"Yeah, I guess so," he says. "Anyway. Bacon plant."

It's a tangly little shrub. Rolled-up strips of raw bacon sprout from its coiling branches.

"That's really weird."

"I mean, yes, it is, but what specifically is really weird about it?"

"There's lots of magic where I'm from but none of it can create persistently magical effects unless you count the indestructibility; everything has to work by the laws of physics once it gets there. This plant could conceivably be managing to do that somehow but it implies some combination of a magic system that can handle the design of a thing that does that somehow, on its own, or an inventing civilization that could invent it and thought this was the best use of their incredible biological knowledge. Or, this magic system works very differently from the ones I'm used to, but is based on similar enough underlying principles that it has 'bacon' as a concept."

"Basically all the magic I ever saw before I got here came from an athra creating a persistently magical effect," says the still-unnamed eldritch crystalline horror. "So there's that."

"Any of this seem like the sort of thing an athra would do?"

"Nnnno, not remotely. From everything I can tell, there used to be humans on this planet and now there aren't anymore, and it's hard to imagine an athra fucking up that badly at the whole 'not killing anyone' thing. And even besides that it's just... not their style."

"I will have to take your word for that. - what's your name, anyway, I'm Cam."

"Tiro! Tiro se Fara."

"Oh, if we're doing full names it's Campbell Mark Swan."

"Nice to meet you! You're a big improvement over being trapped alone on a dead planet forever!"

"Delighted to be of assistance!"

Tiro giggles.

"How are you going about learning the local magic?"

"I have books! I can't read the language but I've made some progress on interpreting them anyway."

"I can probably speed that up - I'd only get the language for free if someone who knew it summoned me, but I can do computer analysis if you've got enough text."

"I dunno if I have enough text. I can show you my books, though, c'mon in."

There is a door in the side of the hill. Inside there are a bunch of boxy packs hanging on pegs on the wall, and some storage cabinets, and a big table with a small pile of books on it.

"What're those?" Cam asks, pointing at the hanging things.

"Emergency magic kits. They have plates for painting magic diagrams on, and paintbrushes for painting them with, and recipe books for copying diagrams out of, and balls of magic ink."

"This was just all here when you showed up?"

"Yeah. And a bunch of broken furniture and human skeletons. I cleared all that out."

"...naturally. If they had enough stuff to grow a bacon plant I wonder what killed them. If this is in fact a remnant of an entire civilization, though, I should be able to get more text than what you happen to have here."

"With your copying-stuff powers?"

"Yeah, exactly. If this is some weird athra prank or whatever, there will be no result beyond what you've got on the shelves if I try to conjure up 'the complete works ever produced in this language' for a translation program to chew on, but if there was a whole civilization, they presumably wrote more than that."

"Try it and see, then, I guess!"