Isabella waves a hand. "Yes, yes, of course."

"I am also concerned about unforseen interactions," remarks Keo a moment later.

"As I said, my residence is not your average castle." She hides another smile - the motion has a little upward shift to it that suggests she's most used to doing it with a fan.

"I'll talk it over with research types and get back to you; it doesn't sound like you urgently need anything from home."

"You'll be able to hear music even without the crystals being in the circle with you; I'll go get a selection." Keo casts a spell and vanishes.

Isabella waits patiently for the crystals, neglecting to breathe and have a heartbeat while Keo is gone. It gets tiring to have to look alive all the time.

Keo comes back a degree later with a boxful of long crystals. "We can put these in the circle with you later but for now I'll have to operate them." She picks one up and strokes one of its facets. Music plays.

Isabella listens. She's really remarkably still when she wants to be.

"Is this one all right or should I put on another?"

Keo plays brief samples of a few other crystals.

"The school's responsible for you," Keo says. "And my daughter was one of the summoners."

"True enough. Still, I would have expected many people to delegate such things rather than attend to them personally."

"I'm uniquely able to do safety checks as necessary," shrugs Keo, "and the school employees are teachers and librarians and even less qualified to handle a circled offworlder."

"Makes sense. Some things you have to do yourself if you want them done right." Isabella's fingers slide along the faded paper of the parasol in her lap.

"Anything else you need while you think and the encyclopedia and chair are on the way??"

Keo nods acknowledgment and teleports away.

And after a while a chair, and then a stack of encyclopedia volumes as tall as she is, appear.

The index includes a lot of things, many of which are listed, handwritten, in the index as proper nouns unexplained except via their subsections (for instance, "Oridaan" is next to "Oridaanlan history" and "Oridaanlan physical geography" and "Oridaanlan dialects" and may be assumed to be a political unit). The world has rabbits and chocolate and wine and clouds and a moon and oceans. It has merfolk and elves and dragons and vampires and wolfriders. It has several unrelated kinds of magic.

Isabella is happy that this world includes chocolate! She checks to see if it has tea as well before flipping to the section on the local vampires. The various other magical races can wait: for the moment, she needs to see what her hosts' reactions would be to her asking if she can bite people. She can go without for quite some time, but it would not be comfortable, and if she's really stuck here for a year then she would risk sliding into torpor and that would be rather problematic.