raspberryturk | Room 501, Friday Afternoon

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Room 501, Friday Afternoon

Reno was sitting cross-legged on his bed, a stack of photocopied papers spread out on the sheets in front of him. He was ignoring his laundry, which probably ought to get done before his roomie could notice the red streaks across the back of one of his white shirts. And he was ignoring his report to Tseng, which he usually ignored anyhow until the very last minute or whenever the angry e-mails started to pour in. And he was focusing entirely on making stupid sounds without sounding too stupid.

"Oui pnayg so ... hekrd. Ed ec lumt eh dra dnaac?"

...

"Drec ec lnywo. Cdnyhka. Pydrnuus nupud lyhto bahkiehc."

Reno sounded like an idiot and he hated everything.

[That Reno is making stupid sounds is totally fine to mention on radio, that the stupid sounds are Al Bhed is totally NFB, please. <3 I leave for work in 20 minutes. Am available for slowplay much later tonight though, if you really want to have strange words thrown at you.]

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Sokka, munching on some pork rinds, poked his head in the door. "No, you're saying it wrong. It's pronounced 'pydrnuus'," he said. "TRUST me on this one."

Edited 2008-02-08 23:59 (UTC)

Reno glanced up from the photocopies and stared at Sokka.

...

"You know this stuff?"

Sokka shrugged. "Not really. So you're a friend of Rikku's, now?"

"She's one of the first people I met when I got on the island," Reno replied, raising an eyebrow. "That a shock somehow?"

Sokka shrugged. "Nah, a cool guy like you would probably be drawn towards the awesome crowd. That's why you hang with me, isn't it?"

Reno had to smirk at that one. Just a small smirk. Just for a moment.

"Somethin' like that."

Sokka was amusing and made him look even cooler by comparison. Reno wasn't going to be the one to say that.

"So you don't know Al Bhed, you just know how to pronounce it? Or what?"

Sokka shrugged. "I know a few words. Enough to get by. 'Hello', 'how are you', 'lunch', 'dinner', 'we're going to go kill some fiends', stuff like that."

Huh.

Reno pointed at Sokka. "You're takin' a seat and recitin' them to me, yo."

Sokka popped another pork rind into his mouth. "Hey, I haven't seen most of these words actually written down, you know. Why don't you just ask Orangey?"

And now Sokka was going to receive Reno's best, 'um. No.' look.

"Because if I ask Rikku, then she'll know I'm tryin' to learn, you follow?"

Sokka grinned and punched him in the arm. "You sly dog!!! How close of a friend of hers are you???"

"That's for me to know, isn't it?" Reno smirked and halfheartedly rubbed at his shoulder. It didn't hurt, but the impulse was still there. It was more an afterthought than anything. A bit of a fidget without actually fidgeting.

How close a friend was he? He had no freaking clue.

"Maybe I just want to learn to speak a language I'm never gonna have any use for outside of this island," he mused. "Or maybe I really do want to know how to properly pronounce 'bathroom robot candy penguins,' yo."

"Pydrnuus nupud lyhto bahkiehc," Sokka reeled off fluidly and perfectly, without looking at the papers.

...what?

Reno looked amused for a moment, then shrugged and gave it a try, too.

"Pydrnuus nupus lyhto bahkiehc? Like that?" Huh. That... wasn't so hard, actually. "So the 'y' sounds like an 'ee.' That answers a lot. You know any words that weren't in the papers? I can't piece together many sentences with things like, 'boys are strange,' yoto."

"I dunno. Can't remember what was in the papers." He leaned over and looked at the papers in front of Reno. "What sort of things you want to know?"

"Little things, I guess. How you make a word show possessive, like 'Rikku's weird language,' or past-tense, like, 'Reno looked like an idiot tryin' to learn it,' yo." Reno considered for a moment. "And... whatever you got, man, I'll take it."

Tamaki peered into the room, eyeing Reno strangely.

"Roomie... did you swallow something by accident?" he asked, looking concerned and somewhat horrified.

Sokka scratched his head. "Did I mention I only was around the people for a few days? I mean, it's amazing the levels of conversation you can have using only the words 'that', 'please', and 'thank you'."

Reno made a face. It was not a patient face. Or a thrilled face. But it was not a particularly angry face, either, and he wasn't going to break Sokka's face just because he had decided to be a masochist and attempt to learn a language based on a year's worth of newspaper articles with no pronunciation guide.

"Okay. So. Tell me what you know, and I'll buy you a round at Caritas."

Reno glanced up at Tamaki and raised an eyebrow.

"Never heard another language before?" .... "Probably butcherin' it. Never heard it spoken, so I got no clue what I'm doin' here, yo."

Tamaki grinned and walked over to his side of the room, rummaging in his schoolbag and presenting to Reno his French Class handout (http://www.syvum.com/cgi/online/serve.cgi/squizzes/french/frenchmonths1.html?table) from Thursday's class.

"I've heard another language, just not one that sounds so unique," he offered, sitting down on his bed. "What is it?"

"Al Bhed," Reno replied. "Rikku's language."

There was a pause. And then Reno gave Tamaki the look. The scary one. That look that said, 'I am not afraid to hunt down your dog and kick it.'

"And if you tell her that I'm tryin' to learn it, I'll shove these worksheets up your nose, you understand?"

This was said in the most endearing way possible, given that it was Reno.

Probably wouldn't be his nose they got shoved up, is all?

Instinctively placing his hands over his nose, Tamaki nodded. He wasn't about to argue.

Then, realization dawned.

"You're learning Rikku's language?" he asked, a sly grin creeping across his face.

Reno rolled his eyes and attempted to hide the fact that his ears were turning red by looking back at the photocopied sheets.

"Learnin' to butcher it is more like it," he clarified. "Got nothin' to work with but a mishmash of words that I don't think were ever meant to go together in the first place, yo."

Ooh, that sounded pretty awesome!

Sokka tried to remember every Al Bhed phrase he knew, and started to list them off for Reno.

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Room 501, Friday Afternoon

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