2nd [action]

[bestworstdad]

Τὸ συμβόλαιον δια-

δ....δ...

The heck? How am I even supposed to memorize that?!

[Nagi madly flips through his spell book, flopped out on a mushroom on the third floor, wearing his black shirt and pants. More like angrily laying on it, unable to keep this stuff in his mind long enough to memorize it. It took him years to memorize his lightning spells. Having to relearn to ice was just as difficult. And yes, his pronunciation was horrific and stilted in a way only a person with a English accent could pull off.]

Does Greek really need to be that hard??

Fine, next! Latin...

....god, I'm still bad at Latin too.

Immitte. Okay, I can remember that word. Immitte. Immitte. Immitte. Got it.

Maybe?

[He finally gives up, yelling loudly to anyone who can hear.]

Tell me someone around can speak Latin or ancient Greek! I'm about to die over here!

Comments

[evantuality]

[He manages to startle a young man a few mushrooms over, bent over his own precious sheets of paper and intermittently muttering to himself.

Evan looks up, his face a portrait of surprise and indignation at being interrupted. However when the words sink in he can't quite help himself at the opportunity to show off knowledge. He calls from his own mushroom.]

I know a small amount of Latin. And I can conjugate -- or I could last time I tried. I haven't had to in a while. What do you need?

[bestworstdad]

Conju-what?

Look, just tell me a way to remember these words better.

[He waves his spellbook around, not even caring that the words written in them are impossible to see like that.]

[evantuality]

[Evan sighs, feeling put-upon, but he gathers his papers and tucks them in half and takes himself all the way over to this noisy stranger.]

Conjugate. Extrapolate the different forms of a verb based on its root. You know, 'he goes, I go, they go', that. What are you trying to memorize?

[By then he's all the way over, craning to peer at the spellbook that's being flailed so enthusiastically.]

[bestworstdad]

It's an incantation. You know, to cast a spell. Yeah, sure, I could read it straight out of the book just fine but it's more handy to memorize.

Don't tell me you're gonna be the type to think that's crazy though.

[evantuality]

[Evan snorts, looking sourly amused.]

I suppose that's the trouble of being thrown into a mix with peoples from plenty of other worlds. No, magic exists where I come from, though I'm not really familiar with incantations as such.

[He's more of a do-by-willpower sort.]

So do you need to understand what you're saying, or just be able to pronounce it right?

[bestworstdad]

Well look at this.

[He opens it to a page and speaks the words outloud. And yes, he carries quite an English accent with it as the words are spoken haltingly.]

Immitte, Gelida Halitus. Nivis Casus. I can tell you that means "Frozen Breath, Fire. Falling Snow." but hell if I can remember that without staring at the book.

[evantuality]

[Evan is squinting at the text, reading over the words and chewing on his bottom lip as he does. Something's bothering him about the words.

When he looks back up, he's frowning, and he completely fails to respond to Nagi's actual ask.]

Are you sure it says 'fire' in there? If so that's not the Latin I know.

[bestworstdad]

Eh? It says what it says!

[Of course, he's not intelligent enough to know that 'fire' never rolled around as that type of verb until gunpowder weapons. But when one's magic world takes a lot of culture from the modern world, stuff gets horrendously twisted in return.]

It always works like that, at least....

[evantuality]

[Well, Evan may be clever, but he's parsed the spell in the entirely wrong way. He's frowning harder now, and he reads over the phrase again.]

Isn't 'fire', 'ignis'?

[bestworstdad]

I think you got the wrong kind of fire that. That kind of fire is banned here, I think.

[evantuality]

The wrong kind of...

[He trails off, furrowing his brow, but only for a moment.]

Oh. Oh! Fire as in -- uh, 'shoot'? Right. Okay. That makes a lot more sense.

Wait -- banned?

[bestworstdad]

Banned. Impossible to do. They took away all my fire and electric spells when I showed up here, you know.

[evantuality]

What?

[Alarmed, he stares at Nagi. Then he looks down, digs for something in his pocket, comes out with a lighter -- which he tries, to no effect. This turns his frown into a scowl.]

How do they do that?

[bestworstdad]

If I knew, do you think I'd be tryin' to memorize spells I don't even need?

[evantuality]

[Why was everybody here sassy about perfectly reasonable questions?! Evan had just suffered something of a blow in finding out his fire had been nerfed, and it was making him testy.]

Well, I don't know. Maybe you knew and just didn't know how to defeat it yet. Maybe you're just expanding your repertoire. I certainly didn't want to assume anything.

[bestworstdad]

What's wrong with assumin'. I know they got that whole ass saying but better to be an ass than be nothing.

Or something.

[evantuality]

Pfft. Yours is a happy nature, isn't it.

[He's peering at the spellbook again, though, freshly interested now that he knows why Nagi's up to what he's up to.]

So... what does it take to cast something like this?

[bestworstdad]

What does it take? Uh....beats me. I failed out of magic school at the age of six. I'm guessin' it either takes super talent or lots of learnin'.