"Yes. But they might be better at teaching you than I have been."

She leads him towards the college.

The college is a single very large, incredibly tall hexagonal building at the edge of town, looking out over the ocean. There are two fountains and about two dozen marble statues at its main entrance, and the walls of its enormous entrance hall are covered in huge, ornate mosaics. Most of the people here wear simple robes, not unlike Imrainai's, though there are also obviously wealthy people, a few men (and the occasional woman) in leather armor, and there are still plenty of people in rags.

Impressive. Places that look like this at home are usually old government buildings, so maybe that means the college is an arm of the government here.

He'll just go to whichever part of this place Imrainai points him to.

She leads him to a central courtyard, where there's a hole in the center of the building that goes all the way up to the sky. There are four large platforms here, going up and down at staggered intervals. They serve all floors above the first ten; lower than that, and you have to take the stairs. The stairs might well be faster, given that the elevators stop at every floor, but that doesn't mean you want to walk up and down twenty-six flights of them every day.

They get off at floor thirty-two, if he's counting. The walls here are mostly painted murals. They pass a few doors and then enter the back of a relatively small and cramped lecture hall, which contains a few dozen students. A woman at the front of the hall is sitting on one of the tables, lecturing. She nods, but doesn't otherwise acknowledge their entrance. A few students turn and stare, but none of them say anything.

He'll let Imrainai be the one to figure out whether to interrupt the lecture and how to tell these people why she brought him here. He listens for words he already knows, but he's not optimistic about that.

It's pretty technical; he'll be able to catch a lot of prepositions, but will miss most of the content. He'll catch the word 'words' several times. Imrainai doesn't interrupt, though the professor seems to have lost at least a fifth of her students. There's not very much more of class left, anyway, and after a few minutes she dismisses them and waves her guests to the front. Almost none of the students actually leave. 

The professor retrieves a silver dish and a rolled-up scroll from her bag, says a few words, and lights the scroll on fire with a small flame that shoots from her hand. A murmur goes through the lecture hall. The professor ignores it and touches her hand to an exquisitely inscribed bracelet on her arm.

"So," says the professor, in what he will hear as Hari, "I understand that you're Mahan, and that you come from a land called Har."

He hopes that scroll is being sacrificed instead of someone getting sick again. "Yes and at home I'm a doctor and we have an understanding of disease that you don't seem to. Where I'm from most people die of old age or violence or magical accidents, infectious disease outbreaks are usually contained before they reach more than a few dozen people, individual cases of infectious disease are usually cured within a day, and some of that could be replicated without magic if you made good use of heat and soap. There are probably other things you could benefit from knowing but that's probably the best use of limited translation magic."

"I appreciate your concern for our people and our resources," she says, smiling. "I'm Chavi, a member of the linguistics department. We're interested in creating a comprehensive record of your language, for academic purposes. It sounds like the college of medicine will also have a lot to talk to you about, once we can talk to you through nonmagical means. We've got several more minutes of this spell, anything you've been dying to say?"

"The type of thing infectious diseases are is a type of thing that also helps you digest food and stay healthy. Everyone has lots of different kinds of this thing, microorganisms, and one of the reasons I can't heal everyone is because I don't recognize some of the microorganisms here, so I can't tell the local cholera from the way people here digest plants. If I could see lots of healthy people and lots of people with an infectious disease I'd learn how to fix that disease. And to a first approximation this only works for the kind of diseases that cause epidemics. Can you pass that on to Imrainai?"

"Of course. Paper," she says to one of the students, who pulls a roll of paper out of a bag for her. Chavi begins taking notes. "Doubtless the medical department will have countless questions for you, but I'm sure they'll be happy to begin with a simple explanation and a demonstration and then go from there."

"I'm willing to demonstrate things. Are you one of the linguistics people?"

"We all are, to varying degrees," says Chavi. "You came in at the tail end of a grammar lecture. I hope the dozens of observers don't bother you, it's not every day they get to see translation magic in action. I'm sure they do see foreigners every day, though I imagine most of them are not quite so obvious."

"Yeah, I think I'm from another planet. So what if we use some translation time for one of us to explain grammar, I can explain mine or you can explain yours. Might be faster than trying to go from examples?"

"That's possible," she says. She is, conveniently, very good at explaining Kaltish grammar, and is also good at asking questions that lead to a working understanding of the basics of his own.

He's not a linguist and even though he knows three languages two of them are really heavily influenced by the third. He seems to expect her to need to be told that the different vowels contrast with each other and doesn't seem to expect her to need to be told that numbers go before the thing they count.

He does his best to come up with mnemonics for Kaltish grammar.

She's able to get a list of examples that work for her pretty quickly, though it still takes some amount of time to cover the basics. She stops with about five minutes left and asks him if there's anything else he'd like to communicate in the remaining time.

"People here care a lot less about privacy, is it possible to get any protection from scrying?"

She raises an eyebrow. "Perhaps. I'm not aware of anyone who knows how to counter scrying, but the college is probably about the best place to look for it, if an enchantment exists. I'd try the divination department."

"Thanks."

Yet another ongoing humanitarian disaster. Yay.

"Mhmm. Scrying is costly and therefore rare in the first place, so it might be tough going. Good luck, though."

That is... barely better. This fucking world.

"I guess that's good. Anything else?"

"Not from me. You have a place to stay in the city?"

"I've been staying with the sick order."

" - ah. We can set you up in the dorms, if you'd prefer. I expect it would be nicer, and probably more convenient if you expect to do a lot of business with the college."

"I should ask Imrainai if she thinks that's a good idea."