"Do you not have pockets? The bars stack like the cubes do, although I guess they only go up to ninety-nine each."

"I don't seem to be able to appear them stacked, but if we were on a flat surface I could make a few thousand of them or whatever all at once literally on top of each other and they seem like they'd be fairly obliging about stacking themselves that way," Cam explains.

"Oh. If you can make more than one thing at a time, then that does make sense. Okay then. But I want to make a lot of chlorophyte things when we land. Let's see, what else... oh! Hallowed bars?"

Hallowed bars?

Cam tries. "Nope. What is a Soul of Flight?"

"They're little glowing blue orbs you get from killing wyverns and they're an ingredient in every kind of wings. There are a bunch more Souls - Night, Fright, Might, Sight, Light - that come from different places and make different kinds of things and glow in different colours."

"How... cute. I don't seem to be able to manufacture them; they may be too inherently magical or inherently magical in the wrong way."

He follows. "I'm glad you speak a language I know. It would be automatic if you'd been my summoner, but since you weren't it's sheer luck you know English."

"English?"

"Unless there is, in addition to physics fuckery, linguistics fuckery, you are speaking an unfamiliar dialect of my first language, which I am accustomed to calling English. I'd be pretty surprised if all those Souls managed to both rhyme and translate correctly in another language. What do you call what we're speaking?"

"I... don't. I suppose it might have a name but I've never had cause to find out."

"Well, this is English. I speak a bunch of other languages, too, some demonic that I learned the long way and some imprinted by summoners who spoke this or that."

"I guess it is lucky. And weird, now that I think of it. I don't think I know of anyone speaking any other languages, back in my world, but there's no reason why the languages in two different worlds should be the same..."

"The basement-dwellers here speak English, too, don't they? That might be involved."

"Can you call them a less disgusting term?"

"...NPCs?"

"...What?"

"...it's a term for characters in a game who do not have players behind them and instead behave according to more or less simple rules. When we land show me a good place to put a house for myself and I'll introduce you to video games. Gotta do something with all the free time you will enjoy in this era of no material scarcity except of souls."

"Sure," says Sable. "Do your wings not go any faster than you're going, by the way?"

"I could speed up a little. Not a whole lot. If I want to go really fast I take a vehicle."

"You should try on one of my spare pairs," she suggests. "See if you like them. They go faster."

"Sure, why not," says Cam, "I can cut these off and see if it's worth the tradeoff."