"...huh. That's pretty clever, if you have reams and reams of paper and a thing everyone wants to read at the same time, but - that is indeed not the case here. Something to trade on if you make it upstairs maybe."

"Earth has a lot of stuff like that, but most of it is too complicated for me to know how it works.  Let alone try and build it."

Belmarniss nods. Rummages through his bag to see what books he has.

Death on the Nile, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in paperback, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in hardcover.

Ooh, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea sounds neat.

"That one's my favorite."

"Is it a novel or a memoir or what?"

"They're all novels.  Well, Midsummer's a play, but they're all fiction."

"Here." She pulls a novel off her own shelf to hand to him. "I like this one." It's titled Ilvaria and Arcavato.

He starts in!

Ilvaria and Arcavato is about a farmgirl drow who falls in love with a prince by correspondence passed by the queen's laundry wizard. She becomes an adventuring swordswoman with an adventuring party consisting of a sorceress, a priestess of Baphomet, and a bard boy on the outs with his mother, slaying monsters and dragons and growing more powerful with every chapter that goes by. They are pivotal in a battle between the prince's mother the queen and a neighbor of hers; Ilvaria demands the prince as her reward and they live happily ever after.

"...Is everything in this the sort of thing that can really happen, here?"

"Oh, it's very much abbreviated - their sorceress gets a new circle practically every time she rolls over in bed, it takes much longer than that. But apart from that basically, at least as far as I know, I don't have firsthand knowledge of xorn or anything."

He thinks on that for a second.  Well.  Hm.

...Anyway:  "Mine aren't, except for Death on the Nile.  Leagues is closest after, since it's old and was trying to be all future-y, but there's still some fantasy-type stuff in there."

"It's interesting that you've got no magic but still write books about it!"

"It's interesting that you've got magic!"

"I guess it is!"

He's really glad that Belmarniss is the one who found him, in a way that's been happening the whole time but is also kind of sudden, too.  She saved his life.  She knows a lot of really useful magic, and is teaching him some.  She doesn't seem to want to use him for anything... terrible... and she likes his books!  He mostly likes her book, although some of the stuff in it is kind of worrying, for him, as a guy.  On top of the stuff that was already worrying about him being a human.  And she's really smart, and pretty -

- Well, it makes sense that his first time feeling kind of into a girl would be because he met one who's this impressive.  He, conversely, is not impressive at all.  So he can, and should, and will - keep this entirely to himself.

"- Um, uh, are there stories here about different kinds of magic than what - really exists?  Or without any magic?"

"There's stories that don't happen to prominently feature any casters but I can't off the top of my head think of any that take place in a setting that just doesn't have magic at all. Some authors get things hilariously wrong but it's sorta hard to tell which ones are doing it, uh, on purpose, versus which ones believed the wrong legend or misheard an explanation of a real thing or are speculating about something they think might be real even if they don't have a specific reason to think so - there's a lot of stuff out there even just on Golarion, let alone other planets."

"Are most of the books you get from people down here stealing paper and writing them, or are there a lot of books from the surface, too?"

"There's surface books too! But you can't read them because you're under Share Language for Drow, not for Taldane or Draconic or anything. Enough Share Language is supposed to get you to the point where you can mostly manage without it, and then I can start doing other languages for you."

"Oh, I just wasn't sure if people would write about really different things."

"They're about a very different culture? But I won't be able to tell you more than guesses how much of what comes through in the books is accurate."