08-09-2008, 05:38 PM
428 words. Yay. [html]
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He was surprised to find that the word for coyote was the same in Italian. He said coyote in his head anyways, as if trying to confirm that it was the correct pronunciation. He looked to the next picture – a squirrel – and grinned when Savina told him the word in Italian for this creature. "Scoiattolo means squirrel," he said aloud, then saying it once again in his head, mouthing the syllables as he did.
He moved with Savina as they looked to his next drawing. It was kind of horrible, but Apollo was thrilled that she had deciphered the concept he was trying to portray. The word for sunset was tramonto. Apollo repeated it aloud twice, before letting his eyes travel to the next illustration. "Libro is for book. Kinda like library," which supposedly they had in Shadowed Sun. His dad had mentioned it once on one of his trips to visit Apollo. Apparently it was an underground den hidden beneath the roots of a tree where they stored all of their books and reference guides.
Apollo laughed when they came to the last picture. He had only seen a moose in real life once, when he had been a little bit smaller too. It was a huge creature with a large rack of antlers on top of its head. It was probably the biggest living thing that Apollo had ever seen before. He marveled at its size before it offered a strange noise (sort of a bellow) and took of stampeding through the trees. The antlers on top of his illustrated moose’s head were uncharacteristically large and the picture made him giggle. "Alce," he said, trying to pronounce it just as Savina had. "Alce is for moose."
"Alright," Apollo replied as he watched Savina draw new images into the dirt. He grinned to himself, trying to figure out what the actions were while she finished drawing them. "‘Hokay, well, let’s see." He twisted his nose and studied the dirt, deciding on the word for the first one. "Quello è qualcuno che funziona," he replied in an Italian phrase. He smiled to himself, proud for having figured it out. "E quello è qualcuno nuoto nell'acqua." He hadn’t been swimming before, but he had seen others do it. "E saltare. E, uh, qualcuno che sia… l'OH, so, arrampicandomi!" He knew what the next drawing was illustrating, but wasn’t sure how to say it. "They’re howling, but I don’t know how in Italian. How do you say it? And then the last one the two of them are playing. Gioco."