family’s possessions. “The completed inventory you asked for. I hope it helps you when you get... wherever you end up.”“Thank you, child, you’ve been a treasure,” the old tailor replied with a smile. “You know, there’s one last empty seat, should you want it...”
“That’s very kind of you, sir, but here is where I need to be right now. This is where I’m needed.”
“I knew you would say something like that. Truly a shame.”
“Thanks for not giving me a hard time about it. I get enough of that at home.”
“We have to leave a few things behind. They are yours if you want them.”
She gave the old man a hug. “Good luck! Stay safe, now.”
“That’s what I should be saying, not you.”
Sofie waved enthusiastically at the retreating wagon as it made its way down the street and towards the closest gate. With her boss and his family fleeing from the upcoming battle, it looked like she was unemployed once more. Not that she blamed them for hightailing it out of there; anybody with the means to get away would have to be insane to stay with an army bearing down on the city.
The thought made her sigh. She couldn’t deny that what she was doing was objectively absurd, but she’d made a promise to stick by Arlette and support her no matter what, and she intended to keep that promise, even if nobody, not even Arlette, thought she was making the right choice. She just wished that her decision didn’t mean putting Pari in harm’s way as well. The adorable child would never agree to separating. She seemed to fear being alone more than any actual physical danger. In fact, Pari seemed strangely fearless about most anything that might kill her. Bounty hunters? Nothing to be afraid of. A conquering army poised to slaughter all resistance? No big deal. A giant toad monster that spit acid strong enough to eat through nearly anything? Yawn! She’d been so unafraid of that ranutepo that she’d even crawled into the dead beast’s maw and, after covering herself in the creature’s disgustingly viscous mucus, harvested its acid sac for future candle experiments. Then, covered from head to toe in the toad beast’s vile secretions and giggling like she hadn’t just been toying with deadly corrosive substances, she’d chased Sofie through the tunnels, threatening to wipe the horrid snot dripping from her hands and arms all over Sofie’s delightfully un-snotted body like the evil little demon that she was. Robotic vacuum cleaners, on the other hand, were a terrifying menace that needed to be eradicated posthaste.
Speaking of Pari, it was time to go round the little beastgirl up. When Arlette was on duty and Sofie had to work, she took Pari along with her, letting her go out and amuse herself in the neighborhood around the shop. It helped give the girl some stimulation and let her expand her horizons a bit and hopefully even make some friends with the other children in the area. Perhaps more importantly, it also meant that Sofie and Arlette didn’t have to worry about coming back to find their home burnt to the ground.
“Pari!” Sofie called as she stood outside the shop. “Pari, it’s time to go!”
Nothing. Strange, normally she’d come shooting out from some alley or something within a few seconds.
“Pari?! Pari, come out!”
Still nothing. Sofie felt a pang of worry shoot through her. She gave it another minute, but still the child did not materialize.
Now somewhat trepidations, Sofie made her way into the nearby alleyways. Several tense minutes later, to her relief, she found the beastgirl sitting against a wall, hugging her legs to her chest. The girl seemed lost in thought.
“There you are!”
“Nya!?” the girl yelped, looking up in surprise. Recognizing her sister, Pari leapt up and sprinted into Sofie’s waiting embrace, burying her head into Sofie’s stomach. She’d only had a split second to look, but Sofie thought she saw tear streaks beneath the child’s eyes.
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” she asked as she stroked Pari’s sleek midnight-black hair. The girl mumbled something inaudible into Sofie’s torso. “What was that?”
“Does... Pari smell weird?”
“What? No, of course not,” Sofie lied. Pari spent a good deal of time every day messing with substances of dubious origin and burning things. Of course she smelled like chemicals. “Were the other kids being mean to you?”
“Kids said that Pari smells weird. Kids said that kids don’t want to be around Pari because Pari smells weird.”
“Awwwwww, sweetie... don’t be sad. They’re just a bunch of jerks. If they don’t want to be your friend, that’s their loss.”
“Pari doesn’t want to smell weird.”
“Well, we can fix that. Maybe we could make some nice-smelling candles. Or, we could take a bath.”
Pari squirmed at the word “bath”, but Sofie grabbed her arm tightly and started heading home.
“Hmmmm, yeah a bath sounds good right about. No getting out of it now. Let’s go. After the bath, I’ll make us some food.”
For some reason, the last sentence made Pari squirm even more.
* * *
“Probably something about the leaves... it’s always about the leaves,” Sofie mumbled as she jotted down more notes on the parchment beside the tome using the quill. It had taken her some time to get used to writing with a quill instead of a pen, but after days of working at it, the act had become second nature. Now instead, the problem was that she wrote too much. Her supplies of ink and parchment were running low, and with her sudden unemployment, not to mention the upcoming battle, getting more from this point on was likely to be highly difficult.
Page after page of notes covered the desk and spilled onto the floor, the sum total of now weeks of work deciphering the massive journal. That’s what it was, she believed: a massive journal spanning years. The large majority of the book was nothing but page after page of the ancient people’s flowing, arcane script. Given her studies on the foundations of language as a linguistics major, she felt she could have translated at least some of the writing eventually but it would be highly incomplete and take a massive amount of time and effort. Luckily, the journal came with a bit of a cheat sheet. Perhaps two-thirds of the way through the book, the style of the journal changed, and the entries became interspersed with pages upon pages of detailed drawings and notes of one specific plant. What reason there was for the sudden shift she had no clue, but she was impossibly grateful for it regardless. The notes, with their labels and small amount of words, had already provided her with numerous breakthroughs, from helping her narrow down the meaning for the more basic words to showing her their ancient number system. From there, she’d been able to expand to sentence structure and grammar.
In her head, Sofie broke the writing down into two different categories: the simple words and the complex words. The simple words were patterns of loops and curves and angles, always a contiguous line that flowed unbroken from one word pattern to another. As far as she could tell, simple words corresponded to simple ideas. Most of the notes contained simple words. The complex words, however, were a whole different story. Lines broke, they overlapped and became thicker, they moved in strange ways. Sofie believed that they meant much more specific ideas, though that was only because the simple words seemed to handle the rest. The journal entries, unlike the notes, contained thousands of complex words.
At this point, she believed that she had at least a quarter of the simple words worked out. She’d even translated several complete sentences, though without context they didn’t really make any sense. The problem was that she was running out of simple words that could be translated just by using the notes. There were many more simple words that she’d have to figure out just through context, and she didn’t have enough context yet.
As for complex words, she hadn’t managed to translate even a single one. They mocked her, popping up in otherwise easy sentences to deny her any meaning. For example, she’d stumbled across one sentence fairly early on that she believed went “The [complex word A] killed all the [complex word B]”, or, to be more accurate to the original sentence, “The [complex word B] are all dead, slain by the [complex word A].” Try as she might, she couldn’t make heads nor tails of either complex word, and as such the sentence itself told her little.
Sofie leaned back from the desk and rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t getting anywhere with this, so it was time for a break. Time to check on Pari.
The soft winter light of the mid-afternoon shone through the windows as she headed downstairs. Normally she got done with her work at the tailor’s about now, but they’d left the city before midday, giving her plenty of extra time to bathe and study. That also meant that Pari had extra time to mess around, which could be dangerous. Sitting in her sack of supplies, encased in inert wax, was a large volume of that ranutepo’s acid. Arlette and Sofie had forbidden Pari from using it unless they gave her their express permission and were there to supervise, but Pari was still a child and children were prone to bouts of youthful disobedience. It was only smart that Sofie made sure Pari didn’t get bored enough to have any truly bad ideas.
A bouquet of powerful scents washed over her as she descended to the first floor. She fought back a cough and opened the front door to let some fresh air in, taking a deep breath from the cold air outside before diving back into the cloud of fragrances. Pari sat on the floor in front of her candlemaking equipment, surrounded by dozens of candles organized into small groups. Many of the candles were lit, a fine haze emerging from them.
“Pari, what are you doing now?”
“Nya? Sofie-sis said to make smelly candles so Pari is making them. Pari will find the best smells!”
“Awwwww, Pari! You’re such a good sister!” She wrapped the small girl up in her arms and tousled her hair affectionately. “So what are all of these then?”
“Tests.”
Sofie noticed that the candles were all arranged in small triangular groups, with two candles closer to Pari and a third between and behind them. Focusing on a group by the edge of the table, Sofie picked up the left candle and cautiously sniffed the light smoke emitted by the flame. A rich, nutty scent that reminded her of cashews filled her nostrils.
“This smells kind of nice,” she said. “What is it?”
“Antola root juice,” the girl replied.
Sofie exchanged the candle for its counterpart on the right and gave that one a sniff. This time, she found a cloying, fruity smell that reminded her of a pear just on the edge of going bad.
“What about this one?”
“Pamot seed oil.”
Sofie figured she might as well complete the trifecta, so she grabbed the final candle behind and between the other two and gave it a sniff. A soothing, pleasant fragrance filled her, the smell of a field of flowers on a warm summer day. It felt wonderful. She inhaled again, feeling her stress fall away as the nostalgic scent wafted into her nostrils.
“This one is amazing! What is it?”
“Antola root juice and pamot seed oil.”
“What? But they didn’t smell anything like this!”
Pari gave Sofie a look like she was the dumbest person on the planet. “Smells together makes parts of smells stronger and parts of smells weaker,” she said. “Smells on top of smells make more complicated smells.”
Sofie wasn’t quite sure that was how it worked. She could understand two smells having an additive effect, boosting each other, but the idea that one smell with a second layered on top could result in one canceling out certain aspects of the smells seemed...
A light went off in Sofie’s head, brighter than the midday sun.
“Pari, you’re a genius! Great job!” she cried as she planted a big, loving kiss on the girl’s forehead.
“Nya?!?” Pari sputtered, but Sofie was already sprinting back up the stairs.
Of course, how had she not seen it before? The complex words were just simple words, combined! But there was more to it than that. Instead of just having two or more words written on top of each other, the words interacted like smells, reinforcing some parts but canceling out others. If two lines flowing in the same direction merged, it would be reinforced. If they flowed against each other, they would cancel out. It explained everything, especially the gaps and broken lines!
In a way, nuance was simple the combination of a variety of simple concepts set against each other. That was what complex words were, she believed: the words they used for nuanced meaning, for specifics, for more complicated descriptions. With this breakthrough, she’d be able to translate so much more! And with the added context and better understanding of the sentences she’d gain, she’d be able to puzzle out more of the simple words as well, which would open up more complex words, which would open up even more simple words...
Sofie took the last sentence she’d been studying, “The [complex word B] are all dead, slain by the [complex word A]”, and decided to start there with complex word B. Scooping up her notes, she began to rifle through the pages, searching for a combination of simple words that combined would result in complex word B. The answer did not come immediately. She’d identified over a thousand simple words already so finding the proper combination of them took her several hours, but in the end she had it. One of the words was something she believed to mean “little” or “small”. The other she was certain meant “people”. “Little-people”? “Small-people”? Interesting. A race of some sort? A species, like the elves or the beastkin or humans? Was there another race that people didn’t talk about? She looked at the sentence again.
“The little-people are all dead, slain by the _________.”
Hmmm. Well, if this was to be believed, whoever the “little-people” were, they weren’t around anymore. Something, or somebody, or somebodies, had wiped them out. Sofie wished there was more she could glean, but that was all there was. She didn’t have the sentences that came before or after worked out much at all. But no matter! This was just the first step, after all. The first of many. Sofie lit some candles, put her head down, and got to work.
“Pari! What is this?!”
Sofie’s head shot up at the half-cough, half-shout. That voice could only be Arlette. She looked about, finding the room dark save the light from the candles on her desk. Hours had passed in the blink of an eye, it seemed. Remembering her friend’s words from a few days before, she decided to take a break and go see what was going on downstairs.
She’d thought the first floor had been bad before, but this took the cake. Dozens of candles covered the floor, sending a cornucopia of varied scents into the air, enough to make anybody wheeze after a single breath. Anybody but Pari, apparently. Sofie wondered just how out of it she’d been to not notice the smells from just a single story away.
Over by the front door, her body bent over as she hacked and coughed, stood Arlette, dressed in her red guard uniform. Most countries that Sofie had been to didn’t dress their guards in a uniform, but Eterium did. Sofie liked it; she thought that the uniform gave Arlette a handsome, commanding appearance... when she wasn’t doubled over and wheezing, at least.
“Welcome back,” she called to Arlette as she bent over and picked up several of the candles, blowing them out. “Pari, that’s enough. You did a really good job but it’s time to stop now. Let’s blow all these things out so we can breathe again.”
“Okay,” Pari responded. Together, the two put out the multitude of candles scattered about the room while Arlette recovered.
“What in the name of the spirits are you doing?” Arlette asked, mystified. “Some sort of chemical weapon?”
“Scented candles, dummy!” Sofie responded.
“Scented candles? To sell?”
“Well, not originally, but sure, why not? I bet we could make a good amount of money selling these to rich people.”
Arlette rubbed her nose. “Some of them, perhaps. I would recommend weakening the strength though. But yes, that’s a good idea. It would be a good source of income for you when this is all over.”
“As long as Pari and I have the ingredients, I guess. That reminds me, Pari, where did you get all the wax you use for your candles?”
Ever since they’d met, Pari had been toting around a large ball of wax in her sack, which she used to make all her candles. At first the ball had been about half a meter in diameter, but after all the candles she’d been making, the remaining wax was down to the size of a volleyball.
“Grandfather,” the child replied.
Sofie rolled her eyes. Of course that was the answer. She didn’t even know why she’d bothered to ask in the first place.
Arlette let out one last heavy cough and pounded her chest with her fist. “Well, let’s open the windows and get the smell out of here. I’m hungry and I’d like to be able to taste my food tonight.”
“Busy day?”
“You have no idea. Everybody’s in an uproar, trying to get out while they still can... if we let them.”
“If you let them?”
“Erizio Astalaria is now in command of the city. He’s a great commander, maybe the best one we could have right now, but he’s desperate. He knows that Crirada is likely the last hope of Eterium, and by extension the rest of the continent, so he’s not holding back at all. Yesterday he ordered us to block any people of fighting age from leaving the city, probably because he’s going to press every single person he can into defending the walls. It’s gotten... messy.”
“Oh no! But Mister Salvide-”
“He’s fine, don’t worry about it. He and his wife are way too old, they would have been let free. They don’t want people who can’t fight staying here and eating up the food and whatnot. That’s why you need to worry more about yourself. I wouldn’t be shocked if troops come by tomorrow or the next day checking every house to find any eligible people that might be hiding.”
“B-but I can’t fight!”
“I know that, but they don’t. You’re of the proper age, so they’re probably going to make you fight if you don’t hide when they show up. We need to come up with a plan in case they-”
A massive horn blast echoed through the city, followed by a second, and then a third.
“Shit!” Arlette swore.
“What is it?”
“The Ubrans. They’re here.”
Comments
IrateRapScallion
Thank you!
Pariah
Love the elaborate tail you weave. Thanks!
IrateRapScallion
I'm doing what I can. I'll try to write some more for 53 too because in a few week when Smash Ultimate comes out, I'm going to probably disappear for a while until the Smash sickness has run its course.
Altoroc
Yay! Keep up the good work! And tell your editor thanks too!
