“Go ahead and walk normally. You can just walk like a normal person…”.
“This skin feels too tight, it’s chafing in all the wrong places.”
“I don’t care, suck it up and walk, you can take it off when we get back to base.”
“And how long is that gonna take?”
“Another day or two.”
Looking around, I noticed people were starting to stare, and caught myself. Without realizing it, “Joey” and I, and reverted back to our native language, rather than speaking English. Luckily we were talking quietly enough no one could quite make out what we were actually saying, and likely just thought us crazy, speaking in their “pig Latin” or something or other.
Whispering back to him:
“We need to be more cautious when speaking, the inhabitants here may be less evolved and incompetent, but they are the superstitious type. We’re going to have to work on our English some more.”
Joey, or whatever he calls himself now, nods in agreement, and we continue along our path through this incredibly underdeveloped “subway.” Even when speaking English, I’ve found we both have some trouble with certain English words. Some of their pronunciations just make absolutely no sense. Whoever came up with this language really just disliked foreigners. When we had first stepped onto the subway, Joey attempted to blend in, via reading some article on one of their “newspapers” (whoever comes up with these names is as simplistic as the human race comes, I mean come on, that’s just right on the nose (I think that’s what they call these appendages) but that’s besides the point. He began reading, and it started off quite discombobulated and jumbled, coming out to something like this:
“Jah – Pahn has reeleesed N-Ew Bullet Train . . . Three zero zero miles (isn’t that a name?) per hour.”
Granted, as crazy as these people are for creating a name after a unit of measurement, it probably would’ve been best if we didn’t learn English at our world’s equivalent of the “weekend course.”
It doesn’t matter, soon enough we will have toppled this world’s government and terraformed the planet, before returning home. Soon. Until then, I’m taking a nap on the subway, as Joey’s incessant reading is obnoxious, and hurting my “ears”.
“Walk like a normal person” hmph, he’s gonna be walking home with that attitude.