Language LOL: Translator Malfunction

[rumham]

You know what's cool? Chatting with your pals. Reading the Internet. Navigating the roads because you can understand the Gods-damned street signs. You know what's not cool? Not being able to do any of that. By that metric, one might describe today in the Nexus decidedly uncool.

It's utterly without warning that the multiversal hub goes from automatic to manual translation. Shop signs, radio and television broadcasts, conversations on the streets between vendors and friends and businesspeople are suddenly a jarring cacophony of dissonant languages. Then there's the silence. Then there's the shouting. Turns out people get pissed off when nobody understands them!

Momentary chaos dies down as the average people of the Nexus come to grips with their new situation. Shopkeepers wait outside their stores and stands with expectant expressions, impatiently waiting for the translator to pull itself together and start working again.

Except...

It sort of doesn't.

No, it super doesn't.

Citizens of the Nexus, it would appear you're going to have to adjust...

((The temporary LANGUAGE LOL is now underway! It's freeform fun until you're done and participation is completely optional. Don't feel like this event should stop you from making threads which are unaffected by the LOL in the mean time. If you want your Language LOL'd character to interact with a non-LOL thread, please ask the OP if they want to play that dynamic first. For the OOC and organization post, GO HERE. ))

Comments

[attackpatternbattista]

Delia swears in a language that obviously doesn't translate--if Bearded Jim's heard the Orion Trade Language before, he'll at least recognize that much, but she does, fortunately, speak Federation Standard, "Tricorder's giving me errors too, ones I don't recognize."

Fortunately, by Federation Standard, we mean English.

Then she glances up, and furrows her eyebrows for a moment, mistaking this for the Jim Kirk she's previously met: "Hm. I like the beard."

[boldygoing]

Oh good, she speaks his brand of English. Jim was kinda worried he'd have to break out the Klingon, and he's slightly out of practice. Not to mention most of his vocabulary is insults or how to order bloodwine, neither of which is particularly helpful at the moment.

Her aside comment has him frowning a little, slightly puzzled. "Thanks...?" What a weird thing to say.

He'll worry about it later. There are more important concerns right now. "I didn't notice explosions or magic words or whatever before my translator started screaming, did you?"

[attackpatternbattista]

"No, it spat out some kind of error before it went off like holding a microphone too close to a speaker." Delia replies, frowning as her eyebrows furrow. She deactivates the tricorder, setting it--and the translator as well after a moment's debate--in the leather bag.

As a result of who she works for, Delia had to learn Klingon to operate within (and occasionally outside) the Empire. English she learned simply because it was easier to communicate that way, most Federation based translator and translation systems tended to default to it, and working with the Federation, it was easier to speak it.

"Also an error I didn't recognize, by the way." She flipped the bag closed and sighed, "So I don't have any clue what the source could be, and I'm thanking the Dead Gods I can actually speak Federation Standard."

[boldygoing]

Dead Gods...? Whatever, not important. Jim shakes his head a little, putting his curiosity on his low priority list. "All the street signs are unreadable too. I can recognize some of the alphabets, but I can't read them anymore. Whatever this is, it's doing more than just killing translators."

[attackpatternbattista]

Look, when you're a nomadic species with a presumably dead homeworld scattered six ways across the stars, belief systems get weird, okay? Admittedly, Delia's not particularly devout, but still. "Apparently so." Delia says as she slings the bag back over her shoulder and stands, "I'm assuming we can still understand each other since we're from similar realities, which isn't the case for most of the Nexus."

[boldygoing]

He nods once. "Could be. I'd be more surprised if people here could understand each other so easily." Statistically speaking, it's enough of a surprise that these two have run into each other. An infinite crowd of people means there's a good chance that someone somewhere speaks your lingo, but good luck finding them. "It's like the Tower of Babel all of a sudden."