How to Outsmart a Numidium

Even the best plans will always go awry. Even ones spent many Dawn Eras creating. There are things that the Dwemer did not foresee, things that come innately to creatures of high intelligence. This is the story of how the voice of tens of thousands of mortals overpowered the voice of a whole race.

17th of Midyear, 5th Era 121, Resdayn The remnants of the Nirn's armies were reeling from Numidium's last push. They mourned the ones that were denied out of existence, and the fact that they could not remember their faces made it even worse. There were tents full of soldiers who were missing limbs and other body parts that were caught in the blast radius of Denial Grenades and Nonexistent Flames. The soldiers could do nothing but sit and wait as their leaders argued about strategy. Many stared at their foe, still in awe after hours of fighting. The Numidium was taller than White-Gold, and the skin was covered in disembodied heads of Dwemer encased in gold. Each one spoke with a thousand voices, most of which kept Walk-Brass functioning. It stood silently, recharging its weaponry and plotting ways to deny as much as possible in a single attack.

It was an Orcish moth priest that made the first move, his blood running with rage from the hopelessness of their situation. He walked away from the Imperial camp toward the Numidium and yelled three words with vigor: "YOU ARE NOT" The Numidium shook slightly, but quickly reasserted itself as the thousands of Dwemer convinced it otherwise. But this lapse in focus gained the attention of every mortal. They had no means of fighting a god, but if they could get it to fight itself... In less than a minute every Imperial in the camp, from the wounded to the generals, was shouting. "YOU ARE NOT"

It had no visible effect on the Numidium, but they kept chanting anyways. This is when a Greybeard walked out in front of the Nord camp released an ear-splitting Thu'um: "HI LOS NI" Then every Nord shouted at the Brass God in the dragon tongue, which attracted attention from nearby Dov who were assessing the battle. The Nords were needless to say surprised when dragons swooped down from the clouds and added their Thu'um to the chant.

Then the Tribunal stood in front of the Dunmer army and declared in Daedric: "YOU ARE NOT" The Saxhleel in Jel: "YOU ARE NOT" The Khajiit in Ta'agra: "YOU ARE NOT" The Tsaesci in their Snake-Tongue: "YOU ARE NOT" The Kamal in their Cold-Breath: "YOU ARE NOT"

Tens of thousands of mortals denied the Denyer in a slew of languages, and refused to stop even after hundreds of thousands of Dwemer declared to their god: "YOU ARE" The Numidium, however, was built to take in every piece of its surroundings (due to the large amount of Dwemer that were there to analyze it), and could not ignore the multilingual message. The Dwemer were by far the loudest, but it still heard every word at the same time. This is where the Dwemer made their mistake; the one thing they did not account for.

Question: What is the bane of every polyglot? Answer: Word order.

The Numidium was constantly making mental switches from language to language, and every Dwemer was busy reassuring it of its existence, so to ease data flow it translated every word into the simplest language it knew: Ehlnofex. Even after doing this the data was still overwhelming its systems. So in order to further simplify its data input, it stopped translating the sentence and changed to only translating the words. Now the Dwemer language is vastly different from the majority of the others that were currently being spoken, especially in grammar. After translating the Dwemer sentence "YOU ARE" without taking grammar into consideration, it ends up saying: "ARE YOU". The Numidium took this as a question being asked by its own circuitry, and before it could create an answer, an imperfect harmony of languages sang: "YOU ARE NOT". Now the Numidium was still suffering from an audial data overflow, so it took this as an acceptable answer and promptly announced in every language simultaneously: "I AM NOT". And just like that it was gone for good, and in this reality Nirn was saved.