Nod.

"Mages - well, people who've had the right magic done - live a bit longer than regular humans but not hundreds of years."

Nod. "You could have been in your twenties."

"Nope, just shy of eighteen."

Nod.

"Penumbra's older but she doesn't know how old."

"Why doesn't she?"

"Elementals appear in the wilderness fluent in every language spoken on the planet at the time but they don't really keep calendars by default."

"That seems inconvenient for them in some ways and very convenient in others."

"They like being wild but often develop more humanlike interests after time in civilization."

"Huh."

"They started visiting humans more often after we invented writing. New ones could suddenly read."

"How long ago was that?"

"A few decades."

"Huh. The earliest known writing systems here were developed..." he gets out another tablet and looks it up. "A bit over five thousand years ago."

"Wow."

"It's been a long time."

"Any cool writing related innovations we might not have yet?"

"What's your writing system like?"

"Do you have some paper?"

"Of course." He opens another desk drawer and pulls out a spiral-bound loose-leaf notebook and a mechanical pencil.

She is distracted briefly by the mechanical pencil but then starts writing. It's simplified pictograms, but a limited enough set of them that they could be a syllabary.

"Are those phonetic, or...?"

"Uh, some of them."

"And the rest?"