Communication, as Sarah had previously noted, is not limited to verbal exchanges; however, communication without the verbal element is limited. There is only so much that can be communicated through demonstration and creative gestures, especially when learning something like why it is important to grow Vegetable A next to Vegetable B but to keep it at the far end of the garden from Vegetable C.

The most Sarah got from that particular exchange with the children was that A plus B equaled good, but A plus C equaled bad. She wasn’t sure if that applied to the growing stage, the cooking stage, the eating stage, or all of the above.

The communication hurdles were a growing source of frustration for everyone in the household – and Sarah’s Plans required effective communication – so she and the children set about teaching each other their respective languages, pulling their father into the lessons whenever he could spare a moment from the busy life of a farmer.

As a possessor of the [Polyglot] Skill, Sarah could have chosen to teach her new friends any of the over 7,000 languages spoken on planet Earth at the time of the fateful “accidental error in calculations” by the mysterious Builders.

Truth be told, she had a bit of a hard time wrapping her head around that number, or more specifically, what it represented. 7,151 books made a respectably sized library. 7,151 languages all crammed into her mind was…well…a little mind-blowing. It helped, actually, to imagine the knowledge as a library. She could reach in and take any of those languages down off the shelf and put it to use. She could then return it to the mental shelf and let it fade into the background with all the other “books.”

If she had been forced to make a logical choice over which language to teach her new friends, she would have immediately disqualified 7,128 of them. The remaining twenty-three languages had accounted for over half of her world’s population, so it made sense to teach the aliens one of those languages which they were most likely to encounter amongst other humans. Teaching them one of the over three thousand endangered languages, some of which were spoken by only a handful of people in the modern age, might have been fun – some of those languages were really fascinating – but would hardly be helpful for future relations between their two species.

And yes, darn it, she remembered that these people were really only artificial-intelligence-simulated representations of the real thing and so she could teach them any language she wanted without having a long-term impact on the real world, but she’d made a commitment to treat this like the real world and she wasn’t going to renege on that now, even if she was the only one to whom it mattered.

Besides, how could she be certain nothing done in the Tutorial would have any effect on the real world? It seemed safe to assume the Builders were aware of everything that occurred within the virtual reality they’d created for the human race; who knew what they might decide to copy or implement within real reality? For that matter, how could she be certain this wasn’t real reality itself?

Oh, now that was a disconcerting thought. Could the Builders have created the illusion of virtual reality just so humanity wouldn’t go into hysterical mass riots and run rampant over the Builders’ precious Sanctuary worlds? It was, after all, less frightening to contemplate the possibility of one’s death or serious injury if said death or injury was only digital and therefore temporary. People would be a lot more likely to throw themselves into dangerous situations if they believed there wouldn’t be any real-world consequences. Even with that System warning during the Tutorial set-up phase, about the possibility of virtual death inducing physical death, Sarah was sure there were plenty of humans who would consider those odds an acceptable risk. Could all this be a devious plot by the Builders to whittle down the ranks of their most recently acquired species?

No, that just didn’t fit. For one thing, it would be fairly easy to tell the difference; the first time someone died and didn't come back, all his Tutorial group mates would scream bloody murder and the jig would be up. Scared, hysterical mobs were dangerous enough...angry, furious, spitting-mad, hysterical mobs would be much, much worse, and Sarah had to believe the Builders were smart enough (or simply experienced with multiple species enough) to realize that. Besides, every bit of the System that she’d seen so far had spoken to a true desire to ensure the survival and basic wellbeing of humanity. The Builders might not actually care about a species so technologically primitive (comparatively speaking, of course) but they at least seemed to be earnest about making up for their mistaken destruction of Earth.

It might be a bit like a construction foreman ensuring a family of birds makes it safely to a wildlife sanctuary after one of his people accidentally knocks the nest out of a tree with one of those big orange construction machines, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter to those birds if the foreman saved them because he cared, or if he did it because he felt guilty, or just because it was the thing to do…in the end, all that matters to those birds is that they have a safe new home…right? Right.

So, now that she had reaffirmed her decision to treat everything that was happening to her as if it were in the real world…what had she been pondering? Oh, right…logical choice of language for instruction of aliens. Right, so, again, if she’d been forced to make a logical choice about which language to teach her new friends, she would have first narrowed it down to the twenty-three most-used human languages.

After that, well, she wasn’t sure how she would have narrowed it down after that. Thankfully, she didn’t need to, because there really was only one choice to make and it was entirely practical, which, come to think of it, kinda made it the logical choice too, right? Gah! Bad brain! Stop going into contortions.

The only practical choice was to teach the three aliens the language of her birth, her mother tongue, her…(stop it, brain!)…ahem, to teach them English, specifically, of the Canadian variety.

The reason for this choice was simple: culture. Culture was what made Canadian English different from American English, British English, Australian English, and all the other versions of English…to say nothing about the other seven thousand-some languages.

Words developed different meanings within different cultures. Call someone mad in London, England and you’d be calling them crazy. Call someone mad in London, Canada and you’d be calling them angry. Idioms were even more confusing. Sarah knew that the phrases “hit the road” and “pound the pavement” had two completely different cultural meanings, but both – if the words were taken literally – also meant "to strike a paved surface which is intended to facilitate travel and transportation."

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Anglophone Canadian culture was the one Sarah understood best, therefore Canadian English was the language and dialect she knew best, and not even [Polyglot] could change that.

The problem with [Polyglot], Sarah had realized, was that it gave her the meaning of everything – even idioms – but it didn’t explain any of the cultural background. For example, the Polish phrase “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy” translated into English as “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” which…okay, Sarah admitted, that was a bad example. That one she did understand, but that was because she was familiar with both concepts: the circus and the monkeys within it. There were plenty of expressions that were beyond her expertise, like the Mandarin Chinese one about inflating a cow. Sure, [Polyglot] told her that it had to do with bragging and making something out to be bigger than it actually is, but...okay, okay, that one kinda made sense too, even if she didn't understand what cultural peculiarities would lead to that particular phrase being given that specific meaning...what did the Chinese have against cows, eh?

The point was, even if it was an idiom that she could puzzle her way through, could she explain it to the farmer and his children? Could she explain what a circus was? Did they have such a thing in their culture? And what if she described the common physical attributes of a monkey and then discovered that the local equivalent was some ferocious carnivorous predator that would rather eat you than jump through hoops for you, literally or otherwise?

(Wait, what was it monkeys actually did in a circus? Not important, brain!)

The point was that after much (probably unnecessary) consideration, Sarah decided to teach the family English and they began to teach her their language in turn. For some reason, all three of them took to the pronunciation of English words with incredible acuity. Their memory for the meanings of words and their ability to construct sentences with grammatical correctness lagged behind, but they managed to perfect their pronunciation with very little effort. Sarah was left with the odd little feeling that asking them to accurately produce English sounds was like asking a concert pianist to accurately play Hot Cross Buns.

As her occasional language sessions turned into day-long marathons conducted by the ever-enthusiastic children (much to the farmer’s quietly amused sympathy) Sarah’s odd little feeling turned into two distinct realizations. Firstly, that her childhood struggles with the various eccentricities of French seemed quite laughable compared to her current challenge…after all, French was at least a human language, while this new conglomeration of meaning-laden sounds was strange, beautiful, and utterly alien.

The second realization was that there was a reason the family had so little trouble with English sounds and it was the same reason that true fluency in their alien language would have been utterly impossible for Sarah without the [Polyglot] Skill. She memorized and absorbed the various sounds and their meanings much faster than should have been possible for someone of average intelligence with so little experience learning new languages, but that was only the start.

As she tried over and over to replicate the sounds made by the farmer and his children, she came to the realization that the System, via [Polyglot], was actively changing her. Her tongue was becoming more dexterous, able to twist itself into the more complex shapes needed to produce the alien sounds. Her soft palate seemed more pliable and she had greater control over it. She even started to have greater control over the muscles in her throat.

The changes always seemed to happen while she was sleeping, and the harder she worked to learn the language during the days, the faster the physical changes occurred each night. At first she thought the changes were mostly natural, like the way practicing a specific action – say, touching one’s toes – makes it easier and easier to perform said action as time goes on and the various parts of the body strengthen and adapt; though this adaptation was happening at startling speed.

That theory was blown out of the water the morning she woke to a buzz of new sounds. It was like every sound she had grown accustomed to hearing now had an additional layer to it. The [Raptor Roosters] – with whom she was developing a complicated relationship based on a combination of her dislike of their petty little tyrant hearts, her enjoyment of the taste of their cooked flesh, and her natural sense of sympathy for every living being (with the exception of certain creepy crawlies) – were serenading their feathery scaled mates by crowing greetings to the sun. The daily barnyard concert echoed through the farmhouse every single morning, and Sarah would have sworn she knew every note of it by heart, but now she was hearing a high-pitched trill at the tail end of every crow – and she didn’t remember ever noticing that before.

In between the [Raptors’] repetitive declarations of whatever it was that reptilian alien chickens felt the need to say, Sarah could hear the occasional soft sounds of mommas calling babies in the [Beefalo] pens, but now those calls were marked by a deep bass rumble that she didn’t think had been present before…not that she’d heard, at least.

The shock of new sounds very quickly brought Sarah to full wakefulness. She sat up in bed and stared around her in shock, trying to understand why she could now hear things that she somehow instinctively knew were both above and below the usual range of human hearing.

Then the little girl stirred in her small bed on the other side of the room. She stretched, yawned, sat up, flashed Sarah a smile, and gave a cheerful morning greeting…and Sarah understood why and how she’d been changed.

The words, the many, many words that Sarah had been having so much trouble differentiating between, the words she’d been stuck trying to identify based on context because so many sounded identical to one or more others…those words weren’t identical, she just hadn’t been able to hear the parts that made them different. Now she could, and it could only be thanks to [Polyglot].

When Sarah told the family about her new ability, using a halting and somewhat broken combination of both their languages, the children grew excited. It seemed they had been just as frustrated as she with her inability to tell so many words apart.

The farmer, for his part, was quite intrigued and tried to grill Sarah on her [Polyglot] Skill. She had, by this point, determined that her new friends did indeed have access to the System, but it seemed Sarah’s Legendary Skill was one the farmer had never heard of. To their mutual disappointment, it quickly became clear that neither the farmer’s grasp of English nor Sarah’s grasp of his language was yet sufficient for any kind of technical discussion.

With a sigh and an apologetic smile, Sarah returned to her language lessons as she and the children headed outside to start their morning chores.

This time, Sarah urged the children to go back through all the words they’d already taught her, focusing especially on those containing sounds she couldn’t previously hear. By the time the [Raptors] were fed and their coop cleaned, the morning eggs were collected and put away, the garden was watered, the beds were made and the house swept, and the kitchen was scrubbed of all traces of breakfast and ready for the preparation of lunch, she could consistently differentiate between all the words that had previously stumped her.

Encouraged by her progress, Sarah sat down on the front lawn to play with the children and promptly dove into her next challenge: actually making all those new sounds.