Franklin picked up a small drone to fiddle with and followed Deathstroke into action. His plan was simple: hack into the little flying vehicle, see whether he could connect to the Harvesting Center's information network, and pull up a map.
But he failed. He had hacked into the drone, only to discover that he could not read Alien writing.
It was a tadpole-like script. If there had been a living Nuwali here, Little Rich could have quickly learned the language from their mind. But all he had was a small drone, and its programming did not come with an English dictionary.
So he was stuck.
As though he had seen through the boy's thoughts, Deathstroke reached out and tossed him something.
"Here. I bought this Universal Translator when I was out having fun in space decades ago. It is definitely outdated, but the Nuwali language was already widespread throughout the universe hundreds of thousands of years ago."
"I thought Aliens all spoke English." Squirrel Girl looked around. Her role in the team was something like a hired muscle and police dog combined, her little nose constantly searching for the source of the stench.
"Those who speak English are all connected to the Celestials, and the Celestials' English was probably copied from you by the First Firmament. Just now."
Su Ming walked through the drone hangar, lowered his head to light a cigarette, and spoke while smoking.
"As for some Aliens who do not speak English, their ancestry is more complicated. Some are descendants of ancient gods, some are experiments of the Demiurge, some are accidents of evolution, and so on."
Squirrel Girl only half understood. She scratched the ears atop her head, noticed that the smell of sulfur around them was no longer so pungent, then pulled out a handful