Jade stared at them, all of whom looked back at her expectantly, and sighed. "You know, I'm fairly sure there's a study concluding it's universal that everyone's most interested in other languages' curse words and vulgarities."
"And it's probably right," Ethan agreed.
"Fine," Jade huffed and sent another screenshot into the group chat:
[Rực rỡ mé đường tây, kẻ lại người qua, ca tụng sinh phần quan lớn Lại,
Vang lừng trong thôn bắc, trên kinh dưới dái, một lòng tôn trọng cụ trong dân.]
"This one you'll need a bit of the historical context to understand," she continued. "So basically, the story goes that there's this guy named Lại who made his money trading pigs and then bought himself a fancy title, becoming a corrupted official. He bought a piece of land and set it aside to be his family memorial site; all fancy and everything. Then one day, someone left a parallel couplet on the pre-built tombstone—the one I sent y'all." She paused, letting everyone glance at the image first, even if most of them didn't understand a word, then continued. "Now, on the surface, it sounds like it's praising the memorial site, very respectful and everything. But those last three words of each couplet? That's where the fun bits are hidden."
"Quan lớn Lại," Magnus began slowly. "Quan lái lợn—the pig-trading official?"
"Bingo!" Jade confirmed.
"Oh, that's brutal," Nicole said, with what probably counted as enthusiasm from her.
"The second part might be a bit harder for you to get," Jade said, "since it's not a direct spoonerized word but one of the homophone ones. It's—"
"Cụ trong dân," Magnus was already working through it again. "Dận trong cu—Giận trong cu—Rận…" He started coughing. "…No! Seriously?!"
"Yup!" Jade started laughing, more at his reaction than at the couplet. "Seriously, it's exactly that."
"What? Guys, explain!" Camila demanded.
"It means fleas in your…" Magnus blushed and gestured at his own crotch.
Maya nearly did a spit take. "Penis? Damn, that's racy. And they get away with that?"
"Well, no one even knew who wrote them."
"Still, takes guts. Respect."
Magnus started doing some Googling on his own now that he understood the concept, and for some unknown reason, most of the ones he could find were more and more vulgar than the ones before. He found out "old janitor" in Vietnamese could be spoonerized into "shaving one's crotch." That was definitely not something he needed to know or intended to find out today, but it had happened anyway and he could never unlearn that. After scrolling through increasingly more unhinged examples, he finally voiced this to Jade:
"Okay, why are so many of these vulgar? Is that just—is that the theme or something?"
"Well," Jade said, "one of the functions of this kind of wordplay is exactly that. Hiding something vulgar or dangerous behind something that sounds proper. You can say something rude, or something politically risky, and if anyone official ever calls you on it, you just say: I don't know what you're talking about, I was just praising the man."
Ethan snapped his fingers suddenly. "Sic my duck."
Aaron looked at him. "Really, dude?"
"What? Am I wrong?"
Jade sighed. "No. He's right. That's actually a correct example of the same principle in English."
Aaron pinched the bridge of his nose. Camila laughed so hard she almost choked on her drink.
Alex tapped Magnus on the shoulder. "Share the power with me."
"Which one? Linguistic Attunement?"
"Yeah. I want to learn too."
Magnus considered this for a second, then focused, and leaned in to kiss Alex. She turned immediately and kissed Jade — brief, functional, more scientific than anything else — and pulled back with the particular blinking expression of someone processing new information arriving all at once.
"Say something," Sofia said.
Jade said something in Vietnamese.
Alex's brow furrowed with concentration. "I—okay, I understood that. Mostly." She looked genuinely startled by herself. "I can't say it back, though. I know what it means but I don't—the words won't come."
"I guess that's what the System meant by 'weaker version' of the shared power," Magnus said. "If it goes both ways for me, then maybe it only goes one way for you?"
"Wait! Time out!" Ethan made the hand gesture. "You can share your powers?! Bro, share something with me!"
"I can't."
"Bro, c'mon!"
"No, I'm serious. I can't share anything with you. Because it only works on targets with at least ninety percent trust in me, and it has to be through kissing. So right now, it only really applies to Alex."
Ethan looked visibly disappointed.
"I'll be eligible once we wrap that monthly quest up, though." Sofia raised a hand and winked at Magnus. "And we're just, what, four or five percent away from ninety, right?"
"Wait!" Alex, who had been quietly processing her weaker version of Linguistic Attunement, suddenly said. "Can I still understand Tony?"
She started looking around for the raccoon, who hadn't been anywhere in sight for a while now. Magnus suspected he was off doing raccoon things again.
"Only one power shared at a time, so no." He shrugged. "I had to revoke your Animal-Linked Comprehension before sharing Linguistic Attunement just now."
Priya looked up from her phone and glanced between them. Then, she pointed at Alex:
"I knew it! You were talking to that raccoon the other day!"
"I wasn't talking to the raccoon," Alex said automatically. Then stopped. "Sorry. Reflex." A pause. "Yes. Fine. I was talking to him."
"Wait!" she added, turning toward Magnus and grabbing his arms. "I was talking to him!"
"Uh huh." He nodded.
"And he understood me!"
"Okay?"
"Babe, you can only share a weaker version of your powers with me. So if that worked the same way as this—Linguistic Attunement?—then I was probably just speaking English, yet Tony understood me. So he's definitely not just a normal raccoon!"
"Why are we still on that?" Magnus shook his head exasperatedly. "He's just a raccoon."
"I'm kinda with Magnus," Sofia chimed in, remembering her experience with Tony at Jordan's track meet. "He's just a raccoon."
"I'm with Alex on this," Aaron said slowly. "Tony seems too smart to just be a normal raccoon."
"Thank you, Aaron!"
"But," he continued, turning to Magnus, "since he's not here right now, and even if he was, there's nothing we can test to prove or disprove anything, I'm more interested in understanding how your power sharing works."
"For example," he said, flipping to a new page on his notes. "If she switches back to Animal-Linked Comprehension later, does she retain the Vietnamese? Or does it reset completely?"
"I'd assume it resets," Alex said. "Since I can't understand Tony right now, right?"
"Tony's a raccoon," Ethan pointed out. "Vietnamese is a language that actual countries speak. Those might not work the same way."
"And that's a testable difference," Aaron confirmed. "Magnus, kiss her again, revoke the power. Then we can see how much Vietnamese, if any, she can still remember and identify."
Magnus leaned in but then stopped. "Hang on! Before I revoke the power—"
He pulled out his phone and started reading a few lines to Alex in Vietnamese that made her giggle.
Everyone else naturally turned to Jade with visible confusion. The twenty-four-year-old pressed her lips together and shook her head: "You don't wanna know. They're basically just flirting. With spoonerized phrases. And very corny ones at that."
That earned a collective groan.
Eventually, the couple stopped flirting and finally continued with the experiment, but not before Magnus screenshotted a list of lines he'd just read and sent it to Alex.
"Okay," Alex reported, closing her eyes and concentrating after having the power revoked. "I don't understand most of it anymore. But—" she paused, "—some of it's still there. Like, faint. A few words I recognize even without the power active." She smiled at Magnus. "Especially the ones you read and sent just now."
That earned another round of groans. Meanwhile, Aaron, Jade, and Ethan exchanged a look.
"So," Aaron said slowly, working it out loud, "the power grants immediate comprehension. That goes away the second the power does. But whatever you manage to retain—genuinely learn, while you have it—that stays yours."
"So even the weakened, shareable version is basically a massive language-learning cheat code," Valeria said. "If you use the window it gives you."
"Right," Jade said. "It won't make you fluent forever. But it'll get you further in an hour than most people get in a year."
"Okay, next test." Aaron clicked his pen. "Does regaining the power immediately give her back access to Vietnamese again, or does she have to kiss someone who knows the language every time?"
They tested that. Alex immediately understood Vietnamese upon regaining the power the second time.
"Does this mean the language learned is either coded in the power being shared, or locked away somewhere inside Alex when the power is revoked?" Ethan asked.
"I'm leaning toward the latter," Jade chimed in, "since she still had to kiss me to learn Vietnamese when he already had the language down."
"Maybe the weaker version is separated from his version?" Ethan pointed out.
"Could be," Aaron said. "But that's harder to test without a second target whom he could share the power with." He glanced at Sofia. "How about we shelve this for now until we can actually test it?"
"I mean, we're keeping in touch, so it's definitely arrangeable." Sofia nodded.
The conversation naturally drifted back to casual territories again after that.
"By the way—" Ethan turned to Jade. "—you never specified why Jean Grey specifically? Is she your favorite superhero or something?"
"Yeah, she is."
"Cool, any particular reason?"
"Honestly? It's just that the first time I'm introduced to her, she was wearing green. That was all it took for six-year-old me."
Laughter rang out around the table at that. Meanwhile, Alex was already turning back to Magnus. "Kiss me again."
"Why?"
"So I can understand Tony again, obviously." She said it with such total confidence that several people at the table paused mid-bite.
"You just want to kiss your boyfriend again in front of everyone," Tori said accusingly.
Alex didn't deny it. She was already leaning in.
A third round of collective groans rang out.