Late again – sorry

And even if it did work, he may not have the control he’d need, given the limited vocabulary he had to work with. He had the recording of Urasmian’s translocation spell as well as the sizable collection of Minoan words he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months, both before and after he’d presented his Doctoral Thesis. The trouble was that the words from the tablets were all descriptions used for accounting purposes, such as animal and equipment totals, five sheep, or whatever. They weren’t a general vocabulary of sentences forming an entire language like you would get from a novel, for instance. So he knew it was going to be hard to use the limited word choice to both do things and control them, and that was presuming this even worked!

He had the broom handle with the aluminum foil end bits semi-welded onto each end by whatever the spell did with him. He retrieved it from the pick-up and added it to his collection of materials before sitting down on another handy rock outcrop to consider what he intended to do for a minute or two. Alright, he thought to himself, let’s start with what I know. He opened the laptop up and put his headphones in, and listened to the recording he’d made of Urasmian speaking the translocation spell as he embedded it in the wooden handle. Even though he now understood the words, he re-ran the recording a few more times until he was sure he had it memorized.

He then recorded his version and listened to the replay. The laptop’s built-in microphone wasn’t the best, but it sounded pretty right to his ear. He listened to the original and did a second recording. That was better. He had left off the bit at the end that actually enabled the spell just to be sure his laptop didn’t go whizzing off somewhere! He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been able to understand the words used in the spell, or at least the meanings of the words used. He was glad Urasmian’s translation spell was still working! Which brought up the question of how long it would continue to work. That was something Jason had no idea of the answer, as Urasmian had never said.

He then considered the list of words he had from the tablets and found only one that was any sort of match for the broom handle. So, it would be pronounced like that. Hmm. Right. And phrases would probably sound like this… Right.  The broom handle could be called an axle, as in the word used on several tablets to record the number of chariot axles a person owned. He got the impression that chariot axles tended to break regularly as everyone listed as having a chariot always had more than one axle.

Okay. Let’s see if that works. He ran the modified translocation spell through his head several times and listened to the original a couple more times. He substituted in the word for five paces for the distance and axle instead of the word for a person and moved the broom handle to a clear spot ten yards up the track. He stepped back and said the spell aloud while focusing on the broom handle. It disappeared and clattered to the ground about four yards further up the track!