Robert Stikmanz sat across from a woman selling Japanese calligraphy on rice paper.
The 54-year-old who was at Aggiecon, a science fiction and fantasy conference in College Station on Friday, knows about foreign languages; he conjured one.
It's called Dvarsh, and he's working hard to publish a dictionary about it. Basic English is often taught to people in Asia and Africa by focusing on a core of 850 words, he said.
"With that core vocabulary, you could read the National Enquirer," he said. "I thought, '850 words? I could come up with 850 words.'"
He's got about 700 words. If he can only get a few more, he thinks he'll have a volume. Only a few hundred more are in Na'vi, the language that director James Cameron hired a linguist to create in the film Avatar.
"Do you know how many people are running around on this planet who can speak Klingon?" said Julia Thompson, an Austin-area resident, about the language from Star Trek. "There's a subculture. You can communicate with other people even in other countries."
If there's an audience for Dvarsh, it was probably at Aggiecon, which kicked off at the Hilton Hotel and Convention Center and is set to continue Saturday and Sunday. Daily passes cost $10.
Though focused on science fiction and fantasy, the convention -- billed as the longest-running, student-run program of its kind -- is an umbrella event for like-minded self-described geeks and nonconformists of all stripes.
Kazuko Adams sold the calligraphy, along with kimonos and wooden sandals. The merchandise has a market there because of many of the attendees' interest in Japanese animation, she said. Others sold swords and a spiky ball-and-chain weapon called a flail.
At a room down the hall and around the corner, groups of convention goers gathered to play classic video games such as Super Smash Bros. and Street Fighter. Past midnight early Saturday morning, they were set to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They'll do that again early Sunday.
Saturday will feature a panel about Avatar's impact on society, an art show and a charity auction, which will donate all proceeds to Scotty's House. Featured guests will be on panels from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday.
The convention is put on by student group Cepheid Variable, named after an astronomy term for a star whose brightness varies over time. The group of about 100 spent about $20,000 on the convention, said Lee "Philharmonic" Thompson (many Cepheids have nicknames).
An element of escapism was apparent in the Luke Skywalker and Ghostbuster costumes and love of otherly worlds, but several expressed idealism as well.
"Science fiction allows you to see things how they could be instead of how they are," Thompson said.
The longing for a better world was also what drove Stikmanz, the creator of Dvarsh. He had an environmental proverb about treading lightly on Earth: "The good journey leaves few tracks."
Or as he put it, "Soshoshafveemo y'z bv'rsh molo'm eemomuhmuh."
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