What about the size of the word? Like, say... 'education' and 'הַשׂכָּלָה'?

...yes, one can write things smaller if they want. Is this news to Mortal or something?

No, but in this case she's actually using fewer separate characters, look.

...okay. So?

So she's writing the same word in completely different ways!

They're not, like, exactly the same.

...okay can one of them—actually, can all of them write that word down separately?

Which one?

'Education.'

So they all write it. It looks like English to Sadde.

Even if Sadde squints really close to the paper and tries to follow the lines of the letters?

Yes.

She will keep this piece of paper and show it to someone else later, this is kinda fascinating.

She tries a few more ciphers that were relevant for communication, historically, just to make sure.

Fairies are persistently puzzled by ciphers, but when Promise asks for an entire alphabet to be written out and consults it and counts along and copies the original letters, she can, it turns out, painstakingly decipher anything that yields to this treatment.

But even after all that plain speak doesn't suddenly decide to let Promise understand cipher, she gathers.

Nope. She would have to pick it apart letter by letter with reference to an alphabet every time.

"This is really peculiar. And it seems to indicate that usage has something to do with it somehow. I think."

"Well, I suppose you could write things in this cipher all the time for years..."

"Decades-long science, woo," she deadpans.

"Were you hoping to run out of science to do faster than that?"

"No, but I was hoping to have new science more frequently, this is just a single experiment that's singularly long."

"If you finished every science project that occurred to you as soon as it occurred to you I would expect you to run out!"

She grins. "Yeah, but on the other hand, decades is a long time. At least to a mortal."

"Aren't you planning on living forever?"

"Yeah, and maybe in a thousand years I'll see doing an experiment that takes fifty years as trivial, but right now I don't," she shrugs.