"...okay, well, the major advantage of a human over a halfling is size and if you're not using it I'm really going to have to sell the 'using you for sex' angle, so be prepared for my sister to be completely insufferable for all eternity, but I guess it's what we have to work with and my mom's spendy enough she won't rein me in very soon."

"Do you have something that isn't you for me to try lifting."  His face is entirely red.

"Again, I don't need anything lifted right here right now, I just need a ballpark on how much you can pick up to know if you'd earn your keep putting coal and ore on Rynaeri's floating disk."

"I don't know the ballpark without lifting anything.  I didn't do a lot of it back home."

She sighs. She picks up the duffel bag to assess its weight and then starts looking through its contents.

Yeah he can budge over.

It's mostly clothes!  A pair of sneakers, a travel CD player, a handful of CDs, four books one of which is hardcover.

"The good news is that a lot of these things have amazing resale value, we can coast on that for a while if I find the right fence. What's this?" she says of the CD player.

"It plays music."  He unwinds the headphones, then takes the case on top of the pile and pops in its contents.  There's a little view window which shows the disc inside start spinning.  "Put these on your head.  Over your ears."

She places the headphones over i.e. above her ears.

"No, uh -" He cups his hands demonstratively on his own head.  But even incorrectly positioned she can hear something coming from the padded circles.

She moves them to the correct place. Smiles.

"Is it hard to learn to use?"

"I don't think so.  It won't last forever, though.  I just put in fresh batteries but they'll run out in a few months."

"What's a battery?"

"It's something that stores power for stuff like this to run on.  I don't have any spares or anything else to take them out of."

"And... no magic where you're from so you have no idea if Mending fixes them?"

"Uh, no."

"Okay. So a few months and then it might never work again. And these?" She taps the other CDs.

"They have different music on them.  Er, very different music; this one was a gift from my stepdad."  He presses stop on the player and powers it down.

"- so the music comes from the disk, but only if it spins? What if there were another way to spin one?"

"Maybe...  I think it has to do with a laser bouncing off of it, or something.  Maybe magic could do it; you can already do light, which, uh, is what a laser is."

"I... don't immediately know how to do that and to invent a spell for it I'd have to know a lot more about how this works, do you know more about it than you're saying?"

"Uh, I think it has a lot of tiny grooves on it, tiny enough that if you scratch the shiny side of the CD that can ruin it, and the player shines a light so that when the grooves spin past they bounce it and... makes music.  Somehow."  He swallows.  "That's all I know."

...she gingerly takes out a spare disk and shines the current glowing object at it.