"So how do I do things with it? Can I pick things up with my BRAIN? That would be really handy for scavenging."

"That's simple enough that with a lot of practice you could do it without a template but it's a lot faster to just use a template." She looks around and finds a bit of scrap metal in a nearby pile and splits off a piece of it with magic then levitates it over to her hand and transforms it into a bracelet there before sending it over to Meto. "With a bit of practice you should be able to use that."

He will POKE the cool gadget with his magic.

"So is what you wanted to get- The language, and you consider yourself paid up?"

"That's not really how I approach the world. In terms of fee for service I mean. My translation magic is bidirectional to put me and the other person on more even footing. And to facilitate having actual conversations instead of trying to guess at meanings with illusions and drawings."

"...There's no such thing as a free lunch."

"Yeah, what are you really up to, lady?"

She takes a breath. "I don't know how to convince you of the core truth. I can tell you about things at the edges of what I do that probably fit better within your frame though. My role in my broader society is to check for potential dangers and to build good will with our neighbors so if the war the most paranoid parts of my society are worried about happens there will be more people willing and able to fight it with us. And in the less paranoid case so that those neighbors are less likely to attack us when they have the means."

"Oh, so, scouting, recruiting. And diplo-whatsit." She nods. That makes perfect sense. Not necessarily great to be next to, but it makes sense.

"Yeah, I've heard places that are less crowded are... Nicer than Bastion's trail. And allies and friends aren't out of the question once you've had a couple good deals with someone, just... Yeah. Well, we can definitely trade on this basis, information. I don't have any special insight into things but generalities, for sure."

"Sure, that works. I'm Maenik by the way. Would you be willing to tell me your names?"

"Wren."

"Alice!"

"Wait wait WAIT don't fairies steal names or something?"

"I don't think the 'fairy' threat model is the one we ought to be worrying about here. I'm pretty sure you've never told any of us your real name either, little miss Eagle."

"You may call me Grace."

(Too busy messing with the magic bracelet to have heard the question.)

She laughs a little. "I promise I'm not a fairy, I just didn't want to have to point and say hey you. It's good to meet you all. As to information... well the obvious question is what's up with the flying city dropping piles of trash everywhere?"

The bracelet is both more and less complicated than the translation box. On the one hand the maze of passages inside it is a lot simpler. On the other hand the magic it changes just sort of hangs in a cloud around the bracelet by default.

"That's Bastion. They strip the ground as they fly and throw out anything that's not immediately useful or that outlives its welcome to save on weight... Leaving all us down here on the ground to pick through it. Trade it to folk further afield. It's probably better than hunter-gatherer life, all the useful scrap and salvaged electronics and all."

"That sounds incredibly wasteful. I know without magic recycling is harder but metal is one of the easier things to recycle and there seems to be a lot of it here."

"I think they do some recycling on Bastion? But I heard once that it's easier to just - go forward and keep strip-mining. There's big operations that melt it all back into ingots. We're component-pickers though, it's a different niche- You average 'broken' appliance is probably still ninety percent good, and your average frontline scavenger will usually only grab light and compact things- Tablet computers, not fridges."

(The cloud of magic will go onto... That old tire! Does it do anything?)

"Interesting. Things do seem a lot more intact than I would expect for falling from the city. So you trade what you gather for food and medicine and other useful equipment?"

If he holds the magic there for a couple seconds there's a burst of activity. Thin streams of magic burst out and make their way to the ground and the rest of the cloud shifts and spreads evenly through the tire.