A halfling comes by in the morning to wake Belmarniss up in time for school, with breakfast (fried mushrooms on top of toasted mushroom planks that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike toast). There's some for Beau too.

When the halfling leaves, Belmarniss asks around a mouthful of breakfast, "Do you think you'll be all right sitting here till I get back, maybe working on writing yourself notes on the language that you can study with the spell removed later so that eventually we can sometimes get by without my casting it every day?"

Nomf.  Okay, this isn't terrible, even if it's going to get old fast.  "- Yeah, I think so."

"If anyone comes in, tell them you're mine and that I'm giving you a couple of days to recover before I put you to work, that mantlehood* did you some harm. If my sister comes in specifically probably just ignore everything she says."

*Technically a "darkhood", itself a variant of a "darkmantle". But these characters are speaking Drow and everything down here is dark unless otherwise specified.

"Okay."  Chew chew.  "What should I use to write?"

"Slate and chalk, you can use it while I'm in school. Chalk's cheap, there's a big deposit in the southdowns."

"Oh."  So copying long passages from his books is out.  "Okay.  Can I, um, be in your hammock?  While you're not using it?"

"Yeah, sure. Might make sense to be on an opposed sleep schedule in the long run, I can make out that you're standing guard for me and we won't need two hammocks."

"Okay."  It's not like it's even inconvenient; it's already dark down here all the time.  "...Do you think I can visit somewhere with sunlight sometimes?  Even if I can't live there?"

"We're a ways down. Trekking up isn't impossible but it'd be a significant trip, not something you can do to pop out for a minute. I'll take you up and leave you there if that's what you want? But surfacers might just kill me on sight and they wouldn't be being idiots to do it so I'd rather not stay long."

"What are we under?"

"Country called Taldor. I speak the language, though I've probably got a wretched accent, if you want to learn it."

"What, uh, geographical features..."

"I've never been there, mind." She goes to her atlas and opens it up. "Big river, mountains here and here, forest straddling this border, capital's here where the river meets the sea."

Well, it's no desert, but it sounds like it might be better than Forks.  "Is there anything useful up there?  Maybe I could go shopping, if people won't want to kill me on sight.  Or selling."

"People won't kill you for being a human. I absolutely cannot rule out that they would kill you for looking foreign, carrying money, being on speaking terms with drow, not worshiping whoever the local favorite god is, etcetera."

"Sorry. I wish I had better news."

What does he say.  "...Thanks."

"Anything else to cover before I prep spells and go?"

He shakes his head.

"Mkay." She swallows the rest of her breakfast and consults her spellbook.

He's pretty curious what's in it; can he see from here?  Does it seem like she might not want him to look?

She definitely notices him looking, but then shrugs and doesn't say anything about it. It's covered in something that looks sort of like diagrams of clockwork as imagined by sapient spaghetti. It's in black and white, but notated with finely etched textures in various sections to serve a similar purpose.

He doesn't actually think that he's going to be able to get superpowers just by looking at it, but it's not like he has anything better to do at the moment.

She traces bits of it with her fingers in careful ritualized patterns and makes similar motions in the air above the pages she studies. He can't read it, though he can read the spines of the other books on her shelf (well, some of them) if he tries, while the light holds.