"Suit yourself," shrugs Chavi. "What do you think, Imrainai, should we set Mahan up in the dorms?"

"That would make sense, if you can get him in for free," says Imrainai. "He'll want his own room."

"Fine, fine. She says you'll want your own room."

"I will, yeah."

He glances at Imrainai, trying to see if she looks worried or betrayed. Not that he's sure what they said, he's not great at Kaltish.

Maybe slightly worried, though not any more than usual. Perhaps she looks a little more blandly neutral than she's been with him.

"We can arrange that," says Chavi, and then hops off the table. "We're about out of spell, so if that's all, I'll discuss things with the college of medicine and get you formally registered and leave you and, ah, Imrainai to sort out anything else that needs sorting out."

So Chavi's trying to steal him from Imrainai. After she helped him. Uh-huh. Letting Imrainai lose out on whatever reward she was expecting will send a terrible signal to anyone who might think of doing him a favor in the future, but he's not sure what to do about that now. Get rich and then pay her later, maybe? But there's nothing he can do about it right now except turn Chavi down.

"Thank you, I think that's all."

"All right!" she says, cheerfully, before shooing her remaining students out the door and then heading out herself.

"So. Will you stay at the college?"

"Will staying at the college hurt you?"

She considers. "No. It will make it more effort to visit. More effort to be here to explain things. But I think it will be good for you."

"I will stay at the college if it doesn't hurt you."

There are more questions he'd ask if he could but he can't.

"All right!"

She has no intention of giving up on babysitting him, regardless of how complicated the logistics get. If the circumstances were less dire, then she would have to think very hard about her duty to the order and how likely she is to be of continued use to Mahan or to the city. Given that at last check-in he was still bent on world domination, though, she feels like it would be pretty irresponsible to neglect the situation. 

She handles checking him into the living quarters in the middle of the tower, since Mahan's vocabulary is still pretty limited. The room he's assigned to isn't particularly large, but it's private, and it has a writing desk and a dresser with some robes in it in addition to the bed.

"Do you need anything else now?"

"Not now. Do you need anything?"

Such a consistently thoughtful budding warlord. "Not now. Well, not from you. I need to talk to people from the other orders."

"Thank you."

He shuts the door in her face and flops on the bed.

Imrainai heads off to figure out whether there are any novice sisters currently staying at the college who could possibly cover for her at the sick order compound. The college has an infirmary staffed by members of her order, and with some creative reshuffling of schedules and assignments, she might be able to stay here as many as four days a week, though of course she will often be occupied with other things.

She checks what Mahan's schedule is expected to be. She discusses with a trusted member of one of the word orders how long it's likely to take for the queen (or, for that matter, the king) to notice any of this. 

Spite climbs in through Mahan's window about an hour after dawn.

An hour after dawn Mahan is doing pushups. He stops and grins when he sees Spite.

Spite crawls onto his head, figuring that he isn't really very much extra weight. Ready for languages?

Yes.

He'll just sit still so Spite doesn't get jostled.

OK! Languages now, and later magic.

Spite directs him to the linguistics department again, which isn't hard because he knows his way around almost the entire enormous building.

They wind up in what would be a moderately large office for one person, but which is in actuality a fairly cramped work space for three separate members of the department. They're very eager to learn as much as possible about Mahan's language, starting with his name and the words for a few simple objects, and followed by somewhat more complex grammatical constructions.

He starts the language lesson by introducing himself and struggles to keep a straight face for a minute. (He sends Spite a memory of a government office with an illusion on the wall showing a talking cat. "I'm Mahan and I'll be teaching you Hari," he remembers the cat saying.)

He can name most of the objects around here but maybe not all of them, this place is very foreign. He'll say all sorts of things for them if it'll let him talk to people, anything really, he would tell them his embarrassing childhood stories if it'd let them understand each other. The language he's speaking has no voicing contrast, no dentals, one stop, two fricatives, three tones, four vowels and is mostly analytic.

This will all be very interesting to the linguists, although no specific aspect of the language is particularly shocking to them - Rainfold is very likely the best place in the world to be if your goal is to learn all there is to know about the full variety of human language. After several hours of note-taking and exciting linguistic experiments, they manage to ask if he'd like to go downstairs and eat.