Here's a person! He's on a horse but he stops it in the middle of the street for reasons that become apparent when the horse vanishes abruptly, dropping his bags such that he catches them out of the air.

Feather does have detect magic, so she's not totally surprised by the vanishing horse! 

...So this is a wizard! Or a cleric or something. But not one powerful enough to teleport. Talking to a (non-terrifyingly-arch) wizard seems like a great start! She'll walk right up to him. (Chelish personal-space cues are really hard to parse because everyone she's ever tried learning from assumed that, as a powerful scary person, she should be standing where-ever she cares to!)

"Hello! I am Bright Morning Feather, a druid from Ravounel Forest. I'm here as a convention delegate and to learn to understand the humans. Can I ask you a lot of questions? I can maybe pay for it with a spell!"

Feather's Chelish is fine, in that she can make herself very clear; implications and subtext tend to suffer the same fate as personal space, and for much the same reasons.

"Well hello there. I'm a convention delegate too. Raimon Pages, pleased to meet you but not so pleased I need you in such friendly proximity. Not that I wouldn't be flattered if I fancied girls."

"I probably didn't understand all of that just the way you meant it," 'fancy' is a hard nut to crack, "but that's why I'm here, to learn to understand you people! Will you tell me about yourself? What you're doing and living for, how you see and understand the world, why you think other people do various things."

"Take two steps back, why don't you, and then sure."

All... right? She takes two precise steps back. (She catches herself trying to swivel her head like an owl to see where she's going and makes sure her body does the right thing instead.)

"Sure! I don't know why but it's probably not as urgent." She'd smile, but Outsider humans almost never smile and she's given up on understanding why for now. "Are you a wizard?"

"Technically no. Wizards are lots like sorcerers, but they have books they value as their souls."

"I know about sorcerers! And I know wizards have spellbooks, but if they literally value them as their souls then that's novel and interesting and I might not understand how wizard souls work after all, are they all like liches? No, you probably didn't mean that, this language doesn't mark jokes like I'm used to." (It might mark them with intonation, but the people Feather learned from did not joke much in her presence.)

"Anyway! What are - the big things you want to achieve in life? The kinds of things you think are good and important? How would you like the world to be? What are the biggest problems that you wish would be fixed?" A wizard sorcerer will hopefully say something interesting here, beyond 'I'm just trying to bring in the harvest so my family won't starve this winter', which is very understandable but (perhaps for that very reason) not very enlightening.

"Spellbooks and souls are different things but you're about as likely to catch a wizard selling either. Here, anyhow. I think the market for souls is worse outside Cheliax. I don't know that I want to achieve a big thing? I want to get along through my days till there's enough of them. Things might come up but I don't go looking for them so much, I just hope to be ready if they find me. I'd like... hm, safer roads. I can manage myself but if anything gets me early it's going to be a monster or a bandit on the road. - I'm a mail carrier."

A message carrier is actually very understandable and useful work!

"We mostly send messenger birds. Few things bother birds, except bad weather. And predators, but you can send several. I've heard humans have messenger pigeons but I guess they're not as good without the spell. But if you need bigger things carried then a messenger makes sense!" She glances at his bags; those would definitely need the big birds, ones she's not strong enough to send yet. (Except, you know, by asking them, like a normal person.)

'Monster' is one of those tricky words. She thinks it means 'a creature that could easily kill me if it wanted to, and that is not human' (or one of the few other races humans tolerate, elves and dwarves and halflings), but there seem to be exceptions. Is a big bear a monster to most people, but not to a sorcerer? That seems like a strange way for a language to work but Chelish can be very strange.

Feather decides to simply check. "What do you call 'monsters' exactly? I think humans don't all agree about that. Is a bear a monster? Why are the bandits not 'monsters'?"

"A bear's not really a monster, just a big animal, but it might as well be if you're going to press me to get technical. Bandits aren't monsters because they weren't bandits when they were born and in theory they don't have to be bandits when they die. Monsters are like... owlbears, those are definitely monsters where regular bears aren't. That thing where trees sometimes walk around on their own is very monstery. Dragons're monsters, at least if they're not trying to act like folks."

That doesn't really explain anything!! 

"I don't understand. You're giving examples but what is the rule? And an owlbear is a big animal."

"I don't know that there is a rule. I didn't make up all these words, y'know."

But what does he mean when he uses the word - never mind, different tack.

"Alright. Then, you just want to have a long and safe and pleasant life? Aren't there other things you care about? Maybe you won't or can't work on them yourself, but what do you want the world to be like? This gathering is for people to talk about what the world should be like, right?"

"I think it's about what we want Cheliax to be like, but maybe we can affect the world from here some! I'm the Calistrian delegate - or one, any rate, possible there'll be more - so I expect mostly to be asked about Her pet topic, that being revenge. I think countries take revenge on occasion, if somebody pirates their ships or something, and I don't know that my one cleric circle makes me an expert but maybe it's a hint that my guesses'll be good, who knows. Thing is, till not too long ago Cheliax was exactly the sort of thing one might reasonably want revenge against, so it's a trifle crazymaking to consider the opposite perspective now."

"I can understand people wanting revenge! But I care much more about stopping things that would deserve revenge if they kept happening. Is that something Calistria wants?"

"I think I'd say deterring? Like, the brothel where I grew up has lots of wasps around. They're Her sacred animal, and someone beating up on a whore'll get a visit from some of those as often as not, so they see the wasp nest on their way in, and they behave themselves. That's all to the good, saves the wasps the trouble and the lady the black eye, but you've got to have the wasps, or the knife, or the bigger scarier friends, for this to work out."

"I... didn't understand some of the words. Or the way you used them. But I understand deterrence," because this is an important and useful concept and Feather used to translate dialogues about racial behaviour and traits when she was practising Chelish. "And the wasps themselves are yellow and black to make their deterrence work, too. But - it's not enough. If you're strong, or strong enough, you can display that and deter others, like the wasps do. But if someone is even stronger they will still hurt you, until only the strongest people are left. You can't stop war with deterrence because one side is going to be too much weaker than the other eventually."

"Does Calistria - or you, really, I only care about Calistria because gods give power to the people who do what the god likes - do you think deterrence is good enough? Or just the best there is? Or - do you just like deterrence itself?" Gods can like any weird thing, right?

"So - if you want to kill a wasp nest, you can do that. Wasps can't win against a determined person. You can set their nest on fire and they can't put it out; you can survive being stung, quite a lot. But it's not worth it, see? Maybe you can kill all the wasps and they'll only ruin your week, but it won't ruin your whole week to have a little self-control with the lady you hired - this is the general you, of course - so it's better not to start anything. You can stop war with deterrence as long as the weaker side can still be expensive and painful to fight. I suppose you could come up with a situation where it's not going to cut it but I think as a general rule - be expensive and painful to fight, and easy and pleasant to live politely near, is a good plan."

They. Tried. That. Are trying that, and it's! Not! WORKING!!!

The frustration is going to be visible on her face (because Feather isn't at all Chelish).

Deep breath. "We - I mean. The forests. We've been doing that, for - for ever. And it's not enough. We're very expensive to fight. Almost everyone who fights us loses. But the humans keep trying, every year, every century, until eventually they succeed. And - I want to understand why. If there's anything that could ever make you stop. Not you personally, I mean - there are always, always some humans who want to fight the forests, and all our wasps are not enough."

"I don't think the forests are easy and pleasant to live politely near, what with all the monsters that come out of them? There's some little woods that are safe enough that there's roads through them, but I avoid getting within a few miles of a real forest, if I can avoid it. Because, monsters."

"Very few come out, compared to how many there inside. And I think almost always they're just hunting. But in any case, even if nobody ever came out, humans wouldn't stop going in and trying to cut down the forest or kill people, right? The humans aren't doing it for revenge! ...are you?" It would be kind of ridiculous, given how much more there is to revenge on the forests' behalf, but. "I promise you that if everyone in the forest honestly thought that no-one ever coming out would mean no-one ever came in, we would make sure that happened. And there have been many forests in many places that tried many things, and none of them worked forever."

"- just hunting isn't... not... sending monsters out to kill people? I don't care why a monster wants to kill me if it's trying. Probably if somebody goes into a forest to kill people they think the people in the forest did something wrong, and probably if they cut down a tree they need wood."

"Hunting for food is normal. Everyone does that, everyone has to do that who eats meat. Noone is upset when humans go into the forest to hunt and eat something. Maybe if humans sometimes cut down trees to build things it would be like sometimes killing animals to hunt them. It would be very bad, for the those particular trees and anyone who knew them, but that's life. But actually humans want to cut down whole forests and not let them grow back."

"And - it's normal to not want to be hunted. To protect yourself and your friends and maybe take revenge if they're killed anyway. To kill someone because they killed someone you know, or because you are afraid they will. But it's different from killing so, so many people just because some of them, a very few of them really, might have killed some humans or might kill some human some day! That's - I can't imagine anything worse than that."