"To mess with people who claim to be nerdier than me and don't speak any Quenya."

"I think I'm missing some context. What do they even mean?"

"Bring me a Silmaril from Morgoth's throne, and climb Taniquetil--a mountain the gods are supposed to live on--and steal Manwe's knickers. Respectively. Manwe being the king of the gods."

"Hee."

"I wonder if you have any of the same literature in your world."

"Seems unlikely. We should check what things are the same, though, beyond - humans and oxygen and cars. Um, I'm from a country called Noregr?"

"Never heard of it. This is the state of New York in the United States of America."

"Never heard of 'em. If you have a relief globe around somewhere I could see if I recognize the continents."

"Would it have to be a globe and not a map? I bet we could borrow someone's phone, pull up a geographical world map."

"Well, I could read the words but I wouldn't be able to make out coastlines or rivers or anything..."

"Right. Sorry. Um. I could trace a world map back home onto butcher paper with the lines made up of words repeated a lot?"

"That'd work, if it'd be easier than finding a relief globe."

"Yeah, and there's a reason people use Braille instead of just raised letters."

"Okay."

"It's often difficult to figure out what shape something is by touch if you're used to looking at it instead."

"Oh, I was actually thinking I would just have to be near enough the globe to use my weird sense on it, although I guess it might be hard to make out fine detail that way."

"I don't think I know enough about your weird sense to guess."

"Well, you could try it, if you want."

"I wouldn't want to go around blind and deaf all the time, I think," she says after a moment. "But trying it sounds fun."

"Yeah, I wouldn't have touched it on purpose but that's because if you touch the artifact instead of just getting it pushed you can't take it back." She transfers the weird sense, and the language thing since its side effect is redundant and will allow them to talk.

"...Trippy. Very spatial awareness," she says for her sister's benefit. "I wonder how much fine detail you can get with practice."

"It doesn't seem to have responded to practice so far."

"Really? Not even practice paying attention to things? Hm."

"I think artifact effects in general are not practice-based. I'm certainly getting better at identifying things based on what they feel like to the sense, though."

"Inconvenient, that. Oh well. It is sort of interesting."