Waking to Another Sky Ch3 bit -Conversation

~ crossovercreativechaos

“Yet while some believed all the world was ranged against them,” Kayaba went on, “others refused to despair. They sought allies, even in the unlikeliest of forms….”

Another forest clearing, shadows stretching black with sunset. Kirito stood ready, long black coat blowing in a leaf-rustling wind, sword drawn but held low. Fuurinkazan was a loose, red-and-black armored diamond behind him, with the wary tension Janet had seen in Marines hoping that things weren’t about to turn bloody. And Argo was a cloaked curl of narrowed eyes and war-claws strapped to gloved hands, guarding Kirito’s off side as lion-green eyes glared at them out of the shadows. -If you’ve got a card up your sleeve,- the young woman muttered, -now’s the time to play it.-

“What the-?” Daniel muttered under his breath. “That sounds like-”

-Just one.- The teenager smiled, a little wry. -Let’s hope I pronounce this right.- <<My name is Kirito. We want to talk.>>

Janet almost dropped her pen. The script of the translation at the bottom was completely different; a stark, Gothic lettering, as opposed to the normal clear script. And as for the words….

Klein’s eyes slid to Kirito for a moment, obviously startled. The rest of Fuurinkazan was a little less than perfectly calm, stealing glances at the black-coated swordsman that said next thing they knew, trees would be talking.

Obviously aware of the looks, Kirito scratched his head, trying to seem cool, calm, and as if he didn’t care if the rest of the group trusted him. Really.

Janet so wanted to feed him a cookie.

-What the heck did you just-?- Argo almost clapped a hand to her face, claws and all. -Ki-bou. Only you would make friends with mobs.-

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Klein who shrugged first. One of the other fighters beat him to it; a stocky young man in heavier armor, with a white rope serving as a headband for bushy dark hair. –Hey, I’m just a tank. You guys find the target, I pull it in, you kill it.–

–No one’s getting killed today, Kunimittz,- Kirito breathed. –I hope.-

Daniel hit pause, blue eyes utterly stunned. “That was-”

“Goa’uld,” Jack said tightly. “Joy.”

“No. More than that,” Daniel objected. “Timestamp, where’s… damn it, Year Two Aincrad doesn’t help, it’s not specific enough….” He grimaced. “They’re not speaking Japanese anymore.”

“Goa’uld,” Jack repeated. “Noticed.”

“It is more than that, O’Neill.” Teal’c studied the players frozen on the screen. “Even when they are speaking to each other, they are not speaking Japanese. They are speaking whatever language was created within the game, from both Japanese and Abydonian.”

“And I’m beginning to think created in the game is right.” Daniel’s gaze dropped, obviously thinking hard. “Kirito isn’t speaking Goa’uld. Not the way a Goa’uld does. He’s speaking it with an accent. He must have tried learning it….” He slapped his palm against his forehead. “Oh. Obvious, why’d I miss it… it’s a creole.”

Jack arched a wry brow. “It’s a Louisiana chef?”

67 thoughts on “Waking to Another Sky Ch3 bit -Conversation”

    2. A Creole is:

      1. a person of mixed European and black descent, especially in the Caribbean.
      2. a mother tongue formed from the contact of two languages through an earlier pidgin stage.

      All hail Google.

      I’m guessing the latter definition is the applicable one in this case.

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  3. Well this is going to be a BSOD when the survivors find out some of the mobs where aliens in the basement hooked up to the same game. Particularly if they turn out to be sophont?

    And I can just here O’Neil’s snark in the last line.

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      1. Eek.

        Question. Janet has had the place for a year, and would have had patients to deal with from her regular work. Any Bluebook people doing rehab at the Bluebook rehab center?

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    1. Actually, this is a point for very interesting Linguistic debate. Technically, a Creole has to be a “native tongue”, and in the real world that adds a required secondary point of “second generation” (which most definitions of Creole include, even tho it’s just a case of the real world requiring that to get the first part), but in this case they’ve got the NervGear(DHD-analog) putting it into their heads in such a way that they treat it as “native tongue”…

      About the only part Linguists would agree on (mostly, tho there’d probably be a few holdouts disagreeing) is that it’s past the point of a mere Pidgin language because it is both a complete language (Pidgins are defined partly by being incomplete) and because it’s effectively a Native Tongue (Pidgins are also defined partly by not being Native Tongue, but instead combinations of fragments of two other languages, neither of which actually has to be the Native Tongue of its speakers).

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      1. It seems to have put in American English as a native tongue, or at least extremely fluent, but it is not clear Kayaba did the exact same thing with the other languages.

        We’ve got at least four added languages (or at least vocabularies). English, Goa’uld, Abydonian, and Ancient. Kayaba could have done different things with each one. Might’ve eventually screwed up their sense of language doing that, but Kayaba is hardly the most risk averse about such things.

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      4. Yeah. I’d call it a Creole for the same reason. But I know a lot of Linguists would disagree, and it’d start the fun sort of argument.

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  5. (Quirks eyebrow) A mob that can be negotiated with, that speaks Goa’uld… were there Tok’ra NPCs in this game?
    …see, now I’m picturing the player reaction to this, and it’s something along the lines of “those shifty bastards really exist?!” Followed by multi-lingual swearing, and everyone volunteering Kirito as their negotiator/hiding behind him, because if this language and these people exist, maybe that brain-snake thing wasn’t just Kayaba being a horrifying troll?
    (Grabs ALL the popcorn!)

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    1. >(Quirks eyebrow) A mob that can be negotiated with, that speaks Goa’uld… were there Tok’ra NPCs in this game?>
      I highly doubt this bunch are Tok’ra. First there is the mention of ‘lion-green eyes’ and Tok’ra wouldn’t bother hiding from/ambushing a bunch of primitive humans. Rather they’d come up and try and convince said humans to be hosts.

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      5. It’s one of those moments where you can’t argue with Kayaba.

        Because even Jack’s, who is pretty good at Devil’s Advocate, “They are allies” is not spoken with a great deal of enthusiasm or conviction. Especially when he mutters “When it suits them” immediately after that.

        Hmmm . . . I wonder if Hammond is considering just how long he can get away with not mentioning any of this mess to the Tok’ra. It was pretty easy to do when they were in comas but now . . .

        Could argue that it is none of their business as it is an Earth problem . . . that already involves some aliens and alien tech . . . tech that they will probably want to take away citing human immaturity . . . but they don’t need to know the nitty gritty of all of Earth’s encounters with aliens, just ones that might affect the alliance . . . which this might darn it . . .and the survivors might end up involved in some fashion with the mission which means one of the Tok’ra will see them eventually . . . . and one of their Skills eventually. Or something else that makes them decide to be nosy about this particular bunch of humans . . . arghhh . . . where are my antacids?

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    3. >(I suspect Kayaba put in Tok’ra as an example of “You see these guys? Don’t trust these guys.”)>
      The snark will be over 9000.

      Argo: “Wow, looks like A-chan wins the bet. Everyone else said that if the Tok’ra were real they couldn’t be nearly as bad as Kayaba made them out to be.”

      Jack: “Oh?”

      Argo: “Oh yeah. They were this perfect combination of disapproving old biddies that find fault in anything and everything you do, while also coming across as the creepy old men offering kids candy so they’ll get into the car.”

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  7. I just had a thought: couldn’t the nanotech, as executed by the NervGear, fix the Jaffa? I mean, they completely rewired the players and made them capable of feats that should be impossible for a vanilla human. I’m not an expert on Stargate, but isn’t the main way that Jaffa are different from humans the fact that the Goa’uld engineered their immune syatems to be reliant on Goa’uld larvae? How hard would it be for Kayaba to fix that? (And that would be a hell of a bargaining chip if he could pull it off…)

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    1. Potentially, but a) who would trust the shifty so-and-so? b) it is not at all clear that what he did to the players is safe enough not to be an early death by Jaffa standards c) Jaffa are engineered to support larva, and it isn’t clear how Kayaba got his mods, and if the method is one that would give him a foundation for modding Jaffa.

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      4. I suspect the first volunteer for this would be post-SGC-vetting-process and have their larva maturing right that moment. They would also have a good friend with a staff standing by, just in case the results of the procedure were worse than a point-blank staff blast.

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      3. Very big. Like “I want a lot more testing and data and such” before I’d do it maybe.

        You’d have to be pretty desperate otherwise.

        Through how long do Gao’uld larva remain larva? Because one assumes they get too mature to stay in there eventually. Having time limit of how long a Jaffa can hold a particular larva would be another method of control. They need them for their imunue system to work and they have keep getting new ones every so often or they die.

        Granted, the Gao’uld’s idea of every so often is probably different from a human’s but still . . .

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      5. If they have his notes on what he thought he was doing, and if they have some years of the players not up and dying on them to validate that his approach doesn’t, unexpectedly, have oversights.

        Because right now it is an IT project, and IT projects can be deeply riddled with subtle flaws. Kayaba’s blindspots on a number of topics raise the possibility that there are also gaps in his design work.

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      7. I think Goa’uld larva stay in the pouch for something like seven years.

        Master Bra’tec is over a hundred, and IIRC Teal’c is something like seventy. Given that we are maybe a couple years away from the chemical substitute, and would have that much evidence about long term survival, pretty desperate. Unless Kayaba convinced some Jaffa he was the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

        If Kayaba is using Ancient technology for the mods, it would likely predate the creation of the Jaffa, and not have any data for them. Remember, the Jaffa are less widely distributed than standard humans.

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  8. Also question. How far widely known is the Goa’uld? Because Kirito is not exactly unfamiliar with being the first and one of the few at XYZ. So I could definitely see this being known only to a few people. But it could have also spread.

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      1. >He’s not the only guy, but it isn’t exactly common, even in the clearers.>
        Now that’s interesting. This means that learning Goa’uld wasn’t automatic and something the player would have to deliberately chose and work at.

        Also that it wasn’t vital to clearing the levels and/or main-line quests. But if you can speak to some mobs with it……by any chance does Silica know the language?

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  9. As mentioned above, Jack was asking for clarification and making sure everyone is on the same page, which is a good thing. And one easy way to do that is to trigger one of the various nerd’s lecture mode.

    Through studying that language will probably make Daniel very curious since it sounds like it might be some combination of Abyonian, Ancient, American English, Japanese, and who knows what else thrown in for flavor?

    Hmmm . . . you know with the SAO players being gamers, I wonder how they classify the members of the SG-1 party? Like who’s the Tank, etc? Teal’c is pretty tough, frontline fighter type . . . but Jack is pretty good at drawing aggro . . .

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    2. I’m pretty sure the American English is separate, and not mixed into the creole. And the Ancient might just be a few loan words, like maybe the Russian in American English.

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