"So that might matter."

"Yeah, it's what I'm thinking, but I'm not sure how to test it to appropriate levels of rigour."

"Not enough languages of various ages?"

"There might be, but even so that's not the only thing that varies, number of users being the most salient."

"How inconvenient of mortals not to set up their language use to provide a varied experimental range."

She giggles. "I mean I don't think there's a way to fix it or a way it could've evolved that would be easier or anything, it's just bothersome from a practical perspective."

"Well, presumably languages get older over time, you could just wait."

"...I am not a very patient person."

"I'm not either, but if there aren't any languages that work for the experiment you want right now..."

"Yeah, I'll check first. One thing I want to check is whether ciphers don't work in general, I'll get some historically relevant ones and check."

"So what are you going to test today having not done that yet?"

"I will open a tiny gate to HQ so I can get wifi and use this," she grabs a phone from her pocket, "to find those."

"...you can't plan on starting anything today that relies on a settled gate."

"I could try to use that trick you mentioned, several gates on top of each other?"

"Yes, but it feels untidy to have that many gates lying around for a non-emergency. You can't permanently get rid of them, only close them."

"What's the practical difference between a single gate and several gates on top of each other that no one else can even detect?"

"Not practical so much as aesthetic, but it is very unaesthetic to make something that will last forever because you didn't want to wait a week."

"Well, alright, since that bothers you if a gate doesn't settle I'll do something else instead."

"Like what?"

"I wanna see how homophones behave, for instance. And I do know a couple of ciphers that were historically meaningful, like very simple numeric substitution ciphers when this was invented. I have downloaded a couple of dictionaries into my mobile phone and I wanna see how plain speak from the fairies' side works when I write stuff in other languages, or like partial words or sentences..."

"What's a homophone?"

"Two words that sound the same but have different meanings."

"...doesn't that defeat the whole encoded-sounds-for-meanings purpose?"

"I think conlangs tend to not have those, but languages that have evolved naturally do."

"But why?"