This is going to be fairly breezy, honestly.
Somewhere in the back of the former Dominion’s beyond
“They’re speaking some weird version of Old American,” Oren told our team. “I mean, like really weird. I’m surprised the Alliance garrison can understand the locals here at all.”
Getting that far had been an exercise in frustration. Between us, we knew pretty much every language spoken on the continent, from Spanish to Latin — and Mai and I knew a couple of spells that should have helped, too. We were still getting stuck with our translations until I started listening to how the locals were talking. Once I realized that their vowel shift from Old American had gone a different way than ours had, suddenly their gibberish turned into actual language.
Mostly. The poor bastards still didn’t have much of a vocabulary. The Dominion isn’t big on its slave-farmers talking.
Oren was getting the most out of them. I’m better at reading than speaking Old American, and I didn’t think any of these people had ever even seen a pen in their lives. But I was following the gist. “The beasts are where the sun falls,” the peasant told us. His teeth were surprisingly white in his lined face; the local Alliance garrison had a dental mage. “It is more than one walk. They are very bad, very hard. Do not go there.”