Da Book

Chapter 4: New Clothes and a History Lesson

"Alright," Reiry said, once we got far enough away from the blast site, "we need to get new clothes,"

"What?" Jacob asked, sounding a bit confused.

"We just killed Duke Branwen, dumb ass. I don't know if they have Dukes wherever the fuck you're from but here they're some high ranking people. And that wasn't some thrown together hideout, that was a well-established base and there were bound to be cameras. So they know what we look like."

I need to reiterate, in the less than 48 hours we were in that world we had seen Reiry kill two people. So we decided that she was right and started running away from the blast sight.

We managed to find a clothing store and started looking for clothes, it seemed that Reiry already had something in mind for herself and was in one of the dressing rooms almost immediately. At one point I overheard her talking to Nate, saying, "Nate, you need to turn around. And if you so much as think to turn around, I swear, I'll find a way to revive you just so I can kill you again," after that little laugh to brighten the mood, I went to find something to change in to. What I ended up finding was a heavy, black, coat that went downtown my ankles, with some kind of crest on the back that I had no chance of recognizing. It wasn't exactly my first choice but they didn't seem to have anything else.

Jacob ended up finding something he wanted and we went to the counter to pay, "Um," Jacob said to the clerk, "we would like to pay for these, but we're in a rush. Is there any way we can pay for the clothes without taking them off,"

The clerk responded in some language we couldn't understand, to which Reiry sighed, displeased. "I'll handle this," she said, and started speaking to the clerk in what I assumed was the same language. Their conversation went on for a minute or two, eventually Reiry slammed her hand onto the counter, said something that sounded angry, and the clerk let us leave. (Now that I think about it, I don't recall whether or not we actually paid the clerk.)

"What was that?" I asked once we were out on the street. Reiry responded, "Lower Tongue,"

"What?" Jacob said confused.

"You know how, when you're younger, you just kind of spoke in made up words. That was you trying to say regular words as a child," She said, "Where you come from they probably teach the language to the younger children, but here they don't. It turned out all the kids babbling random shit, were consistently babbling the same random shit. No one could actually translate it or find similarities between that and English. (I found out later that we weren't speaking English but somehow or message got translated into whatever the hell we were speaking.) But they couldn't translate it because the similarities were essentially just grammar patterns, you could get a rough meaning of what people are saying, but things would get lost in translation,"
"Why is it called 'Lower Tongue'?" I asked.
"It's called Lower Tongue because only people from the lower class spoke it, and it's impossible to learn,"
"You learned it though," Nate interrupted. (I feel like I need to say that I couldn't actually see or hear Nate at that time but she seemed to continue as if someone had.)
"I didn't learn it," Reiry said, a little angry, "I had to learn English. I clawed my way up to the shitty position I'm in- great now I need a drink, follow me I know a good place,"