"Thanks for the ride!"

"Any time."

Knock knock. A Charp gets the door and shows them in.

Kib sticks his head out of the dining room. "Oh, hello," he says. "Which one are you, Boots or T'Mir?"

"Boots. This is Rúmil and this is my Fëanáro who has nicknamed himself Epic."

"Oh, that's a good nickname, it's not a number or a letter of the alphabet at all."

"Mm-hm. Is your husband home?" Epic does not know about the boyfriends, I don't know how to make it not weird, I'm practically fostering him.

"Immunology conference, he'll be hours, did you specially want to meet him?"

"There'll be time later, just curious."

"Well, anyway, I'm home, fortunately, or Island would have inadvertently stranded you here and that would have been mildly inconvenient if you don't have Loki's spells yet."

"We're expecting to get them from Elspeth when she comes through to resaonableize our Valar."

"It seems like such a niche skill, yet she deploys it so often."

He is talking to the Charp.

Well, the Charp is not a particularly interesting conversationalist but it will respond to questions readily.

That's interesting! He has so many questions. How much math does the Charp know, how many languages, does the Charp feel happy or sad, does it know if it's injured, what does knowing it's injured feel like, can it learn magic...

The Charp knows all the mathematical operations that seemed worth programming in, including the basics and some obscure magic-Arda-engineering stuff and some cryptography. It knows Quenya and the common and Harthanic, because those were the languages its programmer knew at the time. It does not have feelings. If it is substantially damaged it will deactivate completely; if it has minor cosmetic damage it can see it but not feel it. It cannot servantmake or do magic-Arda artificing but it can reproduce magic songs it has been exposed to in the same way that a recording device can.

Does the Charp want things, can the Charp learn new things...

It does not want things but it can learn things!

Can the Charp have goals or intentions -

Not really because it's not a person or even an animal, but it will try to carry out its instructions and it does know things about what the state it's aiming at is like.

"Okay," he says, satisfied. "Teach me Harthanic and the common, please."

The Charp does not know how to teach a language and he will have to be more specific.

"Say things in it, then say the same things in Quenya, and when I say things, tell me if you understand."

"What things?" asks Charp.

"This is a sentence in Harthanic? I am Charp, you are Fëanáro, I am silly, this is a silly sentence in Harthanic, this is Rúmil, these are Rúmil and my Bella, my Bella is called Boots..."