A Comic Fool

Tom Balatro’s fingertips pressed into his palms making two tight fists. Hatred burned within him. Before him were two men who were mocking a helpless child. They were young, only in their early twenties, and they knew no better, but they were making the wrong choice. Blood flooded Tom’s face, and he grew more tense during each minute of the conversation taking place in front of him.
“Hey, tubby, you gonna eat all of those hamburgers yourself?” The dark-haired one prodded the child in front of him. Then his friend added to the mockery:
“What do you weigh, butterball?,” to the kid. “He probably weighs three-hundred,” to his friend.
Tom had been waiting in line at Hot Burgers for nearly twenty minutes and it was, indeed, hot inside of the restaurant; his stocky figure was burnished with sweat. He was sweating even more when he got to the register. Tom abruptly realized that he was no longer watching the two twenty-somethings tease the poor chubby child.
“Sir, what can I get for you?” The cashier smiled at him.
“Oh, nothing; I mean, sorry I can’t eat right now.” His heart pounded in his ears a few more times, ushering him out of the surreal world of frustration in which he had found himself. His appetite was gone, so he left.
Tom Balatro was forty-three and handsome. He drove a 1994 Mercury Sable that ran well enough to not take it to the junk heap. He was not obese like the child that had been mocked in the line ahead of him, but he understood the child’s pain and felt an intense sympathy for the boy. He had always made things like that personal, and he had always sided with the underdog. He drove around the parking lot of Hot Burgers to see if the kid was still around and spotted him climbing into a minivan fifty feet from where he had been parked. He hurriedly drove over to the van.
The child was sitting in the middle seat of the van with tears resting on his fat cheeks. His mother was comforting him, telling him that the two men who had mocked him didn’t matter and that he was her pride and joy. Tom rolled down his window and tried to make things better for the discouraged boy.
“Excuse me miss,” Tom implored the mother. She looked up at him with fierce eyes; indeed, the child was her pride and joy, and, indeed, she had dealt with cruel people before.
“What?”
“Well, I was in there when those two punk kids were being mean to your son. I am sorry about that. They were just some stupid kids with low self-esteems who needed to invent something to mock.” Tom looked at the boy. “Son, ignore what they said. You have bright eyes and strong arms; you don’t have to let people push you around…” He suddenly felt like ‘push you around’ was a little too close to an insult for a round person. “…I mean, you can do some great things; just ignore people like that and listen to your mom – only her opinion and your opinion matter.” Tom ended his encouraging statement weakly and with apprehension. He thought, “Why did I say ‘push you around’?”
“Thank you for trying, but we don’t need your input.” The mother hissed at Tom.


“You should have just stayed out of it.” Tom spoke to himself as he drove home from Hot Burgers. He was the successful owner of a comic book store called ‘Tom’s Comics.’ Ever since his childhood, Tom had enjoyed comic books and the colorful, meticulous illustrations that filled them. He called himself a comic-seur, a connoisseur of comic books, and that was how he titled himself on his business cards.
The thing that had attracted him to comic books, he had analyzed, was akin to why he had felt sympathy for the fat kid at Hot Burgers. He knew what it was like to be mocked and feel insignificant, and yet he knew that he possessed a rarely-disclosed power just like most people who were oppressed. Just like the heroes that lived in comic books: nerds, chubby people, ugly people, and little people – they all had something amazing inside of them. That is why comics, Tom believed, were the key to understanding the underlying potential of every broken person. That is why he fought for the underdog, or at least sympathized with him.
Tom pulled into his driveway at eighteen Power Station Drive. He lived exactly two point three miles from his comic book store and had recently calculated that he burns an average of eleven point five ounces of gasoline every time he drives to work. Tom had speculated that if he was to no longer go to the grocery store or anywhere other than to his shop, he would only have to fill his tank once a month. Tom often analyzed things quantitatively like this.
He climbed his front stairs and entered his house through a door locked with four deadbolts. This home was clean – clean and lonely. Tom rarely took visitors and only dated a little during his free time, but his freedom was something he was afraid to give up, so he had decided to never marry. His routine, upon arriving home, was to strip down to his boxers, sit on the couch and watch two hours of television while eating his dinner. He didn’t have any specific television shows that he wanted to watch, he just liked to have something to look at while eating.
Tonight, without food, Tom decided to break his routine and called his father. Al Balatro was a very intelligent but basic man. He had spent most of his life as a union electrician and was often called upon to solve complex amperage problems. “He has a way with numbers” his wife Jean would always say. This made Al proud. He was born from a long line of successful trade labor men. His father had been a carpenter, just like his grandfather, but his great-grandfather had been an iron-worker. For some reason, the family history was fuzzy when he traced it back to their native home, Italy. Al was reading the new copy of Scientific American magazine when his phone rang.
“Ahoy.”
“Hi Dad, its Tom.”
“Oh, Tommy, I thought it’d be your sister. She just got a job down at the Railroad, did you hear?”
“Yeah, I knew about that. I was just calling to see if you could get together sometime. I need to talk, let off some steam, you know?”
“Okay. I miss talking to you, ya know, when do you want to meet?”
“Some time later this week would be best, in the morning.”
“You pick, I’m retired, ya know.”
“Wednesday at seven?”
“I’ll be there, you want me to swing by your place?”
“Yeah. Thanks Dad, I love you.”
“I love you too, son. See you then.”
Tom hung the phone up and took a breath. He and his father had not met for quite awhile. It would be nice to see him again, but Tom was afraid that some of the old stuff would come up again. For some reason, Al was not very pleased with Tom’s career choice. Not that an old man would understand the prestige of owning a comic book store. But the root went further than that. Tom’s father knew something about him that few people were privy to: Tom was gifted. He had mathematical abilities like no person he had ever seen. Tom had even shown great promise in his early years of undergraduate nuclear physics studies at the University of Texas. Tom had dropped out, though.
“Dad, I hate it, I am the laughing stock of the whole department.”
“Son, don’t quit. You have something that we Balatro’s are proud of: a good mind. Just because people see irony in your life doesn’t mean that you have to let them control you.”
“You don’t understand. Science has a whole social side to it. You drop names, you meet people and network with other scientists. I just cannot stand the social side. I love numbers, yes. But I hate working with other intelligent people, and that is what you have to do in the world that science occupies.”
“If it is the people you can’t stand, maybe you should hole yourself up like Grigori Perelman and solve some obscure mathematical problem like the Poincaré conjecture. Just don’t let your mind go to waste, son, I am begging you for society’s sake.” Tom rolled his eyes at his father’s allusion to the brilliant and elusive Russian mathematician who had solved a long-unsolved mathematical problem that had boggled great minds for a nearly a century.
“I love comic books. Can’t you just accept that. I will be catering to the needs of many ravenous minds who will discover that they, too, could become real heroes.”
“I understand, Tom. But, don’t give up the better dream. Anywhere you go, there will be people who will make fun of you. I made the mistake of giving up my dream because I couldn’t handle it, don’t you give up yours.”
“I’m not.” Tom had ended the conversation nearly twenty years ago, and the topic had been brought up only twice since then. Yes, Tom had a great mind, but he used it for a different dream: he opened a comic book store where he could encourage the young and old alike to live heroic lives.


Tom also had a love for words. On his wall was a prominent old-script lettered poster framed in gold encrusted wood that said:

Etymology
The history of a word exemplified by tracing its development and relationships through the ancient tongues.

When he had been growing up, his father had tried to steer Tom away from studying language or etymology because they were related to comic books in his mind. Words were good things, but it did a man no good to know where every word came from. “A man only needs to know words in order to use them to communicate, and we only speak English in this country,” Al would tell his son.
Tom was elated when he enrolled in college and discovered that every degree that was related to science required Latin and Greek courses as a part of their core standards. His first spring in college was spent learning Greek and the Greek background for the words commonly used in physics and mathematics. Then the fall brought Tom’s ready mind the world of Latin, the root language for most European tongues. It was this first fall of undergraduate studies that began to give Tom an ill feeling for the intellectual world. He lasted only one more semester before deciding that academia was not for him. During this last semester, Tom made several enemies among his colleagues and classmates, had a few girlfriends, and astounded teachers. The enemies Tom created were because he had something that everyone wanted – a great mind that would guarantee him a grant in any field in mathematics or physics later in his career. He was constantly challenged and maligned by jealous scholars. Therefore, worse was his ending, and his semester of Latin had made him critical of words and humanity alike.


Tuesday morning Tom woke up on a wet pillow. He had established a regular pattern of drooling in his sleep. He rose from bed with the typical morning groans of displeasure. The light from outside was white, it was a beautiful summer day. Tom’s Comics would sell a lot today according to Tom’s calculated chart of weather-to-comic sales ratios. Motivation walked the aging man to the bathroom where the obscured window was white with light and divided by two stripes of red on the exterior.
“What on earth?,” Tom gazed at the red stripes showing through the window. Was it paint? Blood?
He dressed quickly, went outside and circled his house to the side where the bathroom window was striped in red.
“You…” Tom stopped himself from cursing the punks who had tagged the side of his house. In great letters of red spray paint were the words ‘Comic Fool.’ Tom never expected to be the victim of graffiti, but the choice of the words proved to him that this was not the work of street thugs – the suspect would be someone he knew, probably a two-decade alumnus of the University of Texas, an old enemy who knew that he was in the comic book industry.
That day – in spite of Tom’s anger – the sun brought many customers and Tom sold over $500 worth of comic books and collectibles at his comic book store. Exactly within the fifty-dollar field that Tom had estimated within his statistical analysis of environmental conditions and sales. Tom’s ratios were never wrong.


Al Balatro shook his head and read, “Comic Fool,” as he pulled into his son’s driveway. “I should have seen this coming, no wonder he asked me to talk.”
Perhaps humor would put Tom in a better mood. Al climbed the stairs to the front door as he heard his son unlocking the deadbolts that kept everyone out.
“Ya know, a paint job like that can really screw up the resale value of a house, Tommy.”
Tom glared at his father. “Yeah, well, I’m not done painting yet.”
“So, ya want to get something to eat?”
“I made some pancakes if you want.” Tom thought that his father ate out too much since he retired. The local supermarket café enjoyed Al’s presence for over twenty hours a week as he and his old retired friends all sat around and drank coffee, clogged their arteries with fatty foods, and talked about their life accomplishments. Al often wished he could brag about his son, but a comic book store owner in the family didn’t seem impressive to him.
“Well, that sounds good, thank you.” The two entered the house and Tom prepared two plates of food.
“Coffee?”
“What else?” The caffeine, Al projected, would help him stay awake during his son’s inevitable comic book drivel. The two ate silently for a few minutes, and then Tom placed some judicial paperwork in front of his father.
“Dad, I’ve decided two things.”
“You’re changing your name!?!” Al exclaimed when he read the first line of the papers.
“Yes, I am changing my name. I have also decided that I am going to move to Massachusetts and pursue a career in theoretical physics.” Tom looked at his father, waiting for a reaction. The old man knew; in order to have his ‘greater dream,’ his son would have to change his name.
“Son, I understand, but this is drastic,” then pride moved Al, “you going to MIT?”
“Yes.” The father could brag about his physicist son to his friends at the supermarket café now. He might even read about his son in Discover or Scientific American now and then. But would Tommy really be his son if his last name was different from his?
“Son, I fully support your choice. I think that you will revolutionize the mathematical world, ya know. But do you have to change your last name?”
“Dad, we’ve been through this before, I cannot stand in the academic world unless I have a name of distinction and honor, a name like ‘Thomas Giuliani.’” Tom had made his decision, and Al accepted it with a bittersweet plea.
“It’s just that there is nothing wrong with having a last name that means ‘Fool’ in Latin, Tommy.”

Dimora Loessiel

(This was a the creative non-fiction story I wrote for class. With that knowledge, understand that some of this story is based on real incidences, and that some of the details of this story are not true. John D. Rockefeller is not guilty for any terraesserian blood, nor was he an abominable person. For grammatical, linguistic and cultural notes on the Terraesserians, see the 'English-Unslitino Grammar Guide' at the end of the story.)

I lay awake in bed, thinking. I cannot sleep because there is a persistent pattern of sound that will not free my mind from consciousness. For two weeks now I have heard the sound of a copper pipe vibrating against the brick foundation of our house whenever the furnace is on. Dog gone rattling! It has not been so bad as to keep me awake like this before, so I have not invested the time to descend into the basement to fix the problem. Now is different though, my wife sleeps peacefully because she is one of those sleep-skilled people who only wakes up to the sound of the alarm clock. I wake up whenever there is any noise that is suspect.

I determine to rise and correct this irritation. And, at this point, I don’t care if I have to break something to make it stop. I grab a flashlight and go to the basement. The sound grows as I creak down the stairs. The infernal noise is coming from the crawlspace. I look at the quarter-inch paneling separating the dirt-filled area of the basement from the rest of the foundation (where the furnace resides). There is a door that is just large enough for me to fit through in order to enter the crawlspace, and I proceed through it.

On this night, kismet is having fun playing with me: the furnace stops running as soon as I fully crawl onto the dirt floor. Along with the furnace, the metal-to-stone rattling also ceases. “You gotta be kidding me!” In the dark and separated portion of my home, I expect no interaction. But a warm small voice answers from the dark.

“L’esserel uman-Jordan, è che voi?”
Scared to death, I impulsively swing the unlit flashlight in the darkness before me as a weapon, but then I realize that there is something familiar about the strange words I have just heard. I have not heard this language for almost eight years now. And I certainly haven’t heard a warm shrill voice like this for a long time. I calm myself. The voice had asked, if I heard it right, “Jordan, is that you?” It is modified Italian, an ancient form of muddled Latin that has not been spoken for hundreds of years. When I researched the language almost a decade ago, in high-school, I had discovered that the language had no modern relative other than the languages spoken in Italy. So I had learned Italian.
I answered in Unslitino, the ancient language, “Sel siete Cai, sono iel uman-Jordan,” which means “If you are Cai, then I am Jordan.” (From this point forward, I will share everything said in its English translation for the sake of economy.) Cai was the name of a pseudo-humanoid creature I had met in a long-ago summer. He was the member of a race of peoples that called themselves Terraesseri (Earthen-beings). I switched on my flashlight and searched for Cai’s small figure.
When the light illuminated Cai, I saw not what I was expecting.
“Wow, you’ve grown!” I shouted. He was only about three feet tall when I last saw him about eight years ago. Now he was almost five feet tall and crouching against the brick foundation just feet from a tell-tale Terraesserian burrowing hole. His brown fur had turned blacker (though it still had dirt clinging to it), and his teeth were smaller (Terraesseri begin their lives with large front incisors that help them to burrow, but they grind down over their lifetime). But Cai still had his big eyes that were dark brown and black with insight. I had always felt very comfortable in his presence because of these eyes. His hoofed hands and feet were twitching with excitement, and his opposable digits were grasping stone-digging tools.
“Yes, uman-Jordan, I am in my prime. That and our friendship are why I was chosen to find you. Do you remember the upland-path to get to Dimora Loessiel?”
“I think I do. What is going on?”
“I cannot tell you now, we don’t have time, it has taken almost two weeks to get your attention!”
“That was you this whole time! Why didn’t you just come upstairs and talk to me?”
“Need I explain to you, uman-Jordan, what your wife would have done if she saw me first? I assume you kept your word and told no person about us. That is why I kept beating away at the wall down here when the furnace was on – so that the sound would be explainable and so that the man of the house would come down to investigate and fix the problem! Solo Dios knows how much I prayed for you to come down here.” Good point.
“Yeah, you are right. Umana-Leeann would have never gotten over it if she saw you without me first explaining you to her. I am sorry; the last visitor I was expecting was a Terraessendo like you.”
“Now, uman-Jordan, we need your help. Come to Dimora Loessiel tomorrow first-priority, I will meet you at the gate.”
“Okay…Cai?”
“Yes Altossendo”
“It was good to talk to you again.”
“I agree, until tomorrow uman-Jordan.”

I lay awake in bed, thinking. Thinking about the snowstorm in October of 1997 and how it had affected my life so much. The snow had been heavy and the trees cracked, and many fell under the weight. The woods behind my parents’ home were totally changed; I was bothered because I loved to explore the woods and climb the trees as they were.
But, with the Spring thaw, I had discovered new adventure in the woods. The hills had met a fallen and cracked tree in such a way that I could scale a nearly horizontal trunk into a network of fallen trees that were supported on the smaller trees beneath. I had named this my ‘Explorer’s Post’ and spent most of the spring-time jumping from tree to tree in search of new arboreal paths. By the time it was summer, my kingdom had spread almost one-quarter of a mile long; I could leave the ground and never touch it again with plenty of space to explore. Who knew that the tops of trees had so much to offer: mulberries, edible birch leaves and even some identifiable insects became my food (until my mother would call me in from the house).
During June I was fortunate enough to discover a narrow wooded area that provided a path into another forest that I, in all of my years of exploration, had never before seen. This is where I settled to make another ‘Explorer’s Post.’ One late afternoon in mid-June, I was stringing a rope bridge between two trees when I missed a branch I was reaching for (inevitably) and fell nearly twenty feet. On the way down, I hit a rather large branch and bruised my back and then proceeded to the forest floor. This is when my life was forever changed.
I should have been killed or at least critically injured, but I was not. Instead, the ground swallowed me. I hit the moist soil and slowed, but I kept falling, and falling, until I landed on a well-maintained floor covered with bark. The roof collapsed above me onto a network of underground roots that held the dirt nearly 6 feet above my aching head.
I had lain there for at least an hour when I finally decided that I was not dead and that this dark place was not Heaven. I finally mustered the will to stand when I felt a disgusting insect begin to burrow into my ear. “Bwaaahh! Get off of me!” were the intelligent first words of greeting I gave the Terraesserian who was trying to help me. His name was Aslo, and, fortunately, he only understood the shock in my voice, not the meaning of the English words. He knew not to speak any complicated Unslitino words to me. He only purred while he lit the gas network lights that entered the chamber we occupied. In the dull light he motioned for me to follow him, and I did.
The Terraesserians are master diggers, and create incredible caverns for their communities to inhabit. They are lit using waste and a very efficiently ventilated gas light network. Dimora Loessiel is the only Terraesserian village I have ever seen. But during my time with the Terraesserians, I discovered that these creatures have villages that span the earth, and most of their villages have interconnecting ‘highways.’ I spent three days with them after my fall from the tree, and they treated me like a treasure. Never once do I remember being hungry or feeling tired when I was with them.
Aslo kept me at his own den and I lived as one of his family, even attempting to communicate with them in their confusing tongue which I, at the time, thought was Portuguese. When I was well enough to return home, the Terraesserians indicated to me that I must leave and ‘go higher,’ which meant ‘go to the world above the ground.’ After explaining to my mom that I was on a hiking tour of Western Iowa and spending two days grounded at home, I went to the library. This is where I learned that Unslitino is actually very similar to Italian and Latin and very unlike Portuguese. I spent the remainder of that summer learning Italian and some Latin.
I went back to the place where I had ascended from Dimora Loessiel and tried to find my way back down. No luck and such was the case for several attempts until one rainy day. The Terraesserians have specially placed vents at the bases of some trees for rainy weather. These vents channel water in such a way that the village is not made muddy by ceiling drips. I caught Cai by the fur as he was opening one. He probably could have killed me (for he was in training to become a warrior) and would have if he had not known that I was the strange Altosserian who had been kept in his village for several days. In fact, all of the Terresserians knew me by sight because they all wanted to see me. Humans are not a common thing in the underground world. Cai threatened me but eventually led me into the village where he claimed to his people that I was his ‘captured Altossendo,’ and best friend.
During the rest of that warm summer and through the subsequent one, I became a regular visitor of Cai’s. He and I became friends, and he was the one who made me promise to never tell any other human of the Terraesserians. Humans had stumbled upon these people before.
“Uman-Jordan, have you heard of one Altosserian named ‘Rockefeller’?”
“No, I do not think so.”
“Well, many winters ago he discovered Dimora Novum, a great city that once was. I have heard stories about that place. There was black water in that place that the Terraesserian named Trophlin discovered could be used to create things. This Altosserian Rockefeller killed all of our people in Dimora Novum when Trophlin showed him this substance. The human took all of the black water for himself. My people wanted to share it, but the Altosserians wanted it all for themselves. That is why we do not deal with your people now…except for you; we are glad to have your friendship.”
I felt shame for what had happened. Less than a year later, my sophomore year of high school, I had learned about John D. Rockefeller and how he had discovered oil and its many uses. Why? Why kill for money? “Can I tell my friends about you or Dimora Loessiel?”
“No, uman-Jordan, you must pact to never tell another human about us. Your people will kill us.”
I did make a pact: I would never tell any other human about the Terraesserians or their home. Not even Leeann. I eventually took the warriors training, hilariously named Iteri Pugli which means ‘The Path to Battle.’ As a part of my rite, I swore to protect the Terraesserians and Dimora Loessiel with my life. Had I been one of their people, I would have been sent on a journey to obtain something for the village. Upon my return, I would have been given a Primo Civis, a medal of honor that named the warriors as key citizens in Dimora Loessiel.
Summer wore on, and then school began. Unfortunately the schoolwork grew more stressful, and I spent less time outdoors and with the Earth Dwellers until I had all but forgotten the Terraesserians. Eight years later and many life-changes since, I find myself excited about the possibility of putting my Iteri Pugli Oath to use.
Leeann wakes me up as she is on her way out the door to work. “Honey, you can’t be late for work.” I am groggy; I had slept just three or four hours last night. “Bye, Sweet Pea.” The door latch clicks behind her, and she is gone. I go to the kitchen and drink a glass of milk. Then I follow it with a glass of white distilled vinegar. I already feel sick enough to call work and say, “I won’t be in today – I have a killer stomachache.”
My parents are not home – good. I park my pickup in the driveway and proceed to Dimora Loessiel with a great deal of sweat and excitement. Why are they just now calling on me for help? The forest had been crowded out by housing developments a little more each year. The Terraesserians would probably be under a road within the decade if things continued this way. Money – that is why people sell their land, for money. I found the old gate to the underground village not without difficulty. I lifted the sod and searched for the passage. Nothing.
“Uman-Jordan!” Cai was whispering about twenty feet from me. That’s right, they change the location of the passages to their cities every year. I followed Cai down to the heart of Dimora Loessiel, and I greeted the ones I knew well and was greeted by all. Cai brought me to the center circle of the underground village. I see Aslo proceeding towards me followed by several of the leaders of Dimora Loessiel. They sit in a circle, making me the end of the circle, as is their custom. Greetings followed as well as a gesture of honor from all of the leaders. Madna, the leader prime of the city, speaks.
“The time has come for us to move on, uman-Jordan. In this task we ask you for help.” They cannot leave! They have lived here for over four hundred years, we have only been here for over one hundred.
“Madna, you must not leave. This is your home first, not ours!”
“Yes, we are aware of the Altosserians’ attempts to build their homes over us. That is not so much a problem; you know how far we dig. Rather, we have discovered something that means we cannot stay here. We shall show you.” Madna gestures, and the whole group of Terraesseri stands and begins moving toward the western portion of the city. They move me through the crowd to the front after ten minutes of marching. And I see it: dark dirt.
“We, too, have discovered the dark water here. This substance is very good for many things, as those at Dimora Novus saw. But it means death for us because your people have killed for this material before…”
“I promise you will not die because this is here!” I interrupt.
Aslo pipes in “Uman-Jordan, we have heard many stories, true stories, that prove that we cannot live where the black water springs. The Altosseri kill for any amount of it…that is why our people are disappearing.” The Terraesserians will not listen to my arguments. For several hours I try to persuade them. I will buy this land. “No, we must go. Perhaps you will kill us for the black water.” Several of the people respond with distrust. Why do they think we are so greedy?
Madna restores the order with her warm voice. “We must leave uman-Jordan. You must help us, it is not out of fear, but out of righteousness that we leave. No one must have this dark water. Neither we nor your kind can handle it right, and destruction of a thing is greater than the destruction of a soul.” Is this sadness in Madna’s voice? It must be.
I feel the weight of her words. “I will do as you ask for I serve the Terraesserian people and Dimora Loessiel.”
“Good, we have planted a destructive gas-powered implosion system in the heart of the city. You must ignite it when we are three hours gone. We love you our good Altossendo.”
What can I do? Aslo shows me how to effectively destroy Dimora Loessiel, and his family give me their fearful salutations. Why do they think we are so greedy? I watch as the last Terraesseri trail into a darkened passage. Then I cry and wait and think. This oil is under my parent’s land; would it not be wrong to destroy it? Yes, it would be wrong. I start the gas light network and scurry above ground. Up here it is late afternoon and all is peaceful.
Three months later, the pipe in the basement begins to vibrate against the brick wall again. I am quick to investigate this time and run to the crawlspace expecting to find joy. The floor is level, the Terraesserian burrowing hole is now re-filled with packed dirt, and on the dirt floor lays a round nickel medal that says: Primo Civis di Terraesseri et Dimora Loessiel

English – Unslitino Grammar Guide

Jordan, is that you? - L’esserel uman-Jordan, è che voi?
If you are Cai, then I am Jordan. - Sel siete Cai, sono iel uman-Jordan.
Earthen-beings (plural) - Terraesseri
Earthen-being (singular) - Terraessendo
High-being - Altossendo
Jordan - Uman-Jordan
Leeann - Umana-Leeann (Grammar Note: In Unslitino, like Latin, there are masculine and feminine forms of words and addresses, therefore a female human is an umana and a male human is an uman. The Terraesseri add the prefix of uman or umanna to the names of humans for clarification, it has become a custom of respect also.)
Loess Dwelling - Dimora Loessiel (This is an ancient Terraesseri village that is below the forest behind my parent’s home. The name means Loess Dwelling because of the special soil that the geographic area is famous for in Terraesserian circles.)
Strange Dwelling - Dimora Novum
The Path to Battle - Iteri Pugli (Terraesserian Warrior Training)
God Alone - Solo Dios (Note: The Terraesserians are a monotheistic people believing in Dio, the Italian and Unslitino translation of God. They have grasped the truth about Jesus Christ but do not identify themselves as Christians for such a distinction is not needed in their ideologically heterogeneous society.)
Citizen’s Reward - Primo Civis (A medal that names the recipient the protector of their Dimora.)