Story: "Dolls and Guys" (Part 12 of 13)
Mar. 17th, 2013 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis story is a sequel to "Love Is for Children" and "Eggshells."
Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Phil Coulson, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanova, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers, JARVIS, Betty Ross, General Ross.
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: No standard warnings apply.
Summary: Phil Coulson finally talks Betty Ross into letting him visit. General Ross is not pleased, but is no match for the opposition. Betty decides to take refuge with the Avengers ... and the interpersonal dynamics get complicated.
Notes: Asexual character (Clint). Aromantic character (Natasha). Asexual relationship. Past abuse. Verbal hostility. Angst. Control issues. Hurt/comfort. Non-sexual ageplay. Fluff. Cuteness. Toys and games. Teambuilding. Personal growth. Howard Stark's A+ parenting. General Ross' A+ parenting. Making up for lost time. Family of choice.
Begin with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11.
"Dolls and Guys" Part 12
They did eventually get around to that Scrabble game Tony wanted. Bruce settled between Betty and Natka, with Phil behind them. Bruce watched Betty with a small, secretive smile.
"Something you want to share with the class?" Phil murmured to him.
"She always beats me. So does Tony," Bruce said with a shrug. There was something more he wasn't saying, Phil thought, but didn't push further.
Tony pulled his usual trick of filling the middle of the board with big words, making it difficult to add more words without hitting something the wrong way. This turned out to be exactly the wrong approach with Betty, who excelled at turning words into longer words -- and like Tony, she knew a lot of words. She also had a knack for aiming at the high-scoring squares.
Tony finally gave up after Betty stretched "zoogeographical" along the bottom of the board, wrapping it around Tony's "geograph" and covering the last two triple-word score squares on that line. "That's it for me," he said. "I got nothing left I can play." He tipped over his remaining tiles -- L, N, and Z -- which added another 12 points to Betty's score since she had used all her letters.
"Thought so," Bruce said with a grin.
"You didn't tell them where I learned to play?" Betty asked him.
Bruce shook his head. "More fun this way."
"Well I'm an army brat, so that's where," she said to Tony. "I learned a lot about strategy from the officers who'd come around the house. I had to learn the good words on my own though."
"Yeah, right," Tony said, pointing to the "stratofortress" that she'd made out of his "fortress."
"Except for the weaponry vocabulary," Betty admitted. "That I grew up with."
"Wasn't expecting you to wipe the floor with me like that," Tony muttered. Then he gave a philosophical shrug. "Oh well. Good game." He stuck out his hand over the board, and they shook on it.
"Next game?" Natka said to Betty.
"Are you sure?" Betty asked. "I mean, I did just beat Tony."
"I admire your grasp of strategy. I wish to practice. Also we have this game in Russian," Natka said.
Betty laughed. "Well, my Russian is ... не очень хорошо." Not very good.
"Then we both practice," Natka said.
"I want to play too," Tony and Steve chorused. They both spoke some Russian.
"I'll get out the Russian set while you guys pack up the English set," Clint said.
Natka's native fluency and Tony's deep memory against the strategic skill of Steve and Betty, Phil mused. This ought to be fun.
The words were a lot shorter, the game longer, and the final scores lower. In the end it came down to a double tie with Natka and Tony a scant 10 points ahead of Steve and Betty. They were all grinning.
"When I first learned to play this game, it was called Criss-Cross Words. One of the codebreakers had a set. He used it to teach us some basics about cryptography, like word length and letter frequency," Steve said. Then he stirred the Cyrillic tiles with a fingertip. "You know, not to fill up the whole cabinet or anything, but does Scrabble come in more languages now?"
"Does it come in Portuguese or Hindi?" Bruce asked.
JARVIS chimed in then, "Scrabble is currently available in 37 languages, including Portuguese but not Hindi."
"I can fix that," Tony said at once.
"Do you even know Hindi?" Bruce asked.
"मॅँ बंदूक बेचने है।," Tony said. I sell guns. "I can make arms deals and buy drinks in about fifty languages. After that it gets sketchy." He shrugged. "I don't need to know the whole language to make tiles for it, though. I just need the letter shapes and how many of each to make, and JARVIS can get me that. Just bags of tiles wouldn't take too much space, or we could play on the viewscreen. It wouldn't take me long to write a Scrabble program -- those already exist, but I'd want one I could change into new languages."
"Cooooool," Bruce said slowly. "I wanna Hindi set, please."
"What about Albanian and Hungarian?" Clint asked then. "Are those on the market yet?"
JARVIS said, "Albanian no, Hungarian yes."
"I can fix that too," Tony said.
This teambuilding exercise was turning out to be educational in far more ways than Phil had ever anticipated. Betty made a perfect fulcrum between Bruce's cautious reserve and Tony's heedless curiosity, and oh, now they had Phil thinking in scientific metaphors too. Apparently if you put several smart people together and encouraged them to play, they'd carry everyone else along for the ride. They were blurring the age lines a little, but they were obviously having fun. Phil leaned back and watched, a fond smile on his face.
* * *
Notes:
You can read about the game of Scrabble, its letter distribution, scoring rules, and see a picture of the board online.
Read about zoogeographical and stratofortress online.
See the Russian Scrabble. I've actually played this one.
Explore the history of Scrabble, including its origin in Criss-Cross Words. Yes, letter frequency and word length are fundamentals of cryptography.
Here's an overview of lever and fulcrum.
[To be concluded in Part 13 ...]
Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Phil Coulson, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanova, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers, JARVIS, Betty Ross, General Ross.
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: No standard warnings apply.
Summary: Phil Coulson finally talks Betty Ross into letting him visit. General Ross is not pleased, but is no match for the opposition. Betty decides to take refuge with the Avengers ... and the interpersonal dynamics get complicated.
Notes: Asexual character (Clint). Aromantic character (Natasha). Asexual relationship. Past abuse. Verbal hostility. Angst. Control issues. Hurt/comfort. Non-sexual ageplay. Fluff. Cuteness. Toys and games. Teambuilding. Personal growth. Howard Stark's A+ parenting. General Ross' A+ parenting. Making up for lost time. Family of choice.
Begin with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11.
"Dolls and Guys" Part 12
They did eventually get around to that Scrabble game Tony wanted. Bruce settled between Betty and Natka, with Phil behind them. Bruce watched Betty with a small, secretive smile.
"Something you want to share with the class?" Phil murmured to him.
"She always beats me. So does Tony," Bruce said with a shrug. There was something more he wasn't saying, Phil thought, but didn't push further.
Tony pulled his usual trick of filling the middle of the board with big words, making it difficult to add more words without hitting something the wrong way. This turned out to be exactly the wrong approach with Betty, who excelled at turning words into longer words -- and like Tony, she knew a lot of words. She also had a knack for aiming at the high-scoring squares.
Tony finally gave up after Betty stretched "zoogeographical" along the bottom of the board, wrapping it around Tony's "geograph" and covering the last two triple-word score squares on that line. "That's it for me," he said. "I got nothing left I can play." He tipped over his remaining tiles -- L, N, and Z -- which added another 12 points to Betty's score since she had used all her letters.
"Thought so," Bruce said with a grin.
"You didn't tell them where I learned to play?" Betty asked him.
Bruce shook his head. "More fun this way."
"Well I'm an army brat, so that's where," she said to Tony. "I learned a lot about strategy from the officers who'd come around the house. I had to learn the good words on my own though."
"Yeah, right," Tony said, pointing to the "stratofortress" that she'd made out of his "fortress."
"Except for the weaponry vocabulary," Betty admitted. "That I grew up with."
"Wasn't expecting you to wipe the floor with me like that," Tony muttered. Then he gave a philosophical shrug. "Oh well. Good game." He stuck out his hand over the board, and they shook on it.
"Next game?" Natka said to Betty.
"Are you sure?" Betty asked. "I mean, I did just beat Tony."
"I admire your grasp of strategy. I wish to practice. Also we have this game in Russian," Natka said.
Betty laughed. "Well, my Russian is ... не очень хорошо." Not very good.
"Then we both practice," Natka said.
"I want to play too," Tony and Steve chorused. They both spoke some Russian.
"I'll get out the Russian set while you guys pack up the English set," Clint said.
Natka's native fluency and Tony's deep memory against the strategic skill of Steve and Betty, Phil mused. This ought to be fun.
The words were a lot shorter, the game longer, and the final scores lower. In the end it came down to a double tie with Natka and Tony a scant 10 points ahead of Steve and Betty. They were all grinning.
"When I first learned to play this game, it was called Criss-Cross Words. One of the codebreakers had a set. He used it to teach us some basics about cryptography, like word length and letter frequency," Steve said. Then he stirred the Cyrillic tiles with a fingertip. "You know, not to fill up the whole cabinet or anything, but does Scrabble come in more languages now?"
"Does it come in Portuguese or Hindi?" Bruce asked.
JARVIS chimed in then, "Scrabble is currently available in 37 languages, including Portuguese but not Hindi."
"I can fix that," Tony said at once.
"Do you even know Hindi?" Bruce asked.
"मॅँ बंदूक बेचने है।," Tony said. I sell guns. "I can make arms deals and buy drinks in about fifty languages. After that it gets sketchy." He shrugged. "I don't need to know the whole language to make tiles for it, though. I just need the letter shapes and how many of each to make, and JARVIS can get me that. Just bags of tiles wouldn't take too much space, or we could play on the viewscreen. It wouldn't take me long to write a Scrabble program -- those already exist, but I'd want one I could change into new languages."
"Cooooool," Bruce said slowly. "I wanna Hindi set, please."
"What about Albanian and Hungarian?" Clint asked then. "Are those on the market yet?"
JARVIS said, "Albanian no, Hungarian yes."
"I can fix that too," Tony said.
This teambuilding exercise was turning out to be educational in far more ways than Phil had ever anticipated. Betty made a perfect fulcrum between Bruce's cautious reserve and Tony's heedless curiosity, and oh, now they had Phil thinking in scientific metaphors too. Apparently if you put several smart people together and encouraged them to play, they'd carry everyone else along for the ride. They were blurring the age lines a little, but they were obviously having fun. Phil leaned back and watched, a fond smile on his face.
* * *
Notes:
You can read about the game of Scrabble, its letter distribution, scoring rules, and see a picture of the board online.
Read about zoogeographical and stratofortress online.
See the Russian Scrabble. I've actually played this one.
Explore the history of Scrabble, including its origin in Criss-Cross Words. Yes, letter frequency and word length are fundamentals of cryptography.
Here's an overview of lever and fulcrum.
[To be concluded in Part 13 ...]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-17 05:20 am (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2013-03-17 05:38 am (UTC)Yep, strategic skill makes a big difference. I have a huge vocabulary, but not as much gaming finesse. I can usually beat people with a smaller vocabulary, but not a deft strategist with at least a good vocabulary.
>> Betty's got mad skills. <<
Yea, verily.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2018-06-10 01:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-17 08:38 am (UTC)Yes...
Date: 2013-03-17 08:50 am (UTC)Sooth. All living things grow and change over time. This exercise has let the Avengers cast off some of the things that held them back. They may trip over each other sometimes, but they're moving in the right direction.
>>I'm enjoying each new chapter like a delicious treat! Thanks for sharing!<<
That's good to hear.
One more chapter to finish this story, then it's on to the next one.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-18 01:43 am (UTC)I love Scrabble, and I spend
too mucha lot of time playing Words With Friends on my Android.Hindi would be very difficult to do for such a game, since the vowels are not written as separate letters but as diacritics above, below, before, or after the consonants, unless they're at the beginning of a syllable, and all the consonants in a cluster, e.g. STRICTLY, are ligatured or otherwise combined as well. It's
oS Rt O F_ Li K(e) THi S_
(where "_" means "no vowel here"). And each of those four words would be on just two tiles.
Yay!
Date: 2013-03-18 01:55 am (UTC)I'm happy to hear that.
>>Hindi would be very difficult to do for such a game<<
You'd either need a LOT of tiles, an electronic version, or transliteration into English alphabet rather than Hindi's quasi-syllabary.
Re: Yay!
Date: 2013-03-18 02:15 am (UTC)Even with an e-version, how would you cross a vowel? The units are C*(V) (0 – n consonants plus zero or 1 vowel). While it's possible to write Hindi and other languages that use Devanagari or other Brāhmi-derived scripts One. Letter. At. A. Time., using the initial forms of the vowels, it looks totally bizarre and wrong to native speakers. (We had some text like that at work, and that was our annotators' reaction. Euhh!!)
Of course, I wouldn't put it past this set of characters to work out a way to play Scrabble with... um, that set of characters. [I wasn't even thinking of that when I started the sentence, honest!]
Re: Yay!
Date: 2013-03-18 02:30 am (UTC)I love you so much. You find words I don't already know.
>> Even with an e-version, how would you cross a vowel? <<
Well, there are several options.
1) Combinations are indeterminate until used in a specific word. Once used, they become determinate and can only be crossed by a word that uses the combination in the same way. It's like leaving a ligature completely tied, which makes for a much smaller possible word set of crosses.
2) Combinations are flexible can be crossed with anything that matches their base configuration, even if the two words use the symbol in slightly different ways. It's like partly untying a ligature, making for a larger possible crossing set.
3) In quantum mode, all the subsections of a given combination exist in separate dimensions, and may be crossed individually; so you could cross vowels as pure sounds even if the adjacent consonants are different in the two words. Electronic polydimensional scrabble.
The writing system is already polydimensional, because trying to mash it into strictly linear letters feels wrong. It should work fine in a computer game which can handle multiple dimensions.
And by the time I even thought of #3, Tony would probably have started coding it with one hand and studying a Hindi dictionary with the other just because it's cool.
Re: Yay!
Date: 2013-03-18 02:16 am (UTC)Re: Yay!
Date: 2013-03-18 02:31 am (UTC)the fix is in
Date: 2016-11-07 10:50 am (UTC)"I can fix that," Tony said at once. <<
Of *course* he can, and just about that quickly!
SQUEEEEEEEE! *wanders off, still giggling*
Re: the fix is in
Date: 2016-11-07 10:56 am (UTC)moar game goodness
Date: 2016-11-07 10:16 pm (UTC)Hmm, would you need a whole fabrication floor, or just a 3-D printer? I would think the latter would suffice, for the tiles at least. :-)
Re: moar game goodness
Date: 2016-11-08 02:27 am (UTC)implementation
Date: 2016-11-08 11:36 pm (UTC)Meanwhile, the Scrabble sets I'm familiar with have wood tiles, and wood is a nicer material than plastic anyway, imo. The tiles plus a Brother P-Touch - as long as *it* has or could be enhanced to have the right set of symbols - could make a decent-looking, easy-to-read other-language set in short order, methinks.
Re: implementation
Date: 2016-11-29 03:05 am (UTC)T-America has hordes of this stuff. L-America has a fair number of free 3D printer files, but I'm not sure they're into customizable ones yet. In T-America there are sites comparable to our icon maker or banner maker sites. You choose a base object and then it gives you a menu of things you can put on that, or you can upload symbol files to stick on.
>> Meanwhile, the Scrabble sets I'm familiar with have wood tiles, and wood is a nicer material than plastic anyway, imo. <<
Agreed.
>>The tiles plus a Brother P-Touch - as long as *it* has or could be enhanced to have the right set of symbols - could make a decent-looking, easy-to-read other-language set in short order, methinks.<<
Fascinating.
russian
Date: 2017-01-10 10:08 am (UTC)Not sure if you want the phrase in this chapter to be correct - technically betty is saying she isn't too good at it, but if you do :
'не очень хорош' - bc Russian as a language is neuter so the description needs a diff ending. If she were saying 'I don't speak well' it would be 'Ya govoru не очень хорошо'.
Anyway, love the story, am beyond delighted w your latest seasonal addition.
And it's a lot of fun to see how the characters all interact and play - natka doing things her way is so cool! And lol, now I want to play train wreck!