"You can't? Why not?"

"Just doesn't work for mysterious harmonics reasons."

"Huh. Sounds weird. Is there anything else like that?"

"What do you mean 'like that'? Not opening or closing other people's gates, maybe?"

"I mean, stuff that doesn't work arbitrarily depending on the target, I guess?"

"Can't do any harmful sorcery to your masters..."

"Well that's not really a feature of sorcery, it's a feature of master-vassal relationships."

"Yeah. I can't think of anything else that's definitely intrinsic to sorcery that's like that."

"Hmm. And do you have any nice fairy intuitions on why that restriction exists for mental sorcery?"

"No, I was really disappointed when I found out. I guess if people could make themselves forget their names fairy society wouldn't look like it does."

"There's sorcery for forgetting names?"

"Mental sorcery can in general do forgetting things."

"Huh. That... would be super useful, actually. I expect you specifically wouldn't want to forget your name, though, right?"

"I would've wanted to before anyone else knew it. It's more complicated now."

"Yeah, it sounds more like a disadvantage now that half Thorn's ex-court knows it."

"Yep."

"Anyway, back to science." She writes 'I read a book' on a piece of paper. "What tense do you read this in?"

"Tense?"

"Verb tense, past or present. Way I wrote it, in English, there would usually be no way to tell whether this sentence is 'I read a book,'" she says in the present tense, "or 'I read a book,'" she says in the past tense, "without more context."

"Well, yes, the sentence is ambiguous," Promise says, "the way you wrote it."

She then writes the same sentence in Spanish, in the past tense: same number of words, each meaning the same thing, except the language's grammar eliminates the ambiguity.

"...and that way of writing it is not."

She giggles. "Okay, now can you try writing it in a way that is not ambiguous? I don't actually speak Spanish, and everything you wrote so far was in English and I'm not sure English can express that unambiguously..."

"You know I'm not actually writing in English, right?" Promise says. "If you can't read it in an unambiguous way then presumably you won't." She writes. It looks like English and thus ambiguous.

"Yeah, but I was hoping if you meant to write it in the past tense it'd somehow... be in the past tense. Since that's what you actually wrote. Like, I presume if a Spanish-speaker came here and read this it would be unambiguous to them."