(This work'll have a lot less words; 1.5K as compared to AAp14's 2.5k, but i did promise 2.5K words per week, not two 2.5K words per week.)

Part 6 of La Tramuntana, continuing from a promise to speak

“quieres una pakiba?”, asked the clerk. Do you want a pahkibah?

Pon-massa, im ready. Wrong. 

No, no estoy listo. No, of course you can't learn any language in a week. No, especially not this one.

“Un que?”, i asked, faking a gringo accent. Please, speak the standard language

“Una bolsa, kollons-mill.”, said the clerk. A bag, balls-person.

“Entiendo”, i responded. “el ‘kollons’ es una palabra catalana.” I understand… “koyons” is a Catalan word.

“¡Nakare! Me entiendas, que mal!!!”, said the clerk, pouring sarcasm like fuel onto a fire. ·$/(")! You understand me, how horrible!

And Onista stared at nosotros. Wait fuck, my brain is in modo bilingual. Can't be arsed to bother with a single idiomas.

Back to the topic. “Bien.. No, gracias, ya tengo una.” Well… No thanks, i already have one.

A chuckle still wanted to leave, involuntarily.

And we left, with the food we'd just bought. “So… we can go use the grant to hacer new accommodation”, i said to Onita, this time in perfectly regular English. How beautiful the subconscious restricts language choice!

“What?”, she asked.

“I said that we can go use the grant to build new accommodation”, i said.

“Did you even notice that you used a Spanish word?”, asked Onita.

I frowned. “No… did i? You're pulling my leg, aren't you?”

I ran over my recent memory. Yeah, it was all perfectly understandable, all English.

“Stop being dumb”, said Onita.

“Says the monolingual”, i said.

Onita stayed silent.

And i went to look at Anista. She'd kept silent. “Understood anything?”

“Only ‘couillon’”, she said. “French word for balls.”

It was pronounced “koy?” by her…? What the fuck is up with French?

“Funny thing is… i thought i was on top of the game living in the bilingual part of Canada, switching languages, making all kinds of silly ”, she started. “And then we moved here. I'm basically monolingual now and it sucks.”

“No you aren't”, said Onista. “You're still bilingual, just hiding most of it.”

“Hmm”, said Anista. “What?”

“There's gonna be people here who speak French”, she said.

“If that's true…”, said Anista. “Let me try an experiment.”

She ran out towards some square and screamed "¿Qui ici peut parler français?" who here puet speak French?

No abnormal noise. Then “Je peux!” from somewhere else. And again, elsewhere. 

“¡Créons un groupe francophone!”, screamed Anista. “¡venez ici!” Create a francophone group and… and… come here?

And i looked at Anista. She had a wicked smile. Onita did too, a supportive one. “So, there you go, you are effectively bilingual.”

And we saw the people. A man, a woman, and another man.

And Anista went to babble on in French. Maybe there was teasing for her accent… i think, but i could certainly hear the difference. Giggles.

“And there she goes, being bilingual again”, said Onita. “I'm jealous. We should go learn Spanish in the dead hours of the brothel.”

“We can start now”, i said. “Like, with word gender and stuff.”

“Oh… what even is that?”, asked Onita. “Are some words genderfluid?”, she joked.

“Well… the word for water is kinda genderfluid”, i said. 

“Seriously?!”, asked Onita.

“Agua… has a feminine ending but needs a masculine article, but then uses a feminine one when after adjectives”, i said. “The word itself is always feminine, though… so not quite genderfluid."

“Ah, so it's bi”, said Onita. “Matches with the opposite gender sometimes, with the same one other times.”

“Well", i started. And then i chuckled as i thought about what she said. “And i guess most of the words are then homosexual if we follow this logic.”

“Wait… there is this word i remember, mar. No vowel ending, so guess the gender”, i said.

“Well, like our world… defaults to male…?”, guessed Onita.

“Correct… but guess what poets do”, i asked.

“Oh, they're weird… lemme guess, they make it feminine”

“Yes!”, i exclaimed. “So yeah, genderfluid words do exist.”

“I thought gender made no sense”, said Onita. “But it really does.”

i challenged. “Guess what gender-", i said, quietening my voice. "-polla is then, the word for cock”

“Well… society expects it to be surrounded by woman, so female”, said Onita.

“Yeah”, i said with a melancholy nod. 

Anista was still babbling. I guess she hadn't the chance to speak French in a while.

“Well, at least gender is somewhat predictable here… in French it isn't as much”, i said. “Same could be said for oral transcription."

“And the verbs?”, asked O8nita. “I've heard they're complicated.”

“Oh… yeah”, i said. Tables. I remember tables. TABLES. TABLES TABLES TABLES. “Remember hablo hablas habla hablamos habláis hablan” and you'll be fine, they all said. “And then memorise the other tenses and moods.", they said. “We can focus on the irregular later… just memorise these”, they said. MEMORISE MEMORISE MEMORISE PUT IT IN YOUR HEAD, they said.

“Trust me… just use the infinitives for now”, i said.

“But there's so much nuance you can express”, she retorted.

“Use. the. infinitives. for. now.”, i said. “No arguing.”

Onita saw the grimace i had at the same time i realised i was wearing it. “Fine”, she said.

And Anista did a hop and skip back to us.

“Sorted”, she said. “We're going to this French-owned restaurant this dinner!”

“Fun”, said Onita. “So now we both will be ‘effectively monolingual’.”

“Deserved”, quipped Anista.

And we continued walking, away from the square, to explore North City. A chill crept over us, carried by a new wind. The sun, still slightly warm, did little.

The trees were derobing, the ground becoming less of a heat source, instead a sink.

And the world was changing. “When do you think snow'll start?”, i asked.

“In a few weeks”, said Onita.

“And we'll have to go migrate to the first floor”, i said.

“Well… people do like to hyperbole. But yeah, if we need it, we can use the minibalcony door. I guess that's why the railing has a fence.”, said Onita.

And the evening came again. In the yellowing sky floated a single snowflake. On the tv spoke a single broadcaster, about the winter predictions. It was in Northern Spanish, but i understood a little from the graphics. Something about a decrease in potential snow due to the devastation caused by the 10-year storm.

Somehow, the large part of the roads had been cleared out. But i saw why it had been done; big scary southern “road-clearing” vehicles sat in the hard shoulder of some Northern road. 

They're probably able to clear a lot more than roads, i thought. Just look at the spinny thing… definitely capable of death…. too easily.

Sharp blades and all, i acknowledged. More than that which is sufficient for the dirt

And i watched the TV. The motorway was fine. People were doing their, what, 200 km/h, no, 400 km/h? Not the side roads. The poor jeep struggling its way up and down couldn't go very fast.

That was for later, they said.

And i looked at the side of the jeep. two Ms along the bottom and a little circle above them, forming an equilateral triangle.

It was the same symbol as i saw on that street, just the two bottom circles replaced for ms.

Was this a genuine connection or just a coincidence? Probably a coincidence. Triangles, after all, were exceedingly common. Letters and circle, after all, were incredibly common.

And people do need jeeps transporting items.

Next segment. Something about a “Mulumu” gang. A bunch of little petty crimes, recordings of pickpockets and some loan-giving. 

Well, i remember having been given the loan, what took me all the way here.

What a different life there was in each of the three? four? five? Countries i'd lived in. The UK a horrid climate and monolingualsim, Spain and Catalonia warmth but language barriers, the South and North werewolves but either xenophobia or more impenetrable language barriers.

The news panned to a street, to things in the north. A live interview. A multilingual one. I heard the newscasters throw Spanish at them, throwing in some northern spanish words and particles, being replied to in… a nasal language, sounding funny… oh, it was French!

I called Anista in. “Hey look, there are French speakers here!”

And she peered. “They're talking about how much they hate Quebecois people… and extrapolating to America in general?”

“Which America?”, i asked. 

“Maybe both, probably just the Englishy part”, said Anista.

“Oh… and i'm English”, i said.

“Maybe you'll be affected.”, said Ansita with a shrug. “Deserved.”

“Come on, all i did was mis-label your language!”, i protested.

“'Good luck!' is all i can say”, said Anista. Then she left the room, not even to watch the tv, as if she was doing it for dramatic effect.

Traitor. Well, i mustn't assume. Eh, that's more fun. Traitor.

Stay tuned for part 7, in which

Some notes:

• (maybe you can learn toki pona in a week; a weekend for the vocab, and a week for the grammar… but it'll still take years to get the sense you need to be fluent)
• I got a taste for it in a clockwork orange and in writing AAp14. Get ready for Jinner's own nadsat. Code switching shall reign!!!!
• (ok now i've trialled it out in my journal and it actually seems fun but i've guilt-tripped myself into finishing worm after i got broed of a fight scene in arc 24…?)
• Yeah… get ready to learn Spanish through comprehensible input :p.
• I spent quite a bit of time discussing parts of this extract in Discord. Turns out Spanish speakers see things wrong with my extract i don't, even things not related to Spanish. That's great. Things like “why am i reading the same dialouge twice” and such.
• Toki pona speakers, unite! Jinner here is referring to the sitelen pona for “kulupu”, but with the two ms. So, as we've seen, they've developed their own dialect. I'm not sharing resources here this time, so good luck decoding it!
• Maybe you wouldn't even notice if Jinner became so species-blind that werewolves were never mentioned again nor any of their traits so everyone becomes a humanoid and we're relying on the fact that Alexander's already described everyone and everything to even give the slightest semblance that Jinner is surrounded by werewolves.