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Post by Linyü on Aug 9, 2020 22:26:01 GMT -6
San watched her do it, and had a thought. He dug out a few more coins, all of them coppers, and laid them out. There were ten in total. He separated one from the rest on the floor, pointed it out to Rei, and said, “-One.-” Then, moving another coin over next to it, he tapped them both and said, “-Two.-”
Rei was the one who moved the third one over. “-Three,-” San said.
Her ears twitched, and she looked up at him. “San,” she said.
San felt a slightly rueful smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “... You’re not wrong. But… Not quite. Our unit, we’re named in a different language that has some of our numbers in common. ‘San’ is one of them.”
“What’s Hachi?” she said.
San moved over several more coins, so that now there were eight. “-Eight,-” he said.
“And Nana?”
“-Seven.-”
“Roku.”
“-Six.-”
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Post by Linyü on Aug 9, 2020 22:26:39 GMT -6
Here she paused. San knew what was coming, but he waited for her to say it herself, to ask him the question. “Rei,” she said at last, her voice very soft, even in the silence of the room.
San swept aside all the coins at once. “-Zero,-” he said.
Rei was quiet for a moment, staring at the empty space he had cleared. San couldn’t guess at her thoughts, and it wasn’t really his place to comfort her anymore, if comfort was what she needed. But he said, “They don’t mean anything. We just choose them to have something to call each other.”
She said nothing, and San said nothing more either. It was some time before she moved another coin over from where San had swept them aside. “-One.-” Another joined it, and she said, “-Two.-” A third; “-Three.-” And then a fourth.
She waited.
“-Four,-” San said. She repeated it.
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Post by Linyü on Aug 9, 2020 22:26:51 GMT -6
As she moved coins one by one, San listed the numbers for her. “-Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine… Ten.-”
She lined the coins up in a row, then started from the beginning, counting up one by one. “-One, two, three…-” When she arrived at the end, she started from the beginning again, but this time she tapped the empty space first. “-Zero,-” she said.
San watched her do it. She didn’t stumble over these the way she had with the colors. Maybe it was because she was growing used to memorizing words and sequences. When she came to the end again, he said, “-Ten copper is one silver.-” He moved the single silver over to join the rest.
Rei studied the coins for a moment, then took the silver and placed a copper next to it. “-What?-” she said.
“-No. How many?-” he corrected. “For numbers. ‘How many’, not ‘what’.”
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Post by Linyü on Aug 9, 2020 22:27:39 GMT -6
“-How many?-” she repeated.
“-Eleven.-”
She repeated the word, then stopped for a moment. When she spoke again, it was to say, “It’s not like Common.”
“No,” San agreed. “It’s simpler. Ten-one. -Eleven.-”
(OOC note: Xin is based on Mandarin Chinese, in which eleven is literally “ten-one”, twelve is “ten-two”, twenty is “two-ten”, and so on)
She considered the coins again, then moved a second copper. “-Twelve,-” she said. San nodded, and she picked a third. “-Thirteen.-”
In this manner, she worked all the way up to nineteen, then paused again.
“-Twenty,-” San supplied.
“Then… -Thirty? Forty?-” Rei ventured. Again, San nodded. There was another pause before Rei said, “-Ten-tens.-”
This time San shook his head. “-Hundred,-” he said. “-One hundred, two hundred, three hundred.-”
“-Ten hundred?-”
Here San finally sighed. “-Thousand,-” he said. “But we should stop there for now. I’ll teach you the rest later, when you’re used to what we went over today.” She didn’t protest, and so they went over the numbers again.
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Post by Linyü on Aug 9, 2020 22:28:02 GMT -6
They had time to do it twice more, during which San retrieved the forgotten pomegranate, and cut into it with his knife. Rei stopped what she was doing to watch as he made incisions in the fruit, before peeling it back into sections, each glinting with small ruby-colored kernels.
He held one section out to her. “-How many?-” he said.
Her ears drooped. “-I don’t know,-” she said.
San found himself smiling after all. “-No,-” he said, and then mimed taking a bite of a different section of fruit. “-To eat.-”
“-To eat… One.-” Rei gingerly picked off one seed and bit into it, eyes widening in surprise as the juice burst out.
“Is it good?” he said.
“-Yes,-” she replied in Xin.
“Then take more. As many as you like.” He would eat the rest; she could hardly finish the whole thing, and pomegranates didn’t keep well once opened.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 22:18:37 GMT -6
But at least the seeds were of a convenient size for her to eat. He saw her take another three, and took a bit of the peel, plucking off a dozen more to set atop it as a makeshift plate.
“If you can’t finish them today, throw them away.” She nodded, and San rose to his feet, taking the rest of the fruit with him.
The next time she came to see him, they exchanged a few pleasantries, some of it in Xin - at this point she had enough of it to say a smattering of things on her own, not always grammatically correct, but clear enough to be understood. And in turn, she herself understood much more than she could put together; San, who recalled his own experiences learning Common, knew the feeling well.
From there, San held up one hand with three fingers sticking up.
“-How many?-” he said.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 22:19:08 GMT -6
“-Three.-”
It took her a moment, but not a very long one. He had been teaching her long enough that she could anticipate some of his intent. She was remembering, he was sure, the lesson last time about numbers.
He held up both hands now, four fingers on one and three on the other. “-How many?-” he asked again.
“-Seven.-”
And so they went on, with San sometimes repeating a number that he had already gone over, just to keep her on her toes. After a few rounds, he turned the game around. “I’ll say the numbers, and you hold up the fingers.” She nodded once, to show that she understood, and then San began. “-One.-”
She held up her right forefinger.
“-Good. Five.-”
Rei fanned out all the fingers on that hand.
“-Four.-”
Her thumb curled back in to rest against her palm.
“-Eight.-”
She held up another hand, four fingers splayed.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 22:19:21 GMT -6
It went on like this for a while, but there were only so many numbers they could test out this way. At length, San dug out a larger pouch of coins than last time, and spilled them out, silvers and coppers, onto the floor.
“-How many is twenty?-” he said.
Rei studied the coins for a moment, ears twitching, then retrieved two silver coins and separated them from the rest. San nodded. “-How many is forty-seven?-”
She collected two more silvers, then hunted around until she had seven of the copper coins. They played this game for a while, but she was a quick study, and Xin numbers were easy to pick up due to their simplicity and regularity. After a time, San felt comfortable that she knew the numbers well enough. They would need to practice them, but no more and no less than any of her other vocabulary; they even went over the animal cards every so often to make sure she didn’t forget.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:06:15 GMT -6
As far as teaching her Xin, the only thing that would really help in the long run was practice and exposure. There was a limit to what San could do when they were in the warrens, but when she came to see him, he would show her different picture cards and name them for her: fruits and animals, household objects, the weather, times of day.
Feelings.
He laid those cards out the way he always did, and let her look at them for a while. She would point out one that she was curious about - or if she was indifferent, she would go through them in sequence. It was a subtle way of learning about her, watching where her eyes went, what caught her attention, what kept it, and what she tended to avoid. San knew enough to read her moods now, but there were plenty of other things he didn’t know.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:06:39 GMT -6
This time, she started with the picture of a man clutching his stomach.
“-Hungry,-” San supplied. And then, because the picture was perhaps a little unclear, he gave her the Common word for it.
“-Hungry,-” she repeated. Almost immediately she went to another, of a man clutching his hand.
“-Hurt,-” San said.
“-Hurt.-” She dwelt on this one a little longer, her face impassive. And then, slowly, she moved on to the smiling face.
“-Happy,-” San said.
“-Happy.-” Rei blinked, then looked up at him. “-Are you... happy?-”
There were a few verbs she had grasped mostly intuitively, simply through hearing them over and over. Others, San had taught her, but ‘to be’ had been one of those she knew for herself. It was easier, in Xin; there were no tenses, no conjugations. All of it was context-dependent. It didn’t take much to learn besides memorization, no worse than any other new word.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:06:59 GMT -6
But the question, haltingly delivered, brought San up short.
Sometimes, too, Rei would take his pauses as a sign to second-guess herself. She was still learning the language, after all, and however fast her progress might be, there had not been nearly time enough to make her fluent. But this time she didn’t hesitate. She simply waited, watching him.
San didn’t know how to answer.
It would have been easy to lie. He felt, at first, compelled to do it. Yes, I’m happy. Of course I’m happy. Why wouldn’t I be? And he could smile at her, like he used to.
But she knew the rest of it to be a lie already, and the lie might tell her something else, something he didn’t want to say.
And yet, what else could he have said?
Eventually, she abandoned the question, but only to point out another card. The face was crying this time.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:07:48 GMT -6
“-Unhappy,-” said San, his voice carefully neutral.
“-Unhappy?-” At this, Rei frowned very slightly, and inclined her head.
“-Unhappy,-” San repeated, confirming what she had heard. “You’re thinking of ‘sad’, aren’t you?” In Common, that would have been the word for the expression she had pointed out. But in Xin there was no direct parallel for it; in the mildest, most colloquial sense, one didn’t say they were sad, only that they were not happy. The absence of happiness.
“If you’re very sad, you could say -heartbroken,-” San said. “If it’s not very much, then you’re -unhappy-.”
“-Are you heartbroken?-” she asked.
She didn’t look up, and her voice was soft as she spoke, the same as it always was. In some ways the question felt offhand, almost conversational. It should have been easy to play it off, to give some shallow answer, and yet San found he could not.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:08:06 GMT -6
A moment passed in silence, and while San had no more answers than he did when she had asked if he was happy, it occurred to him that no one had asked him anything like this in a long time.
He hadn’t… thought about it in a long time.
“-I don’t know,-” he said at last. A phrase she knew. “-What about you? Are you… heartbroken?-”
Rei’s frown deepened, and after some deliberation she shook her head. He saw her staring at the picture cards, and he saw her finding them wanting. But then, these cards were only meant for children. The full breadth of emotional nuance couldn’t be found here, among twenty or so crude and colorful illustrations.
Eventually, however, she settled on one. “-I’m…”
“-Tired,-” San supplied. “-You’re tired.-”
“-I’m tired,-” she agreed.
“-Every day?-” San asked.
She thought about that too. “-Not every day… But a lot. A lot of days.-”
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:08:23 GMT -6
They both fell silent after that. San didn’t know what to say, or if it was his place to say it. Guilt unfurled itself in his chest once again. This wasn’t something words could fix. Maybe it wasn’t something he could fix at all. “Do you want to leave?” he asked, very quietly. Rei stared down at her hands. “Where will I go?” she said. ----- They went over the feelings one by one, the next time Rei came by; and after that, a set of cards with common verbs. She liked those better - or at least there were no heavy questions, and despite her attempts to hide it, he saw at once that she found something humorous in his attempts to pantomime the actions on the cards. He watched her hiding a smile behind a hand, looking for once as though it didn’t cost her, and though it was not quite laughter, he felt that it must have been something close.
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Post by Linyü on Sept 4, 2020 23:08:34 GMT -6
For one dizzying moment, he saw another figure in her place: a smile, a laugh that he knew well, the way her eyes would crease into dark crescents, the way her shoulders would shake -
But then Rei was calling him, smile gone, and San remembered himself.
When they had time, or rather when San had time, he took her out as much as she could. He pointed things out to her as they saw them, and as her vocabulary widened, she began to ask questions, give answers. Their conversations, once short and stilted to keep within the bounds of what she knew, expanded into longer sentences, sometimes several at a time.
He could see her listening too, picking out snatches of conversation, sometimes asking what this or that word meant, or why someone had said something. He explained as best he could, at first mostly in Common, but then increasingly in Xin as her understanding of the language broadened.
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