It's okay. This one I'll learn English and you can learn bits of my language if you're interested and I can sing the forest cozy and we won't get too bored.

Yeah, I should probably not land in your world completely ignorant of the language even if people are mostly telepathic.

Probably not. And Dwarves don't have osanwe, nor do Men, you might end up wanting to talk to some of those. I can translate for you but it'd help to know a bit.

I wonder if my magic can do translation. Or maybe fluff-style telepathy without fluffs serving as relays.

Bet fluff-style telepathy doesn't work on Dwarves either. Categorically immune to mind-affecting magic.

Sounds nice. What do Dwarves speak?

They keep their language a secret, won't teach anyone. So they speak ours with us.

Okay. ...It's going to be really hard for me to learn a language that doesn't do writing. Maybe I can just transliterate it all.

Yeah. Sorry I don't know the Noldorin letters even a bit, I could teach you those if I did.

It's okay. I managed to spell everything you wanted rendered into English one way or another, I can do the same thing for notes to myself.

And it's not like anyone'll expect you to know how to read the local language. Unless we do end up in a Noldo kingdom.

Even there it would be fairly silly to have an expectation about it.

No, they do a thing where they expect everyone to know everything they do, and pretend it's courteous to so assume, and then can publicly pity you for not knowing it.

...ah.

I shouldn't say these things, we might need them to find weaknesses of the Enemy.

No, it's better for me to have an idea of whether and how they'll be rude to me in advance so I'm not startled.

They also tend to treat humans as children, I think! Except when they're taking them under their wing in uncomfortably intimate mentorship roles that last until the human is too old to be pretty!

...Creepy, thank you for the warning, I am never going to age and therefore will have to be extra on the lookout for uncomfortably intimate mentor relationships.

You aren't going to age??

I'm technically a rock, remember? She taps the rock that she technically is. My human body is doing biology stuff by default, but I can manipulate it, not-aging is pretty trivial.

I hadn't realized. I thought you would die at a hundred like most mortals.

That's really good.

Yep. Some people freak out about the technically a rock thing, it's really ugly when that happens, but I consider it an upgrade.

It's sort of like what Elves are. Not as strongly as the Maiar, but still, they're souls steering bodies, not ensouled bodies, fundamentally.

Oh, interesting. How does that work in practice? I assume if they had soul gems they'd have mentioned.

Yeah, no gems. The soul is the part that goes to Mandos so the Valar can make them a new body, though. You can sort of see souls if you look magically, but it's hard to describe...