"Audron can make a big plane and you have all your things in the plane with you?" He translates the conversation and asks if Audron can in fact make a bigger turbowing?

"Probably. Not fast. I'm pretty sure they have turbowings of their own. Ask what they need to land safely!"

"The rover is bigger than that. It is almost as big as the plane. We know the ice is sometimes dangerous, we are being careful and think to make a road later once we know the easiest place to make a road."

He is slows alarm at the thought of aliens trying to dig a tunnel under farmland and through towns, without werewolves or vampires! "To make a road on the ice is good. To make a road on stone is maybe good. To make a road on place where people live is bad. 

Do you have plane? We can make place for you to land?"

Siamek can totally help them navigate with an angle-warbler and beam-warbler signal! Sadly, that's a secret.

"Yes, making a road on somewhere people live would be bad... A runway for our shuttle to land on needs to be very long, and we need to put machines to tell if we are going in the right direction if we want to be safe. Shen?"

"An I-L-S set... The V-O-R is too big. The ILS plus a power cell and wiring are maybe the size of two people. We can verify the ILS is set up correctly from the air. I think the risk would be acceptable."

But it's still their only shuttle, even if using it as a diplomatic jet is almost as important as putting up satellites.

Very long, like the very long flat area where Audron landed? ...such a sacrifice might actually be worthwhile, but hopefully there's a better option. "Maybe we must make a new house for talking in a different better place. Can you fly and land in a hot place?"

It's a little suspicious that they're not willing to go unless they can bring a lot of things with them. Along with their only plane being big, and not letting the visitors see most of Nivis, it gives Hestlierre the impression that they need bulky artifacts with them to be safe in some way. Miguel seems fine, so it's not necessary for their survival, but either they don't want to have important conversations away from their artifacts, or they don't want their important people to be damaged by the separation.

"We must make a bigger plane to bring Miguel to here... in the future, we work hard at make plane and them we bring Miguel and also then we have big plane, you can go to place for talking. Now, you have questions about countries and magic and trade?"

If Nivis isn't sending anyone to the chartreuse, he doesn't have the excuse to stay in Nivis because the turbowing isn't big enough to bring him back. But they still might have the excuse of learning each other's languages, since that's easier to do what you can point to things you can both see, and the radio Nivis is going to give them is only for sound. Which is odd, since Nivis is clearly capable of making a machine that sends images over a distance.

"I think one of us is confused. Jack, pull up Paint and let me borrow your PDA?"

The notes on the big screen are replaced by a white field with a toolbar at the top. Shen takes a stylus and quickly draws a poor rendition of a globe. He paints a thick green curving line across it, then colors one side bright and one side dark.

"People of this planet live here," a red mark on the green.

"Ice is here." Another, blue, line some distance away from the green. "And Nivis is here." Another red mark well beyond the ice line. "Does that seem right so far?"

Pause to let people take in the (terrible) sketch.

"Did you fly from the green," pointer wave, "to Nivis? Or did you fly from the dark," wave, "To Nivis? I thought we would fly from Nivis to the dark and then go to the talking place however people go when they don't have to walk on dangerous ice. We could also fly to the bright and do the same thing."

Ooh the screen has colors and ooooh that's how colors are described in screen-language.

Now which part of the PDA is making the screen language? Like Miguel's PDA, it only has a few parts, but none of them are the screen-language part.

"Ah! We fly from the dark to Nivis. We can make a runway in the dark! This is good. To go from the dark to the talking place, to carry lots of things with you, go on different kind of a flying thing. This flying thing is big and slow and doesn't have fire, just have magic to make not fall on the ground."

A runway in the chartreuse might actually be fine if it were all shadowed, or if it were temporarily moved to cover intact farmland, but it's a relief to not have to worry about that at all.

"The ILS, how heavy is this? Two people's size, also two people's heavy?"

He watches each part of the PDA... and there is actually screen-language there matching the image on the screen! It's just only there sometimes. The parts switch around between many jobs!

Now he can follow how the screen-language on the PDA is garbled with complicated math and sent via poets and then ungarbled by the screen. Each time the PDA sends new information, the complicated math has some parts that are the same and some parts that are different. There's also some numbers that straightforwardly count up.

"The ILS equipment weighs a small amount more than me."

"The things we want to bring to the talking place are... Lots of PDAs and screens," gesture to the screen, "A thing that makes those work better, thing to get electricity- PDA food- From light, things to hold electricity, things that use electricity to do work that we want to show countries and talk about if we want to trade, and a big thing like the radio for talking from far away but bigger, so we can do more than talk from even farther away, we can send pictures and words. Also a few things that the people who go are used to having and like."

Ah, clever Hestlierre; Siamek was imagining that the ILS was made of solid metal like the other alien things. He gets to stay here and look at the machines, yay!

The part of the complicated math that is different each time is calculated in the previous math step! Even when the PDA's math part does something else in between, it remembers the numbers to use next time. And right, he already knows that poets have an excellent memory.

"When we go from Nivis, we carry the ILS in Audron's plane? Two people must stay in Nivis... Maybe I stay, maybe Chime stay to teach our language, maybe Siamek stay to learn English? Maybe I go, because good to have two catfolk in the plane. What do you want?

Tengu stay? Tengu also go."

"If people who are not of Exodus are going to stay here, we need to think about that more. Magic is scary. We don't know what magic can do. Maybe machines are scary to you, if you don't know what machines can do. We have rules about touching people in scary ways, or talking to them in scary ways, or doing things to machines that you don't understand, because that might break them or cause big danger."

"Also we could get sick with your sicknesses and you could get sick with ours. I don't know how to safely treat people who are not humans. I can guess but I would be guessing. I don't think any of us want each other to be hurt or sick."

"People looked at your plane, Audron. I'm going to also gift you an attitude indicator. It uses a spinning thing to stay pointing the same way no matter how you turn. It's very important for flying safely. I would feel bad if you didn't have that and you crashed, maybe it was our fault, we didn't help."

"Thank you for the attitude indicator." He translates that for Audron.

"We won't touch people or machines in scary ways... if to explain scary ways we must learn better English, then how we to learn better English? Maybe we use thing like radio but bigger, show images and talk about images and learn better English?

When you say 'sick', you mean a kind of a hurt that go from person to person? This is dangerous now? Or only dangerous if not-Nivis people stay in Nivis? If this is dangerous now maybe we must leave now very fast and get a liefling and come back?"

"I think it is probably not very dangerous. Fifteen people talking in a room and washing carefully is less dangerous for spreading diseases - being sick with things that infect - go from one person to many - than one thousand people walking everywhere in the rest of Nivis and touching everything everywhere and breathing everywhere. But not very dangerous is not 'not dangerous'. Also we can probably deal with it. I would enjoy talking to a liefling a lot. I think we can teach each other a lot. But we don't need one to be safe, probably."

"We'll be glad to use the screens to help teach English, or learn your language, while you're at Nivis. When we send more people to the place for talking later, we will have a more of a foundation to build on."

Ooh!! He should probably not take it apart to see how it works, but maybe Chime can see what it's like inside?? Later. Once they actually have the thing, it's clearly not here now.

(She would be delighted.)