Native conversation examples! So useful for learning the language, aren't they.

Too bad she's hardly had any time to learn it and so she's probably not getting, well, approximately anything out of this apart from some keywords.

And then the conversation ends, the father says, "Hi there," to Airta, and then he leaves unless Airta stops him or wants to talk to him about something. (Like who he is, how she will stay here, something like that. Though presumably Ev will help arrange something.)

Assuming Ev taught her greetings, she responds to the father with, "Hello." She also makes a sort of bowing motion that gets arrested halfway.

She isn't confident that she's fluent enough to extract any of that information from him, and doesn't really have any reason to ask him questions instead of asking Ev.

Ev actually taught quite a wide variety of things, after her feeble first attempt at communication and teaching. Then her father leaves.

She goes into the house, indicating that Airta should follow.

Airta follows.

Now that they are in a relatively quiet, private location, and Airta has seen the village, she has a lot of questions about the village's economy! She expresses them very creatively.

Ev will try to answer them! She'll also try to correct Airta's grammar, politely, where necessary, and offer vocabulary that might be useful.

Airta's asks about a lot of things, including the village's agriculture, whether it belongs to any sort of larger political entity, what sort of trade there is...

She makes some mistakes involving articles and adjectives, but seems to be picking up the grammar fairly quickly. She absorbs the vocabulary, but she hasn't heard any of the words used enough to make a useful distinction between similar ones, so her phrasing isn't going to get more standard immediately.

The town sort of belongs to the country, since it's within the country, but they don't have any larger political entity that actually controls them or directs how they do things, at least not on a day-to-day basis. They do trade with other towns, though.

After a while, Ev will ask if Airta is hungry. Seeing as they have been talking for a while and she mysteriously dropped into a field before that.

Airta indicates that she is indeed hungry. She then immediately asks several questions about the state of metalworking, such as how rare various metals are, and whether they have steel.

They do have steel! They have– well, not all that much metalworking, though there are other towns that focus on it more than they do, but they're a pretty big town as the towns this place go, so they still have a decent amount of it.

Rarity of metals is a bit screwed with because you can get a sorcerer to transmute them if you have one on hand who knows how to do it and is willing to do it and you have some of the required materials, but they don't have much in the way of rare metals because they don't actually do much mining. The surrounding area is quite dangerous, hence the wall around the town, and it's a bit difficult to gather materials if you're limited in the area you can look for them in.

Food consists of: bread, fruit, and some sort of red meat if she would like it.

Airta eats some of all three foods in between asking questions. Are there dangers other than the shadows? Why are the shadows dangerous? Do people often go outside of the walls?

Well, there are wild animals but those can be fended off quite easily for the most part. Especially if you happen to have fire – she smiles at this point – even if you're not greatly practiced with it. There are some weird creatures that are probably shadows in some sort of disguise or some sort of magical accident – vocabulary, here we come – and the shadows are mostly dangerous because they will attack you if you get in their way, or if you happen to be conveniently disabled near one, and also they vary in size and the large ones are really horrible if you provoke them.

People do relatively often go outside the walls, but that's as an absolute – most people stay within the walls most of the time, or go outside a small distance, but quite a few people leave in large groups for protection purposes. Also their town has quite a high population of sorcerers and people trained with various weapons, and they have relatively frequent excursions to visit other towns for trade or communication, so people have more freedom to move about from this town than in most of the others.

Plus you can go out alone in the day. If you're lucky, there won't be any fog on your journey and you'll be able to get safely from point A to point B.

This world's magic sounds really convenient, except for apparently somehow being related to the shadows. Which sound inconvenient.

Airta will interrupt her stream of questions temporarily, in order to finish eating. She'll then inquire at what time Ev would like to go look at shadows.

The magic is really convenient! She's sort of curious about Airta's world's magic, and might ask more later, but for now she'll just talk about what's probably more relevant to Airta right now.

Ooh, times! This means that Ev gets to explain clocks and how their system works, how long an hour is, that sort of thing, with limited vocabulary. She does so, tries to make sure Airta understands, and then basically says 'approximately late evening', very helpful of her.

Airta doesn't ask for much further clarification.

She has more questions. Grammar, this time. She wants to know how plurals are derived from their singular form, or vice versa if that's how it's done, and she wants to know what the deal is with adjectives. And articles. And she wants to understand more precisely how the different pronouns and words for "to be" are used. And then she switches to asking for more specific vocabulary. She tries to pay attention such that she would notice if Ev was bored of answering language questions, but it quickly becomes apparent that she's not going to run out any time soon.

Ev is kinda curious about the new person, so she's interested to see how she fares learning the language, what parts she finds easy and what parts she gets stuck on, that sort of thing, so she actually won't get very bored anytime soon. They can… probably, actually, spend another while doing this.

Her dad comes back after about an hour, so she has a short conversation with him – something about living arrangements and Airta – but then they can resume the discussion.

Airta would also like to know about living arrangements and Airta.

Well! There is currently no obvious place arranged for her to go, though there might be an empty house around somewhere – she might not want that, though, since it probably wouldn't have any food in it and also they're not sure if there is in fact one available – but she could probably stay in this house for a bit?

That sounds like the best available option, and she appreciates their generosity. (She is not quite that articulate, although she is entirely grammatically correct, which is better than could have been said a short while ago.) This prompts a slew of questions about etiquette, followed to some about gestures and body language.

Ev is willing to answer them! Her father seems… slightly amused, probably, though he doesn't show that much, and disappears to go do– something.

They can continue this for a few hours, probably with a change of scenery partway through both as a break and so Ev can show Airta around the town a bit more and give some words for various things that can't be found in houses.

Then it looks to be nearing sunset.

By now Airta is capable of holding a conversation, although she takes a noticeable amount of time to put sentences together, and there are plenty of words that simply haven't come up yet.

She'll look at Ev questioningly when the sun reaches the top of the wall.

They should probably go look, yes!

Ev shows her the way to a part of the wall where you can actually climb up, then talks to the couple of people on guard there and assures them that they'll be okay and will make sure not to do anything stupid.

Airta trusts that either Ev will know what stupid things not to do or her danger sense will actually function. She will tell something like this to the guards, if they ask her slowly enough that she can parse it, which they probably won't.

She'll climb up the wall after Ev.

There are fortunately steps built into the wall – there's an archway in it, since this is one of the gates, and then you turn to the side before you get to the gate itself and climb up some stairs built into the wall, since it's rather large.

Up the top: there are parapets at the edge and they can conveniently see over and into the distance. Outside the wall are quite a few fields and orchards that are presumably used for food, probably only in the day so as to avoid the dangers of the shadows, and it continues to be near sunset.

Airta might notice a small blur in the distance. It looks sort of like concentrated heat distortion, doesn't seem particularly large, but it's quite noticeable.

Airta stares at it. After a few seconds, she points at it, and then, after a few more seconds, she asks, "What is that?"

Ev looks that way and– "The blur? It's like a shadow, but usually attacks sorcerers, people who do magic."