3 years ago by LiarXAgerate , 1 Comment »
Liar: So. Chewy. If I am looking at my notes correctly, and not numbers, chapter seven of ten marks the halfway point of the translation project.
Chewy: Yeah. I think that’s supposed to be really invigorating and gratifying, but I’m freaked out by the fact that I have as much ahead of me as I already struggled through.
Liar: Successfully struggled through. Gotta keep that in mind. It took more than Golden Week—he said, leading the interview—but it’s happening.
Chewy: Yeah. I guess considering it’s been stuck halfway through chapter one for six years, relatively speaking I’m translating at the speed of light. I’m upset that my time goal fell through when I realized I take a lot longer than I thought, but I think it’s going to be genuinely good quality in the end.
Liar: Yeah—the I Have to Rewrite The Mother 2 Novel Translation Blog would be less interesting than this one. And you might have to get another co-blogger.
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3 years ago by LiarXAgerate , 3 Comments »
Chewy’s progress through chapter seven continues apace; this is the last of the chapter six excerpts. And where better to close out this globetrotting chapter than in Fourside, the Big Surrogate Apple? In this excerpt it becomes clear that Ness failed to check out the map from his local library (or, perhaps, that while all the information is there, there’s a little more of the information that isn’t there than usual.)
The three kids crossed the Golden Bridge, made their way into Fourside and got a room at a small hotel to start discussing their next plan of attack. They avoided burgers for dinner—even if they’d felt tempted to grab some, the line was ghastly! They settled on a pizza delivery. After all, the pizza shop employees were probably twiddling their thumbs at this point.
Sure enough, the pizza arrived shockingly fast, and printed on the pizza box was a guide map of Fourside.
“Monotoli Building must be that huge, fancy skyscraper… Ahh, a dinosaur museum! I wanna gooo!”
“There’s Topolla Theater, too!”
“Hey—not until we fix up this burger mess,” Paula said, presuming the Big Sister role with a knowing extended finger. “I’d like to search through the Ness Burger kitchens if we could… There must be some kind of secret there.”
“… You mean break in?”
Paula is the Cool Big Sister.
But maybe I should back up a little—why do they need to break into a kitchen? Why is there a line out the door for hamburgers? Why is there a Burger Mess? Back in the Dusty Dunes Desert, George Montague offered the kids the following bizarre explanation for Fourside residents’ equally bizarre behavior.
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3 years ago by LiarXAgerate , 3 Comments »
When we last left Pokey, he was super pissed. Ness, Paula, and Jeff were having a lovely time in the desert while he was cooped up in his office, spying and plotting. How does any self-respecting adolescent male deal with this kind of angst? Angry, atonal music. How does a Japanese lady write angry, atonal music? Like this!
Pokey instinctively blinked his tiny, cold blue eyes for a moment.
The wallpaper was pastel and striped. The carpet had an elegant flower pattern and a distinctly expensive-looking flair. Large, two-doored windows were covered by two-tone color blinds, and recessed ceiling lights with antireflective lighting. The oak business desk was nearly seven feet across.
Lying next to that was an enormous, salmon-pink leather sofa. And right in front of that, a table with an inch-thick piece of glass across it and marble legs. It was a fabulously rich-looking office, one that would come right out of a page of an Italian magazine—modern and casual, yet cutting-edge.
The room itself was big enough for five people to comfortably dance the waltz, but he was plopped down completely alone in the middle of it. The room was so quiet that it sounded to Pokey as though his ears were ringing, but after he dug his finger around in his ear for a while, it turned out that it was just the hum of the air conditioner. The air was dry and cold, with a vague scent of plants.
Pokey clicked at his tongue and got up, scratching loudly at the red sweaty marks on his chubby thighs from where his skin had been pressed against the leather. He went and opened the cabinets next to the wall and turned on the audio equipment inside. Vivaldi, or somebody, was playing—it felt wonderful, as if you were actually in the orchestra hall. He quickly flicked to another radio station. Country western—rap—a Bali gamelan—a choir of clear, high-voiced children—a stand-up comic… and hard rock with a totally slammin’ beat.
GO TO HELL
GO TO HELL
I WANNA YA TO
GO TO HELL
DA-DA-DA-DA-DAHHH DA-DAHH-DA-DAHH
DA-DA-DA-DA-DAHHH DA-DAHH-DA-DAHH
MOTHER 2 Novel Translation blog, are you ready to rock!? I said, are you ready to rock!?
Pokey is ready to rock, no doubt, but Kumi turns the music off after this lovely picture of his having rocked.
Pokey shook his head and his wrinkled, sagging cheeks—the spitting image of a pink bulldog’s face—shook in the air with a twisted smile on his face. The fat on his arms pulled at the sleeves of his t-shirt, which was being swallowed up by his body and ready to tear at any moment. His shorts were also on the verge of snapping in half. It seemed that Pokey had grown even fatter than before.
Does Saori Kumi miss an opportunity to call Pokey fat? I daresay she does not.
Chapter Seven is on the way—Chewy has been swallowed up at work like so much t-shirt, but she’s still committed to defeating the Wall of Untranslated Japanese headed her way. In the meantime, I WANNA YA / TO GO TO HELL.
3 years, 1 month ago by LiarXAgerate , 3 Comments »
A bright, cheerful boy in a red baseball cap and a bat across his back, a cute, gaze-attracting girl with a ribbon in her curly blonde hair, and a skinny, genius with thin-framed glasses.
Our three chums walked along together, smiling. While they left their trail of little footprints along the yellow sand of the desert nothing seemed to bother them one bit—not even the intense midsummer sun glaring overhead, sending boiling sunlight burning down on them, or the tiresome, dreary scene that stretched out endlessly, continuing on forever and ever without an end in sight.
This may come as a shock, and it’s certainly out of character, because I was not fond of the Lord of The Rings films, but one thing I love in RPGs: the characters just walking around, wallowing in their heroism a little, exploring. (Editor’s note to self—this is why you don’t hate EarthBound Zero.)
The boy in glasses would look at his watch, then at the sun, and decide which direction they would go next.
Rock, paper, scissors! The boy in the cap’s face turned beet red. Having lost, hepulled all the luggage over his shoulder and began running ahead.
The ribbon girl sang a funny song that she had learned from somewhere in her pretty voice, and made everyone laugh.
If sand got into someone’s shoes, someone would lend a shoulder to lean on; if someone opened up a can of juice, they passed it around and drank it in turns.
After a while, the boy in the red cap stopped walking and blurted something out. Everyone put down their luggage. The boy in glasses took out a short pen-like object. It flipped apart and opened into a parasol. They all sat down under the makeshift shade, and the ribbon girl spread out a picnic mat and handed out wet towels. The boy in the cap pulled something out of his backpack with the proverbial drumroll, and—ta-da! Wrapped hamburgers for all. The boy in glasses connected some kind of cord to the parasol and set out a boxy object that seemed to be covered in foil. It looked like the parasol had become a solar battery, and the foil box was a microwave.
Ding! The hamburgers were piping hot, and everyone dug in.
Can anything ruin our heroes’ makeshift domestic tranquility? How about… a fat kid with friendship issues!
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