Coming along nicely. What can she get in the way of verbs?

Lilaima is getting steadily less confident as the language lesson continues.

Imra, who has apparently been following this entire conversation from up front despite being unable to see any of the gestures or writing, offers a few helpful comments and suggestions that prompt Lilaima toward more useful avenues of communication. Verbs ensue.

"Thank you!" she calls, not expecting too strongly that Lilaima will be able to figure out what that confidently enough to offer a translation, but maybe Imra will figure it out.

He laughs and calls back something that may very well be 'you're welcome', and then manages to coach Lilaima through a confirmation of what that exchange meant and a translation of 'thank you' into Nenastine, and then the carriage rolls to a halt and he hops down from the driver's seat to open the door. Lilaima looks mildly scandalized; he steps back to let the two of them exit the carriage without offering any further assistance.

It's still earlyish in the morning, but the sun is well above the horizon by now. The castle they've stopped in front of casts a long shadow across the goat-strewn fields that surround it. It's a very pretty castle; it does some amazing things with stone. Sufficiently amazing that May might want to take care not to argue with the walls, actually, in case that lacy arch is held up by magic.

May picks no architectural fights. She admires the castle, and giggles softly at the goats and how everywhere they are, and tucks her notebook under her arm and swings her backpack onto her back. Steps out of the carriage carefully.

Standing on level ground instead of perched out front of the carriage, Imra is a little taller than May but not inhumanly so or anything. He smiles at her and then beckons her to follow him into the castle.

In for a penny. She ambles after him, watching her step.

He seems briefly distracted or perturbed by something, when they get a few steps away from the carriage, but whatever it is it clears up after a second or two.

Into the castle they go, and up some unnecessarily beautiful stairs, and along an unnecessarily beautiful hallway, and into an only moderately beautiful study where Imra gestures invitingly at a comfy chair.

Okay. That chair better not try to magic her or it will have trouble.

The chair seems to be unharmed by contact with May! It presumably was not trying anything sketchy.

Imra goes to a bookshelf, reaches for a book, hesitates, frowns, reaches for a different book, hesitates, frowns again, then turns back to May and conjures an unnecessarily beautiful small wooden statuette of a sleeping goat. It sits up in his hands, hops forward to stand on thin air, turns in a circle, sprouts wings, flaps them, and vanishes. He names this phenomenon: magic.

She repeats the word, guesses a spelling, adds to her glossary.

Okay. So.

"You have magic."

"Yes," she says, because this is obvious.

He frowns slightly in thought, trying to figure out how to get at the heart of the problem as efficiently and accurately as possible.

—okay, quick illusory history lesson.

An image of the continent forms in midair, set in a circle of ocean that fades out of visibility at the edges. Buildings in the old human architectural style - they look vaguely Bronze Age, lots of stone and clay brick - appear, in stylized simplicity and exaggerated size. Little illusory humans scamper between them, wearing pre-invasion human clothing and going about the business of their pre-invasion human lives. Some of them have a pale glow around their heads, and those ones can do things like construct entire buildings telekinetically, or teleport from one end of the continent to the other, or have silent conversations conducted via eye contact alone without the gestures and mouth movements the other humans seem to require.

After a minute of this, a portal appears in midair over the continent, and elves pour out of it, taller than the humans and with pointier ears. The glow symbolizing magic centers on their hands, and they all have at least a little of it, and they use it to good effect in their immediate conquest of the planet: illusions, conjuration, manipulation of living things. They get the humans subjugated in short order, and immediately exterminate all the ones known to have magic.

Some of the haloed humans manage to keep their heads down, so to speak, and avoid tipping the conquerors off; but then they have little illusory fast-forwarded children, and the children are less discreet, and the elves kill their whole families. A few fast-forwarded generations go by, and a couple of haloed babies appear in families with no prior magic users at all, and when those are found out the elves kill them too, and usually also their parents and siblings and definitely always their children if they managed to hide their powers long enough to have any.

He pauses the illusion and waits for a response.

This is very concerning! She lacks the vocabulary for how concerning this is!

Yeah, she's getting the idea. Okay. He moves on to the next phase:

An elf conceives a child with a human slave. (The actual conception takes place inside an illusory building, but the intent is fairly clear.) The child is born with the halo of magic shining brightly around both its hands and its head, and when it grows up and demonstrates how powerful it is in both forms of magic, the elves panic and kill it and come together in a continent-spanning council to discuss the subject, and then the next time an elf has a child with a human, the neighbours find out and murder the baby and drag the elven parent in front of the council for a scolding.

The illusion of the continent cycles through the seasons of the year a few times, then blurs through them at an impossible-to-follow pace, demonstrating the passage of a considerable amount of time.

Then it slows back down to normal time. An elf meets a human girl in a forest, and they spend a while sitting by a lake and talking and holding hands, and then she produces a tiny baby with the telltale hybrid glow—and the baby goes home with his father, and grows up in a blur of seasons into a miniature Imra.

"So that's why my family's willing to help you," he says, dismissing the illusion. "I'm a halfblood. Half human, half elven. And I could teach you Nenastine a lot faster if you'd let me use magic to do it."

Her glossary doesn't cover more than one word in three, out of that, but he hopes she'll get the gist.

She looks up the words she thinks she's heard before as fast as she can, when he talks. "Magic teach?" she asks.

Two little illusion humans, one with the glow of magic. Both speaking different languages, represented by clouds of letters issuing from their mouths in different scripts. The one with the glow waves their hand dramatically, and then the one without switches alphabets to match.

"Human magic can do that. Human magic does minds and movement."

She doesn't have 'minds' in her glossary but she does have "words" so the use of a different term has potentially worrying implications.

"Hmm?"

"Minds is word... uh, before words are, minds do?"

—he has to take a moment to disentangle that, but then, "Yes, exactly."

"Mind magic..." Wobbly gesture, leery expression. "Words magic good, mind magic no. I no some magic, I no no words magic, you words magic?"

"Ye-es?" he says tentatively. "If I'm understanding you right, I think that's what I'm going for."

"Okay," she says, waving a hand.