deercountry | The Building Blocks and other assorted tales!

"Yeah... He can be when he tries." Keith shrugged a little. "That's quite the bias." Though, Keith knew some Spanish words thanks to growing up in Arizona. It was hard to grow up in the southwest and not know some of it. He'd heard it pretty often. Still, he was just more amused than anything. "I've heard him use it, though... sometimes. Sometimes I understand him, too. But, I think he uses a different version than what I was used to hearing around the neighborhood where I grew up."

"Uh huh!"

She's actually gotten around to liking Lance quite a bit. A few months ago she thought they'd be poised to not like each other (Reaper related matters) but it just turned out that Lance had his own stuff to deal with.

"That might depend on the dialect you heard and what he uses. For instance, I'm Dominican American, and that sounds a little different from, say, Mexican American, which sounds different from Puerto Rican American and so on. They all have their slight differences."

Keith nodded. "I think he's Cuban, but most of what I heard growing up was probably Mexican because of where I was." He shrugged. "I mean, there are some basics that are the same, so I can sometimes catch the gist of it. But, even then, I never took like a class or anything. It's just what I picked up from listening to other people. I'm definitely not fluent." But, knowing a conversational phrase here and there was kind of helpful when you needed to find out from someone where the bathroom was while in a mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood.

"Either way it's Spanish, so you still understand it."

She smiled. "That fine. I usually stick to English, since that's what most seem to speak, but it is nice to go back to the language I learned first."

Granted, it did hurt a little to do that since it reminded her of her mother, but there was still comfort in it too.

"Man, this spray is really not coming off!"

"Sometimes," Keith said. He shrugged. It was hard when people spoke fast. "Traveling space, though, I've come across a few different languages. It's been interesting."

He watched her for a moment.

"Do you want help? Or are you considering this your penance and therefore you have to do it alone?"

"That's true. You must have come across plenty of different people with many different languages! How did you manage to decipher them?"

Luz started rubbing her hands.

"Oh no, I am NOT too proud too accept help! It's actually pretty hard to do this when it's this cold!"

"I uh..." (Thanks, canon, for never specifying.) Keith shrugged. "It just kinda worked. I think it was part of ship we were on that automatically translated stuff." (Like Star Trek? Sure...)

Keith nodded. "Alright." The physical work was something that would keep him occupied for a bit, anyway. That sort of thing usually prevented him from getting too antsy. He looked at the wall. "You know... if you're able to clean off anything that's identifiable, it might not be a terrible thing to just leave the rest of the artwork up..."

"Oh cool, like Star Trek! I figure that has to be the case here too though, since we all seem to speak English and I'm pretty sure that some of us ought to not?"

Certainly how Usagi spoke English was a mystery, so Luz assumed there was just something that translated everyone.

"Thanks, and you know, you're right! She may have been a vagrant, but just like me, her art skills are totally on point!"

Let's just lose some of those middle finger drawings please...

Keith nodded.

"Yeah... probably something like that... there's weird stuff here, so it wouldn't really surprise me at this point."

He did smile a bit at her comment, but yeah... some of the more 'rebellious' images and words could go. So, he settled in to give her a hand with cleaning off that stuff.

"I never really bothered to question it myself. The last town I was in had its own rules and crazy happening that had been going on for years, so I just sorta went with the flow. Since the place I'd been to before it was the demon realm, the type of new creatures I'd meet were not as surprising as they might have been."

Now the macabre stuff and all the death? That was definitely new and frightening.

"Thank you for this, by the way. This was much harder to do than I anticipated, and she tagged more places than I'm prepared to go visit!"

"The demon realm?"

That kind of took precedence over anything about graffiti tagging...

"Yes, the place I was before here or Deerington. I kinda stumbled into it really, but that's where I learned how to do magic! It does have demons there too, but they're not as bad as humans make them out to be."

Some WERE, of course, but the same could be said for certain human beings too.

"Yeah... that actually doesn't surprise me," he said quietly. After all, not all Galra were as bad as the Alteans had made them out to be... but he kept that to himself for now. "It happens, unfortunately."

"Honestly, I think it kinda comes down to the power that people have, and what they do with it. You can have power and you can use it to help, which benefits everyone! The thing is, most people consolidate that, and make sure to only help themselves. Everyone else just has to be fine with what's given to them."

Luz was very clearly thinking about the Boiling Isles here, and how the emperor of said isles dictated what witches could and could not practice.

"Mm." Keith nodded a little. "I mean, most people I know have either done really bad things or really helpful things with their abilities. But, I definitely know some who've been kind of selfish about it. I guess they exist everywhere."

"They do," Luz said, nodding. "I've known a tyrant who took something as amazing as magic and made it something only he could use, restricting it to others. But that's what people who have strength always seem to do: they limit the good so they can squirrel it all for themselves."

Luz was certainly thinking about the Emperor back on the Isles when she said this.

Keith was definitely trying not to intrude on anyone's thoughts here, but being a paleblood this week was making that hard. He frowned a bit.

"So, uh... is that this Emperor guy you keep thinking about?"

Huh? How did he know that? She hadn't even talked about him out loud. She gazed at him with suspicion.

"ARE YOU A WI-ok, just kidding, you're not a witch. For one thing, I actually AM one. Guessing that you're probably a Pale Blood though, like me."

Keith was a bit startled at her initial reaction, but then managed a small chuckle.

"Yeah... at least, for now, I guess." He frowned a little. "This whole shedding thing actually changed the blood thing. When I first arrived, I was a cold blood. But..." He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I'll go back again? I'm not sure."

It was off putting! Luz hadn't expected someone to read her thoughts! Not that she was too bothered by him knowing that specifically.

"Hopefully. I have a friend who also changed blood types. According to the blood minister, that CAN happen, and sometimes its permanent, but hopefully that won't be the case for you? I mean, unless you're fine with it. Are you fine with it?"

"Heh... uh... not exactly," he said. "I mean, not that was used to being a cold blood before, but this change? I think it's harder to deal with... all the extra... stuff... going on in my head. I'm not a fan." He shook his head.

"I understand. I don't even have that specific power, at most I get impressions. I can travel out of my body and see ghosts though, so I can get how strange it would be to suddenly hear people's thoughts."

And that being said...

"The Emperor is the worst though. There were several times he came close to killing me, and he definitely almost petrified my mentor. No one like that should be the emperor of anything in my opinion."

"Travel... oh..." Keith paused for a moment in the scrubbing, and then shook his head. He saw Allura use quintessence based alchemy to transfer a trapped soul from inside a sentient robot spaceship into a dying clone body. And this was after Keith himself momentarily had his soul in the same metaphysical space and spoke to the trapped soul. These things should really not surprise him anymore. He nodded. "Right. It's uh... definitely weird."

He listened as she continued on the initial topic. "Yeah... I've only known one Emperor, and he was a pretty nasty guy, too. Conquered most of the known universe and enslaved entire races... and worse. That's why I was with Voltron. To stop him."

"Yeah...I'm still working on that one. Not even I understand how to do it at will."

Luckily it didn't just happen BECAUSE, so that was a good thing.

"Ugh, that's my worst nightmare, that he's trying to go bigger. I'm glad you guys fight your own version of that emperor guys yourselves. Voltron, you said? That's the big pilot mech, right?"

"Yeah... so I'm kind of hoping to go back to the other type soon."

He nodded in response to her question. "It separates into five somewhat smaller ones, but they're still really big. The big one is humanoid shaped, and the smaller ones are lions.

"There's a couple of them here in Trench, actually." Not the complete set of five, so they couldn't form Voltron, but... three out of five wasn't bad.

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Please don't ak me those differences as I don't know them extensively:(

I don't know the subtleties, either. LOL. I just remember switching dialects in high school one year

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