Part 2 of La Tramuntana, continuing from a very dangerous crossing north resulting in an existential coping tool

The North had its fair share of poverty. Probably more then a fair share.

It also had its fair share of political action. Every sign we'd passed on the motorway had some language's message degraded, sometimes multiple, in different styles. The vast majority rid of either Spanish or English, leaving only Northern Spanish.

I eventually found out how to distinguish between the two. I spoke standard Spanish, to some extent, and could read it easily. Not Northern Spanish. It was foreign.

“Could i, in theory, get by in just standard Spanish?”, i asked the driver.

“Well yeah, if you have an accent they just assume you're from earth”, he said. “But you'll see that it helps to have Northern Spanish.”

“How?”

"Oh…”, said the driver. “They're not obligated to standardise their dialect in front of foreigners, that's all i'll say.”

And we continued north. I reflected. Not much had happened in the summer that passed after “we” brought down the loan shark's brothel. The brothel had become better, but i was noticing that the old me was coming back. I was saying goodbye to the sober me now. I didn't feel sad, somehow.

I should have taught myself Northern Spanish, but everything else got in the way. It was among my priorities but never done. Ok, maybe i did read some Northern magazines. In Standard Spanish, though. A heavily loan-worded dialect. 

And i looked out the window. Countryside passed us at speed, flashes of fields giving way to flashes of settlement giving way to city.

Densely built, for some reason. Very dense, flats 6-floor tall.

And we followed a series of less-and-less large roads. We reached a street, platea de pekatuf, where we stopped.

We left, carried our suitcases, towards the building.

The brothel had a cracked wall covered in not much. The brickwork was cracking away under patches of lichen.

Inside, it was somewhat more functional then the old one. It was mostly empty, save for the odd prostitute who hadn't anything better to do with the day. Card games, strange suits.

A floor of tiles adorned in cracks and dirt. We went and asked for the way to management. Directed to sex room number 10, we walked.

The sex room corridor was like the one of the southern brothel but somehow grimier, dirtier. And we saw what they meant. Permanently closed, sex room 10, said a sign. And we passed through, into yet another hallway of rooms.

And we found the manager's office.

Onita opened both the door and the conversation. “We're from the south.”

The wiry middle-aged man, who i'll call mr wire, looked at us with a blank expression. “To relieve me of the brothel?”  

Onita frowned. “To help you in its management.”

The man stood up. “All the documents you'll need are here. I'm leaving.”

And he left. Just like that. He stood up and went through the door and abandoned us.

Anista ran after him. “Stop!”, i shouted, to the both of them..

I ran to follow her as she chased down the man, grabbed him on the t-shirt. “You're staying here and you're helping us!”, she growled.

The man glared. “I can give you anything- what do you want?!”

Anista brought up a fist to deliver a punch. She didn't send it. “I want you to help.”

The man shook his head and twisted in such a way as to evade Anista. “I'm not going to. Bye. The red man in the cloud needs me!”

Anista didn't run after him this time. "He creeps me out..”

And she came back to us. “So, what's been left for us?”

Onita dived into the room and dug through filing cabinets. "Trilingual logs and official government forms and.”

And i felt an odd tingling sensation three languages. Just like back where i lived. I remember it so vividly now; Spanish, Catalan, and then English. Or French. Depends which tourists you were meeting; the French or everyone else.

And i peeked at a document. It had three languages for each field; “doba / fecha / date” for one, “asma / nombre / name” for another.

And then i remembered the forms back home. Changing depending on which government administered them. If Gencat, it'd've been “nom / nombre”, if the Spanish government, simply “nombre”.

I smiled. “This is a Rrossetta stone, in a way.”

Onita shared the smile. “Yeah… thank god we can just use standard Spanish. You speak it, don't you?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, and Catalan, a little”

And i thought about what it meant. Catalan and Northern Spanish were both similar but so different. Northern Spanish seemed to have an almost identical grammar to Spanish. Catalan didn't. It had lost the future subjunctive and had a full-featured set of “weak pronouns”. I liked it for its efficiency, in a way. But one of the crucial benefits Catalan had was its surface similarity. So many words looked similar. “any”, and “año”, for example, when one considered that “ny” was just a way of writing “ñ”, looked the same if not for the dropping of the noob's -o.

And that, i thought, seperated the two languages; Spanish well-suited for mass learning with its systematic grammar, and Catalan best-suited for everything else with its relative efficiency and orthographic spice.

Northern Spanish was fundamentally different. They went for the furthest vocabulary possible. I'm pretty sure some guy just went on some random dictionary and found the weirdest words just to form a new language.

But still, it was a language, and it felt quite valid.

And i smiled, warmer this time. A fire of nostalgia had ignited itself. “Reminds me of home, what with the masses of multilingualism.”

And Onita smiled again. “Yeah… it's going to be a little battle for me with my accent.”

I nodded gently. “Let's see”

“Hole ah, mie lame oh Onita.”

Very far. Too far. “'ola, meh iamoh Onita', would be better, even if only a little"

“Bale.”, she said. The English bale, as in a box of hay. Not the Castilian word for “ok”.

I sighed. This is going to be more then a “little battle”.

I decided to shift the topic. “I think i'll need to get a dictionary to learn Northern Spanish”

“Is that a buisness expense?”, asked Onita.

I paused a little second. “Yeah, let's just say it is.”

And she chuckled. A quiet thinking moment.

Anista walked up to the table. “Anything need taken care of?”

Onita took a look back at the documents. “Fuckk there's a lot. It's not even organised.”

“The filing cabinet”, i said. I could see in my mind's eye everything falling into place. Separators arranged on the drawers holding the documents between them, all clearly labelled by year-month and purpose, as close to ISO-8601 as possible. “Sort out the documents and it'll become so clear.”

And i noticed about myself. My brain could organise. It wouldn't, but it could direct.

And i realised.  I stepped back. Derealisation hit, a little; life stopped feeling so real for a second. I was an object in an object world.

Anista spoke but she faded out to the roar of ideas i hadn't even realised had taken over. “As if it's tha-”

And, thusly, if we were all objects, we all could have a purpose. And what would be the best purpose in this case? A cocktail of different purposes. Neurodivergence ideas hit like a loose train. We're all different, we can all contribute in different ways!

I deduced the rest of Anista's message; “-that simple”. Simple deduction, really. Common phrase in response to ideas.

Ideas… what beautiful things. I remember when i was younger, ideas firing me at 100 a minute. I didn't get a break. I never needed one. Well, until i had my first drug and i felt clear, focused, crystal-sharp.

“I need coffee”, i said. I blinked several times as i collapsed back into the world. “The ADHD is acting up again.”

Anista simply chuckled. “Do you realise how expensive it is here? By all means, take alcohol or some other shit but not coffee.”

“Tea? Some has caffeine… right?”, i asked.

Onita had a lightbulb flash open. “Yeah, and it's surprisingly reasonably-priced here!”

“Not that you need it”, interrupted Anista. “We all have a little ADHD.”

Maybe we all do. Or maybe the fact is that you are normal and i have stuff which can be debilitating at times. I didn't bother to argue, though. Too much effort.

No, shit, i could feel the previous days biting at me again. Days of being too tired to expend effort on focus, days of having to give in and follow alternative life goals, days of being my unmedicated myself.

“Unopened box of Methylphenidate, black market rate ¤75”. Not my pills!

That's what i first heard when i came to this dammned world. And it was biting back at me. I avoided it in the first brothel through novelty but little was novel here. Multilingualism, diversity, brothels, all the old shit i'd already lived through. Repackaged, only slightly.

And the old days were going to bite. Hard. “We need the most caffeinated tea.”

Onita lit up again. “Hey, they have the pure version. Synthetic, designed for a terrifying high. You're not a werewolf but if you regulate your consumption…”

My eyes opened. “That's scary.”

Onita rolled her eyes. “Eh, just dilute it in warm water and put some tree bark in; it'll be just like the real thing!”

I rolled my eyes in response. “whatever.”

And we toiled through the documents. We made several piles to arrange them, to form some cohesive picture, which prostitutes (fokortu) had joined and when, the balance sheets, and plenty more.

“Seems quite clear now", said Onita. “Really fucking high tax, some.. 75%?! Half of the income is government-given, at least.”

I laughed, a little. “That makes no sense”

“You're in a world of werewolves in some magical realm with a clear political split created by some Victorian guy in Wyoming”, said Anista. “Did you think it would?!”

“And what the fuck is that magical realm, anyways?”, i asked. “Really, magic in the real world?”

“Eh, no scientists have been allowed near the portal. They're scared of it collapsing”, said Anista.

And Onita leaned closer. “I'll tell you a secret. Not quite a secret.”

I nodded to encourage it.

“Samuel Prachet-Irving…? He was a perfectly normal guy. Well, until he found the portal and listened to the wind coming out. And that's how he developed Agent Brown… and became a zoophile.”

“The portals were there before Timodore?!”, i asked.

“Yes, and they say that they were there since the start of humanity. Language developed from the sirens in the realm, who spread their sinful tongues to the nomads and that's where the evolved primates got their communication.”

I slumped. “How scandalous. ”

And i paused for a second, teasing the edges of an idea. It was coming out of blur.

I jamp at a realisation. “What if the sirens have a conspiracy? Make werewolves and use them for…. where are the sirens now?”

“I'm pretty sure Timodore had them all destroyed”, said Onita. "So their conspiracy won't matter”

A naughty thought hit. “Let's have a conspiracy… maybe to improve the world.”

Anista chuckled. “So you say you have ADHD yet you let yourself these massive goals…”

I glared. Of course i have goals. You can't go say that i can't do them. “Meh, maybe i can't do the grunt-work, but i will help you in what way i can.”

Anista simply raised an eyebrow in question. “And how'd you do that?”

“I'll find a way. Maybe we can lower the tax rates. I'll find my role, i guess”

Anista shrugged. “Eh, whatever. I'll go talk with the prostitutes and see what they'll be doing for tonight, what they want us to go do.”

And she left. The judgmental bitch left.

And yet again, it was just me and Onita.

“Really rude of him to just throw the whole business at us, no direction”, i said.

“Don't worry, it'll be ok”, said Onita. “I've learnt a thing or two.”

Anista came back. “Such thick accents, woah.”

Onita shrugged. “You'd think some of them have English as a second language”

The room was getting dark. The strain of sunlight's dying orange beams made that clear. Anista didn't mind. “So, the bar needs to be started up and the cleaners brought in… surprisingly well-arranged of a brothel, efficient.”

“I know”, said Onita. “The taxes make it difficult not to be without tanking. I'm surprised they lasted this long.”

And we found our way downstairs. The brothel was really only one main room, split into wings. Small wings, split mainly by floor-colour. Blue for the gays, pink for the lesbians. Red for the straights.

And a client came up to me. Female, though. Not male. She glared at me. “¿Español del norte o español estándar?”

Northern or standard Spanish?

“Estándar”, i stated. “Soy homosexual”, i clarified to her. I'm not her slut.

Standard. I'm gay.

“No me importa”, she said. “¿Eres el jefe?”

I don't care. Are you the boss?

“Sí, con mis colegas aquí", i said.

Yes, with my peers here.

“Hole-ah”, said Onita.

“You're English?!” asked the she-wolf. “Thank god, i was looking for someone i didn't have to speak Spanish to.”

I felt a pang of guilt. Fuck, i'd forced the wrong language. Well, maybe i let it in.

“What happened to old Mr Wire here?”, she asked. “What did he do to you?”

“He ran off when we asked him to help. I almost beat him up but decided that he wouldn't be a good team-member”, said Anista. “Seemed high.”

“And he did really try to make ends meet. Taxes are too high, though”, said Onita.

The she-wolf narrowed her eyes. “Mr Wire has been accused of tax evasion.”

Onita stepped back a little. “So 75% isn't enough?!”

The she-wolf glared. First at us and then nothing in particular. “Tax is only 40% here!”

And i looked at Onita. She was sorting through documents in her mind. “But… the prostitutes were allowed a lower pay due to the higher ‘required cost’!”

“That shouldn't have happened”, said the she-wolf.

But Mr Wire, what did he do? “What happened to the money?”

The she-wolf let on a little smirk. “Went into the white powder. Testing revealed it was flour. Not herricane.”

I chuckled a little. “Didn't he try regular testing?”

Onita did the opposite of a chuckle. “Do you realise how dangerous that shit is?!”

I narrowed my own eyes. “I don't even know what it is.”

Anista put her forehead in her hand. She sighed. “It's a werewolf-strength drug that Samuel Prachet-Irving made to extort the werewolves and make a bunch of money.”

And Onita glanced at history in her mind's eye. “After which he was killed for ‘crimes against humanity’ when addicts got humans hooked… first on the drug, and then their claws. Turns out appetite becomes wider.”

Is this cannibalism? Maybe.

“Oh and all the agent brown was promptly incinerated!”, exclaimed Onita. “There was the ‘burning ash’ incident  because it works for more then DNA, but that problem was killed.”

So, Samuel was more then a zoophile but was also a budding cartel kingpin…? “The more i hear, the worse he gets.”

Onita smiled. “Welcome to the real world.”

And the she-wolf looked at us. “So, everything ok here?”

“Yeah”, i said. “Planning to work tonight.”

“Nice”, she said, as she walked out of the door.

And we were left alone to contend with the inertia of a business. 

Anita sighed. “They did say they were being ‘paid unfairly’. I guess we'll have to fix that."

Back at the office. It was drawing so late the prostitutes were retiring to bed. Not in the brothel, but elsewhere. Why did i hav to remind myself that this was the normal thing?

And i looked at the bookshelves to gain some intel. At least Mr Wire had organised the books somewhat. The upper shelves held fiction and were about 50% erotica of all gender mixes and species combinations. A simple system; Mh for Male human, Fw, for female werewolf. I'd be into Mh/Mw or Mh/Mh or Mw/Mw for example. Below, though, held a more telling side; the non-fiction section. The titles i could read ranged from buisness-starting guides to psychology, dark psychology, black psychology, money, and some dictionaries.

I could see a clear trilingual split along the full bookshelf. Along the left were the English books, the middle the Standard Spanish books, and the right Northern Spanish. 

And i looked at the dictionaries. Webster and Oxford for English. The middle held the Diccionario de la lengua española, two massive volumes, tomes, containing the entirety of what the RAE considered to be Spanish. What they, and by proxy, the Spanish government, considered to constitute real Spanish.

2001 said the year on the book. The first ran from a to g, the second from h to z.

It shook me a little. Here, on some random bookshelf in this weird magical realm, lay the entirety of the official Spanish language. 

And to the right sat two other books, almost as thick. La qamufo Inglés-RAE-Fepentrio hivatolofo was what one of them was. The second was La Qamufo de las palabras nufu.

(This feels like its just keyboard moshing… was it?)

No, i mustn't let such thoughts in.

Two different publishers, two different opinions, i guessed, just like Oxford and Webster. Or maybe Oxford and Collins.

I pulled them both out to look inside.

The second, the one without “RAE” in the title, read like this:

Lifana (De Arábico ??????, (lis?n)) 
ES: Lengua que utiliza una colonia para comunicarse 
EN: A language used by a community for communication

And the first, after some searching for the same word, read instead like this:

Lisana (Arábico ??????, (lis?n)) Idioma; Language

And i peeked at the two. The first was only slightly thinner but all the definitions took a single, maybe two, lines. The second took so much more space to define the term.

And i looked at the little alphabet-indicators on the side. the normal Spanish a-z +ñ for the second. A different list for the first; it went to y, omitting s and z, q and c, g and x, the various letters which served multiple roles. A simplified orthography. The RAE'd only dream of doing such things.

And just for fun, looked up Tramuntana. I knew the world only from novelty Barcelonan souvenirs who'd think that extra novelty over just using Catalan “nord”, would use the more formal term. I remember looking it up; “behind the mountain”. 

I decided that for the best chance, i'd go for the more word-dense dictionary. And i found it:

Tramuntana (Catalan tramuntana) Norte (más informal de sepentrio); North (more informal then sepentrio)

And i smiled. “They used a Catalan word”, i told Onita, working on documents in the opposite corner. “Tramunatana, which i think is formed of tra-, meaning the same as trans-, and muntana, meaning mountain, so ‘the direction towards the mountains’. Where i lived, the mountains, the Pyrenees, not just the baby ones every else were north, so it makes sense."

“Youre obsessed”, said Onita. “First werewolves and now linguistics.”

“I guess it's the ADHD playing up, then”, i said. “Seems like it'd be a good title for a book about this place, y'know, la tramuntana… sometimes i feel like Catalan can be a good analogy for Northern Spanish, minority language, and like, this word perfectly shows that and how nonsensical this place is becuase to the north is only sea and then we have the way that they have both have some form of very-fast transport and happen to inhabit an area of an area roughly the size of Spain and it just feels so very fitti-"

“I need to focus”, interrupted Onita. “All these fucking numbers about werewolves fucking…”

And i pinched myself. What could i do? No, what would i be able to do?

Maybe i should go memorise Northern Spanish words, teach myself the occasional phrase.

And i found a phrasebook. It was written in Spanish, RAE Spanish.

And there were way too many words for please. Quaseo, the standard. Por favor, the one for foreigners, Sodes, the formal one for the people with more control, Amabo, the one for making routine requests politer.

(Lucifer, Satanus, Beelzebub … why do these come from the same language as the thanks…?)

Fuck, i had a bad thought. I hate them.

And i chuckled a litttle. They all sounded relatively Latin. Amo, to love. I remember reading a little back then. It was so much less powerful of a verb then English. “I love you” said all the Roman soldiers to each other. The true translation would be "Thanks”.

“Quiet down”, said Onita.

Fuck this, i'm going outside.

Through the stairs, past the main room, out of the… unlocked? main door, and into the street. It was 04:12, according to a clock tower. It was late, even for werewolves.

The flickering yellow of the high-pressure sodium lights. No colour save for a monochrome gradient of yellows. Amarillo y solo amarillo. 

And it bounced off me, this sickly colour.

And i walked down the street, to immerse myself in the north.

“Aitum!” i heard, a scream. A human one. “Fokours! Fekorreme!”

Fuck. That sounds too much like a Catalan word for help.

Stay tuned for part 3, in which we learn better things

Some notes:

• A rant on signs because i'm as language-obsessed as i am werewolf-obsessed :p
  • The “remove the foreign language” idea on signs i find to be quite silly for when road signs are designed for communication. Doesn't mean that on my way on the motorways around Lleida i didn't see Spanish scratched off the signs resulting in Catalan being the only legible language. Well, Catalan and a handful others, from German to French to even Basque. 
  • There's not much of a problem when the difference is only in the placement of a few accents or spelling (such as Catalan “França” vs Spanish “Francia”), but it can sometimes get quite large, possibly mutually unintelligable. I don't like it because that invites misinterpretation.
• Too often i have times where i go “i should raise questions and answer them much later to keep people reading”, so that explain's the drivers refusal to answer.
• I write web serials on furry platforms and i like the amateur ability it excuses me for. Eh, i plan to publish Indebted as a full novella and the thought of editing it and making it better is a little boring.
• Language
  • If you want, a comparison between Catalan and (Standard) Spanish is available at https://i.imgur.com/NoeYn8i.png. Catalan is the one above in a bigger font. Note that if you look past the surface similarity, clitics and such are much differently implemented.
  • Ok, so Northern Spanish does have some things like the “l'” used in older words starting with a vowel instead of el/la, but that's just an outdated obsufication move. Northern Spanish has went in the “change the lexicon” direction instead.
  • When Jinner goes says “Parlar español estándar, si us plau”, he's using the Catalan verb “parlar” and the phrase “si us plau”. Then, maybe, he's speaking pure Catalan given that “español estándar” is the official name for the language when compared to Northern Spanish
  • Obviously, given that the respective Northern Spanish terms'd be “lokuar” and “quaseo”, this makes no sense to the nativer.
• Synesthesia rant
  • This is only going to make sense to me but i kind of prefer “Jinner” over “Newbie” because “J” (and j) is magenta and “N” (and n) is yellow. I used to like yellow but now i prefer magenta. O doesn't really have a colour beyond the blue-brown it switches between and A has a clear yellow. So, i like the way these colours work. Magnificent Magenta for the Hedonistic Homosexual, Blue and Brown for the brains and beauty, and Yellow for the brawn. It works out.
  • I have a lot of synesthesia. Some images have a very clear smell which jumps out sometimes. Words have a colour from their first letter, digits also have colours. Some lines have a certain sound to them. Sometimes things just make a certain word or phrase appear in my head. I don't know why everyone says synesthesia affects creativity when i don't really use it for that. Sure, i use the colours as a checksum for numbers sometimes and synesthesia helps me break down input into “logical” (to me only :p) components.
  • My favourite type by far is the one from music. Through earphones, i can have anything from abstract shapes moving around on a 2D plane (and sometimes a 3D one) to a full-formed music video playing out. Once, just once, i could see colour and texture in music. And the fun thing is that it just makes sense, like genuine sense. White noise from noise makes sense. Moving long rectangles make sense for the melodies they represent. Flashing squares make sense for drums. I don't even question it because it makes sense in the most intuitive manner.
• Story
  • Onita's attempts to speak Spanish have been inspired by my dad's attempts. Hi accent is so thick it's painful and he only converges from quite a distance once i try to knock a better accent in.
  • Jinner's neurodivergence rant comes from personal experience. There are times i stop feeling real and times when my thoughts suddenly walk back into the same place. What happens if we combine the two?
  • In fact there are often times that people have no special “aurora” that seperates them from simple robots taking input and giving output in response. It's a little scary to feel like that but i still make sure to treat them like humans are usually expected to be treated. Because, the way i see it, if it turns out the world is real and everyone is conscious, then i'd have fucked up my life believing the other thing.
  • You know what? Fuck it this story might as well be a “neurodivergence is cool” Aesop. An “every brain is useful in some way” Aesop. An “ADHD is valid” Aesop. A “starting a business is hard” Aesop. Maybe a “ableism against invisible disabilities both exists and is not very nice” Aesop.
  • That rant about the old days is heartfelt because it's where i am living right now. I can only really focus on writing these silly stories and maybe schoolwork in class sometimes. But i guess it works out, in the end. Back in the days of tribes, i'm sure teamwork was much more common and the bread and butter of life. 
  • The “explain an old mystery using the portals” idea has been bouncing around. And as has been made painfully obvious, i do enjoy linguistics so that becomes the solved.
  • Maybe as one reads this novel i give them interesting and avant-garde coping strategies and beliefs to encourage diverse thinking. Not that someone this young can be that wise yet.