"Maybe! See anything that looks like a book?"

He tosses the orb in the air and catches it. After the initial surprise, the flames don't seem to affect him.

The only thing in this room is shelves and shelves of boxes presumably containing magic balls, but there are two more doorways besides the one they came in; one even has the remains of a door next to it, or at least that's a pretty good explanation for that haphazard scatter of splintered boards.

"You seem like you'll weather failure at finding books that comes with success at finding... booby traps... better than I will." He cranes his neck but avoids tromping around; he might fall.

"Fair enough."

He sets the spilled box upright, puts the flaming ball in it (it goes out), waves a hand vaguely at the ceiling (it starts glowing), and wanders off down the nearest tunnel.

"You sure have a lot of random magical powers. Did you have any of them besides the possibility of sprouting wings before?"

"Nope!" comes the cheerful reply, from out of sight down the tunnel; and a few seconds later, "Ooh, skeletons!"

"Oh dear."

Giggle. Faint rummaging noises.

"It's your lucky day, the skeletons have books! Well. Had."

He comes back down the tunnel carrying an armful of books titled in an unrecognizable alphabet.

"Can you read those? Because I can't, and you're the one who mysteriously picked up my language."

"I can! There's a couple of what looks like magic textbooks and then I dunno what the other one is."

"Ooh, magic textbooks. What's the other one say?"

"Mm..."

The stone floor sprouts a stone table so he can put two of the books down on it and open the third.

"Some guy's journal." He flips to the end. "'We can hear the fiends scratching at the door every night', wow, ominous much?"

"Very, and I perform a sort of magic that involves me chanting about fire and blood and destruction all the time."

He giggles.

"Okay..."

He spends a minute or so flipping through the journal, skimming the entries that catch his eye.

"...So, this guy's on a research project in the middle of nowhere, he complains a lot about how boring it is, he's got a crush on one of his coworkers - she sounds hot, I wonder if one of the skeletons was hers - and then the weather gets all fucked up, like, 'the last rainfall recorded on the continent was three months ago', and so now everybody's trying to figure that out... then there's fiends, and the research people hide away in their little mountain hidey hole and bar the door and spend what looks like another month or two getting really sick of each other, and then the last entry's about the fiends and I guess they got in because those skeletons were pretty fucked up."

"I see. There don't seem to be fiends left..."

"Just a guess, but maybe once they were done eating everybody they all starved to death?"

"Could be. I don't see fiend skeletons, but maybe fiends don't have skeletons, or there weren't any in the places we've been before they starved."

"Yeah, or something. Anyway." He looks at the other two books and makes a face. "How likely is it that the magic textbooks are boring?"

"Dunno what magic is like here. Mine is like art history."

"Eh, guess there's only one way to find out."

He puts down one book, picks up another, skims a bit.

"Could be worse, I guess. Looks like you do magic by painting." He turns the book around to show Cor an example diagram, neat lines and arcs drawn out carefully in coloured inks. "And you have to be really careful to get all the lines right or you'll fuck it up and maybe die or catch fire or something."

"Oh no. The horror. Whatever shall I do."

Snort. "What, is yours like that too?"

Cor gestures at himself. "It might require less exactitude but I do paint things and have to get them right. That having been said it would be irresponsible of me to take any unusual risks until I've gotten word home."

"Makes sense, I guess. It'd be too bad for your planet if you found this nice wasteland and then caught fire before you could tell everybody."

"Exactly. I mean, I told them what I was doing, but they won't consider it as promising to follow up on if I disappear."

"No kidding."