The Linguist
forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, I am going to do whatever heinous thing I need to save myself.
Profession: Professor of Comparative Linguistics and Translation Studies, specializing in dead, endangered, and constructed languages.
Current Country: Suggested ~ France, Switzerland, or Germany
Age: 35-55
Archetype #59: Freedom Of Speech
Face Claim: Player choice
Connections:
Worked with The Curator to provide translation for rare museum artifacts
Occasionally clashes with The Cryptographer, who prefers algorithms over linguistic intuition.
Key Role:
THE LINGUIST has an unsettling talent for finding structure in riot and intention in silence. To them, language is not fixed or inert, but a living system shaped by fear, power, and omission. A sentence is not a statement; it is a transaction. Interpretation is never neutral, and they know better than most how meaning can be bent, buried, or deliberately obscured to protect the speaker, or the listener. They arrive at the manor lightly, carrying little more than a slim case, loose pages tucked into unfamiliar bindings, and a few objects whose purpose is unclear: wax cylinders, rubbings of inscriptions, and a recorder that never seems to run out of power. What few can explain is the timing. Only weeks ago, the Linguist was abruptly dismissed from their university post, no reason given, no farewell offered. Just as suddenly, they were reinstated, their position restored without comment or apology. The dismissal was not an error; it was a warning. The reinstatement was not an apology; it was a leash. No one knows what prompted either decision, or what may have changed in the interim, but whispers suggest they translated a text they were never meant to read, a text linked to the estate itself. What unsettles most is not what the Linguist records, but what they choose not to translate. They move through the halls listening for syntax in the settling stone, decoding the house itself. They are capable of a heinous thing to save themselves, and everyone here speaks a language they know how to silence.
