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AN: Constructive criticism welcomed, particularly on characterization. If Losing Streak is on a losing streak, tell me so I can fix it. This fanfic is multi-chaptered so if you got an Alert for this chapter, you should go and read it from the beginning or else it won't make any sense. In addition, I allow reviews from people without accounts. Thanks for the Hits, Reviews, Alerts, and Favorites!
Chapter 22: Weird Symbols
After leaving Fairy Court, Norm's master had quickly made his wishes.
Norm was sucked back into his lamp. He groaned, since he had practically nothing to do. Then he remembered the weird symbol object. He could try to learn how to decode the symbols while he waited for a chance to escape his lamp.
Norm hadn't looked intently at the object in Fairy Court. He didn't have much time then.
Now that he was looking at, he noticed that the outer symbols were on the side. That was confounding.
The object was small, and Norm hoped the symbols inside wouldn't be.
He grinned when he noticed the colour. It was blue like his tail, though a much softer shade.
He opened it. The symbols were small, and it wasn't just one leaf. It had tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of them. Of symbols he couldn't understand. He groaned.
He began to look at the symbols. His eyes went left to right, then right to left, looking for a pattern. He kinda saw a few, but he had no clue which one he wasn't imagining.
He wondered if he knew any of the symbols. In fact, he did. When he was in Fairy Court, a fairy had pointed out the symbols that meant that. Norm scanned the object for those symbols, and found them all over the place in the object. He grinned. He was getting somewhere!
However, Norm didn't see how that would help him understand the other symbols.
He wondered if there were any other ways to learn what individual symbols meant. He doubted that the humans would be helpful for that, since his last master was even more clueless than he was in Fairy Court.
However, his TV had symbols on it, and showed lots of them sometimes. Maybe there was something on it that would help him learn what the symbols meant.
Norm turned on it. He searched the channels for a show that showed what lots of symbols meant. First, he found one showing what had just happened in Fairy Court, then, a show that seemed to be about the night sky. Then one that wasn't like anything he'd ever seen before. Next, a show set in a court that wasn't Fairy Court.
Norm groaned. Was a symbol-teaching show too much to ask for?
Apparently it was.
Eventually, after several long minutes, Norm found the type of thing that he was looking for. The show was brightly colored, and cute, and it contained the required symbol-teaching. He began to watch.
He quickly discovered that fairies, and courts weren't the only things he knew nothing about. There were computers, houses, apartment building, carburetors, printers, and other stuff that was nothing like the stuff that he knew. Fairy Court, and the human world weren't the only places in existence, despite the fact that it sometimes felt that way.
He tried to read the book again. He knew the title now:
The Big Book of Legal Loophole Humor
That meant it was intended to be funny. However, he had trouble understanding what anything really meant, so it was neither funny, nor educational.
Norm wondered if law shows existed, then remembered the one he had spotted while looking for a word-learning show (he had learned that the symbols were called words). He found it again, and began to watch.
However, his lack of understanding made it very boring, which Norm thought defeated the purpose. He kept watching, since he wanted to escape his lamp, and knowing legal stuff would probably be helpful in achieving that goal.
After he had learned enough legal terminology, he started replying to his masters with it. The legal terminology confused them, but they mistook it for spirit terminology, and assumed Norm meant something evil with it. However, the closest to evil that Norm meant was:
If they didn't set him free, he'd mess up their wishes in such and such way, and would even explain it in legal terminology.
However, his masters either called him an evil spirit, or did whatever wishes they were going to wish for originally.
Just like usual. He hadn't changed their behavior, though he was more capable of tricking them now, and finally escaping his lamp!