Chapter 47: Fateless
In The Mystic Emporium, John was looking through a shelf full of books on the main floor of the store. He was bored and was looking for something interesting to read.
He could manifest nearly anything, long as he was in this store. He only needed to visualize something he desired and it would appear. The problem is he was unsure of what to manifest. John couldn’t just say he wanted something interesting or fun to do and it would appear, he had to visualize it in his mind, and that’s hard when you don't know what you want.
John was hoping that looking through his books, he would find something interesting to read, but it wasn't looking hopeful.
He let out a long sigh.
“No good. These are all written in the local script, which I can’t read very well. Since coming here, I have gained the ability to understand what people are saying to me, but why doesn't that also translate to writing? Ugh, maybe I should stop being lazy and learn. But, I would have to ask someone to teach me, and that just feels too embarrassing.” he thought to himself.
John had realized a long time ago that what people said to him, and what he heard, were completely different. The words he heard people say didn’t match the movement of their lips. He immediately clued in that another world would likely develop a completely different language from his own. Therefore, he concluded that he had gained some sort of ability from Onyx, allowing him to understand what people are saying to him and vice versa.
Unfortunately, that same ability didn’t seem to work with writing. John never completely learned the local script. He knew just enough for him to get by, and have sorta an idea of what was being written.
Graheel was located in the Union states, who all spoke and wrote Unia. John wasn't sure about the spoken language, as he was not able to hear it because it was automatically translated for him, but he knew that written Unia was ridiculous. It had a weird convention where it had two types of writing to convey tone, Formal and Informal. Formal Unia is no nonsense and straight to the point, where Informal is more flowery and poetic.
The main problem of Unia for John was that words in Formal and Informal are spelled completely differently and follow different sentence structure. It made the writing so much harder to learn for him. It was like Unia was two languages in one.