WEEK 2

[umbralant]

WEEK 2

monday

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wednesday

thursday

The first week is over, and two of your number are gone. Everything related to the case has been cleaned up, with nary a knife left at the Main Square nor a trace of the mud shapes that once painted the clock tower walls, although some stray graffiti still dots some storefronts.

However you may feel about the entire debacle on Friday, there’s no doubt that something has changed about the atmosphere, although whether it’s something tangible or just a trick of the mind is hard to say. Maybe it’s nothing. Either way, there are more palpable changes to the city, with some of the fog retreating away from a few of the surrounding areas, uncovering new buildings and streets along the way. The night, however, remains unchanged as always save for the slow waxing of the moon, leaving it bright and full as early as Thursday night. Regardless of if you take it as an omen or not, at least that means the streets will be lit up fairly well for the week, provided some inconvenient cloud cover doesn’t slide right in.

[[Welcome to Week 2! Note that new areas have been added, and can be found under the Week 2 tab on our Locations page. Once again, feel free to make top levels at your discretion, and remember to note it in your header if you plan on investigating any locations. You can also privately contact The Lady or Rembrandt.]]

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Comments

[pr159]

[ ??? ]

No, each one is a syllable. This is my name.

[ All ninety-something strokes of it... ]

The writing here looks so comically simplistic that it would be hard to believe it was a real language if I didn't miraculously understand it.

[notbymyside]

It certainly does. The writing I am used to, it's similar to yours. Each symbol is a word, though, rather than a syllable. May I?

[He indicates to Rideaux's pencil, asking permission to write something down to show him what he means.]

[pr159]

[ This is hard to imagine. Wouldn't they need hundreds of thousands of characters in that case?? ]

Go ahead.

[ Hands it over... ]

[notbymyside]

[More like a few thousand, but Ango will show that off in a moment.

He takes the pencil, and he pauses for a moment as he considers what to write. He could do his name, or Dazai's, but...

In the end, he writes two symbols: 織田 ]

This first one here means 'to weave'. As in, weaving fabric. The second symbol means 'rice paddy'. When you write them right next to each other like this, they combine to mean 'a woven rice paddy', as in rice paddies so close together they are like the weave of a cloth.

Or, more commonly, it's a family name. 'Oda'.

[pr159]

Hm. So all of your names are made up of combinations of words? That seems like it would be confusing.

[ He's used to middle names always having meanings, but his first name doesn't mean anything.

(Never tell him about French.) ]

Is it pronounced the same either way?

[notbymyside]

Sort of. The first part is conjugated when put into sentences, since it is a verb. But the base form is the same as in the name.

Actually, most names in my country are like that. My family name, Sakaguchi, means 'the opening of the hill', while my personal name, Ango, means 'I am relaxed.'

[Don't laugh at him, he knows his name does not fit him at all.]

It also depends on the exact symbols used to write it, as there are multiple ways to write both 'Sakaguchi' and 'Ango'. But the symbols for my name are as I described previously.

[pr159]

[ He raises an eyebrow at it, but doesn't actually laugh...

He thinks he kind of gets the basic concept, but he still can't really picture what it would be like to read pages of text in that language. It sounds like there's a lot of room for misreading. ]

So yours and mine and the one they use here -- all three really have completely different writing systems, then. Not just the way the characters are written, but what they represent.

[ though he STILL DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHERE THIS POLISH SPELLING OF HIS FIRST NAME IS COMING FROM!! ]

Interesting... Though I have to say, I'm glad yours wasn't my first language.

[ He's pretty sure he would have had a much harder time pulling ahead of all the other agents if he'd had to teach himself to read that. ]

[notbymyside]

Speaking it is actually much easier than writing. And we did adopt a simplified version that uses symbols to represent syllables. It's just impractical to use all the time.

[pr159]

Oh, speaking I wouldn't have been worried about.

What's so impractical about it? These already look simple enough.

[ if you want to talk impractical......... ]

[notbymyside]

Oh no, that's not quite what I mean. Here-

[Then he writes out 'sakaguchi ango' using a slightly different way of writing.]

This one is harder because a lot of words sound similar to each other, and using syllables like this doesn't show the actual meaning of the word like kanji would. When we speak it's easy to figure out if you mean 'book' or 'wood' or 'country' based on tone and visual cues, but in writing that's more difficult to do.