"Like... imagine a continent, right, and now imagine something exploded real hard right near the middle, so now there's still some continent around the edges but it's mostly hole?"

"A crater?"

"Yeah, I guess that's the word. A really big one."

"Ocean crater hogging all the water, okay. How does your language thing work?"

"I know a whole lot of languages and it's like I've known them all my life but that doesn't actually make me any better at using them than the one I really have known all my life. And I think I learn them as soon as I'm in the same world as somebody who speaks one - I think yours showed up while I was lying at the bottom of a hill being miserable."

"Both of 'em?"

"I guess? What's the other one?"

"Gatetalk? Sounds like this."

"Oh, yeah, that one too then."

"Neato. I've only got tidbits of the rest - uh - how much does this cost -?"

"I vaguely feel like I might've heard that somewhere before even though I'm pretty sure I haven't? And I dunno what it means."

"'How much does this cost', and I have numbers in that one too."

"I guess you don't know enough of it for the language magic to pick it up."

"Wonder what the cutoff is."

"Dunno. Guess you could bring people here who know different languages but not very well and see which ones I get, but that sounds boring to do more than like twice."

"It'll happen incidentally anyway if you hang out here even if we eat this planet. I dunno if you'd rather terraform it but we kinda need a lot of space."

"Arguing with the desert was pretty fun. How much is a lot?"

"Billion people. I dunno if your terraforming also does, like, natural resources besides water and dirt and plants? We'll want metal and things like that, I don't have a complete index of the things like that off the top of my head though. Seems like the kind of thing that... fiends might have eaten... or whatever."

"Dunno, but I can try it and see!"

"Cool! You're good to have around, this is way better than I was expecting to be the best case."

He bursts out laughing.

"...what?"

"I haven't been called 'good to have around' much before!"

"The magic powers admittedly give you a huge edge."

"Oh, if I'd grown up with these, people would definitely not think I was good to have around."