System Programmer - 34 The Globulous Adventures of Nathalie Tangai, Private Incinerator

Lydia explained she found the stock of comic books in the ruins of a desk with one drawer miraculously intact. Something hit Joshua, he wondered how the paper that was several thousands year old had withstood the test of time like that. It wasn’t just those comic books, the cooking book he had used before was also in similarly good condition. He had Luna analyze the paper, its composition was very different that sheet of paper used on Earth, making it much more sturdy and able to be preserved for millennia.

In any case, he examined the comics. Looking through the covers revealed they were all part of the same series which Luna translated as ‘The Globulous Adventures of Nathalie Tangai, Private Incinerator’. Just looking at the title, he was able to fix two words for Luna’s dialect. After they ate dinner, he didn’t waste time and started to read the series.

Nathalie Tangai was a young private investigator living alone with her magical cat Salami who had the ability to turn into a tiger when faced with danger. One day, she received a letter informing her that her uncle Maximilian had passed away and left her a manor. Obviously, the place was haunted so she had to perform an exorcism with the help of an alcoholic priest.

Once the place was safe, she discovered the manor was once the headquarters of an evil cult wearing penguins masks. That’s when the main antagonist made his entry, a man going by the name of ‘Baron Viktor’, a master of disguises whose goal was to access some ancient documents leading to a mythical treasure hidden in the manor. Nathalie had the brilliant idea to memorize all the documents thanks to her genius intellect and burned them all once she was done.

The series then turned into a bizarre murder mysteries series as Nathalie traveled around the world to look for the treasure while Viktor kept chasing her in a new disguise every adventure while always committing murder for some dumb reason. For example, one case had Viktor disguised as a snake charmer and he murdered a sailor with a tankard, to have the local innkeeper accused of the murder. However, Nathalie proved he had used the tamed snake to smash the sailor with the tankard in question.

Halfway through the series, a major twist happened in the story: Viktor was revealed to be her long lost twin brother who was kidnapped as an infant by the cult. When he realized it, he saved her life by protecting her from the evil Penguin Lord Nico who was the true main villain and died in the process.

The rebooted series involved them traveling around the world and solving ridiculous cases against all odds. If you thought the snake charmer story was ridiculous, it was nothing to what transpired in the second half of the series. The finale of the series took them on a rocket ship patrolling around the moon to face the penguin cult and their master, Lord Nico. Nathalie defeated him by feeding him bagels for some reason. The story ended with the siblings going back on their planet but along the way got absorbed by a vortex leading them to another dimension and therefore, new adventures.

Joshua didn’t know this, but it should come to a surprise to no one those new adventures never came, the series which had been losing steam since the ‘reboot’ actually got canceled.

As you might have guessed from this little summary of the ‘plot’, this series was probably written by either someone on drugs, someone badly advised by their editor or someone even crazier than Joshua. It must, therefore, not be a surprise to you that Joshua loved every freaking moment of this utter nonsensical plot and even cried several times.

In any case, reading the series took a good part of the night, he could have sped up with Luna’s help but he was having so much fun with this dumb series he just relaxed and enjoyed the ride. He didn’t neglect his main objective, mind you. His knowledge of Easan was making great progress.

In the meantime, Catherine had a similar idea to help improve Luna’s knowledge of the language. She entered the recreational room, picked a random board game box and looked for the manual. The game was a bizarre variation of chess and there were illustrations on how the several pieces were allowed to move. She managed to establish a basic set of rules with Luna’s help and played a round against Lydia. Some parts didn’t seem right so she made a few adjustments. They repeated the process until they got a game that mostly made sense before moving on to another game. That one turned out to be some variation on Monopoly so apart from Joshua, who was busy reading the comics, everyone joined in for the game. While some rules had to be improvised, they did have fun. Considering the nature of the mission, this moment of relaxation was pretty beneficial to the party’s morale. There were a few other games but by the time they were done with their current round, it was close to midnight so the group decided to call it for the night.

The next few days passed by quickly, Catherine and Joshua spent their time improving their vocabulary slowly increasing the difficulty of the material. After running out of board games and recipes, they moved on to individual documents. Most of them were still too complicated, but they picked up a word here and there. One day, The twins stumbled upon a couple of novels of various genres which was a blessing for them. Catherine wasn’t very interested in those fictional stories so she let Joshua handle them while she continued to read documents.

The first book was a horror novel involving a horrible monster killing people in terrible ways. While Joshua found it lackluster, mainly cause the protagonists were all morons who kept splitting up, he had to admit it was pretty useful to learn how to translate various causes of death. Have you ever wondered how one said: ‘Thrown into a giant spaghetti machine, torn apart and served to unsuspecting restaurant clients’ in Easan? Well, neither had Joshua but now he knew how to say it. Ultimately, the monster was revealed to be vulnerable to soap and was tricked to enter a washing machine where he got locked in and dissolved. He wondered if this was some kind of hidden marketing ploy to boost the sales of washing machines. Anyway, he didn’t linger on it too much and moved on.

The next one he picked up turned out to be an erotica novel. Obviously, it was terribly written. Regardless, he read it, after all, considering half the text consisted of 2 people alternating yelling ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAH’ it was fairly easy to follow. Actually, this one was more instructive than the horror novel, as it greatly helped him identify the word referring to certain body parts. His method of figuring them out was quite pragmatic, considering what happened to each part, he just had to figure out what was possible and what wasn’t. Joshua, who had been so moved reading that dumb comic, finished the novel in one go, his expression remaining stoic all the time. He was glad when he finished it, in a sense that novel was so bad it was more disturbing than the horror one.

In any case, he finished story after story. Despite the bad luck he had with the first two, some of the books were actually pretty good. His favorite book was the story of a young baker going on a quest to create the greatest bread recipe ever. By the time he was done with all of them, his level in Easan was pretty good and it was time to resume his research.

He checked Luna’s database and brought for the book about runes he had tried to read before and was glad to see the system was able to translate most of it this time. Therefore, he headed back to the library. He could try to make the rune that had exploded in his face again, but he preferred to check for safer models first, that one was still only half translated. He found a couple of purely theoretical books and while they were hard to understand, he still learned from them. Even with Luna’s help, it took him two days to read all the books present but when he was done, he felt like he was ready to accomplish wonders.