One of those times when both characters are playing “guess the meaning of the word from context” — and both getting it not-quite-right.
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Leif: It’s okay, sir!
Thorn: Thorn.
Leif: Thån.
Thorn: You’re shaking! Let me see.
Leif: It’s only a normal “don’t touch” compulsion for servants. I should have known better. The shock will heal in a few minutes.
Thorn: Do you want help with that?
(wriggle)
Leif: Um . . .
Thorn: A guy in my line of work isn’t going to walk around without a healing gem on hand. It’s “sapphire” in Ceanska.
Leif: Lapis lazuli?
Thorn: Sounds right!
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Someone is getting the hang of those tentacles.
In an unrelated note, does Leif’s native tongue not have an ‘r’ sound?
It does have an R; it’s just that, between Thorn’s accent and Leif’s, the R sound in certain words gets lost. Think about how it would be pronounced with a heavy British accent.
Why are the Sonska such jerks to their service workers?
Well, they’re just servants, right? If they wanted to matter, they should have been born into a different social strata – one that isn’t best suited to being ignored! (/snobbish British accent from the 1910’s)
But seriously, this is a decent example of a rigid class system, a social construct that is stupidly (and I DO mean STUPIDLY) common in annuls of human history, a couple of which are still alive to this day.
That’s about the size of it.
In fairness to Ragnild, she’s just a kid — she and Iona aren’t at the stage where they can reliably separate “non-neutral cultural norms that we can potentially critique and discard” from “just the way the world works.”
Did anyone else see panel 3, and get their hopes up for accidentally shirtless Thorn? …which, in this case, would actually mean technically naked Thorn, with tentacles.
Saphire and lapis are 2 diffrent gems (though interestingly saphire and ruby are the same gem just diffrent colors not relevant just interesting)
Both characters know that, they just don’t know all the words for gems in each other’s languages.
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