you're over my head

Maximilien had the day off from duties so he was doing one of his favorite things: studying culture and language by the Little Tiber. He had been reading a book on Italian culture both inside of the Italian peninsula and outside of it. The book was in Italian, his current goal language to tackle. He was making a pretty significant dent, mostly because he knew other languages similar to it. He had an Italian to English dictionary open next to him in the grass. He was using minor witchcraft to search the pages when he needed to find a word that he didn't know. It made the whole thing a lot easier.

After taking in a lot about the Italian ownership of Corsica, he had decided to switch to some lighter reading: Hamlet in Italian. It was nice to read something he had read so many times before in new languages. Since he knew what it meant, or at least generally what it meant, he could understand sentence structure and prose a lot better. Hamlet was always his favorite Shakespeare, with A Midsummer's Night Dream in a close second.

Max pushed himself up from the lush green grass and started to pace along the water's shore as he read. He'd finally reached Hamlet's, or in Italian 'Amleto,' famous monologue. He started reading out loud, since no one was around anyway and it was important to practice his accent. That was how you convinced people you were a native speaker. While he had only grown up speaking three languages (English, French, and Yiddish) he could convince people of his competency in 8, soon to be 9. and that wasn't even mentioning the ancient languages he knew well but wasn't amazing at speaking.

"Essere o non essere, questo è il problema.
Se sia più nobile sopportare
le percosse e le ingiurie di una sorte atroce,
oppure prendere le armi contro un mare di guai
e, combattendo, annientarli.
Morire, dormire."

Max listened as the water rushed past. He looked down from his book and watched as the water caught against rocks, little waves bending around it. He always liked how that happened. He liked how something as small as a little rock could change the course of rushing water. When he came to Camp, he felt like a small rock. Now, he was a centurion. He could change this place. That felt good.

Max's musings were broken when he heard a voice. Max had a tendency of ending up in his own little world when he was thinking or reading, so he hadn't realized the girl had shown up. He jumped a little bit when the voice cracked his thoughts. He turned to the voice and saw a smiling girl with light hair and a familiar accent. Max was able to clock it as French quickly. It was only a few words, but if he had to wage a guess he'd say it was s southern French accent.

Max smiled. "Sûr." He said, instinctively. Max's brain worked very quickly and in a reactive way when it came to languages. So, if he got caught off guard by an accent or another language, or was studying a language, he would respond in that language, like a kind of broken computer.

Max walked over to the girl. He took pride in knowing peoples names. He knew everyone in the 5th and 4th and most of the 3rd, but as it got farther from the 5th he got a little more blurry on names. He recognized her as being from the 2nd, but her name just wouldn't come to his head. He offered a hand to Max.

"Maximilien."

Maximilien smiled at the girl as she stood up to shake his hand. He always appreciated when people were polite. His dad had always raised him on the grounds of kindness and having good manners with everyone. That was about the only thing traditional about his childhood, though. His dad had been taking him to political rallies and teaching him about more risque topics for as long as he could remember.

"It is nice to meet you, Verity. 2nd cohort, right?" He asked. While he hadn't known her name, he did want to make it clear her kind of knew who she was. It was part of the territory of a centurion, to him. He was always trying to prove himself in some way. Maybe it was because he wasn't sure he actually deserved this, so he had to keep telling himself he did.

"Oui. Je l'ai parlé toute ma vie. J'ai été élevé en anglais, en français et en yiddish. Je viens de la Nouvelle-Orléans." Max explained. He always loved speaking lots of languages, even when he was just a tri-lingual toddler. Being from New Orleans mostly covered the French thing, but he was also of French descent, but quite a few generations back. Thanks to his dad, though, he was really connected to his cultures.

When Verity tapped for him to join her, he sat down. "Oh yeah, I get it. I feel like with all my duties, I rarely just get to relax and take things in."