A Gathering of Tongues

Um… this is a really weird thing I wrote a long time ago about languages. It's REALLY WEIRD. All linguistical errors are mine.

Also, Blogger is acting up. Um. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS HAPPENING TO BLOGGER

Enjoy?

¿Divirtete?
~

America paused by the staircase as Britain swept past in her stark business suit. “Hey, Bri,” she said. Her eyes glowed, star-like. “How’s it going?”

Britain lowered her glasses, her face shadowed with a red-white-blue starburst. “Rather strangely,” she said.

The sharp blue-green form of Ísland exploded down, occasionally spitting shards of ice. He tapped the banister, and frozen crystals rocketed outward. “Don’t start another war, yeah?” His words cleaved open the silence.

“Yeah,” America said brightly, and went on her way in her tank top and jeans, multicolored rainboots squeaking, blue skin shimmering ever-so-slightly. And as she faded out of sight, an explosion of color ensued in her footsteps, purple and green and red and orange.

Britain put her glasses back on and looked at Ísland. He shrugged, navy jacket crinkling. “So, milady, the war continues. Til ðryð.” The syllables jabbed at the air.

“Yes,” she said primly. “To glory.”

Deutsch, the purple-misted old man living in the attic, waved from the balcony, voice rasping, and laughed. “I see, that many people friends make.”

Britain raised her eyebrows. “How are you?”

“As gut as ever,” he said. He coughed, leaned on the railing. “And you?”

“All right,” she said, shrugging.

“Stop with the understatements,” Ísland said.

Britain shrugged again and continued up the staircase.

Ísland raised a hand in greeting to Deutsch and left to the ballroom, where he pushed his way grimly through thirteen dancing couples.

“Ah, Ísland!” sang Italia, the little bird in a pale yellow ball gown, and stepped up, bouncing. “Long time no see, no?” Her hands fluttered with quick gestures.

“I do not have time for idle talk,” Ísland said.

“Sì, signore,” she said, and stepped out of the way again to greet Indiya, who stood tall and proud in her dark green sari, watching the dancers.

“Buongiorno, signora,” she said, teasing.

She looked at her, frowning, and stayed silent. Italia bowed, and she left. She knew when someone didn’t want to be disturbed.

“Italia,” France called.

“Ciao!” Italia swept up to join her, golden notes trailing behind her.

France’s dress of midnight stirred. “Have you seen Britain?”

“No, signora,” Italia trilled.

France swore. “She said she would be here.”

“For what?”

“We have… things to discuss.” Her accent smoothed out the words. Even in the linguistic equilibrium, Italia could hear the velvet softness in the pauses.

“You won’t find her in the ballroom,” Italia said. “Maybe on the second floor? She always did like high-up places.”

“Oui,” said France, “et merci.” And she left in a swirl of blue and chocolate. Italia watched her leave and continued on.

Español was at the buffet with his twenty children — from one wife or another. The baby, Guinea Ecuatorial, squealed as Italia approached.

“Hey!” Español yelled, extremely enthusiastically. “¿Digame?” Talk to me?

Italia sat down by his side. Honduras, short brown hair pulled up and braided in the Mayan fashion, said, “Haven’t seen you in a while, Auntie.”

“Me neither,” said Italia, and she rumpled his hair. Honduras ducked away.

“So how’s the food?” she asked Español.

“Could be better,” he said. “Fairly decent. And this ballroom dancing is too slow for a man of my time.”

“Silence!” yelled a very, very old man. And everything abruptly stopped.

He was old, the oldest one: older even than Latin and Norse and Sanskrit but somehow still living.

All that was left was a ink-black man, his clothes a multicolored white shimmer in the air. No one knew who he was, or where he came from. No one knew where he was the moment he called for silence, but they could all see him. No one knew his name and instead named him. They called him Dog, because Dog backward is goD, and everything about him was backward.

“I have called you here today,” he said. “I have called you, so that you might speak to each other again, for the first time since you were each created. And maybe some of you have never met the other.

“There is a war, on the mainland, a war of tongues and understanding and melting. Of separateness in the melting and stubbornness. Of becoming different and the same. And we are falling apart.

“And I tell you this: If we do not conform, we will wither. Before, we were apart and we could survive this way. Now the spider on the top of the world has been busy, and people can speak to each other in a matter of moments. They are connected, and we must be this way too.

“You do not realize this. You are all proud of yourself, that is fine. But we must recognize the greatness of the other. And we must understand each other’s language. America and Britain are not the most amazing of you lot. For if we do not understand, how can there be peace?”

There was a silence.

America looked up, letters of cyberspace floating across her skin. Britain and France, standing on the landing of the staircase, paused in the conversation that shot from English and French and back in milliseconds. Ísland, rolling up the sleeves of his jacket, stood straighter, cold blue gaze ricocheting from one silent face to another.

Italia looked back into the ballroom, where Indiya looked back, and smiled. Indiya raised her eyebrows slightly, and red danced its way down her fingertips. Español looked away from the buffet and into the eyes of Nihon, the lovely lady in a sea-green tall dress, and even his twenty squirming children felt his mood lift.

Dog tapped his fingers on the grave of Latin (250 B.C. — 972 A.D, Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure) and grinned, his white smile beaming all over the world. He looked at the graves of Norse (963 A.D. — 1403 A.D, Ek veit sem ek em dauðr) and Sanskrit (1930 B.C. — 579 B.C, Eshaha ka?) and all the other forgotten tongues and congratulated himself on a job well done.

And Deutsch, sitting in the attic, laughed.
~

Zhong fiddled at his tie for a moment, looking into the mirror. He frowned, slightly, and reached for a different one.

Of course he'd heard Dog. Who couldn't? But he did have to look good for the rest of them. Otherwise there would be no point.

He vanished the tie he was wearing and began to loop the next one around his neck. And if you looked hard enough, you would've seen the trail his arm left in the air.

I Like Whales

Since you asked, Selina, yes, we have abandoned this blog.

THE FACT THAT I COULD UNDERSTAND 99% OF THE FRENCH THING (the 1% being aujourd’hui)

I’M USING A SPANISH KEYBOARD TO TYPE IN FRENCH IS THAT SACRILEGE

L’amitie c’est manger tout le déjeuner d’autre.

(Friendship is eating all of the other’s lunch.) (I think. In theory. SELINA CHECK)

WHY IS THERE A C’EST EXPLAIN

SHOULD IT NOT BE L’AMITIE EST ____

*is even more of a noob than Selina*

My vocab is even worse. But in case you ever wanted to know, “pomegranate” is “grenade.”

Here is a song about whales. You may sing it to whatever tune you like.

~

Whales are great
and they sing often.
Why? I don’t know.
All I know is that singing is good,
singing often is better,
and whales are the best.

Whales are great
and they jump often.
Why? I don’t know.
All I know is that jumping is good,
jumping often is better,
and whales are the best.

Whales are great
and they _____ (your verb) often.
Why? I don’t know.
All I know is that _____ (your verb in gerund form) is good,
_____ (your verb in gerund form again) often is better,
and whales are the best.

Bridge:
Whales! Oh, whales!
Lovely lovely whales!
You sing! You jump! You _____ (your verb)!
Whales are great!

Ending:
Whaaaaaaleeeessss! (drawn out for as long as possible)

A Late Valentine's Poem (in French)

Okay, I'm not sure what happened to everyone else, but why am I the only one writing on this blog?
(￢_￢;)

Anyway, here's a Valentine's poem I wrote for my French class. Even though it's supposed to be the day of lovey-doveyness, I decided to write about friendship. After all, I know much more about friendship than love.

I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out even though I'm a noob French student.

Qu'est-ce que l'amitie?

L'amitie c'est discuter avec toi
et aller au café
et écouter de la musique
et chanter avec toi.

L'amitie c'est danser avec toi
et faire un pique-nique
et jouer aux cartes
et voir des films avec toi.

Mes jours sont heureux avec toi.
Mon ami, aujourd'hui, je pense à toi.
Mon ami, je t'adore. Et toi?

And in case you can't read French, here's a translation:

What is friendship?

Friendship is chatting with you

and going to the cafe

and listening to music

and singing with you.

Friendship is dancing with you

and going on picnics

and playing cards

and watching movies with you.

My days are happy with you.

My friend, today, I'm thinking of you.

My friend, I adore you. And you?

Look at that limited vocabulary... (￣u￣;)

First Piece: A Riddle (by Selina)

This is my first time writing on this blog. I don't write often, but I'll try to write when I get an idea or something. I'm being pressured to do this by Cynthia *cough*
Actually, this is a "poetic riddle" I wrote for my lit class. See if you can guess what it is. I'll put the answer at the very bottom. Hope you like it :)


An upside-down smile stretches across the sea-
A sliver of happiness after a good long weep.
Its paint drips through the surrounding snowdrifts,
Like a ribbon nicely tied around a birthday gift.


I tried.
Scroll down for the answer-























Answer: a rainbow :)

Spelling

From heaven there are angles

and from hell there are devilles.

From the ground grows flours

and space has stares.

Grammar is herd.

English is wired.

But I love Poe and tree.

And I absolutely hat autocorrect.

Because I really, never spell anything rung.

You’re asking how many strips of bacon?

I’ll take too.

Where are we?

Around the corner killing Tim.

What kind of hairstyle?

Get a layered cute.

The guy we met today?

I thought he was kinda hoot.

Anyway, I’m done with this. I’m finally going to tune of autocorrect.

I mean you red all of this correctly any weigh.

Done.

Good buy.

Belated Merry Christmas

Hola. I can not sleep. The rest of the house is asleep. I can hear my sister breathing.

I have been trying to do this for two hours and have failed miserably. It is 12:32. I got socks for Christmas. They are nice socks. I feel like I should be channeling Dumbledore here.

Therefore, you are getting this piece. It’s the first part of my Christmas Things, the rest of which you can find here:

[redacted]
[redacted]

You can also find the above here: [redacted]. It has the fastest cover in the history of covers. That’s the only difference. Maybe a better explanation of Sagatime, but you already know what that is.

Right?

You may find these things interesting. You may not. I do not care very much. I want to sleep. My sister and I have discussed marrige vows and the various ways of drinking water (e.g. Asian, German, etc). The alarm clock has red glowing numbers. It is way too late. The smoke detector is flashing. I hate that smoke detector and wish to smash it into 209381029319273+ tiny little pieces. My brain is probably in a different time zone.

I have learned to play the recorder. It is a soprano recorder. Which means a) it’s really loud and b) it’s really high. Which means the neighbors are annoyed. Even my ears are annoyed. It’s a great instrument until you realize that you can’t multitask while playing it. You can walk around. But you can’t multitask. And you CAN’T PLAY MULTIPLE NOTES AT ONCE.

Well. you can annoy people. That makes up for part of it. and YOU CAN WALK AROUND WITH IT.

I’m freezing.

If you wish to waste your time, I have compiled a list of my favorite TED talks. You can watch them.
[all redacted, for no particular reason :)))]

You may not question me.

Belated Merry Christmas. May it be filled with belated donuts love, hugs, donuts cookies, and donuts milk. The milk is important.

And this one is called “A Yuletide Carol,” by Charles Chickens Me.

Caitlin may recognize this one. I think I showed it to her. I actually wrote it last year but did not post it due to the lack of existence of blogging in my life. It’s not as funny as I remember, though. *sigh*

SELINA WRITE SOMETHING

IT IS NOW 12:42

IN THE MORNING, IF THAT WASN’T CLEAR ALREADY

I’M TIRED

MY EYES ARE TIRED

I REALLY NEED TO SLEEP

I ALSO REALLY NEED ONE OF THOSE EYE-COVERING THINGS BECAUSE OTHERWISE I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SLEEP

ALSDKFJALSKDJFLAIEWORUAOEWUROW!!!

~

It was the holiday season, and Thor was in charge of the decorations.

He’d dragged in the Christmas tree, thrown the Yule log in the fireplace, donned the Santa Claus hat, and tried to bake a turkey. Odin had panicked and hurriedly excused him — read, kicked him out.

Which was why Thor was dressing up his two goats as reindeer.

With a red beard that stuck out in every direction and arms as thick as tree trunks, Thor was rather intimidating. But he was also wearing a Santa Claus hat, and Santa Claus hats make everything better.

Toothgnasher (Vixen) bleated and tried to shake off the antlers Thor had just stuck to his head. The goat’s head, not Thor’s.

“Be a good goat,” Thor grunted, straightening the antlers again.

Toothgrinder (Blitzen) butted Toothgnasher with his antlers. Immediately, Toothgnasher growled at the other goat and thrust his antlers at him.

“No, Toothgnasher. Bad Toothgrinder,” Thor said, pushing the two goats apart. They looked at him and bared their teeth.

“No,” he said again. “Bad goats.”

They shuffled apart. Toothgrinder snuggled up for a scratch, and Thor obliged. Toothgnasher butted Toothgrinder, attempting to secure a spot. Toothgrinder butted Toothgnasher back.

Thor pressed his face into his hands and promptly gave up. He pried apart the two goats. “Go on, shoo. Don’t bother too many people. Go on.”

Toothgnasher looked at Thor pleadingly.

“Oh, all right,” Thor sighed, and took off the antlers. Toothgnasher waggled his ears at Toothgrinder with a grin that only goats can manage. Toothgrinder growled.

“Stop it.” Thor dragged Toothgrinder back and unclipped his antlers rather reluctantly. “Run along, you two.” He pushed the goats away, and they ran wherever goats run when they are bored.

Thor got up, brushing off his pants and squinting into the sun. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, and he still had to persuade Odin to be Santa Claus.

Reaching into a pocket, he picked out a set of foldable skis (an early Christmas present from Ullr, the poor guy — he’d forgotten when Christmas was). He snapped them on and stepped into them.

Standing on the hilltop and whooping, Thor plunged down into the snow, skiing as if his life depended on it. He got to Valhalla twice as fast as usual, though with a twice-as-messy beard. He straightened it, checked that his Santa Claus hat was still on, and kicked the door open with the skill of someone who specializes in kicking doors open.

Thor opened his mouth to start dictating his speech (he’d written an excellent persuasive essay) and looked up at Odin and a large host of Viking ghosts. He promptly scraped the speech.

“Hi,” he said.

Odin was (very reluctantly) dressed in a too-big Santa Claus suit, glumly sporting a sack of toys slung over his back. “Ho ho ho,” he said unenthusiastically. “You have just tossed my reputation down the drain.”

“Yay!” yelled Thor, hugging Odin. He’d only recently learned how to do this without strangling people and was now doing it as much as possible.

Odin mumbled something unintelligible.

“What?” Thor beamed.

“Nothing,” Odin said. He straightened his Santa hat.

“Well, I was wondering if you had Christmas lights for the tree,” Thor said.

A brief smile flickered across Odin’s face. “Try the attic,” he said.

“And ornaments?”

“Up there too,” Odin said. He tugged at his sleeve.

“Good. I’m going to get them — see you later.” Thor ran outside, completely missing the fact that Odin was waving back. He tripped over Toothgnasher. “Oh. Hi.”

Toothgnasher bleated.

“What is it?”

The goat ran away.

Thor sighed. He would never understand goats.

He scratched his beard, frowning. Christmas tree lights, ornaments, and what was that smell?
The stench of burnt fowl wafted through the air.

Thor swore and ran off to save it.

~~~

“Thor swore” rhymes. I’m tired.

MERRY CHIRSTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT.

(you knew that was coming, did you? Or did you not?)

TO BE OR NOT TO BE THAT IS THE QUESTION

AND I DON’T KNWO WHAT AI’MM WAYING ANYMORE.

The one I fail to title

Need more things on this blog. *glares*

Right now I am developing an obsession with Twitter and Wordpress. This means that a) a lot of my stuff is going on my blog(s — I don’t consider a storage room for my writing to be a blog) and b) Calletrix promptly is very lacking in new written pieces.

You know, you should just go on my blog. It’s snowing there. I bet tumblrs don’t do that. You can see it especially on [redacted]. And I try to direct people to my other blog…

GUYS YOU REALLY NEED TO WRITE MORE

SELINA CHARLOTTE HAS WRITTEN MORE THAN YOU HAVE

SO WRITE SOMETHING

I* do a thing called #Sagatime on Twitter, which is adapted from Joanne Harris’s** #Storytime. Most of the time I post it somewhere. Usually I do not put it here. 

Because I have a blog, I shall direct you to blog post for further explanation: [redacted]

*looks at Christine pointedly* This one’s for you. It’s also the only reason I’m putting it here.

~

Once upon a lemon tree there lived an elf among its branches.

She was very pretty and had features that biologists and novelists generally agreed on.

She also had wings and used them to flit about happily between the branches of the lemon tree.

One day, there came a handsome stranger with similarly gossamer wings who enjoyed flitting about the lemon tree as well.

He had strangely perfect features. The elf thought he was a bit boring. She wasn’t one for romance.

But boys are intruging, even in the elf world, and so the elf followed him home one day.

She did not think it was very creepy. Elvish society encourages stalking others, especially handsome but boring boys.

In case you have not noticed, Elvish society is strange.

She thought this might’ve been because all Elvish girls must take classes on stalking handsome Elvish boys at school.

As she followed him, she noticed that his wings were molting. They melted down his back and dripped into the ground slowly.

She stepped over the puddles. He walked on, still unaware of her.

Now his clothes were melting. And his skin. At the same time. They turned into the same quicksilver-y stuff.

She stepped over the mathematical-esque shapes in the ground and kept her eyes on the stranger. His wings were gone now. They turned into a dark quicksilver puddle, sliding over the ground like an eerie pool of…

Worms, she decided. Definitely worms. The liquid was squiggly.

So she kept following him, and he kept walking until suddenly he stopped.

This was mainly because if he did not, he would’ve fallen over a cliff. He turned around and faced her. For the first time, the elf noticed her surroundings.

They were in a cavern, towering over them both. She could see her lemon tree. It was a golden-green tower in the darkness. The cavern ceiling was sprinkled with sparkly diamond things. She wasn’t sure what they were.

It was cold.

“Why are you following me?” he asked.

“I was curious,” she said. “And— and it was my final for Stalking 101.”

“I would wish you to pass,” he said. He was still dripping quicksilver, and his voice wasn’t quite the same as before. It was hollow with the sound of metal.

She took a step back. Behind her, something whispered against the ground, snake-like.

The elf-imposter raised a finger to its lips. Its face was melting. “No magic in the world can save you now,” it said. Its face was silver.

She turned. A wave of silver was crashing down upon her. She looked back at the elf-imposter. It was expressionless.

Quietly, she opened up her wings. She stared at the silver ocean. She watched it come crashing down.

And she flew away, far away, faster and faster, into the night. She flew where all the other elves had gone.

She could not fight the imposter. She could only run. No one ever saw her again, or any of her kind.

Back home, the lemon tree became angry. It noticed her leave. It remembered the imposter and its quicksilver smell. And so it grew spikes. Big, long, green ones. When the imposter came back, pleased and in its Elvish suit once more, the lemon tree refused to let it back in.

The imposter never bothered anyone again.

~

* @[redacted lmao also i changed it again]. I’m fairly sure it’s not good ettiquette to change your handle after you’ve chosen it. But I don’t know, since I fail at social media. which I have said 7000000+ times already. Sue me.

** @joannechocolat. She’s awesome. In case you have not noticed this particular aspect of me, I absolutely love her stuff. DID YOU KNOW THAT SHE ACTUALLY ONCE HAD LONG HAIR??!?!?