paradisalost | Thread: Talking with our hands~ [Miwako and Ravi]

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Thread: Talking with our hands~ [Miwako and Ravi]

Who: Miwako and Ravi.
What: Finding a book on sign language to learn it so Miwako can talk.
When: After this? >>
Where: The library, mainly.
Rating: PG?

It sounded like some people were losing things other than what had already gone missing for them. But did Miwako's voice count as one of those things? For a moment, Ravi wondered if his hammer disappearing that one time also had something to do with that, somehow, but since it had come back, that probably meant it wasn't anything like the memories and things people had already lost after all. Those didn't seem to be coming back anytime soon.

Either way, not being able to talk out loud had to be hard to get used to. Maybe the sign language idea wasn't going to make up for it completely, but it was a start, right?

Ravi found his way to Miwako's floor and then it was only a matter of finding the right door, knocking and waiting. (And hoping that she was actually there and not already somewhere else to look for the library.)

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Miwako heard the knock and it made her jump a little. She hadn't neard much noise all day, especially since she hadn't been able to talk or sing like she normally did. She jumped up, dusting off her skirt and walking quickly towards the doorway. She began to yell out 'Coming~' but remembered that while her lips moved, nothing would come out. She sighed, defeated; and opened the door.

'Ravi!' she mouthed, before attacking his arm with a hug. She was grateful that he had come to her rescue, really. What would she do for without some means of communicating if she didn't have the journal with her? She wanted to say 'Thank you', but settled for a happy smile in his direction. She hoped he would understand.

A surprised expression briefly crossed Ravi's face when Miwako latched onto his arm (not that it was a bad way to be greeted), but a moment later, he easily returned the smile she was giving him. "You okay, Miwako?" he asked. She looked like she was fine, at least, even if it was pretty obvious that her voice really did seem to be gone or she probably would have said something by now.

He motioned over his shoulder with one hand, waving at nothing in particular. "You're pretty high up here," he remarked. "It's gotta be almost like a whole journey for the people all the way up on the higher floors whenever they wanna go downstairs."

Miwako nodded. She lifted up her hands and made a walking motion on her palm, before making a tired expression and pretending she was out of breath. She put her hands behind her back and grinned; nodding her head suggestively towards the staircase. She had no idea where to go, so she was counting on Ravi to show her the way. Although, he had said it was on the first floor ... she pondered briefly why she hadn't seen it before.

Ravi chuckled. "Yeah, that's what I figured, too," he agreed with a nod, then grinned at Miwako. It looked like talking still worked like this, kind of at least. "Ready to go?" He turned around to lead the way, assuming that Miwako was going to follow, and headed back towards the staircase leading downstairs.

After a while, he glanced at Miwako again, checking that she was still there. It was pretty weird, somebody losing their voice out of the blue like that, without anything happening to cause it - other than whatever had made anything else disappear, probably.

Then again, everything else was just as weird... They still didn't know where everything even ended up when it went missing if it wasn't something along the lines of memories and why all those things were taken in the first place, did they?

Miwako nodded and followed closely behind. She studied the walls carefully, making sure to smile cheerfully whenever Ravi looked back. The stairwells were certainly a lot lonelier when you weren't humming a song all the way down.

She sighed. Why did she have to lose her voice, of all things? She could live without a lot of other things, but this would be hard to deal with. And a lot quieter. Miwako didn't like the quiet, it made her feel less alone in the big castle if she was making noise. The sound of her own voice had been comforting, but now it was gone.

She blinked, realizing they had descended several flights (she had lost track of how many) of stairs while she had been lost in thought. She began to call out 'Are we almost there?', but again, there was no sound. Miwako decided to grab Ravi by the sleeve instead and look at him questioningly. This was going to be hard until they both learned this 'sign language'. She hoped it wasn't too difficult.

Ravi stopped, feeling the tug on his sleeve as Miwako caught hold of it. He turned his head to look at her, studying her expression for a few seconds as he ventured to make a guess as to what she was trying to ask him. Maybe this was harder than he'd thought it would be. You couldn't always be a hundred percent sure of whatever you were guessing based on motions and facial expressions, after all, and making guesses could take a while, if you didn't get it right the first time.

But letting silence drag on wasn't something he was planning to do. Even if he wasn't so sure that talking a lot when Miwako couldn't respond out loud would be a good idea, either, it seemed more awkward not to say anything.

"Something wrong?" Ravi glanced around, then looked at Miwako again, giving her a smile. "We're pretty close," he said, deciding to let her know that they were almost there. "This one's the floor I'm on and so's Yuu," he pointed into the direction where his and Kanda's rooms were, "so we just got one more set of stairs left to go." The castle was on the huge side, though, so maybe it wasn't actually hard to miss the library if you weren't looking around the whole first floor.

Miwako shook her head at the question, and then nodded at the location he had just given her. She looked down the hall and remembered going down that way to deliver Kanda's lunch. Which he still hadn't said anything about. Miwako pouted about that for a moment before she got off the stairs and paused for a moment to look around. Library, library ... she still didn't see a library. Maybe it was behind a corner? Miwako looked over at Ravi again, smiling and waiting for him to lead the way.

Leaving the last flight of stairs between them and the first floor behind him, Ravi turned the corner. He placed his hands behind his head as he walked and nodded into the direction he was now heading in. "It's just over there," he announced. Maybe it'd be easier to spot if it were right in front of you when you made your way down the stairs...

Ravi lowered his arms and pointed at the entrance coming up. "And, if you look to your left, we're just about at the castle library up ahead now," he added in a mock tourguide voice. "They've got a pretty big collection of books here." Nothing that seemed to tell you much (if anything) about this place, though, oddly enough.

Miwako giggled silently at the mental image of Ravi being a tourguide for a group of little kids on a field trip. She walked towards the door and puched the door open softly. She didn't even have to take one step in to let her jaw drop at the massive amount of books she saw already. She pondered whether or not they had any books on fashion as she stepped inside, looking around in awe. 'Amazing', she mouthed.

Ravi followed Miwako into the library, stepping through the doors behind her. He grinned at her reaction. "This one's way bigger than the library back home," he remarked, "and I thought that one was already pretty big." This place seemed to cover all kinds of information that Ravi was sure didn't have anything to do with the world he was used to, on top of carrying books he did recognize from that world.

The down side to such a huge place was that it took a while to find what you were looking for if you didn't have any idea where to start looking. Things probably weren't organized the same way everywhere. Ravi glanced at Miwako. "You wanna split up and look around, Miwako?"

Miwako pondered this for a second. If they split up, then they would probably find it faster ... but she was also concerned about getting lost in this place. And if she found a book, how would she find Ravi? She didn't have a voice to call for him. She shook her head, and pointed to her throat, and then stretched her arms out to indicate the size of the library. She probably looked silly, but for now, there wasn't really another way to communicate.

Ravi tilted his head to the side slightly. Yeah, Miwako had a point. That was another reason the size of this place could be a problem right now. Splitting up could mean they'd have to spend more time trying to find each other again than just looking for one book, depending on where they ended up, right? Even if Miwako stood out pretty well with her pink hair and Ravi didn't think it was hard to spot him from a distance, either, the shelves around here weren't exactly small and they were filled with books, enough to block out anything behind them.

He shrugged and smiled at Miwako. "Guess it'll be easier to stick together, huh?" He threw a glance around the part of the library they were in - a good place to start from didn't hurt. "How about we start looking over there?" Ravi raised one hand to point out a row of shelves. He thought he'd seen something to do with languages around there somewhere. That was probably their best bet.

Miwako nodded and smiled happily, walking over to the row Ravi had pointed to. Just by looking at the titles of the books; they all seemed to be translating dictionaries and books in other languages foreign to her and perhaps even her world. She slowly started walking down the shelf, tapping each book with her finger as she passed it. Japanese? No, Miwako already knew that. Spanish? No. ... that book she had no idea how to read the title of? Probably not.

Ravi headed over to the row of shelves and cracked his knuckles before he got to work on glancing over the titles on the spines of the books sitting there. This part of the library wasn't actually one he'd spent a lot of time in before; he'd just looked through it fleetingly, since there didn't seem to be much that would have helped with anything here.

Right now, it looked like they were on the right track at least, even if most of the books he was seeing so far were just other languages and dictionaries and things like that - some of them weren't even in any kind of language he recognized ever seeing anywhere.

"Any luck?" Ravi had climbed up a ladder to get to one of the higher shelves and now he turned his head, glancing back down at Miwako.

Miwako shook her head. She tapped a few more books until she found one that looked relevent. American Sign Language? She pulled it out of the shelf and waved it at Ravi. Although it said "American", it might be learnable ... right? After all, everybody had hands ... or something like that. She opened the book, waiting for Ravi to come down and help her decide if that was the right one.

Ravi turned his attention back to the books in front of him until he noticed that Miwako had taken out a book and was waving it at him. Climbing back down the ladder and hopping off to land with the floor under his feet again, he grinned when he saw the book's title. "That was fast," he said. "Okay, now we just gotta learn what's in there." As long as it taught you some kind of sign language, it was probably going to work just fine, right?

Ravi stepped closer to glance over Miwako's shoulder and at the page she'd opened the book at.

Miwako nodded at Ravi and moved the book so he could see the page as well. The book began with the alphabet ... the English alphabet. A, B, C ... Miwako frowned. She knew a little English, but not enough to spell things out the way she might have to. She looked up at Ravi. He did say he wasn't from Japan before ... did he know English better, then? She blew a little air out of the side of her mouth in frustration, making her bangs fly upwards for a moment.

"Looks pretty straightforward," Ravi remarked, eyeing the pictures on the page in front of them. He copied the signs with his fingers. "That's an 'A'. They're probably gonna have whole words somewhere in there or it'd take forever to spell everything out letter by letter with your fingers all the time."

Lowering his hands again, he glanced back at Miwako and noticed the expression on her face. He gave her a questioning look, wondering what could be up. "Something wrong?"

Then something occurred to him. Ravi rubbed his forehead, giving himself a mental kick. Yeah, 'American Sign Language'. This book taught you how to do sign language in English. Maybe it would have to be completely different in Japanese - but at least whole words, as long as Miwako memorized them, had to work just fine, better than learning the alphabet, right?

Somehow there didn't seem to be any language barrier in this place, though. It was easy to forget that it was possible not everyone was actually speaking or thinking in English.

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Thread: Talking with our hands~ [Miwako and Ravi]

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