"Explore local culture? Get lots of books and bring them back to Earth? See if your brother's lack of magical potential is a fluke? Sleep with attractive men? General touristry."

"I can definitely get you books. Although they'll be in local languages. And we can take you wandering around while waiting for answers from the other primes - maybe we'll go to Chialto. I will be fascinated to try one of your spells myself. I cannot advise you in any detail about where to find amenable attractive men, although apparently my brother did the trick with some magical intervention, and I suppose I can guess that Loel will be potentially interested, so there's that. Does your translation work on reading?"

"Nah. I've got a different spell for that bound up in my reading glasses. You can try an introductory spell, and if that still doesn't work I'm going to want to try a suite of analytical spells on one of you to see what's up with that. And Loel's the blood and water guy, right? Sounds fun."

"Loel's the blood and water guy. I may want a set of those reading glasses." Kiri finishes one letter and then gets some sealing wax, the end of which melts as though of its own accord when it's over the envelope. "What do you recommend as an introductory spell?"

"Unfortunately, the glasses are an heirloom and I'm fairly sure they were made by unpleasant means. And I'll need some help to get them working on your languages, somebody who already knows the language has to read a page or so of writing in it. Good introductory spells include hiding a zit or freckle or crooked teeth, or making a rock glow, or setting the tip of a match on fire. Preferences?"

"Does the rock keep glowing?"

"I mean, it can. That's a less introductory spell, though, this one is essentially just 'the rock lights up in recognition of your magic'. That one's about attaching properties to an object."

Kiri grabs a paperweight. It is a rock. It has a stripe. "What do I do?"

"Oh, no, it's- has to be a specific rock." Leo grabs a lump of quartz out of the bag and hands it over.

"Ah." She puts the paperweight down and takes the quartz. "Okay, now what do I do?"

Leo demonstrates with the non-useful paperweight. "You trace this- shape in the air, and you say- hm. Okay, I'm going to take out the pearl for the incantation, because it has to scan and you shouldn't really say it in your native language anyway." He spits the pearl into his hand and, slowly and clearly, recites the incantation.

Kiri writes this down, presumably phonetically. "What will happen if I pronounce something wrong?"

"Nothing, in this case. The spell fizzles. I can tell the difference between fizzling due to mis-incanted spell and fizzling due to no magic, but to you there won't be much difference for this one. Bigger spells, you'd have a problem. Try not to mispronounce spells."

"Right. But this is just a basic check to see if I can do anything, so..." She skims her phonetic transcription, then traces the quartz through the air and reads it aloud.

Kiri investigates the thoughts underlying this concept for a moment, then says, "Yes."

"And you're sure that's not just residue from the illusion on his teeth?"

"Are you contagious?"

"Okay, so if you're contagious, and we might be contagious in turn, I need to know more than I currently do about this kind of magic."

"Sounds like a plan. Uh, when I get a door home you should come in and get the full Terrifying Library from Milliways. You don't have to use all the terror, but it's good to have a library that's terrifying at least in size."

"I am familiar with the concept of full libraries being a good thing. But if your reading glasses are not nonhorrifyingly duplicable I don't see how I'm going to read them without learning your language, and you don't seem to expect to be here long enough to teach it to me even with mindreading speeding things up."

"...Hm. That does present a problem. And half the books aren't in English anyway. Damn the fact that languages aren't inexplicably constant across the multiverse."