fandomtownies | The C.I.C.

Kaidan stared at the front door of his shop when he came downstairs to open. The raven had brought friends. There was a perfect conspiracy of ravens standing on the sidewalk outside. That.. was new. He opened the door and addressed the one he recognized, "Uh, hi. This isn't going to turn into a Hitchcock thing, is it?" The raven gave a subdued, quiet quok that Kaidan took as 'no'. It disturbed him, the subdued tone, for the raven hadn't been anything but confident since he'd known it. Taking a breath, he held the door open for the conspiracy.

They waddled in and hopped up onto the counter, shuffling themselves into some sort of order but also packed themselves tight, huddling. "What's going on?" Kaidan asked, frown lines forming on his brow. 'His' raven barked a loud noise, others joined in at various points with some strange hissing noises. It sounded like.."You don't like fireworks," Kaidan said, "Ok. I get it. You guys can stay in here, but, uh, we're going to have to work something out for bathroom breaks outside." He thought about the problem, looking around for what was at hand. One of the consoles he'd scavenged for parts ought to do the trick.

Pushing the door open with a foot, he set the console between it and the jam, creating a space big enough - he hoped - for the ravens to come and go through. 'His' raven fluttered down and strutted over, inspecting the opening, then striding outside and back in. He shook himself, feathers fluffing, and made a small chirrup noise before flying back to the desk. Kaidan followed, bemused by the whole thing.

Description of shop is here.

[OOC: CIC is OPEN, no OCD. Will be sp during parts of today because we're doing a thing if it ever stops raining.]

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Kanan had made a promise to Kaidan, and so, with a book tucked under one arm and a sheet of paper tucked into the front cover, he was making his way to the CIC. And kind of pausing in the doorway, careful to not kick the console doorstop out of the way as he made his way in.

...

"Ooookay," he drawled, closing the door so that it stopped against the game system behind him. And then looking up to see the huddle of Ravens. "Did I pick a bad day?"

"I guess they don't like fireworks," Kaidan shrugged. The conspiracy once again repeated its subdued boom-hiss firework noise, then huddled closer together on the counter. Watching them, Kaidan pursed his lips, then popped open the register drawer and pulled out a small handful of dimes. Scattering them on the counter distracted the ravens, who immediately began squabbling over them, pushing them around the counter, stacking them, and playing.

Giving Kanan an openhanded shrug, "I didn't have the heart to leave them out there."

"Fair enough," Kanan replied with a shrug. "I might have to bring Stance into the Ghost for the night. I still don't know how well he'd handle the explosions as it is."

He held up the book he'd brought.

"Got you a present at the zoo this weekend."

The cover had a piece of paper over the title and the author's name, the translation written in Aurebesh over the top. All the words in the book had been given the same treatment using sticky notes, so that they could be moved for easy reference.

"Aw, and I got you nothing," Kaidan grinned, reaching for the book, "Thank you." Thumbing through it for a minute, he referenced the word and the alphabet. Grabbing a pen and a scrap sheet of paper, he wrote something on it. Backward 'C', something that looked like a 'K', the number 7, and another backward 'c'.

There was only one word he'd learned in Kanan's language. "Did I spell that correctly?" Kaidan asked, pushing the paper toward Kanan.

Kanan took the paper, read it, and then broke into a laugh.

"Look at that. Baby's first swear word," he said, grinning and shaking his head. "Yeah, you got that right. And I have to approve of your priorities, there."

"I only know the one word," Kaidan grinned, "I couldn't remember the one for your goopy band-aids. At least it's phonetic?"

"Kark is phonetic," Kanan agreed. "We have silent letters in Aurebesh just the same as High Galactic. Just to keep things complicated. We have a few more letters, though. Cherek, enth, onith, krenth, nen, orenth, shen, and thesh. Which you can basically just use in the place of the letter combinations I wrote there, see?"

Kaidan nodded, following. "Is 'cresh' a hard c or a soft c, or both? Like card or like cereal?"

"Both," Kanan replied. "So you'd use cresh where you'd use a C in both appearances of it in 'Coruscant.'"

Kaidan tried to write it by sound. C-oo-r-c-e-k-a-n-t.

"Close," Kanan replied, faintly amused.

In that way that meant that it wasn't close at all. He took the paper and pencil from Kaidan and wrote it down correctly for him to reference.

"Cresh, osk, resh, usk, senth, cresh, aurek, nern, trill."

Frown lines folded on his brow, "That's not even a little how it's pronounced. Why?"

"Why do you write a P before phone?"

Because language was stupid, Kaidan. Because language was stupid.

He frowned, "Wouldn't that be like one of your combined letters? PH instead of F?"

"We don't have a symbol for 'ph,'" Kanan replied with a shrug. "It'd be peth-herf, just like in High Galactic."

"Would they?" Kaidan asked, interested, "Or would it just be 'forn'?"

"Nope," Kanan replied, shrugging. "Peth-herf. We do have phones back home, I promise I know how to spell it."

On Coruscant, mostly.

"Huh," Kaidan mused, "Another one of those weird similarities, I guess. There really is no reason for the 'p' if the alphabet isn't English."

"There's not," Kanan agreed. "And we have enough combined letters to do away with a lot of redundancies, but that silent peth is never not weird."

"It's never gonna be not weird to hear you use 'peth' for 'pee', though I guess it's how Americans think of 'zed' as 'zee'," Kaidan shook his head, "But I better get used to it, if that's how it's said."

"Aurek, besh, cresh," Kanan rattled off. "It's a different alphabet. Do all Earth alphabets use A-B-C?"

"All the Latin-based ones do," Kaidan said, thinking about it, "I think that's why it's weird, because this is so close and yet, not at all."

"Yeah, imagine the adjustment I had to make when I came here and had to go strictly High Galactic," Kanan replied, shaking his head. "Weird."

"Is there a class difference between the languages?" Kaidan wondered, "I mean, from the name 'High Galactic', kinda sounds like."

Kanan smiled wryly.

"Yeah, how'd you guess?"

Everyone here was so snobby, with their A-B-Cs.

"Anyone who calls their language 'high-anything'," Kaidan answered, "Is it a social class, caste system..?"

"Social class, mostly," Kanan replied with a shrug. "High Galactic is for the snobs who can afford that education, and Aurebesh is for everyone else."

Yeah, Kanan grew up learning both.

Jedi.

"Nobles use the cursive form for their signatures, that sort of thing."

"How different are the alphabets?" Kaidan asked.

Kanan smiled wryly.

"Aurek is A, besh is B, cresh is C, dorn is D," Kanan said, pointing them out in order as he went. "They're suspiciously similar, actually, all the way to zerek being z. And that's where we add our cherek and enth and onith and so on. We even have characters for all the same punctuation right across the board. The symbols are different, but there's still a question mark, there's still a full stop and we've got parenthesis, more or less."

"So.. what's the difference between Aurebesh and High Galactic?" Kaidan asked, a little confused.

"Aurebesh looks more interesting," Kanan supplied.

Yeah. That was about it.

The C.I.C. - Wednesday

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