A pleasant warmness surrounded Sendo as he reclined back in his chair, averting his gaze to allow his eyes to momentarily rest from the text he’d been pouring over. It was a text written in the words of his forebears, his first language in fact, but he still found it difficult to decipher occasionally. He’d been brought to the village young when he was tested by the CPSS and found to be a good choice for the life of a shinobi, where he had been immediately and thoroughly engrossed in the much more practice of speaking the common tongue, which hadn’t been particularly prevalent in his village in the northern edge of Koúnía. He had learned it certainly, but it had been a broken gathering of words and phrases that you needed to employ when travelers arrived more than it had ever been a true way to communicate. Sendo’s thoughts turned to those dark early days, struggling to understand and to be understood, unerringly gathering the mockery and bullying of fellow students by the broken language he was attempting to utilize while all his peers seemed for all the world to be masters. The gymnastics his tongue was forced to perform as he stumbled over seldom used syntax was mentally taxing as he was forced to think the proper sentence in vulgar before translating to common and finally spilling the words out of his mouth.
Of course, Sendo knew that wasn’t totally fair. It wasn’t that no one in Cloud spoke the tongue, it just seemed to be much more of a rarity than he had been accustomed to. With enough perseverance and immersion over the years he had managed a grasp, which had become fluency, which had eventual very nearly seen the extinction of his accent over the last decade and a half. This fluency did not come without a price though. He had been in his late teens, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, when he had first noticed that he had entered into a conversation in vulgar and realized the words weren’t automatically leaping from him. In fact, he had noted he was beginning to translate from common to vulgar in his head, which he had immediately deemed as unacceptable.
It was that occurrence that had led him to be seated in the Bibliotheca Conscientiae, reading the words of his ancestors. It had been a reprieve from his intense training and mission schedule for the last eight years or so of his life that he would come and quietly read in the tongue of home, assuring to himself he would never become rusty as long as he continued to make time. In a way, he found it soothing to sit and simply enjoy the words and sounds he recalled from childhood, the speech transporting him to a time before blood and duty had engulfed his life utterly. As soothing as he found it though, it was not something he could afford to spend all of his time to. Rubbing his eyes Sendo rose from his seat to store away the text and leave the land of warmth and memories for another day. The cold beckoned and clung as he made his exit muttering to himself, “Μέχρι την επόμενη φορά.<i></i>”
WC: 540
[MFT]
Of course, Sendo knew that wasn’t totally fair. It wasn’t that no one in Cloud spoke the tongue, it just seemed to be much more of a rarity than he had been accustomed to. With enough perseverance and immersion over the years he had managed a grasp, which had become fluency, which had eventual very nearly seen the extinction of his accent over the last decade and a half. This fluency did not come without a price though. He had been in his late teens, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, when he had first noticed that he had entered into a conversation in vulgar and realized the words weren’t automatically leaping from him. In fact, he had noted he was beginning to translate from common to vulgar in his head, which he had immediately deemed as unacceptable.
It was that occurrence that had led him to be seated in the Bibliotheca Conscientiae, reading the words of his ancestors. It had been a reprieve from his intense training and mission schedule for the last eight years or so of his life that he would come and quietly read in the tongue of home, assuring to himself he would never become rusty as long as he continued to make time. In a way, he found it soothing to sit and simply enjoy the words and sounds he recalled from childhood, the speech transporting him to a time before blood and duty had engulfed his life utterly. As soothing as he found it though, it was not something he could afford to spend all of his time to. Rubbing his eyes Sendo rose from his seat to store away the text and leave the land of warmth and memories for another day. The cold beckoned and clung as he made his exit muttering to himself, “Μέχρι την επόμενη φορά.<i></i>”
WC: 540
[MFT]