"I mean, you can tell when they're - changing more or less quickly over a given distance? Tell where they're complicated and where they're simple?"

"Yes. If I sit and watch them for a while I'll be blind for much longer than that, though. Acceptable drawback, but I wouldn't want to do it all day."

"Inconvenient, but not prohibitively. Maybe best to do this inside the tree, which is not as roomy for a mortal-sized person as the outside but is safer to be blind in."

"It's safer to be blind in your house than out only so long as one trusts you, though. I don't necessarily think you're up to no good, but I'm a stranger in a strange land and I still only have your word for the food thing and the name thing."

"If you'd rather do it outside we can."

"I would." She hits a particularly unfriendly patch of bluestream and has to land and start walking.

Promise flies on.

"Are there no animals at all in this forest? Most non-plant living things give off some noise when I listen to the bluestream, but there's nothing except you and me and... Sliding sounds from that pattern to the right, for the nearest 200 meters or so."

"You can hear the 'bluestream' too? But anyway, no, there aren't animals in Fairyland unless they wander through the way you did, which isn't common. Or if they used to be fairies."

"Yes, sight and hearing both. They give different sets of information - sight is better at seeing the way things are structured, hearing is better for detecting change. I can also smell and taste it by losing those senses for a little bit, but that's almost useless."

"What does it look and sound like? Or for that matter smell or taste like."

"This sounds interesting just as a recreational sensory variant, to say nothing of the practical applications."

"It's a bit less interesting when you have to give up your physical senses for five times as long."

"Cute tree. Alright, let me sit down on something and then say what to look at and when."

There's not really a great place to sit, but there's leaf litter, which isn't too terribly uncomfortable. "Look at the surface of the tree, and I'll write down where the knots in the harmonics are, and you can do the same, and then we'll see if we match."

"I can already do magic with the stream, all it costs is some of your brainpower and emotions for a few seconds. Is sorcery meaningfully different? Stronger? Able to do different things? And, would you like your harmonics changed? If you showed me examples of what would be better and what would be worse I could do that over a tree-sized area without going all limp."

"Sorcery doesn't normally affect the emotions. And what matters is if you know what the harmonics are, not what, in fact, they are - I mean, to a point, but only to a point. I'm used to mine, so please leave them alone. I'm not sure what all your magic can do."

"Sorcery does a different but overlapping set of things. I'm not actually sure if there's a sorcerous way to do flight; fairies all have wings. We can do light and heat but your distributed system is - not something I know how to do, possibly only because we don't live in groups that large. Transmutation is doable and doesn't seem as hard as you describe, although I haven't learned it. Healing's doable and I haven't heard of it having a risk of hurting the person. I'm not sure about diseases in people because that isn't a fairy problem, but we can cure plant diseases. And I know how to make plants grow fast. Plus, gates."

"Yes, gates. I'm going to explore the local area for a patch of land with a certain kind of harmonics, where you hopefully don't mind me changing them. I have maybe a week of short rations in my backpack. Leaving those for travel or emergencies, I can sustain myself with sunlight and water. But I have to set up the bluestream for it, and it's easier to find someplace already most of the way there."

"How far do you estimate you'll have to go? There aren't any other fairies very close by but someone might wander through my usual range."