The Academy

The Five

-Shall I come in?- Asked a nervous-looking suited man.

-You may.- Answered the president of the Hyperpolyglot International Organisation from her seat.

-I am professor Roberts, I came here to inform you about the selected ones.

-Parisa Farzan, it is very nice to meet you. Could I have a look at those documents you are carrying?

-Of course you can, President Farzan.

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The people described below have been sent by the HYPIO to The Academy to become part of the Hermes Project:

MATÍAS LOMBARDI
Age: 18.
Nationality: Chilean (Italian roots).
Languages spoken: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, Mandarin, Cantonese.

M. Lombardi has been selected due to his outstandingly deep mastery of the Chinese language and calligraphy.

With more than five high-quality artificial languages fully created by himself, Matías could become a key piece of our project.

KAORI TONEGAWA
Age: 14.
Nationality: Japanese.
Languages spoken: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malay.

Miss Tonegawa is the youngest chosen member and the only one that does not speak any English.

Her father is a rich international trader who works mainly in Asian countries. As soon as he found out about his daughter's ability to catch the language of any country they visited, he started unofficially using her as an interpreter and encouraging her to keep on learning.

JORDI PUIGFERRER
Age: 16.
Nationality: Spanish (Catalan).
Languages spoken: Catalan, Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Galician, Occitan, Romanian, Latin, Basque.

J. Puigferrer is, out of the five, the one who speaks the most languages. He's our Romance language expert, highly proficient in Classical Latin and eight of its descendants.

He also proved to be able to get out of his comfort zone when he learnt Basque, an isolated language with a complex and totally different grammar to that of any other language in the world, in barely a year.

BILAL DELACROIX
Age: 17.
Nationality: French (half Moroccan).
Languages spoken: French, English, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese.

Raised solely by his French father due to his mother's early death, Bilal stayed monolingually francophone until the age of 13, when he started learning Arabic by himself.

Since then, he managed to master every existing dialect of the Arabic language and some other Semitic languages. At some point, he also made it to gain some knowledge of English.

EVE ROBERTS
Age: 16.
Nationality: American (US)
Languages spoken: English.

Despite not speaking any language other than English, Eve is internationally known for her ability to memorise extremely large series of numbers, letters and words.

She won her first World Memory Championship when she was only 12 and could be a potential candidate to lead the Hermes Project once she makes it to become a polyglot herself.

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-May I ask you something, Professor Roberts?

-Uhm... Yes.

-Is this girl... Eve Roberts, your daughter?

-She is.

-Alright.

-Is anything wrong?

-Well, she only speaks English so far.

-I knew you were going to say that. You need to trust me, in less than a year she can make it to learn at least eight languages, trust me.

-Who the hell agreed to send her to the Academy?- Whispered President Farzan to herself.- Let's do something. If she does not become what we consider to be a Hyperpolyglot in a year, she's out. Moreover, you will be charged with influence peddling. Understood?

-She will not deceive you.