Things I feel compelled to explain in the commentary are things that I usually should take out, but I decided to leave this one in the hopes that eventually it will make more sense in context for those that don’t read the commentary – for those that do read the commentary…

 

Naomi is in fact speaking gibberish here (thus the translation of ??? ??? ???). She was probably trying to ask the robot something in a different language. Unfortunately, she doesn’t speak whatever that language was.

This is probably a confusing thing that I should have taken out since I so inconsistently use/render people using other languages. The complication arises from that originally I used real languages for all the different languages, but I was convinced to take that out (in part because I can only write in two or three well enough to be confident it would make sense); this left a general running joke that Naomi is fairly horrible at any language that’s not her own sort of orphaned, and I should have removed it. But I didn’t, so… here we are 😉

When I do have to use other languages I’ve set up a syllable transliteration key; so it will sound like language and be consistent, but be meaningless gibberish. That said, Naomi’s version is intentionally corrupted, since she’s not actually saying words in any language here.

Moving on…

I’ve noted in commentaries that there isn’t really any way to tell someones capability in using magic, unless they are using it. However, when they are using it, there is fairly widespread technology in the IDS for detecting that – Kor’s World almost certainly would have it as well. It seems the robots are shooting at anyone that starts gathering a large amount of mana/psionic energy judging by their reactions so far 😉