Title: Language shifts
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: Generalish
Length: 500ish words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Implied Tarta/Umi relationship but that’s not really important.
Summary: Umi and Tarta discover an oddity in the translation spell that lets the Knights understand everyone else…

oOo

Umi flopped backwards onto the bed with a dissatisfied huff and swore at the ceiling, her arms aching thoroughly from the several falls she’d taken in their training session. Tarta, instead of cackling at her - the expected response, given that she’d caused most of the falls, introducing Umi to fighting with a curved sword - but just stared.

“What did you say?” she asked, voice quivering.

“…Something rude?” Umi had no actual memory what she’d come out with. “’Shit that hurts’, probably. Why?”

Tarta snorted. “I don’t think the translation spell is, uh, working right on whatever you’re saying. Unless you’re really saying ‘oh stony ground I hurt’?”

“…No?” Umi blinked, and then started to snicker. “Why would - no, stony ground wasn’t involved, it really translated like that?”

“Quick, say something else impolite, I want to know if it’s just that one!” Tarta plopped down on the bed beside her, grinning. “Or if there are others - and you’ll have to tell me what you actually mean, too. Literally, that is.”

Umi went to push herself up on her elbows, then thought better of it after a few painful moments, and stayed flopped on her side watching Tatra. “Why? Just so you know what I’m actually saying?”

Grinning more broadly, Tarta waved a hand. “No, so I can swear in public so you understand what I mean but no one else does.”

At that, Umi cracked up, flopping onto her back and laughing hard enough her ribs hurt.

oOo

It was a little unfortunate that half the official meetings they were both going to at that point were about the revival of Autozam, which involved rather a lot of discussion of stony ground - as they were trying to decide on test areas for the revitalisation techniques which were being developed. By the third day of looking at each other and starting to snicker in the middle of some completely innocuous discussion, Fuu pulled Umi to one side and asked what she and Tarta were laughing about so much.

Fuu was the one who was curious enough to enlist Ferio to find out if the ‘translations’ were the same for a Cephiran listener, which, as it turned out, they were not. (As, after a lengthy explanation a few years back, it turned out that the different lands all had their own languages which were translated to the girls as ‘Japanese’, and a common language between them which Tarta would use to talk to Ferio - only it was similar enough to Cephiran that the Cephirans just used their own tongue, which was useful as none of them would have been learning an international language for all the years of isolation, making the invasion even harder to deal with.)

And then there were four of them trying not to laugh at the most innocent of phrases… which lead swiftly to Clef, having tried to ignore the snickering as long as he could, pulling Ferio to one side for an explanation.

He had to call a pause in the next meeting before he too started laughing inappropriately. Umi clapped Tarta’s hand at that - and got glared at, but it was worth it for the way his lip started twitching up every time either of them dropped one of the phrases into conversation.

oOo