Lilia's Tale

Chapter 20: Reading

The next morning, when I woke up, my body still felt oddly sore. I looked at the window and saw a rather bright light coming from it, indicating it was either morning or noon. I stretched as I could despite my rather weak state and got out of bed, yawning. I tried to open the door again, but it was still locked. I sighed and went back on my bed to lay down.

Father likely heard me trying to open the door, as he came in shortly after my attempt at freedom.

"Good morning, Lilia," he said.

"Good morning. Can I ask why you keep locking the door like this with me inside?"

"Since you don't have your pendant, it's dangerous to let you roam around, so I want to make sure that there is no way for your identity to be revealed."

"I understand, but I still feel like I'm in some kind of prison or something..." I answered.

"I understand, but please bear with it for now, okay?"

"Okay..."

Afterwards, we went to have breakfast that Father had prepared. Once done, he simply offered that we started learning about reading and writing, which I accepted. He had already bought paper and some pencils, so we went to the bedroom and settled ourselves on the table.

"First, let's look at your name," he said.

He wrote five characters on the paper and showed me them."

"I'm guessing it says Lilia?"

"That's correct. Now let's-"

"So this is the character for L and this is the character for I, right?" I interrupted him, pointing at the different letters.

"Y-Yeah, that's exactly how it works. Each letter has its own character," he explained, surprised.

"So it works the same as what I already know. Well that will make things much simpler on me."

"What you already know?" he repeated.

"Yeah. I already know how to read and write, but the alphabet in here is different to the one I'm used to. I basically just need to get accustomed to the new characters and I should be fine."

"That's... somewhat impressive. Should I write each character or?"

"Yeah, but I just thought of something else I need to verify. Can you write a sentence and help me analyze it or something, please?"

"Alright. What do you want me to write down?" he asked, preparing himself to write.

"This condescending tone of yours will surely irritate me beyond what is socially acceptable," I slowly said, and even repeated another time.

"That's a complicated sentence," he commented while writing it. "Also, I hope it doesn't apply to me, does it?"

"It's better to have something more complicated in this case, and don't worry it's not targeted towards you."

After he finished writing, I went through the sentence, making sure that its formation was exactly the same as what I had said. After some detailed analysis aided by Father, I came to the conclusion that the writing language of this world was exactly identical to English on Earth, except for the alphabet.

I then asked Father to write each character with some space around it, especially below it, and tell me out loud what character it corresponded to. To my surprise, the alphabet was in the exact same order, making it easy for me to create equivalent. I wrote underneath each character the english equivalent, to which Father commented on: