~You Say Potato~

*****

“Ato boyaa…”

Sephiroth looked up from his ‘cup o what’ soup as his assistant made his way into the tent. The shaggy headed SOLDIER spared a grin and wave for someone in the busy crowd outside before tucking the canvas in place and blinking to adjust to the dim interior. “Heya boozu.”

“What?” The general had the momentary pleasure of seeing the younger officer blink in confusion and then wince.

“Sorry, sorry… ‘general’ meant to say ‘hello general’…”

“What the hell is a ‘bozu’…” He smirked at the dark man’s embarrassment. It was rare that he caught Zack unawares. Normally the captain’s accent was impeccable, indistinguishable from the men born and raised in Midgar’s fast-talking boroughs. It was pure chance that several of the regular troopers arriving with the recent re-supply happened to be jungle brats. As much as Zack didn’t seem to have much love for his old home, the town must have still carried the torch for him. They had wasted no time in running his friend down and gifting him with a care package that was made almost entirely of an oddly spicy flavored beer. Ever since, he had heard a startling amount of the bizarre Gongaga patois around the camp. To be fair it was most likely just in his near vicinity, Zack’s fan-club had developing a knack of following them wherever they went.

The black haired SOLDIER chuckled lightly, recovering from his slip. “…’boozu’, sir. It’s… well… ‘boss,’ you know? ‘boss’… ‘boozu’… sorta let it slide off the tongue…”

“It’s a wonder any of you can ever understand each other at all.” He shook his head in disbelief.

“Well if you grow up with it, it’s not so bad… started out a trade-tongue you know… us and the Cozmos, and hell even some Wutanese words, thrown in for fun… dead handy.”

“And yet you still learn how to form proper sentences? I’m impressed, Mr. Thomson, you’re an honest polyglot.”

“Poly-what?” The man’s patently stupid look only lasted a minute before he gave up and started to laugh. “Yeah whatever, you’re just amazed I know how to read. Admit it.”

“Please don’t tell me you people invented your own writing system too…”

“No way, too much work. Besides we’re all illiterate out in the hicks, I thought everyone knew that.” Making an appropriately idiotic face, the SOLDIER settled on his side of the large map-table and started sorting the messy stacks of papers into prioritized bundles. The system was simple enough. If the documents concerned supplies, enemy movement, or weather reports, they stayed on the table; everything else was casually dropped on the floor and kicked beneath the chair. A rather showy envelope direct from the desk of general Heidegger was given cursory inspection before joining with the useless litter.

“Orders came.”

“Did you even open them this time?”

“Will you bother to read them if I do?”

“No. But it’s the principle of the thing. Who knows, maybe he’ll say something useful for a change.” Sephiroth set his map aside in amusement as the younger offer leaned over to reclaim the packet with a sigh. Orders were almost always good for a laugh, if nothing else.

“Yadda yadda yadda ‘To: Chief Officer of the Front, Commander of the Jungle Campaign, General Sephiroth, from Shin Ra Military Supreme High Commandant Heidegger…? Jeez this reads like a bloody comic book… wait for page 6 to hear about the ‘space lasers’…” Chuckling to himself the officer thumbed ahead only to blink in disbelief.

“Holy shit, and I was making it up…”

“Making what up?”

“No, wait, listen to this… ‘Accordant with the time-table of our Weapons Development program, Construction of the cannon ‘Sister Ray’ will begin on the twenty-sixth of March, the Very Large-Scale Mobile Attack Beam Cannon will be operational no later than the first of the new year…”

“… Sister Ray hmmm? Scarlet is certainly making a statement… Don’t quite know what… but it’s a statement alright.”

“… Fuck, it is a space laser! They’re saying here that if they can get the Rocket up, the laser will be its first company payload…”

“Never happen.” The general shook his head in cynical dismissal. “I’ve seen that rocket. It’s a masterpiece of Shinra mis-engineering. Even if it goes up, it’ll never support any sort of useful cargo.”

“… damn… lasers… that’s fucking cool.”

“So how do you say ‘space lasers’ when you’re from Gongaga…” Distracting his friend from the report, he grabbed it out of his hands and dropped it back on the floor with the other useless company propaganda.

“Choba.”

“You actually have a word for ‘laser’?” He looked over in disbelief.

Zack rolled his eyes before returning to his work. “No sir, Choba is the name of the language… well not language really… dialect? Whatever… we just call it Choba.” He grinned. “And no, we don’t have a word for ‘space’ much less ‘laser’… the best we can do for space is to say the ‘upair’.”

“Up-air.” The general snorted in amusement.

“Actually I think it comes from ‘up there’, but whatever.” Seeming uncomfortable with the topic, his friend focused on the papers in his hands.

“So teach me.” Sephiroth was too entertained to let the idea go easily. His comment served to startle the Lieutenant, making him pause in his work to give him another odd look. The pale man simply shrugged. “I’m curious.”

“…About Gongaga?”

“… About this bizarre little subculture you and the bush-rats are developing in my camp… It’s disconcerting to have you talking and not understand a word.”

“We don’t teach Choba to Shinra…” The mutter was almost embarrassed, the dark man responding to his comment with a shrug of his own.

Sephiroth raised an eyebrow. “…You are Shinra now, SOLDIER. Or had you forgotten in all your playing with your little friends.”

“No sir.” His friend’s reply was mild but he must have felt a sting, Zack’s eyes returned to the report with unnatural interest.

“So teach me.”

“It wouldn’t be useful to you.”

“Teach me anyway.” Persistence was something they could both excel at. The general had watched his partner wheedle his way into any number of confidences, some of which he still regretted speaking aloud. He couldn’t see how turnabout wasn’t fair play. “Teach me something simple.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” He caught the dark man’s eye. Hazel twinkling unnaturally bright in the shadows beneath his hair; Mako eyes, the unmistakable mark of a SOLDIER. Whether Zack liked it or not, he was property of Shinra now, the sooner he got used to his loss of freedom, the better off he’d be. The general tried to tell himself that the acceptance, the tameness, wouldn’t be a pity.

Settling some internal argument with himself, his friend surrendered with a smile. “Fair enough… what do you want to know how to say?”

“Don’t care, something useful.”

Scratching his chin, the toss-headed man set his work aside and slouched on the table to think about it. “Well… when you greet someone… you’ve got the classics. ‘Heya’ is polite, for strangers and superiors… but if it’s just a friend, you can say ‘Yo’.”

“Yo.” The pale man mimicked his partner’s lazy drawl only to snort at the sound. “Seems simple enough.”

“Oh it’s dead simple… It’s for trappers and hunters trading shit in the wilderness, it’s not meant to be hard… So for instance… two strangers meet, maybe scouts from two different groups… you’d go ahead and ask if they want to trade, maybe. ‘Heya boyaa, tonk’a’tradey?’”

Sephiroth couldn’t help but chuckle. “Priceless.”

“Well if you’re just going to make fun…” His friend gave him a cool look and made to stop his lesson.

“By no means, what happens if they agree that they should trade?”

“Well, you’d ask to speak to whoever’s in charge…” The dark man settled down with another smile, showing his annoyance was all in fun.

“Boozu.”

“Not always… boozu is for your boss, you don’t necessarily use it for other people’s leaders unless you really respect them… basically all you say is ‘can I speak to your superior’… ‘Witchen is da olman?’ Which, can also mean, ‘where’s your father,’ or who’s your husband…? or hell, an older brother… like I said, simple language.”

“How do you know which a person means?”

“Well it’s all context, isn’t it.” Zack shrugged. “You can always ask for clarification.”

“So what if someone asks, and the person has two older brothers or something?” Morbidly curious now that he had the man going, Sephiroth rested his chin on his fist.

“Well, you can specify based on appearance… so for instance, if someone came up to me, asking after you… they could go ‘da olman pale-topper’… Since yours is about the palest hair around…”

“What if Rufus Shinra was here…?” It was fun to tease his captain. He didn’t often get the chance.

The dark haired man just sat back and gave him a sour look. “Well that’s where a break down happens doesn’t it… I mean we could say you’re the taller one… but there really isn’t any way to distinguish between blond and white… there’s no word except ‘pale’… I’d probably give up and call you a ‘white-topper’ or ‘da daimyo’ or something. Switch to a language that has better adjectives.”

“God forbid you use my name to look for me.”

Zack made a face. “Well we were assuming that I didn’t know you. Weren’t we…”

“So how do you say, ‘jungle’?”

“Da bigolgreen.”

“And how do you say, ‘army’?”

His friend blinked. “Shinra army?”

“Sure.”

“Da wanks.” The general simply raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What, we were none to fond of Shinra when they first came… anyway the term sorta stuck.”

“Da wanks izzn da bigolgreen.” Sephiroth tried the sentence, finding it as absurd aloud as it was in his head. For his part, his partner looked stunned.

“You learn fast.”

“How do you say /that/ in Choba…”

“Yous one zipp fucker…?”

“Language, Mr. Thomson.” His scolding would have been more convincing if he had been able to keep from smiling. Such breaches in decorum were distressingly commonplace around his assistant.

“Yessir.”

Something about the man just made it too easy to relax and forget oneself. Schooling his features into their customary mask, the general forced himself to return to work. There was a war to plan, and joking aside, he had a few chores for his SOLDIERs to perform. Clearing the current chunk of the map, he pointed off the key hills that marked their next assault. “…And now for a lesson in geography, Zack. We need to know what’s up in here… think you and Ibsow can scout it out? I’m in no mood to risk our new blood before we’ve had a chance to break them in properly. Taking the last set of hills was messy enough.”

“The captain and I can do it, when you want it done by?”

“Can you start tonight?”

The man gave a thoughtful grunt. “Well we can do the first zone I suppose, sooner the better.”

“You should go give the captain the bad news then.”

“Ya. Ato boozu.” Grinning again, the officer ducked out of the tent.

Sephiroth could only roll his eyes and sigh.

*****