fandomhigh | Speaking in Tongues [7.03]

Speaking in Tongues [7.03]

Karal smiled at everyone, hoping no one noticed the bunny prints on the library floor.

"I'm not sure if this will work, but I made lots of little paper squares," Karal put a box on the table, and some large squares of cardboard, with grids marked on them, "with the letters of the languages we've been learning. I thought we could get into pairs, or groups, and play a multi-language version of the game of scrabble."

[ooc:

please wait for OCD.

Have at it! Sorry this is late, I was distracted by coffee woes.]

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A board game that required nothing but language and numbers and little to no talking, barring the argument over suspect plays. Adah could definitely approve of this, as she pulled one of the boards her way and wondered if she could get away with just playing against herself, or, at the very least, the invisible specter of her sister, because that would mean that Adah was almost guaranteed to win.

Romeo was not one for playing by himself; surveying his options, he selected Adah's board. If nothing else, they could argue over his vocabulary again.

"Would you like a game?" he asked, crouching over the board but not yet taking a seat.

Adah took a moment longer with the still blank board set out before her before looking up toward Romeo with a thoughtful sort of consideration in her wide eyes and the natural tilting of her head to one side. She looked down again, a bit forlornly, at the invisible, still-imagined game she was going to play to beat her absent twin as always, and then up toward the boy again.

She shrugged a shoulder, glancing down, and taking exceptional care in straightening the carefully hidden row of letters that she had chosen. She considered them for a moment, considered picking out the letters that she knew she had to spell out the French for yes, to both answer the question and start the game, but, really, that would be unwise, as those were vowels better used for other things, so she just let the slight shifting in her chair, as if making room in her little bubble of space for him, as a consent.

There was silence, and a shift, and she wasn't either glaring or in any way preventing him from taking the seat, so .... he would take that, then, as a yes.

He quickly drew seven tiles and arranged them on his wooden tray, then shuffled them about with a frown. He saw plenty of English words, but for some reason nothing in Latin or Italian was jumping at him. "You should go first," he told Adah. "As it's your board."

Never mind that he *also* wanted her to go first because the best play he could see was a whopping ten points.

She could go first. Well, that was something that rarely happened, she who was used to being last. Well, the last shall be first eventually. She quietly, calmly considered her options. She realized that she could probably make something up entirely, claim it to be some language, and gain herself an absurd amount of points in using all her letters and just claiming it something that it wasn't, which was the main problem with playing multi-language Scrabble among people from Dog knows how many different worlds, but...

...she was feeling like being a good sport today. She had baza, twins, which seemed appropriate. And starting covered the center square, an automatic double word score based on the rules as she remembered them; she wasn't quite sure if she felt that was strong enough to warrant the loss of a Z so soon in the game, but, really, everything else she had was crap and she needed more consonants besides.

She took a moment, writing neatly and clearly on her notebook a divide, wrote on one side an A and on the other an R, and then went to make her play. B-A-Z-A, crossing the center. 3 plus 1 plus 10 plus 1 times two: 30 she wrote, under her A, and beside it, for the sake of the nature of the game, 'twins,' in Kilanga, and then turned the notebook toward Romeo, laying the pen along side of it, urging him to take his turn.

He had too many vowels, and, possibly rashly, used too many of them to form his first play, placing the i, t, and o under her z. "Bridegroom in Italian," he briefly explained, recording the 13 points he had scored in the notebook and handing it back over.

Adah grinned a little at the move, nodding slightly as she wondered whether Romeo had simply wanted to reap his own benefits from the Z or if he was intentionally covering it simply so that she didn't try to use it again. She observed the board carefully for a moment, and her letters, chewing on the left corner of her lip. Her nose wrinkled. If she had an 'e,' she'd be good to go, but she didn't, of course.

So she placidly laid her Q and her U on the left side of his O, and, on the other side, her I. This meant that her Q glanced but did not meet the double word score, but she figured it best to make a move that potentially blocked that one than just putting out something sub par.

She added the new score, 10 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1, to her old one, a total of 43, with the note that her word was 'what' in French.

Montagues did not play to lose, and Romeo was not stupid; of course he wanted to block off the z.

He touched the board lightly, not going near the letters and noting in dismay he didn't have a U. He was also conjugating Latin in his head; Adah would probably notice the concentration in his face.

Finally, he placed an N and an O above her B and an I and an S below it. He added 11 to his score, noting he was at barely half Adah's total. Us in Latin, he explained in the notebook before passing it back.

Edited 2008-03-08 04:07 (UTC)

Ugh, if only Adah had a V, then she could probably create half of the Kilanga language. She frowned a bit at the board, thinking, having a strange need to fill it in with all the languages she knew, but feeling like she shouldn't count all of her anagrams and backwards languages. She wondered where this strange sense of justice was coming from. Romeo's already contributed Latin and Italian. Japanese. There wasn't any... A French word came to mind. No. Needed a V, again. Shimata....

Finally, shifting a bit because the curve of her back was starting to ache on her a bit, she laid down some tiles. It was a stretch, but she didn't have much else, and she was ahead, so she figured she could spare a lackluster round, laying to the right of Romeo's N an O and her X.

53, she updated her score, Roman deity equivalent of night; also, in the language of chemistry, a type of nitrogen oxide.

Romeo bounced his tiles in his hand, considering his move. On the one hand, it seemed early in the game to use an s; on the other, using it gained him a triple-letter score, and he had only single-point tiles.

He shrugged and placed the S-O-L-I before the s in nobis, adding the seven points from that to his score, totalling 31. "Sun," he said quietly, as if he knew Adah knew that.

Adah smirked a little, privately. At this rate, he might catch up with her. With these tiles, he was probably sure to catch up with her, actually. She studied the board carefully, thoughtfully, seeking out the best open vowels, since she had none.

And then her breath caught a bit; it was pure luck, really, that she recognized this, in her study of Islam from class last semester. A J above the O, right on the double letter score, ended with an L below it. 16 plus 1 plus 1. She updated her score to 71, and met her increase with the explanation of Persian, 'way,' helps form Taza Jol, which is a branch of Islam.

She might have been showing off her treasure trove of knowledge a bit here.

That drew half a grin to cover the sting of being so far behind. "I don't know Persian," Romeo confessed. "Anything you play, I would need to believe was real."

Faced with a hand that looked like some of the demon tongue Andrew had been trying to teach him, he reluctantly used up his vowels, placing a blank tile and an E beneath the JOL. "Jolie, pretty in French," he said, noting the 22-point value by his name with quiet pride.

Adah's nose wrinkled. She should have expected that one, really.

After a long, long, long moment of staring at the board, brow furrowed, Adah finally built of Romeo's jolie, with a T and an A of the I. Ita.

She changed her score to a meager 77, with the note: A Latin form of Yes, also I'm pretty sure it's used as a Japanese pronoun of sorts, but I can't quite remember

Edited 2008-03-08 05:25 (UTC)

His tiles still sucked, and trying to play in many languages was starting to make Romeo's head hurt. Giving up, he placed a B and an R above the O of NOX. "Five points," he suggested, not really caring if she allowed the word or not.

Adah smirked a bit, pulling the notebook in closer, and scribbling something down before even considering the board and her pieces.

"I think," she wrote, "that once we start subjecting ourselves to prefixes, it's time to call the game. Multilingual Scrabble is admittedly more of a challenge than I expected it to be."

"It is far harder than I expected," Romeo said gratefully. "Thank you for making the attempt with me, at least."

"Hey, you're the agreeing to calling the game while I'm still ahead, so you're welcome."

He propped himself up on an elbow. "Only because I fear I cannot win, and I'd rather at least pretend to be gracious in defeat. And you would still rather write that than say it?" he asked.

Adah's head tilted a little, almost as if calling attention to the fact that she was writing was the only way she would have noticed that she was doing it. In fact, she hadn't even gave it a second thought. She did, now, although she knew the answer; most of it was ruminations on the natural order of it. She gave a slight nod.

"I prefer not to speak if I can help it at all," she explained with the quick movements of her pen.

Romeo had noticed that from ethics class; his eyes stuttered from the writing to her right side for the briefest of glances even as he realized how rude that was; he wondered if this preference had to do with Adah's disability, though he was not foolhardy enough to ask.

"Lucky thing I can read, then," he said. "Though I should be worse yet at Scrabble if I could not, and so we would not be having this conversation."

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Speaking in Tongues [7.03]

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