Lexicon
Title: Lexicon
Rating: K/G
Warnings: Sludge being his usual A-DOR-A-BLE self.
Main Characters: Snarl, Sludge
Genre: Introspection, mostly
Summary: Snarl reads. Yep, it's that amazingly exciting.
Snarl couldn't exactly pinpoint when it had started to happen, although he did know that it hadn't been too long after he'd been brought online. Once, when he'd been laid up in the medbay with nothing else to do besides staring morosely at the ceiling, he'd tried to pinpoint the very first time that it had happened. He'd systematically sifted through memories that had grown dimmer and fainter the farther back into the past he'd traveled, and he had eventually stumbled upon the first instance that he could remember clearly, although he was still quite certain that that instance had not actually been the first one.
They'd been on Cybertron at the time, he and the other Dinobots. It was a year or so after they'd been brought online, and the Autobots, all of them, had been dying. He and the other Dinobots had been more or less accidentally transported to Cybertron by the Decepticons' space bridge. Shortly before all but Swoop had, embarrassingly, been captured by Shockwave's drones, the Dinobots had randomly wandered into an old, crumbling, heavily-damaged structure, worn with years and neglect as well as with the more obvious signs of damage from a battle that had been fought nearby, who knew how long ago. The structure's walls were crumbling, their color faded to a sick and rusty ochre, and all of the building's many windows were long since shattered.
The Dinobots had realized as they'd passed through the structure that it had once been a museum of some sort, although they could not have termed it as such at the time, unused to language as they had been then. There had been various displays there, sealed in transparent, protective cases, and a few of the cases had somehow not been breached when the building had been mostly-destroyed and then, no doubt, subsequently plundered. Snarl had found himself looking at the items in the cases, regarding them with something that approached awe, feeling drawn to them for reasons that he hadn't been able to explain then and still couldn't really explain even now.
One of the cases had contained a small tablet that was densely covered with tiny inscriptions arrayed in obsessively neat vertical columns. The description of the item, etched directly into the display case in modern Cybertronian that was faded and marred with a multitude of scratches such that it was almost less readable than the inscriptions on the tablet, seemed to indicate that the tablet had been found on a nearby planet, had been dated as being about 350 vorns old - And who knew how much time had passed since the item had been dated? - and that it was the only known sample of the language and had stubbornly defeated efforts at translation.
Except that after studying it for only a few minutes, Snarl found that he could read the tablet well enough to understand from the context of the text that it was a fragment of a manifest, a list of some transport vessel's cargo and the cargo's value, detailed by individual item. He'd stepped away from the display case with a small gasp then, surprised and even a little afraid of the discovery. No one else had been watching him or had noticed what he'd been doing…except Sludge, who'd been staring at Snarl curiously, his head tilted to the side, as Snarl had stepped back from the display case. Sludge had said nothing, though. Not then, at any rate.
Even now, twelve years later, Snarl still did not know how he had been able to read the tablet, had not the slightest idea how he'd managed to begin to decode a long-dead language in mere minutes. He knew only, with solid certainty, that he would have entirely figured out what the tablet had said if Grimlock hadn't decided to keep moving and he hadn't felt compelled to follow.
Snarl knew that he could have completed the tablet's translation because he had found that the same sort of thing had happened again and again, right here on the living, breathing Earth that the Dinobots considered home far more than sterile, half-dead Cybertron ever could or would be. It had taken him about ten years, off and on, but Snarl had mastered all of Earth's modern written languages. He did not and often could not speak the languages because he didn't know how they were pronounced and had no real interest in actually speaking them, except for two or three exceptions here and there. But he could read them. All of them. The task had become quite a bit easier once he'd figured out how the languages were related to each other, creating for himself a reference that looked something like a family tree, and then had deduced how the various dialects of each language then spun off from their mother tongues.
Snarl had found that he felt a need to know these languages. He did not know why and, really, had long ago stopped trying to figure out why, accepting that it was simply something that he was driven to do, something that was for whatever reason an integral part of him. He acknowledged the irony of it, of course; he who would happily go for days, perhaps weeks if he could manage it, without uttering a single word, content simply to observe, had a passion for language.
So Snarl had set himself the task of figuring out all of Earth's written languages. When he had run out of commonly-spoken modern languages, he had begun to move back in time, finding Latin first, discovering in it the common root of many of the more modern languages that he'd already mastered and feeling deeply satisfied at the discovery of the connection. Then there was ancient Greek and its individual dialects corresponding to individual city-states, which often differed from each other in only very small ways. Then there was Cretan. Persian. Aramaic. Then, going back farther, the vast array of Ancient Near Eastern dialects - Hittite, Hattic, Akkadian, Assyrian and on and on - which were in turn all rooted in the even more ancient Sumerian and that in written form were scribbled in tiny, dense cuneiform on clay tablets of various sizes from tiny to impressively large. They were not entirely unlike the small alien tablet that had sparked this linguistic obsession in Snarl in the first place.
The notion tingled and shimmered in the back of Snarl's mind that, if he could just go back far enough, could just collect and comprehend enough examples from enough cultures, he just might discover some primeval and universal language, one that might ultimately connect everyone, every living, intelligent being in the universe, together. The possibility excited him in a disturbingly erudite sort of way that he felt compelled to keep hidden, lest it mar his strong, silent, and stupid image.
But that, he knew, was for the far, far future, if it ever happened at all. If that sort of language had ever existed somewhere...
For now, Snarl had Ancient Egyptian to learn. He'd decided to start with hieroglyph; its antiquity - at least as humans reckoned such things - intrigued him, since it was one of Earth's oldest known written languages. He'd chosen the hieroglyph over the demotic and hieratic simply because for some reason he found himself drawn to the more "pictorial" examples from amongst Earth's written languages. Communicating in images that expressed an entire word, sometimes an entire thought, in one or two elegant symbols was in his opinion much more intriguing than those that used plodding alphabets and sometimes very odd combinations of letters to mundanely describe each sound that comprised each word that comprised each phrase that comprised each sentence and on and on. For this reason, Snarl had spent much time working on the modern Far Eastern languages, had even bothered with learning how to pronounce Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean instead of just learning to read them, such that he could speak them fluently. And now he found himself deeply attracted to the more ancient of Earth's languages, as they tended toward the more pictographic end of the scale.
Having familiarized himself with the basic workings of ancient Egyptian, he was now working on reading the Book of the Dead. He had a fallback for it, if he couldn't figure something out: it had already been completely translated into many different languages that he already knew. But Snarl generally preferred to figure things out for himself, if he could. And more often than not, he found that he could. So, he was working on a random plate from the book, displayed and enlarged on the computer screen in front of him. Half of a sentence was eluding him, and it was deeply frustrating him. He read what he had decoded and translated of it again, muttering the translated words under his breath. Sometimes, he'd found that speaking aloud established a sort of rhythm for the language, and he'd found that sometimes having the rhythm in his mind helped him to decode whatever it was that was eluding him.
"'I live in rightness and in truth and I…I…'" he muttered, quoting the text on the screen. And then he made a noise of frustrated disgust at himself and flopped back in his chair while simultaneously smacking a fist against the desktop in front of him.
"I like all the little birds," a happy voice suddenly and incongruously chirped, after a few moments of silence had passed while Snarl glared at the screen in front of him. The unexpected voice originated from somewhere behind Snarl, and it made him practically leap out of his chair. He hadn't realized that he was being watched.
Sludge was the only other individual who was aware of Snarl's fondness for languages, and for the most part that was just how Snarl wanted it. True, he had on occasion thought to offer his services to Skids, who was in his spare time busily compiling a gigantic historical/anthropological database covering anything and everything having to do with Earth...but Snarl hadn't quite worked up the courage to do that yet. But Sludge had managed to figure out exactly what Snarl was doing over the years, slowly gathering clues that had started with the incident he'd observed on Cybertron. Sludge had a fondness for giving his brothers little gifts now and then, and the gifts for Snarl over the years had taken on a decidedly linguistic bent, were a subtle message from Sludge that he knew what Snarl was up to and was willing to help in whatever way he could. Still, Snarl worked on his project out in the Dinobots' common room only when he knew that no one else was going to be around for a good stretch of time.
Sludge had been safely ensconced in his studio when Snarl had decided to work on some translation, and he'd figured that there his huge Dinobot brother would stay, as he usually did for hours and sometimes days on end if nothing served to interrupt him. But, he must have emerged from his hole for some reason, and Snarl, as engrossed as he'd become in his task, hadn't noticed.
"What is that?" Sludge wanted to know now, pointing at Snarl's computer screen with a deeply curious expression on his face.
"Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph," Snarl informed him succinctly, half-turning his chair to regard the other Dinobot sideways. "Writing with pictures," he further explained when Sludge only gave him a slightly befuddled look before Snarl returned his attention to the screen in front of him.
Frowning thoughtfully at that, Sludge edged slowly but steadily closer, squinting at the computer screen, his eyes never leaving it as he approached. He eventually squatted down behind Snarl to have a better look at the images displayed on Snarl's computer screen, staring at them while leaning carefully over Snarl's spiky shoulder.
"Egyptians use pictures to make words?" Sludge asked curiously, his face creased with confusion and his head tilted inquisitively to the side as if he was one of the birds whose stylized images appeared often in hieroglyph. The very notion intrigued Sludge greatly, for he tended to communicate better with pictures, too. "I like them already," he decided, nodding approvingly, happily.
Snarl wasn't surprised, and he even chuckled quietly at Sludge's words. Sludge was an artist, and the ancient Egyptians spoke - and were still speaking, millennia later, long after their culture had become extinct - through their art and their decidedly artistic formal written language. So, Sludge's approval did not surprise Snarl in the least.
"They used to, Sludge," Snarl answered Sludge quietly, with a fond smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "But this language isn't used anymore. Egyptians mostly speak Arabic now."
Sludge snorted contemptuously at that.
"Figures," he muttered. "Stupid humans always have to ruin good things."
Snarl found that he couldn't argue with that. And then he turned his attention back to the translation in front of him. The symbols that had been troubling him swam before his eyes, almost shimmering at him. He blinked, momentarily thinking that he'd simply been looking at them for too long, but then they just seemed to…coalesce, resolving into sudden and crystal-clear meaning.
"'And I keep my being therein!' Yes!" he crowed triumphantly. Impulsively reaching around and up, he patted Sludge sharply on his cheek. "Thank you, Sludge."
"I didn't do anything," Sludge protested meekly.
"Yes, you did," Snarl insisted.
"Did not."
"Did, too!" Snarl insisted again. And then he added, before Sludge could fire off another protest, "Distraction helped. Couldn't figure out what that said," he said, jabbing a finger at the string of fifteen or so offending glyphs that had been confounding him.
"Oh," Sludge said, not really understanding but willing to go with it for Snarl's sake. "You're welcome, then," he added brightly before rising to his full, impressive height. Turning, he headed back toward his studio; staring at the symbols that Snarl had been reading had given him an idea, too, and his lack of an idea was what had made him leave his room in the first place.
Snarl snorted and then returned to the glowing symbols on the screen, falling back into time once again.
And you all thought that Swoop was the smartest Dinobot, didn't you? Didn't you?! Yeah, that's what everyone else thinks, too. But…Heh. I'm gonna say, "Not by a long shot…" Not in Nightwind Land, anyway.
For those who might be interested, the quoted line from the Book of the Dead actually does exist. It's in Chapter 29A, which is "The Chapter of the Heart Not Being Carried Away in the Underworld." Yes, I am an Egypt geek. Shut up. :)
Also, I must offer my apologies for the utter lack of excitement of any kind happening in this fic. Really, it's just meant to introduce one facet of "my" Snarl, who is…well...complicated. What is revealed about him in this story (and I use that term very loosely) ties in with a big future story arc that is plot-heavy and Earth-history-heavy...and that happens in the CrackVerse. Snarl has a big, pivotal role to play in that arc. Mostly, this is because he never gets any attention, in either the canon stuff or in fanfic. Must fix. I feel like I owe it to him or something. So this is the very first step toward making Snarl, so I hope, a very interesting character...